A few articles
Sep. 22nd, 2010 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Mixed-use neighborhoods may reduce some crimes
An article ambitiously titled "Evolution in Action" about how some skinks give live birth
What to do if you lose a body part. Not likely to come up, but better to read it now - are you really gonna go google if your fingers get chopped off?
An article on the bedbug conference
Hilariously, it notes that the bedbug control folks all religiously checked their rooms first thing. It'd be the worst kind of irony to come home from this event with a few little hitchhikers!
Interesting quote here: “People still have in their heads that bedbugs means someone’s dirty,” Mr. Linde said, “but I handle multimillion-dollar homes in Westchester and Connecticut, and believe me, no one’s dirty.”
"People" think bedbugs mean you're *dirty*, but *he* doesn't bring up dirt, he brings up wealth. Because people do think the two go together (or don't, rather).
This may be the only place in the country where, for two days at least, the prospect of a bedbug infestation carries not the slightest, slimmest of stigmas.
At a meeting here this week, a line of salespeople wore green hardhats decorated with large black bugs, red tongues protruding and legs wiggling, as they spoke about the urgent need to protect mattresses.
Not far from various heating, freezing, dusting and spraying devices aimed at abolishing the creatures were stuffed, pastel-colored bedbugs. All around were films, charts and blown-up photographs of the bugs themselves — the enemies (and stars) of this show.
More than 360 concerned people — entomologists; pest control workers; government, military and university officials; and, especially, inventors of anti-bedbug contraptions — gathered here in the Chicago suburbs on Tuesday and Wednesday for the event, which had a growing waiting list of more than 200 people.
“I can give you back your life in a day,” one pest control company owner, Scott Linde of Edison, N.J., said as he pointed a visitor toward a room full of heaters and computerized heat monitors, all aimed at eviscerating bedbugs in a matter of hours.
“People still have in their heads that bedbugs means someone’s dirty,” Mr. Linde said, “but I handle multimillion-dollar homes in Westchester and Connecticut, and believe me, no one’s dirty.”
Phillip Cooper, an organizer of the conference who proudly wore his BedBug Central company logo shirt, said this was the biggest, broadest meeting of its kind since bedbugs began making their miserable return. The price tag for attendees: $450.
Mr. Cooper’s brother, Richard, an entomologist he calls “the god of bedbugs,” had warned for years that they were returning and helped create BedBug Central, a company that sells “boot camp” training to pest control companies and produces regular “BedBug TV” Webcasts on the latest woes.
“This isn’t going away,” Mr. Cooper said of the insects, pointing out that nearly all interested parties besides the hotel industry had chosen to be represented at the conference.
The seminars, which drew standing-room-only crowds, were not meant for those with a passing interest or for those quick to cringe (or itch). Among the topics: “Bring the Heat,” “Fumigation” and “Group Homes — Unique Challenges in Transient Settings.”
In the hallways, the ordinary pleasantries sounded anything but ordinary. Some people shared suggestions on how best to check beds, mattresses and sheets for bedbugs.
(Nearly everyone said they had done as much when they arrived at the host hotel, and the maids may find more than a few headboards askew from their search. Many people said they started out by putting luggage on the bathroom floor, the better to see any scurrying, before investigating hiding spots in the rest of the room. One man put his luggage inside a bedbug-proof bag and kept all his clothes on a non-fabric chair throughout his stay, though his initial survey found nothing.)
A few attendees debated chemical solutions versus heat, whose supporters said it was generally more expensive but required fewer treatments. Others traded tales of their most challenging infestations.
“You got a popcorn ceiling? You’re dead,” said Kristine Effaldana, who owns dogs trained to search for bedbugs, including Walter, a puggle who sat at her feet looking mildly puzzled in the crowd. She was referring to the sprayed-on texture that was in style 40 years ago and can be a breeding ground for bugs.
If anything, the products promoted revealed that there is, for now, no single, agreed-on answer to the problem. The sheer number of them is enormous and growing by the week: dissolving laundry bags, plastic luggage protectors, screw-in bug barriers for the bottoms of bed legs, slow-release strips meant to vaporize bugs, portable aerosol machines and on and on.
Many grumbled about newcomers to the battle and about products that promised to do everything at little cost. “There are so many pest control places out there showing up and undercutting,” said Corey Westrum of Leonard, Minn., who helped create Insect Inferno, a portable trailer that heats mattresses.
Of course, no one seems to agree yet on exactly who is legitimate and who is, in the words of Brian Hirsch, a sales manager for Protect-A-Bed, “a Johnny-come-lately.” Even the organizers of this event said they were not necessarily endorsing those who had chosen to display their goods.
One absolute message here: there is no shame in bedbugs. It is not you. It is them. Still, there were acknowledgments of how the rest of the country may feel.
At the booth of USBedBugs.com, the company’s sign promised “discreet home delivery,” which workers there said meant that items like travel sprays and large plastic bags would arrive in plain brown boxes with no company name on the return address.
In Mezuzas, a Custom Inherited by Gentiles
The doorways inside 30 Ocean Parkway, an Art Deco building in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, are studded with mezuzas of all sizes and styles: plastic, pewter, simple, gaudy, elegant.
The people behind those doors are an assortment, too: Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, Buddhists, atheists and even a few observing the High Holy Days this week.
“I love mine,” said Eva Gasteazoro, a performance artist who discovered a mezuza on the doorway of her second-floor apartment when she moved in 10 years ago. Although she was raised Catholic, it never crossed her mind to take down this symbol of a Jewish household.
“It’s a very beautiful one,” she said, running her fingers over the raised Hebrew lettering on its tarnished but ornate metal casing. “A lot of the new ones are plastic,” she added, looking askance at a white mezuza jutting from her Jewish neighbor’s doorway.
Jews have left their mark on every aspect of New York life, but perhaps none are so ubiquitous and tangible as the palm-length encasements attached to countless doorways. So in a city that both savors history and likes to shake things up, it is perhaps inevitable that many of those mezuzas now belong to gentiles.
Left behind when Jewish residents died or moved out, they have survived apartment turnovers, renovations, co-op conversions, paint jobs and other changes wrought by time.
When Tazio and Todd Hilbert moved into their fifth-floor apartment in Ms. Gasteazoro’s building 10 years ago and spotted four mezuzas, Ms. Hilbert said, “We didn’t know what they were.” Although she was brought up Presbyterian and considers herself nonreligious, she kept her mezuza in place. “We never considered taking it down,” she said. “I liked how it was part of the history of the building.”
As any observant mezuza owner knows, they are not only decorative. Each mezuza — the word actually refers to the scroll inside, though most people use it to describe the casing as well — is a tiny parchment inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Torah that include “Shema Yisrael,” a prayer central to Judaism: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord Is One.” The Old Testament commands Jews to inscribe the words “on the doorposts of your house.”
Many Orthodox Jews touch the mezuza upon entering or leaving a home, sometimes accompanying the gesture with a touch to their lips in a simulated kiss.
Traditionally, Jews are expected to affix a mezuza to the right side (when viewed from the outside) of a door frame at approximately shoulder height, tilted inward. Ideally, they should do so upon moving in, but most Jewish authorities allow 30 days because, historically, Jews had to move frequently and under duress and were often unsure where their permanent home would be, said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Jewish law commands that every inhabited room have a mezuza on the door, but many Jews in America today put them only on the front door.
Jews leaving a home are expected to leave the mezuzas behind if they believe the next residents will also be Jewish. If not, they must take the mezuza with them, to guard against the possibility that a non-Jew might desecrate it, knowingly or not. If a mezuza becomes too weathered, dirty or otherwise damaged, it is to be buried, as are all sacred documents, a service that a rabbi or synagogue can facilitate.
Non-Jews, naturally, are not bound by these customs, but many follow them out of deference. Alex Cohen of Borough Park, Brooklyn, who sells, installs and inspects mezuzas under the business name Mezuzah Man, said he had answered calls from non-Jews asking him to remove their mezuzas. The mezuzas should be handled respectfully, he said: “You don’t just put it in the garbage.”
But many gentiles choose to keep their piece of Judaica in place.
“It’s good karma, if I can mix my religious metaphors,” said Brian Hallas, a resident of Kensington, Brooklyn, who teaches kindergarten at the Calhoun School in Manhattan. Although his mezuza was heavily camouflaged in what he described as a “lovely institutional beige” hallway tone, he spotted it immediately upon moving in, having once received a mezuza necklace from a college sweetheart.
“They took theirs down,” he said, pointing to a neighbor’s doorway, where all that remained of a mezuza was its footprint, stamped in the pea green color of the building’s previous interior.
The prospect of such a paint scar is what kept Eleanor Rodgers from removing the mezuza from the doorway of her home on Albemarle Road in Brooklyn, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood. “We’re not only not Jewish, we dislike organized religion,” said Mrs. Rodgers, a doctor’s receptionist who grew up in Ireland.
The mezuza-owning gentile might not be so unusual in a city where bankers live in artists’ lofts and almost every nationality has a pizza parlor. But the idea does not sit right with some observant Jews who see the mezuza as an important emblem of Jewish identity.
“To me, it’s very offensive,” said Sara Sloan, a retired schoolteacher in Windsor Terrace. “It’s taking my custom.”
She has mezuzas on every door frame except those for bathrooms and closets. And if she ever moves out, she will take them with her, unless she is certain the next residents will be Jewish. “I have contempt for people who didn’t care enough or respect tradition enough to remove it,” she said.
Still, Connie Peirce, 87, a retired secretary and Catholic who lives in Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, said she often wished she had inherited a mezuza like many of her non-Jewish neighbors did. The tradition recalled her youth, she said, when her local priest appeared each Easter to write “God bless this house” on her family’s front door.
To her delight, one of her Jewish neighbors recently hung a mezuza on her doorway. “Every time I come home and remember, I kiss it and touch it and then I bless myself, saying, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.’ ”
Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes
This is right on the heels of a huge tree-killing storm only half a year ago. Two years before that we had the storm that took out half the (remaining) trees on our block and a spire off the church up the hill. They call these "freak storms" but how freakish can they be, really?
As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.
Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.
They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.
There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.
The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and many commuters were inconvenienced.
But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or 40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.
On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death count.
The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.
Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the 650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut down.
Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.
Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled about 500 trees in Central Park.
The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was merciless in the other boroughs.
“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”
As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.
Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches the wind, and they are inflexible.
Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they are weak-wooded.
The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.
On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like matchsticks and whipped through the area.
Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.
One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.
“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,” Mr. Holden said.
The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.
“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it back? But you can’t.”
In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.
“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”
Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.
It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.
Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.
On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.
“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.
An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the storm took.
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been ripped off.
“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a bald guy with half a tonsure.”
He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.
Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.
The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”
He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”
A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies
Late summer is chili harvest time, when the entire state of New Mexico savors the perfume of roasting chilies, and across the country the delightful, painful fruit of plants of the genus Capsicum are being turned into salsa, hot sauce and grizzly bear repellent.
Festivals abound, often featuring chili pepper-eating contests. “It’s fun,” as one chili pepper expert wrote, “sorta like a night out to watch someone being burned at the stake.”
In my kitchen, as I turn my homegrown habaneros into hot sauce while wearing a respirator (I’m not kidding) I have my own small celebration of the evolutionary serendipity that has allowed pain-loving humans to enjoy such tasty pain.
Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research.
Others, notably Dr. Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the beneficial effects are too small to explain the great human love of chili-spiced food. “I don’t think they have anything to do with why people eat and like it,” he said in an interview. Dr. Rozin, who studies other human emotions and likes and dislikes (“I am the father of disgust in psychology,” he says) thinks that we’re in it for the pain. “This is a theory,” he emphasizes. “I don’t know that this is true.”
But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.” As Delbert McClinton sings (about a different line of research), “It felt so good to hurt so bad.”
I have to agree, although by true chili-head standards, I am a wimp. I can tolerate only a moderate degree of pain, perhaps because I came to chilies late in life. My son was quite impressed with an in-law who grew up in Mexico and ate habanero peppers whole, so my wife suggested a father-son gardening project. The first year only one plant survived the woodchucks and deer. But what a plant — it produced a bumper crop of killer orange habaneros. Nothing ate them. In my mind I still see that plant dangling its little orange heat grenades in front of the deer and growling, “Bite me, Bambi.”
Habaneros are very hot, although there’s a lot of variation. On the standard Scoville heat scale (Bell peppers 0, the hottest Indian jolokia peppers 1,000,000) orange habaneros run 100,000 to 350,000. By comparison, jalapenos can go anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000. Two percent capsaicin bear spray is advertised at 3.3 million units, and pure capsaicin — the chemical that causes the pain — hits 16 million.
This is the kind of plant that endears itself to a teenage boy. These weren’t vegetables, they were weapons! And it was legal to grow them. We started planning the next year’s garden at once.
The garden grew, year by year, and led to the bottling of hot sauce, and then to my first hesitant steps into the capsaicin demi-monde. I met some pain junkies at work. I bought the T-shirt with the capsaicin molecule on it. I marveled at the uncountable number of artisanal hot sauces on the market, and at the frequency with which the words “death,” “nuclear” and “devil” were used in the names. I have to say that I drew the line at getting a capsaicin molecule tattoo. And I did not buy the T-shirt with the flaming red mouth and the legend “Pain Is Good.”
This chest-beating may be particular to the United States, where one hot sauce maker actually markets a limited edition of pure capsaicin. In places like Central America, Asia and the Indian subcontinent, hot chili peppers are an integral part of the cuisine. Only the commercial genius of American marketing could come up with a product that is marketed on the basis that you won’t be able to use it.
End of Life Hot Sauce! So Painful You Will Die! Visa, MasterCard, Discover or PayPal accepted. Well, darn, sign me up for that.
How did this happen? The story of how chilies got their heat is pretty straightforward. A recent study suggested that capsaicin is an effective defense against a fungus that attacks chili seeds. In fact, experiments have shown that the same species of wild chili plant produces a lot of capsaicin in an environment where the fungus is likely to grow, and very little in drier areas where the fungus is not a danger.
The fact that capsaicin causes pain to mammals seems to be accidental. There’s no evolutionary percentage in preventing animals from eating the peppers, which fall off the plant when ripe. Birds, which also eat fruits, don’t have the same biochemical pain pathway, so they don’t suffer at all from capsaicin. But in mammals it stimulates the very same pain receptors that respond to actual heat. Chili pungency is not technically a taste; it is the sensation of burning, mediated by the same mechanism that would let you know that someone had set your tongue on fire.
But humans took to them quickly. There is evidence that by 6,000 years ago domesticated Capsicums (hot peppers) were being used from the Bahamas to the Andes. Once Columbus brought them back from the New World chilies spread through Europe, Asia and Africa. Jean Andrews, in the classic “Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums” (in which she made the comment above about pepper competitions and being burned at the stake), tracks the spread of peppers by early writers. By the mid-1500s, they were known in Europe, Africa, India and China.
No one knows for sure why humans would find pleasure in pain, but Dr. Rozin suggests that there’s a thrill, similar to the fun of riding a roller coaster. “Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” he said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.” And it says, hand me another jalapeño.
Other mammals have not joined the party. “There is not a single animal that likes hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said. Or as Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
That’s from Dr. Bloom’s new book, “How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like,” in which he addresses the general nature of human pleasure, and some very specific, complicated pleasures. Some, like eating painfully spicy food, are accidental, at least in their specificity. A complicated mind is adaptive, but love of chilies is an accident.
And that is what I celebrate behind my respirator as my son and I dice habaneros, accidental pleasures. A taste for chilies has no deep meaning, no evolutionary value. It’s just a taste for chilies. I might add, though, that since it takes such a complicated brain and weird self-awareness to enjoy something that is inherently not enjoyable, only the animal with the biggest brain and the most intricate mind can do it.
Take heart, chili heads. It’s not dumb to eat the fire, it’s a sign of high intelligence.
Family Fight, Border Patrol Raid, Baby Deported
What's all this crap I keep hearing about "anchor babies"? For crying out loud, the girl's mother's family has been in the US four generations, but she still got swept away.
A few days before her daughter Rosa’s first birthday, Monica Castro and the girl’s father had a violent argument in the trailer they all shared near Lubbock, Tex. Ms. Castro fled, leaving her daughter behind.
Ms. Castro, a fourth-generation American citizen, went to the local Border Patrol station. She said she would give the agents there information about the girl’s father, a Mexican in the country illegally, in exchange for help recovering her daughter.
Ms. Castro lived up to her side of the deal. But the federal government ended up deporting little Rosa, an American citizen, along with her father, Omar Gallardo. Ms. Castro would not see her daughter again for three years.
On the morning of Dec. 3, 2003, agents raided the trailer and seized Mr. Gallardo, who was wanted for questioning as a witness to a murder. They also took Rosa. Then they told Ms. Castro she had until that afternoon to get a court order if she wanted to keep her daughter.
A frantic lawyer rushed to court, and she called to plead for more time. But there was no court order yet when the government van arrived around 3 p.m., and agents hustled father and daughter into it for the long ride to the border.
Ms. Castro later sued the government, saying the agents had no legal authority to detain, much less deport, her daughter. Nor should Border Patrol agents, she said, take the place of family-court judges in making custody decisions.
The last court to rule in the case, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected Ms. Castro’s arguments, over the dissents of three judges.
The brief unsigned majority decision, echoing that of the trial judge, said the appeals court did not “condone the Border Patrol’s actions or the choices it made.” But, the decision went on, Ms. Castro could not sue the government because the agents had been entitled to use their discretion in the matter.
Ms. Castro’s lawyers last month asked the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, in a petition bristling with restrained incredulity.
The agents themselves have rejected the assertion that they may have acted a little rashly.
Holding Mr. Gallardo and the girl overnight, long enough for an American court to sort things out, would have involved “a tremendous amount of money,” Gregory L. Kurupas, the agent in charge of the Lubbock and Amarillo stations at the time, testified in a 2006 deposition.
Asked to quantify the daunting sum, Agent Kurupas replied, “Well over $200 plus.”
The American government gave Ms. Castro no help in finding Rosa beyond identifying the city in Mexico to which she had been delivered. That news did not comfort Ms. Castro.
“She was sent to Juárez, which is now the most dangerous city on the face of the planet,” said Susan L. Watson, one of Ms. Castro’s lawyers.
Mr. Gallardo was in time again arrested for entering the United States illegally. As part of his plea arrangement, he agreed to return Rosa, who had lived with his relatives in Mexico. He was once again deported, and my efforts to find him were unsuccessful.
The mother and child reunion, at the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez in 2006, was rocky. Rosa, then 4, did not recognize her mother and did not want to leave her other relatives.
“She was crying,” Ms. Castro recalled. “I started talking to her in Spanish, and she started yelling. She would hit me with her doll. She kicked me. She didn’t want anything to do with me. She wanted to be with her grandmother.”
Like the appeals court, the trial judge, Janis Graham Jack of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi, expressed some uneasiness about the case. Judge Jack said the agents might not have chosen “the optimal course of action.”
Judge Jerry E. Smith of the Fifth Circuit, who was in dissent when a three-judge panel of the court first heard the case and in the majority when the full court revisited it, agreed that the situation was not a happy one.
“No one is pleased,” Judge Smith wrote in his dissent, “that Castro did not see her daughter for three years.”
Things are much better these days, Ms. Castro said. Rosa is a happy, thriving 7-year-old in Corpus Christi. “She’s a straight-A honor roll student, in second grade now,” Ms. Castro said.
Ms. Castro added that the Supreme Court “should do something about the Border Patrol,” and perhaps the court will. The patrol did, after all, send an American infant to Ciudad Juárez with a man mixed up in a murder to save a couple of hundred dollars.
Or perhaps Ms. Castro will have to make do with the muted murmurs of sympathy she has received from judges who have heard her case so far. They do not condone what happened, are not pleased by it and, if pressed, are willing to say that the entire affair was “not optimal.”
Mormon-Owned Paper Stands With Immigrants
Joseph A. Cannon is nobody’s liberal. His résumé reads as if it belongs to a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which, incidentally, he was in 2004.
He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.
So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.
“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.
The News’s push for a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants has led to a collision between its editorial mission and its conservative, mostly Mormon, readers. But if this issue seems to stray from the reliably conservative politics of The News, Utah’s second-largest paper behind The Salt Lake Tribune, that may be in part because it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Hispanics are the most populous minority group in the country — and they represent a vast potential constituency for the Mormon church, which has already made considerable efforts to develop strong relations with Hispanic communities. Those efforts include, since February, a Spanish-language paper called El Observador.
“The church’s practice is to say, ‘Look, we’re not immigration agents. We care for the soul,’ ” Mr. Cannon said in an interview from his office in downtown Salt Lake City, where he can look out his window at the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple.
Both The News and El Observador are owned by the Deseret Media Companies (pronounced DEZ-er-ET; it is named after the provisional state of Deseret founded by Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley in 1849), which also owns Utah’s largest television station, KSL, and its largest news Web site, KSL.com.
Because any editorial that appears under the Deseret Media masthead carries the unofficial imprimatur of the church in many Mormons’ eyes, Deseret editors and executives could indeed help shape opinions in the heavily Mormon state Legislature, where lawmakers are debating a zero-tolerance illegal immigration law similar to the one passed in Arizona this year.
For the time being, church leaders seem uninterested in wading into the debate by taking an official policy position, as they did by declaring support for the referendum to ban same-sex marriage in California. Rather, it has made only a benign public appeal for “careful reflection and civil discourse” on the issue. But that has hardly soothed matters.
That the main sponsor of the Arizona law, Russell Pearce, is a Mormon has not been lost on many Hispanics here. And some active Mormons said they thought that the church, through its media properties, was trying to reassure Hispanics who were suspicious that it condoned anti-immigrant attitudes.
“Some of my Latino friends have said, ‘I’m going to leave the church over this,’ ” said Tony Yapias, director of Proyecto Latino de Utah, a Latino outreach group. “My view is that this is an aggressive way for the L.D.S. church to very effectively use their media power to try to soften up the community. They’re sending a message to their members.”
Both Mr. Cannon and Deseret Media’s chief executive, Mark H. Willes, said they never sought approval from church officials on any editorial or article they ran. They said the church also never asked to see an article before it was printed, though former editors said the practice had been to fax drafts of editorials to church headquarters.
The newsroom at The Deseret News is a mix of practicing and nonpracticing Mormons and people of other religious beliefs. It is not a strictly doctrinaire environment. There is a coffee machine in the break room, despite the church’s discouragement of drinking caffeinated beverages.
But as Mr. Cannon makes clear, The Deseret News is hardly going to run something that would offend its owners.
“No one is going to write an editorial here that we thought was inconsistent with or would poke the church in the eye,” said Mr. Cannon, who this week will move on to become a special adviser to the editorial board. “That’s not going to happen.”
Themes that appear in The Deseret News’s coverage of immigration are often echoed in El Observador. Its editor, Patricia Dark, said the paper now had 7,000 subscribers who received home delivery. Subscribers pay nothing; the three-times-a-week paper is subsidized by the church.
With a staff of three full-time reporters, El Observador typically devotes two or three articles in each edition to immigration-related topics. A major theme is the effect that deportation has on families. “Terror en familias hispanas” read one recent front-page headline.
“The breaking up of families is horrific, so we want to highlight that,” said Ms. Dark. Among Mormons, whose faith teaches that the family bond should be eternally inviolate, the issue of severing families is especially resonant.
Selecting themes and story lines that will appeal to Mormon values has been one way Deseret Media has tried to shift the debate.
Last month, Mr. Willes took the highly unusual step of writing an editorial that simultaneously ran on the front pages of The News and El Observador. The editorial, accompanied in print by an image of the Statue of Liberty with its famous inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” was also read by Mr. Willes on KSL, Salt Lake City’s NBC affiliate, and the KSL radio station.
“We, of all people, should be sensitive to the desire of others to provide more opportunities for themselves and their families,” Mr. Willes wrote, making a direct appeal to Mormons’ sense of their history. Like Mormons, who fled the Midwest in the mid-19th century after failing to assimilate into society, undocumented immigrants know what it is like to be outcasts, Mr. Willes said.
But those who find their positions on immigration criticized by Mr. Willes’s media companies see journalistic bias, not Mormon values, at work.
“Obviously, they’re trying to sway public opinion in a big way,” said Stephen Sandstrom, a Republican state representative who is sponsoring a bill that would create a set of strict immigration laws similar to Arizona’s. Mr. Sandstrom, a Mormon, said he was not deterred. “I do have people in e-mails saying, ‘You’d better not back down or I’ll know the church got to you.’ And I just assure them that the L.D.S. church is not directing me one way or another on this.”
The immigration issue has become intensely personal for Mr. Willes, a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times who was selected by church leaders to run Deseret Media a year and a half ago.
He has consulted lawyers to advise him on the technicalities of immigration law and convened a committee of Deseret Media editors and executives that meets to brainstorm ideas on immigration coverage. “Everywhere we looked, the problem just seemed substantially more complicated than the dialogue,” he said.
Mr. Cannon acknowledged that changing minds would be difficult, but he said he hoped at the very least to challenge readers to reflect on immigration through the teachings of their religion.
“What are the two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor,” he said. “These people are our neighbors — incontestably, by any definition, they are our neighbors.”
An article ambitiously titled "Evolution in Action" about how some skinks give live birth
What to do if you lose a body part. Not likely to come up, but better to read it now - are you really gonna go google if your fingers get chopped off?
An article on the bedbug conference
Hilariously, it notes that the bedbug control folks all religiously checked their rooms first thing. It'd be the worst kind of irony to come home from this event with a few little hitchhikers!
Interesting quote here: “People still have in their heads that bedbugs means someone’s dirty,” Mr. Linde said, “but I handle multimillion-dollar homes in Westchester and Connecticut, and believe me, no one’s dirty.”
"People" think bedbugs mean you're *dirty*, but *he* doesn't bring up dirt, he brings up wealth. Because people do think the two go together (or don't, rather).
This may be the only place in the country where, for two days at least, the prospect of a bedbug infestation carries not the slightest, slimmest of stigmas.
At a meeting here this week, a line of salespeople wore green hardhats decorated with large black bugs, red tongues protruding and legs wiggling, as they spoke about the urgent need to protect mattresses.
Not far from various heating, freezing, dusting and spraying devices aimed at abolishing the creatures were stuffed, pastel-colored bedbugs. All around were films, charts and blown-up photographs of the bugs themselves — the enemies (and stars) of this show.
More than 360 concerned people — entomologists; pest control workers; government, military and university officials; and, especially, inventors of anti-bedbug contraptions — gathered here in the Chicago suburbs on Tuesday and Wednesday for the event, which had a growing waiting list of more than 200 people.
“I can give you back your life in a day,” one pest control company owner, Scott Linde of Edison, N.J., said as he pointed a visitor toward a room full of heaters and computerized heat monitors, all aimed at eviscerating bedbugs in a matter of hours.
“People still have in their heads that bedbugs means someone’s dirty,” Mr. Linde said, “but I handle multimillion-dollar homes in Westchester and Connecticut, and believe me, no one’s dirty.”
Phillip Cooper, an organizer of the conference who proudly wore his BedBug Central company logo shirt, said this was the biggest, broadest meeting of its kind since bedbugs began making their miserable return. The price tag for attendees: $450.
Mr. Cooper’s brother, Richard, an entomologist he calls “the god of bedbugs,” had warned for years that they were returning and helped create BedBug Central, a company that sells “boot camp” training to pest control companies and produces regular “BedBug TV” Webcasts on the latest woes.
“This isn’t going away,” Mr. Cooper said of the insects, pointing out that nearly all interested parties besides the hotel industry had chosen to be represented at the conference.
The seminars, which drew standing-room-only crowds, were not meant for those with a passing interest or for those quick to cringe (or itch). Among the topics: “Bring the Heat,” “Fumigation” and “Group Homes — Unique Challenges in Transient Settings.”
In the hallways, the ordinary pleasantries sounded anything but ordinary. Some people shared suggestions on how best to check beds, mattresses and sheets for bedbugs.
(Nearly everyone said they had done as much when they arrived at the host hotel, and the maids may find more than a few headboards askew from their search. Many people said they started out by putting luggage on the bathroom floor, the better to see any scurrying, before investigating hiding spots in the rest of the room. One man put his luggage inside a bedbug-proof bag and kept all his clothes on a non-fabric chair throughout his stay, though his initial survey found nothing.)
A few attendees debated chemical solutions versus heat, whose supporters said it was generally more expensive but required fewer treatments. Others traded tales of their most challenging infestations.
“You got a popcorn ceiling? You’re dead,” said Kristine Effaldana, who owns dogs trained to search for bedbugs, including Walter, a puggle who sat at her feet looking mildly puzzled in the crowd. She was referring to the sprayed-on texture that was in style 40 years ago and can be a breeding ground for bugs.
If anything, the products promoted revealed that there is, for now, no single, agreed-on answer to the problem. The sheer number of them is enormous and growing by the week: dissolving laundry bags, plastic luggage protectors, screw-in bug barriers for the bottoms of bed legs, slow-release strips meant to vaporize bugs, portable aerosol machines and on and on.
Many grumbled about newcomers to the battle and about products that promised to do everything at little cost. “There are so many pest control places out there showing up and undercutting,” said Corey Westrum of Leonard, Minn., who helped create Insect Inferno, a portable trailer that heats mattresses.
Of course, no one seems to agree yet on exactly who is legitimate and who is, in the words of Brian Hirsch, a sales manager for Protect-A-Bed, “a Johnny-come-lately.” Even the organizers of this event said they were not necessarily endorsing those who had chosen to display their goods.
One absolute message here: there is no shame in bedbugs. It is not you. It is them. Still, there were acknowledgments of how the rest of the country may feel.
At the booth of USBedBugs.com, the company’s sign promised “discreet home delivery,” which workers there said meant that items like travel sprays and large plastic bags would arrive in plain brown boxes with no company name on the return address.
In Mezuzas, a Custom Inherited by Gentiles
The doorways inside 30 Ocean Parkway, an Art Deco building in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, are studded with mezuzas of all sizes and styles: plastic, pewter, simple, gaudy, elegant.
The people behind those doors are an assortment, too: Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, Buddhists, atheists and even a few observing the High Holy Days this week.
“I love mine,” said Eva Gasteazoro, a performance artist who discovered a mezuza on the doorway of her second-floor apartment when she moved in 10 years ago. Although she was raised Catholic, it never crossed her mind to take down this symbol of a Jewish household.
“It’s a very beautiful one,” she said, running her fingers over the raised Hebrew lettering on its tarnished but ornate metal casing. “A lot of the new ones are plastic,” she added, looking askance at a white mezuza jutting from her Jewish neighbor’s doorway.
Jews have left their mark on every aspect of New York life, but perhaps none are so ubiquitous and tangible as the palm-length encasements attached to countless doorways. So in a city that both savors history and likes to shake things up, it is perhaps inevitable that many of those mezuzas now belong to gentiles.
Left behind when Jewish residents died or moved out, they have survived apartment turnovers, renovations, co-op conversions, paint jobs and other changes wrought by time.
When Tazio and Todd Hilbert moved into their fifth-floor apartment in Ms. Gasteazoro’s building 10 years ago and spotted four mezuzas, Ms. Hilbert said, “We didn’t know what they were.” Although she was brought up Presbyterian and considers herself nonreligious, she kept her mezuza in place. “We never considered taking it down,” she said. “I liked how it was part of the history of the building.”
As any observant mezuza owner knows, they are not only decorative. Each mezuza — the word actually refers to the scroll inside, though most people use it to describe the casing as well — is a tiny parchment inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Torah that include “Shema Yisrael,” a prayer central to Judaism: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord Is One.” The Old Testament commands Jews to inscribe the words “on the doorposts of your house.”
Many Orthodox Jews touch the mezuza upon entering or leaving a home, sometimes accompanying the gesture with a touch to their lips in a simulated kiss.
Traditionally, Jews are expected to affix a mezuza to the right side (when viewed from the outside) of a door frame at approximately shoulder height, tilted inward. Ideally, they should do so upon moving in, but most Jewish authorities allow 30 days because, historically, Jews had to move frequently and under duress and were often unsure where their permanent home would be, said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Jewish law commands that every inhabited room have a mezuza on the door, but many Jews in America today put them only on the front door.
Jews leaving a home are expected to leave the mezuzas behind if they believe the next residents will also be Jewish. If not, they must take the mezuza with them, to guard against the possibility that a non-Jew might desecrate it, knowingly or not. If a mezuza becomes too weathered, dirty or otherwise damaged, it is to be buried, as are all sacred documents, a service that a rabbi or synagogue can facilitate.
Non-Jews, naturally, are not bound by these customs, but many follow them out of deference. Alex Cohen of Borough Park, Brooklyn, who sells, installs and inspects mezuzas under the business name Mezuzah Man, said he had answered calls from non-Jews asking him to remove their mezuzas. The mezuzas should be handled respectfully, he said: “You don’t just put it in the garbage.”
But many gentiles choose to keep their piece of Judaica in place.
“It’s good karma, if I can mix my religious metaphors,” said Brian Hallas, a resident of Kensington, Brooklyn, who teaches kindergarten at the Calhoun School in Manhattan. Although his mezuza was heavily camouflaged in what he described as a “lovely institutional beige” hallway tone, he spotted it immediately upon moving in, having once received a mezuza necklace from a college sweetheart.
“They took theirs down,” he said, pointing to a neighbor’s doorway, where all that remained of a mezuza was its footprint, stamped in the pea green color of the building’s previous interior.
The prospect of such a paint scar is what kept Eleanor Rodgers from removing the mezuza from the doorway of her home on Albemarle Road in Brooklyn, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood. “We’re not only not Jewish, we dislike organized religion,” said Mrs. Rodgers, a doctor’s receptionist who grew up in Ireland.
The mezuza-owning gentile might not be so unusual in a city where bankers live in artists’ lofts and almost every nationality has a pizza parlor. But the idea does not sit right with some observant Jews who see the mezuza as an important emblem of Jewish identity.
“To me, it’s very offensive,” said Sara Sloan, a retired schoolteacher in Windsor Terrace. “It’s taking my custom.”
She has mezuzas on every door frame except those for bathrooms and closets. And if she ever moves out, she will take them with her, unless she is certain the next residents will be Jewish. “I have contempt for people who didn’t care enough or respect tradition enough to remove it,” she said.
Still, Connie Peirce, 87, a retired secretary and Catholic who lives in Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, said she often wished she had inherited a mezuza like many of her non-Jewish neighbors did. The tradition recalled her youth, she said, when her local priest appeared each Easter to write “God bless this house” on her family’s front door.
To her delight, one of her Jewish neighbors recently hung a mezuza on her doorway. “Every time I come home and remember, I kiss it and touch it and then I bless myself, saying, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.’ ”
Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes
This is right on the heels of a huge tree-killing storm only half a year ago. Two years before that we had the storm that took out half the (remaining) trees on our block and a spire off the church up the hill. They call these "freak storms" but how freakish can they be, really?
As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.
Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.
They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.
There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.
The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and many commuters were inconvenienced.
But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or 40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.
On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death count.
The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.
Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the 650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut down.
Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.
Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled about 500 trees in Central Park.
The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was merciless in the other boroughs.
“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”
As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.
Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches the wind, and they are inflexible.
Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they are weak-wooded.
The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.
On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like matchsticks and whipped through the area.
Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.
One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.
“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,” Mr. Holden said.
The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.
“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it back? But you can’t.”
In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.
“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”
Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.
It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.
Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.
On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.
“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.
An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the storm took.
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been ripped off.
“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a bald guy with half a tonsure.”
He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.
Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.
The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”
He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”
A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies
Late summer is chili harvest time, when the entire state of New Mexico savors the perfume of roasting chilies, and across the country the delightful, painful fruit of plants of the genus Capsicum are being turned into salsa, hot sauce and grizzly bear repellent.
Festivals abound, often featuring chili pepper-eating contests. “It’s fun,” as one chili pepper expert wrote, “sorta like a night out to watch someone being burned at the stake.”
In my kitchen, as I turn my homegrown habaneros into hot sauce while wearing a respirator (I’m not kidding) I have my own small celebration of the evolutionary serendipity that has allowed pain-loving humans to enjoy such tasty pain.
Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research.
Others, notably Dr. Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the beneficial effects are too small to explain the great human love of chili-spiced food. “I don’t think they have anything to do with why people eat and like it,” he said in an interview. Dr. Rozin, who studies other human emotions and likes and dislikes (“I am the father of disgust in psychology,” he says) thinks that we’re in it for the pain. “This is a theory,” he emphasizes. “I don’t know that this is true.”
But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.” As Delbert McClinton sings (about a different line of research), “It felt so good to hurt so bad.”
I have to agree, although by true chili-head standards, I am a wimp. I can tolerate only a moderate degree of pain, perhaps because I came to chilies late in life. My son was quite impressed with an in-law who grew up in Mexico and ate habanero peppers whole, so my wife suggested a father-son gardening project. The first year only one plant survived the woodchucks and deer. But what a plant — it produced a bumper crop of killer orange habaneros. Nothing ate them. In my mind I still see that plant dangling its little orange heat grenades in front of the deer and growling, “Bite me, Bambi.”
Habaneros are very hot, although there’s a lot of variation. On the standard Scoville heat scale (Bell peppers 0, the hottest Indian jolokia peppers 1,000,000) orange habaneros run 100,000 to 350,000. By comparison, jalapenos can go anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000. Two percent capsaicin bear spray is advertised at 3.3 million units, and pure capsaicin — the chemical that causes the pain — hits 16 million.
This is the kind of plant that endears itself to a teenage boy. These weren’t vegetables, they were weapons! And it was legal to grow them. We started planning the next year’s garden at once.
The garden grew, year by year, and led to the bottling of hot sauce, and then to my first hesitant steps into the capsaicin demi-monde. I met some pain junkies at work. I bought the T-shirt with the capsaicin molecule on it. I marveled at the uncountable number of artisanal hot sauces on the market, and at the frequency with which the words “death,” “nuclear” and “devil” were used in the names. I have to say that I drew the line at getting a capsaicin molecule tattoo. And I did not buy the T-shirt with the flaming red mouth and the legend “Pain Is Good.”
This chest-beating may be particular to the United States, where one hot sauce maker actually markets a limited edition of pure capsaicin. In places like Central America, Asia and the Indian subcontinent, hot chili peppers are an integral part of the cuisine. Only the commercial genius of American marketing could come up with a product that is marketed on the basis that you won’t be able to use it.
End of Life Hot Sauce! So Painful You Will Die! Visa, MasterCard, Discover or PayPal accepted. Well, darn, sign me up for that.
How did this happen? The story of how chilies got their heat is pretty straightforward. A recent study suggested that capsaicin is an effective defense against a fungus that attacks chili seeds. In fact, experiments have shown that the same species of wild chili plant produces a lot of capsaicin in an environment where the fungus is likely to grow, and very little in drier areas where the fungus is not a danger.
The fact that capsaicin causes pain to mammals seems to be accidental. There’s no evolutionary percentage in preventing animals from eating the peppers, which fall off the plant when ripe. Birds, which also eat fruits, don’t have the same biochemical pain pathway, so they don’t suffer at all from capsaicin. But in mammals it stimulates the very same pain receptors that respond to actual heat. Chili pungency is not technically a taste; it is the sensation of burning, mediated by the same mechanism that would let you know that someone had set your tongue on fire.
But humans took to them quickly. There is evidence that by 6,000 years ago domesticated Capsicums (hot peppers) were being used from the Bahamas to the Andes. Once Columbus brought them back from the New World chilies spread through Europe, Asia and Africa. Jean Andrews, in the classic “Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums” (in which she made the comment above about pepper competitions and being burned at the stake), tracks the spread of peppers by early writers. By the mid-1500s, they were known in Europe, Africa, India and China.
No one knows for sure why humans would find pleasure in pain, but Dr. Rozin suggests that there’s a thrill, similar to the fun of riding a roller coaster. “Humans and only humans get to enjoy events that are innately negative, that produce emotions or feelings that we are programmed to avoid when we come to realize that they are actually not threats,” he said. “Mind over body. My body thinks I’m in trouble, but I know I’m not.” And it says, hand me another jalapeño.
Other mammals have not joined the party. “There is not a single animal that likes hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said. Or as Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, “Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
That’s from Dr. Bloom’s new book, “How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like,” in which he addresses the general nature of human pleasure, and some very specific, complicated pleasures. Some, like eating painfully spicy food, are accidental, at least in their specificity. A complicated mind is adaptive, but love of chilies is an accident.
And that is what I celebrate behind my respirator as my son and I dice habaneros, accidental pleasures. A taste for chilies has no deep meaning, no evolutionary value. It’s just a taste for chilies. I might add, though, that since it takes such a complicated brain and weird self-awareness to enjoy something that is inherently not enjoyable, only the animal with the biggest brain and the most intricate mind can do it.
Take heart, chili heads. It’s not dumb to eat the fire, it’s a sign of high intelligence.
Family Fight, Border Patrol Raid, Baby Deported
What's all this crap I keep hearing about "anchor babies"? For crying out loud, the girl's mother's family has been in the US four generations, but she still got swept away.
A few days before her daughter Rosa’s first birthday, Monica Castro and the girl’s father had a violent argument in the trailer they all shared near Lubbock, Tex. Ms. Castro fled, leaving her daughter behind.
Ms. Castro, a fourth-generation American citizen, went to the local Border Patrol station. She said she would give the agents there information about the girl’s father, a Mexican in the country illegally, in exchange for help recovering her daughter.
Ms. Castro lived up to her side of the deal. But the federal government ended up deporting little Rosa, an American citizen, along with her father, Omar Gallardo. Ms. Castro would not see her daughter again for three years.
On the morning of Dec. 3, 2003, agents raided the trailer and seized Mr. Gallardo, who was wanted for questioning as a witness to a murder. They also took Rosa. Then they told Ms. Castro she had until that afternoon to get a court order if she wanted to keep her daughter.
A frantic lawyer rushed to court, and she called to plead for more time. But there was no court order yet when the government van arrived around 3 p.m., and agents hustled father and daughter into it for the long ride to the border.
Ms. Castro later sued the government, saying the agents had no legal authority to detain, much less deport, her daughter. Nor should Border Patrol agents, she said, take the place of family-court judges in making custody decisions.
The last court to rule in the case, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected Ms. Castro’s arguments, over the dissents of three judges.
The brief unsigned majority decision, echoing that of the trial judge, said the appeals court did not “condone the Border Patrol’s actions or the choices it made.” But, the decision went on, Ms. Castro could not sue the government because the agents had been entitled to use their discretion in the matter.
Ms. Castro’s lawyers last month asked the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, in a petition bristling with restrained incredulity.
The agents themselves have rejected the assertion that they may have acted a little rashly.
Holding Mr. Gallardo and the girl overnight, long enough for an American court to sort things out, would have involved “a tremendous amount of money,” Gregory L. Kurupas, the agent in charge of the Lubbock and Amarillo stations at the time, testified in a 2006 deposition.
Asked to quantify the daunting sum, Agent Kurupas replied, “Well over $200 plus.”
The American government gave Ms. Castro no help in finding Rosa beyond identifying the city in Mexico to which she had been delivered. That news did not comfort Ms. Castro.
“She was sent to Juárez, which is now the most dangerous city on the face of the planet,” said Susan L. Watson, one of Ms. Castro’s lawyers.
Mr. Gallardo was in time again arrested for entering the United States illegally. As part of his plea arrangement, he agreed to return Rosa, who had lived with his relatives in Mexico. He was once again deported, and my efforts to find him were unsuccessful.
The mother and child reunion, at the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez in 2006, was rocky. Rosa, then 4, did not recognize her mother and did not want to leave her other relatives.
“She was crying,” Ms. Castro recalled. “I started talking to her in Spanish, and she started yelling. She would hit me with her doll. She kicked me. She didn’t want anything to do with me. She wanted to be with her grandmother.”
Like the appeals court, the trial judge, Janis Graham Jack of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi, expressed some uneasiness about the case. Judge Jack said the agents might not have chosen “the optimal course of action.”
Judge Jerry E. Smith of the Fifth Circuit, who was in dissent when a three-judge panel of the court first heard the case and in the majority when the full court revisited it, agreed that the situation was not a happy one.
“No one is pleased,” Judge Smith wrote in his dissent, “that Castro did not see her daughter for three years.”
Things are much better these days, Ms. Castro said. Rosa is a happy, thriving 7-year-old in Corpus Christi. “She’s a straight-A honor roll student, in second grade now,” Ms. Castro said.
Ms. Castro added that the Supreme Court “should do something about the Border Patrol,” and perhaps the court will. The patrol did, after all, send an American infant to Ciudad Juárez with a man mixed up in a murder to save a couple of hundred dollars.
Or perhaps Ms. Castro will have to make do with the muted murmurs of sympathy she has received from judges who have heard her case so far. They do not condone what happened, are not pleased by it and, if pressed, are willing to say that the entire affair was “not optimal.”
Mormon-Owned Paper Stands With Immigrants
Joseph A. Cannon is nobody’s liberal. His résumé reads as if it belongs to a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which, incidentally, he was in 2004.
He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.
So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.
“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.
The News’s push for a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants has led to a collision between its editorial mission and its conservative, mostly Mormon, readers. But if this issue seems to stray from the reliably conservative politics of The News, Utah’s second-largest paper behind The Salt Lake Tribune, that may be in part because it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Hispanics are the most populous minority group in the country — and they represent a vast potential constituency for the Mormon church, which has already made considerable efforts to develop strong relations with Hispanic communities. Those efforts include, since February, a Spanish-language paper called El Observador.
“The church’s practice is to say, ‘Look, we’re not immigration agents. We care for the soul,’ ” Mr. Cannon said in an interview from his office in downtown Salt Lake City, where he can look out his window at the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple.
Both The News and El Observador are owned by the Deseret Media Companies (pronounced DEZ-er-ET; it is named after the provisional state of Deseret founded by Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley in 1849), which also owns Utah’s largest television station, KSL, and its largest news Web site, KSL.com.
Because any editorial that appears under the Deseret Media masthead carries the unofficial imprimatur of the church in many Mormons’ eyes, Deseret editors and executives could indeed help shape opinions in the heavily Mormon state Legislature, where lawmakers are debating a zero-tolerance illegal immigration law similar to the one passed in Arizona this year.
For the time being, church leaders seem uninterested in wading into the debate by taking an official policy position, as they did by declaring support for the referendum to ban same-sex marriage in California. Rather, it has made only a benign public appeal for “careful reflection and civil discourse” on the issue. But that has hardly soothed matters.
That the main sponsor of the Arizona law, Russell Pearce, is a Mormon has not been lost on many Hispanics here. And some active Mormons said they thought that the church, through its media properties, was trying to reassure Hispanics who were suspicious that it condoned anti-immigrant attitudes.
“Some of my Latino friends have said, ‘I’m going to leave the church over this,’ ” said Tony Yapias, director of Proyecto Latino de Utah, a Latino outreach group. “My view is that this is an aggressive way for the L.D.S. church to very effectively use their media power to try to soften up the community. They’re sending a message to their members.”
Both Mr. Cannon and Deseret Media’s chief executive, Mark H. Willes, said they never sought approval from church officials on any editorial or article they ran. They said the church also never asked to see an article before it was printed, though former editors said the practice had been to fax drafts of editorials to church headquarters.
The newsroom at The Deseret News is a mix of practicing and nonpracticing Mormons and people of other religious beliefs. It is not a strictly doctrinaire environment. There is a coffee machine in the break room, despite the church’s discouragement of drinking caffeinated beverages.
But as Mr. Cannon makes clear, The Deseret News is hardly going to run something that would offend its owners.
“No one is going to write an editorial here that we thought was inconsistent with or would poke the church in the eye,” said Mr. Cannon, who this week will move on to become a special adviser to the editorial board. “That’s not going to happen.”
Themes that appear in The Deseret News’s coverage of immigration are often echoed in El Observador. Its editor, Patricia Dark, said the paper now had 7,000 subscribers who received home delivery. Subscribers pay nothing; the three-times-a-week paper is subsidized by the church.
With a staff of three full-time reporters, El Observador typically devotes two or three articles in each edition to immigration-related topics. A major theme is the effect that deportation has on families. “Terror en familias hispanas” read one recent front-page headline.
“The breaking up of families is horrific, so we want to highlight that,” said Ms. Dark. Among Mormons, whose faith teaches that the family bond should be eternally inviolate, the issue of severing families is especially resonant.
Selecting themes and story lines that will appeal to Mormon values has been one way Deseret Media has tried to shift the debate.
Last month, Mr. Willes took the highly unusual step of writing an editorial that simultaneously ran on the front pages of The News and El Observador. The editorial, accompanied in print by an image of the Statue of Liberty with its famous inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” was also read by Mr. Willes on KSL, Salt Lake City’s NBC affiliate, and the KSL radio station.
“We, of all people, should be sensitive to the desire of others to provide more opportunities for themselves and their families,” Mr. Willes wrote, making a direct appeal to Mormons’ sense of their history. Like Mormons, who fled the Midwest in the mid-19th century after failing to assimilate into society, undocumented immigrants know what it is like to be outcasts, Mr. Willes said.
But those who find their positions on immigration criticized by Mr. Willes’s media companies see journalistic bias, not Mormon values, at work.
“Obviously, they’re trying to sway public opinion in a big way,” said Stephen Sandstrom, a Republican state representative who is sponsoring a bill that would create a set of strict immigration laws similar to Arizona’s. Mr. Sandstrom, a Mormon, said he was not deterred. “I do have people in e-mails saying, ‘You’d better not back down or I’ll know the church got to you.’ And I just assure them that the L.D.S. church is not directing me one way or another on this.”
The immigration issue has become intensely personal for Mr. Willes, a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times who was selected by church leaders to run Deseret Media a year and a half ago.
He has consulted lawyers to advise him on the technicalities of immigration law and convened a committee of Deseret Media editors and executives that meets to brainstorm ideas on immigration coverage. “Everywhere we looked, the problem just seemed substantially more complicated than the dialogue,” he said.
Mr. Cannon acknowledged that changing minds would be difficult, but he said he hoped at the very least to challenge readers to reflect on immigration through the teachings of their religion.
“What are the two commandments? Love God and love your neighbor,” he said. “These people are our neighbors — incontestably, by any definition, they are our neighbors.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 04:44 pm (UTC)This is also the sort of reasoning that insists/assumes that child abuse and domestic violence are things that only poor people do.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 05:43 pm (UTC)Another thing is: can they live in a tempurpedic mattress?
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 05:58 pm (UTC)And yeah, I think they can live in or on a tempurpedic mattress (check under the mattress seams). They can also live in any crevice in any piece of furniture you have. They can live in the holes where the screws are. They can live in the space where you dogeared a book. (That's fun!)
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-30 07:10 am (UTC)