Articles...! (And random links)
Sep. 26th, 2010 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
New Kellogg School Research Suggests a Colorblind Approach to Diversity May Frustrate Efforts to Identify and Confront Discrimination. No duh.
The Disease Called Perfection.
Time Lapse video of a compost pile
This WTF? inducing post by Nikki Grimes
An article on getting boys to read that confirms that literacy does not mean you understand logic.
"Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken."
Or maybe boys who prefer video games to books are more likely to have video games than books.
"The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books. "
And you're also going to keep them from playing sports, you're going to keep them from exploring outside, you're going to keep them from having swordfights inside, you're going to keep them from masturbating, you're going to keep them from doing chores, right? Because the choice is screentime or books, not books and EVERYTHING ELSE, right?
That link comes from here which ultimately I got from here.
On bikeshare programs (and similar)
"But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American. "
Yup, you got it, a business model that allows you to pay to share a bike is un-American. Capitalism isn't American!
Can Americans share? Or, at least, not steal?
That question hung over the rows of identical fire-red bicycles lined up last week for the start of Capital Bikeshare in Washington, the nation’s largest bike-sharing program.
Similar programs also began this year in Denver and Minneapolis, with another to start in Miami this fall. At the same time, start-up companies with names like SnapGoods, Share Some Sugar and NeighborGoods are trying to make money by using social networks to let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a fee.
These companies are looking to join a familiar list — including Netflix, Zipcar and Pandora, the online radio service — built on access to goods and services, rather than ownership.
But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American.
But some scholars say that the Internet — by fostering collaboration on a communal, open platform — has changed the way Americans think about sharing and ownership. Collaborative habits online are beginning to find expression in the real world.
“I thought that online was an exception,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, whose coming book, “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” focuses on the explosion of cooperative endeavors, both online and off. “I now am more confident that the phenomenon is not limited to online but is a general phenomenon of human behavior.”
So far, he said, there have been no formal studies into whether the Internet has affected offline cooperation or attitudes about ownership.
But an ethic of sharing has long found a place in the United States, like cooperative farming and car-pooling, which is the second most common form of commuting. Bike sharing, too, is nothing new. Early efforts, beginning with shared bikes on college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s, relied mostly on trust. That model worked in some small towns like Crested Butte, Colo., but tended to collapse quickly in urban environments. (In 2005, a bike-sharing program started in Edmonton, Canada; 95 percent of its bikes were stolen after three years.)
The bike share programs now spreading to cities like Paris, Washington and Hangzhou, China, follow a subscription model and use electronic tracking to deter theft. (By contrast, college campuses use a library model, with bikes loaned for extended periods of time.)
And like most share programs, a credit card is required for collateral. There may also be membership fees and escalating usage charges. (The first 30 minutes are generally free.) So, while it may be sharing, its success is based on technology — and a deposit.
Companies trying to make money from what is called collaborative consumption are not very big and very new. Each counts its members in the thousands, and together they have a few million dollars in goods available to share.
But it is surprising that consumers are even willing to try it. “Everyone thought we were completely crazy two years ago,” said Micki Krimmel, 32, the founder of NeighborGoods, a sharing service. She said her success was based on a “a desire for community, a desire to be more sustainable and, frankly, it’s the economy.”
Publishers have taken note, with books like Lisa Gansky’s “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing” and Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’s “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption,” published this month.
In a 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin wrote that resources held in common would inevitably be ruined by individual self-interest and therefore needed forceful regulation.
But scholars like Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University and a Nobelist in economics, are revisiting this thesis. Her research focused on instances in which social norms and local understandings led groups to share scarce resources. In other words, people don’t always misuse or destroy the commons simply because it doesn’t belong to them personally.
Yet in the case of shared bicycles, sustainability is still in question. In Paris, vandalism and theft have plagued the city’s bike share program, started in 2007, with most of its 20,000 bikes needing either repair or replacement. “The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” the newspaper Le Monde wrote in an editorial last year.
And in a nod to our darker side, some advocates of sharing are betting that success is based on, well, self-interest.
“Sharing takes away all the headaches of ownership, and people see that pretty clearly,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing, a nonprofit that runs the program.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Lauren Statman, 23, a Washington resident investigating a bike station last Sunday. She just started biking again this month, she said, but is between jobs and not likely to buy her own bike right now.
“It seems cool,” she said, “because you don’t have to commit.”
Some Obama Allies Fear School Lunch Bill Could Rob Food Stamp Program
In her campaign to reduce childhood obesity and improve school nutrition, Michelle Obama has become entangled in a fight with White House allies, including liberal Democrats and advocates for the poor.
At issue is how to pay for additional spending on the school lunch program and other child nutrition projects eagerly sought by the White House. A bill that the House is expected to consider within days would come up with some of the money by cutting future food stamp benefits.
When the Senate passed the bill in early August, Mrs. Obama said she was thrilled. But anti-hunger groups were not. They deluged House members on Thursday with phone calls and e-mails expressing alarm.
“It is wrong to take money from food stamps to finance child nutrition programs,” said Edward M. Cooney, executive director of the Congressional Hunger Center, an advocacy group. “You are taking money from low-income people in one program and spending it on low-income people — maybe the same people — in another program.”
The Food Research and Action Center and Catholic Charities USA said they supported expanding child nutrition programs but opposed cutting money for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
More than 100 House Democrats, including leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing the use of food stamp money to pay for the expansion of child nutrition programs. Labor unions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Education Association, and women’s groups have sent similar letters.
Administration officials are pushing House Democrats to pass the Senate bill. The House Democratic whip, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, sent an e-mail to colleagues this week asking if they supported it.
House Democratic leaders said the House could consider the Senate bill under an expedited procedure that prohibits amendments and requires a two-thirds majority for passage.
Martha B. Coven, a senior staff member at the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the bill “would make a historic investment in school meal programs and go a long way toward achieving Mrs. Obama’s goal of ending the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation.”
“We support the bill as a whole,” Ms. Coven said. “We strongly support House passage of the Senate bill.” She declined to comment on criticism of the food stamp changes.
Lawmakers from both parties and child nutrition advocates have praised many provisions of the Senate bill. It gives the secretary of agriculture the authority to establish nutrition standards for foods sold in schools during the school day, including vending machine items. And it would require schools to serve more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products.
Also, for the first time in over three decades, it would increase federal reimbursement for school lunches beyond inflation — to allow for the cost of higher-quality meals. It would also allow more than 100,000 children on Medicaid to qualify for free school meals, without filing applications.
Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “I want to pass a child nutrition bill. I am committed to the first lady’s campaign. I want to be helpful. But I won’t vote for a bill that robs Peter to pay Paul. The White House needs to work with us to find a better way to offset the cost.”
Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, “While I want a strong and robust reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, we cannot do it on the backs of the unemployed, underemployed and chronically poor.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City weighed in too. He wrote that he was concerned about the health and welfare of the more than one million students in the city’s public schools. But he said that Congress should not try to help them at the expense of food stamp recipients.
By reducing future food stamp benefits, Mr. Bloomberg said, the Senate bill “would reduce the availability of nutritious food at children’s homes in order to provide those very same children nutritious options at school.”
Nationwide, more than 41 million people receive food stamps, nearly half of them children. The number of recipients has increased 51 percent since the recession began in December 2007. The average monthly benefit is $133 a person, about $4.40 a day.
The Senate bill would save $2.2 billion over 10 years by eliminating an increase in benefits provided by the 2009 economic stimulus law. Food price inflation has been lower than expected, so the increase could be ended early, in November 2013, proponents say.
Ellen S. Teller of the Food Research and Action Center said the cuts “would increase poverty and could increase obesity because shoppers would try to stretch their dollars by buying cheaper, calorie-dense food that has low nutritional value.”
Old West Traditions, and Tensions, at Rodeo
The sign at the entrance to the rodeo’s bleachers said “Wrist Bands Required.” So Reggie Queampts dutifully wore his: “2010 Round-Up NDN Seating.”
“That’s NDN — as in ‘Indian,’ ” said Mr. Queampts, a member of the Yakama Nation. “This is where they usually put the Indians, the cheap seats.”
The Pendleton Round-Up — which celebrated its centennial last weekend — did not become one of the West’s oldest, biggest and most beloved rodeos by bucking tradition. The arena where it is held just underwent an $8.5 million renovation, but the bulls still burst out of weathered old wooden bucking shoots. The names of corporate sponsors are not splashed on the arena walls. No motorized vehicles are allowed at the “Westward Ho!” parade that coincides with the rodeo, only people and horses and wagon wheels. Even rodeo riders are impressed with the frontier authenticity of this high-desert town in eastern Oregon.
“This one is different,” said Paul Eaves, a Texan who travels the country roping steer on the rodeo circuit. “This is a cowboy town.”
And that, some Indians say, can be a problem. Some are offended by the sun-scorched bleachers where they get to sit for free (anyone can pay to sit in the shaded grandstand). Others are uncomfortable with Indians’ daily appearances in traditional dress in the rodeo arena — where they are applauded but not expected to stay long. Some say the Round-Up sends mixed signals to the Native Americans who have lived here for thousands of years: we want you, in your place.
That is an attitude with plenty of Western tradition as well.
“They did all these renovations and improvements but the Indians are still sitting out in the sun,” said Fred Hill, a board member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, which includes the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla tribes. “Everybody has taken notice of it.”
One Indian woman, gesturing toward those in the Indian section on a hot afternoon, said, “It’s a subclass.”
Yet Indians have been choosing to come to Round-Up since it began, and this year’s turnout was particularly strong.
“The story, as it goes,” said Carl Culham, a Round-Up board member and the publicity director, “is that the first board of directors in determining what the Pendleton Round-Up was, decided that we need Native American participation but it had to be more realistic than things like Bill Cody Wild West Shows.”
With the help the owners of the Pendleton Woolen Mills, a system of bartering and stipends was developed in which Indians were given food and blankets and paid to set up teepees in the Teepee Village, directly outside the arena. Some were paid — and many still are — to participate in an outdoor theater performance that still goes on called “Happy Canyon.” Adults recall appearing in the arena as children in traditional Indian dress, then receiving silver dollars from rodeo organizers as they made their exit.
A century later, the mill still provides blankets, and families are still paid to appear, $5 per person each day at the arena. Beef and vegetables are provided, as are tokens for other food. The winner of the “Best Dressed Indian Award” at the parade gets 50 silver dollars. The winner of the “Oldest Indian Couple Award” gets 100 silver dollars in a pouch.
Blankets are also among the gifts for the “All-Around Cowboy Award,” though silver dollars are not. And there have long been prominent Indian riders in the regular rodeo, in addition to those who ride bareback in the raucous Indian relay races.
One of the Round-Up’s most famous rodeo champions is Jackson Sundown, a Nez Perce Indian who won it all in 1916 when he was over 50 years old. Earlier, in 1911, after judges denied first place to a popular black rider, George Fletcher, the crowd roared its disapproval and soon collected money on his behalf, more than he would have received had he won, according to historical accounts.
The weeklong event goes on now much as it did before. Over the years, many Indians said, the artificial gathering evolved into a traditional one, bringing together disparate tribes from the Northwest. Many said they loved sharing the tradition with their children. More than 300 teepees were set up this year, a larger number than organizers could remember.
“We could be clear up in the mountains and we’d have to get back to the reservation to get ready for Round-Up,” recalled Jesse Jones Jr., chief of the Cayuse tribe. “But it’s not a place to get rich. My mother stressed that to us. It’s about tradition.”
For all the complaints about the Indian seating, some Indians said they did not mind, particularly since the seats were free, compared with $20 for those in the shade. Mr. Culham noted that Round-Up is run largely by 1,500 volunteers, many of whom are given vouchers to buy meals in return for their service, but not free seats.
Speaking of the Native Americans, he said, “They get a special section to sit in plus they get access to the Round-Up grounds like the volunteers do.”
But volunteers do not bring their children and grandparents out to the rodeo in traditional dress, make their way on horseback and on foot from the Teepee Village to the historic arena, smiling and waving and singing and dancing.
Before the procession this year, Wayne Brooks, the rodeo announcer, called local Indians “our friends, our family” and during the procession he handed over the microphone to Jess Nowland, who spoke for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla.
“We’re all glad to welcome all of you here to our homeland,” Mr. Nowland said.
Mr. Nowland described the tribes’ long history here on the Columbia River plateau, how they had “ceded” much of their land to white settlers but were now striving to improve tribal social and economic health through projects as varied as improving salmon habitat and the steadily expanding Wildhorse Resort and Casino, which opened in 1995.
It was then that a man in the crowd called out, “To suck us all dry! So we can spend all our money there.”
Not everyone heard the heckler. Most people were polite and took pictures. The casino is now a sponsor of the Round-Up. Soon enough, out came the water truck to wet down the dirt so the rodeo could resume.
“This,” Mr. Brooks said, “concludes the Indian portion of our show.”
At Sukkah City, Religion Meets Whimsy
Over by the subway entrance, a Trotskyite with a megaphone was mounting his soap box. On the steps, some artfully unbathed skatepunks were laughing and smoking. And from across the street, the unholy trinity of ShoeMania, Whole Foods and Forever 21 were bathing the scene in a multicolor neon glow. It was another Sunday night in Union Square Park.
Just one thing was different. Well, 11 things: In the midst of this most decidedly secular of settings, 11 sukkahs, the temporary shelters Jews erect each year for the harvest festival Sukkot, were standing watch, and in turn being closely watched by the teeming crowd.
These shelters would have been unrecognizable to most rabbis, and most other inhabitants of earth, for that matter. They were architectural fun houses, one-offs made from stunty materials like giant bubble wrap, long spiky reeds, cardboard signs hand-lettered by homeless people, huge panes of glass balanced perilously on edge and what looked like a million jumbo clothespins reaching to the sky.
These fanciful experiments inspired a fair bit of news media attention but little apparent religious practice (for which many of them were poorly suited in any case). All the same, I started to wonder if their presence in the park could serve as a new model for spiritual life in the city. Could this point the way toward open-source religion?
New York is home to a thousand different religious traditions. Still, there is far less religious cross-fertilization than, say, racial. (We may work side by side. We don’t pray side by side.) As cosmopolitan as we like to think of ourselves, that’s a good recipe for distrust.
Is it just a coincidence that while Islamic institutions far and wide have come under suspicion since 9/11, only Park51, the proposed Islamic community center and mosque, could be puffed up into a national controversy? Who knew before this summer that there were other mosques within blocks of ground zero? How many New Yorkers even know what would go on at a new one?
The wild structures in Union Square Park were finalists in Sukkah City, an architectural competition conceived by the writer Josh Foer and the Jewish cultural provocateurs known as Reboot (one of whose workshops I attended several years ago). Some of the 624 people from 43 countries who submitted designs were Jewish, but others were Christians, Muslims, Baha’i, devout, irreverent, oblivious. The finalists, selected by a panel of architects and designers were plunked in the middle of a crowded park, and all of New York was invited to judge them. More than 17,000 people cast ballots, and Monday night, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the winner.
The traditional way to celebrate the week-long holiday of Sukkot is to eat in a temporary shelter. That worked fine at the larger shelter in Bryant Park, but city inspectors wisely ruled the prospect out for these more experimental and ephemeral designs. That limitation did not stop hundreds of people from checking it all out.
On one visit, I saw children on a school field trip taking notes, a studious-looking Sikh taking photographs, a serviceman wandering around in fatigues, a gaggle of young women in the midst of wedding planning — all poking, exploring, discussing, debating and then continuing on their way to the subway, to dinner or to buy leopard-print thongs at Forever 21.
For some, it was a goofy design stunt; for others, a learning opportunity, or an act of mockery, or an inspiration or even just a roadblock. Around 4 a.m. Sunday, a bunch of motocross riders turned Sukkah City into an obstacle course, to the distress of some of the architects, who had curled up inside their creations in hope of a catnap. And with no one to adjudicate, all those opinions and all those unexpected uses bore equal authority.
“I think it’s wonderful,” said Rabbi Michael Shmidman, the Orthodox rabbi of Congregation Orach Chaim on the Upper East Side. As to the question of whether the sukkahs were “kosher,” Rabbi Shmidman explained, it was irrelevant.
At this moment of national religious anxiety, it’s tempting to ask what would happen if other religious rituals were turned inside out and opened to public view. If the people behind the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural complex had put all their plans forward and invited the entire city to comment, could outside observers have made them sound so scary? One of the Sukkah City architects wrote about the goal of making a structure “transparent enough to be inclusive, but dense enough to create a sense of belonging.” Inshallah.
I returned to Union Square Park on Wednesday night, as the actual holiday began, worried that the winning (and by then only remaining) structure might have devolved into a battleground, with different tribes of Jews trying to lay public claim to it. But I found no black hats and gray beards wielding prayer books. No blissed-out Israeli ravers eating organic produce from Whole Foods. No observance of any kind. The sukkah was roped off and ignored.
It seemed sad that a competition that spawned such excitement about design and open-mindedness made no effort to also support actual religious practice. But on the Upper West Side, where one of the runner-up sukkahs had been deposited on a sidewalk, a few neighborhood families that discovered it had run home and grabbed food, then reconvened for dinner under the stars.
Never underestimate the odd synergies of art and religion. Or the lengths to which New Yorkers will go for outdoor seating.
This house is only a few blocks from mine
Pics!
IN 1888, a German-born beer baron named George Bechtel, who was said to be the richest man on Staten Island, gave his 21-year-old daughter Annie an extraordinary wedding present.
Annie was betrothed to a German-American named Leonard Weiderer, and the gift was a three-story, 24-room Victorian mansion in the Queen Anne style. The 4,500-square-foot showpiece, on the street known as Mud Lane (later rechristened St. Paul’s Avenue), was outfitted with eight bedrooms, two kitchens and six fireplaces, each of a different design.
Annie’s bridal home included virtually every detail of Victorian domestic architecture — hipped roofs, gables, fish-scale shingles, chimneys, bay windows, dormer windows, even a turret. Garlanding the exterior were a series of porches and balconies. Two dozen imported stained-glass windows, courtesy of the glass factory Mr. Weiderer owned, exploded with stars, sunbursts, crescent moons and floral designs pricked in luminous primary colors. Chestnut and oak paneling covered nearly every available inch of wall space.
But the couple’s time in the house was brief. Three years into the marriage, tuberculosis claimed Mr. Weiderer’s life. His young widow moved to Germany and married a second time, but just five years later, in 1899, she died also. She was 31.
Annie’s sister Agnes lived in the house until 1928, followed by the Teitelbaums (1928-48), the Fraziers (1948-88) and, from 1988 to 1999, a chef who painted the exterior what one paint consultant described, not intending to pay a compliment, as a “Lucille Ball shade” of pink.
Through all these incarnations, the house proved a hardy survivor, the undisputed but neglected star among nearly a hundred handsome Victorian dwellings in the Stapleton area. What it lacked was someone who valued its lustrous past.
That person turned out to be a soft-spoken Montana-born doctor named Ted Brown. Dr. Brown, 63, who is the director of the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Institute for Basic Research, and whose specialty is autism research, works out of offices on Staten Island.
At the time he began house-hunting on the island, he and his family were ensconced in a 200-year-old farmhouse in Port Washington, on Long Island, and he was developing a taste for living close to the past. When he was shown what a real estate agent modestly described as an “older house of character,” he was blown away.
“Maybe I was crazy, but I just thought it would be fun to live there,” Dr. Brown said in his understated way as he and his wife, Donna, sat side by side in what they call their formal parlor, an octagonal space framed by a sweeping archway.
Ms. Brown, a speech therapist who works with autistic schoolchildren (the couple met in 1985 at a genetics conference in Australia), viewed the situation differently.
“When I first saw the house,” she said, “I thought Ted had lost it.”
And remind us why she went along with the idea?
“Because I love him,” Ms. Brown said with an adoring smile.
When the couple bought the house in 1999 for $525,000, they set aside $250,000 for renovations, a figure that ballooned to $400,000. Before moving in, they worked for six months on the interior; once in residence, they tackled the exterior. Painting the facade — using sun-drenched colors like squash, copper, antique gold and seven others — took five months.
“The first couple of years, the house was really in sad shape,” Ms. Brown said. “We were really overwhelmed. Then we began to love it.”
But they know the work will never be finished, in part because the family, which includes the couple’s son, Hunter, 17; their daughter, Montana, 19; and two dogs, use all 24 rooms, amazing as that seems.
The room where the Browns were sitting on this day had the look of a perfectly appointed stage set for some forgotten Victorian-era drama. Furnishings include Persian carpets from Dr. Brown’s childhood home, an inlaid chessboard atop an inlaid table and a piano with Debussy on the music stand. (Dr. Brown, who in 1964 was a Montana state chess champion, plays both the game and the instrument.)
The mantel is almost hidden by an assortment of crystal — bells, goblets, paperweights, teardrop candlesticks. A velvet shawl with ivory fringe is draped over one chair, and needlepoint pillows nestle in the corners of the sofa.
The couple are justly proud of the grand staircase, which looks like a puzzle composed of intricately braided chestnut spindles and a matching woven screen, each tiny curl milled separately. At the base of the stairs, a pair of linked circlets have been carved into the wood. It is an emblem, Ms. Brown thinks, of the union of the young couple whose time in the house was so brief and so tragic.
The second floor is devoted to bedrooms, and the third, the onetime servants’ quarters, with its tiny rooms and low ceilings, is a teenage boy’s paradise; Hunter has his own bedroom, kitchen and video area.
The third floor is also the entrance to the little two-story room at the top of the turret. On a Web site that lists the Brown house as a location for filming and fashion shoots, the passageway to the turret is described as a “creepy, coffin-shaped tunnel.”
Creepy is the word.
“When we first moved in, the kids used to play there,” Dr. Brown said, “and someone was always being dragged in and locked away and had to be rescued.”
After he moved to Stapleton, Dr. Brown joined the Mud Lane Society, the preservation group that helped get 92 Victorians designated as city landmarks. The group’s president since 2007, he knows more than most people about what life in this part of the city was like a century ago. Along the staircase hang photographs giving a vivid picture of the brewers who were island royalty before Prohibition brought them low, and through eBay Dr. Brown has amassed a collection of old bottles from the Bechtel brewery.
He has discovered that living in such an over-the-top house was just as he thought it would be — fun. Total strangers stop and take pictures, in part thanks to www.forgotten-ny.com, a Web site that proclaims 387 St. Paul’s Avenue as “possibly the most gorgeous private dwelling on Staten Island and a contender for most beautiful building in NYC.” And at least for the Browns, who see themselves as caretakers of a piece of Staten Island history, the poignant history of the house only enhances its appeal.
“This was a wedding gift for a bride,” Ms. Brown pointed out. “Don’t you wish you could give your child such a gift?”
Their Moon Shot and Ours
China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.
Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.
This contrast is not good. I was recently at a Washington Nationals baseball game. While waiting for a hot dog, I overheard the conversation behind me. A management consultant for a big national firm was telling his colleagues that his job was to “market products to the Department of Homeland Security.” I thought to myself: “Oh, my! Inventing studies about terrorist threats and selling them to the U.S. government, is that an industry now?”
We’re out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.
The electric car industry is pivotal for three reasons, argues Shai Agassi, the C.E.O. of Better Place, a global electric car company that next year will begin operating national electric car networks in Israel and Denmark. First, the auto industry was the foundation for America’s manufacturing middle class. Second, the country that replaces gasoline-powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles — in an age of steadily rising oil prices and steadily falling battery prices — will have a huge cost advantage and independence from imported oil. Third, electric cars are full of power electronics and software. “Think of the applications industry that will be spun out from electric cars,” says Agassi. It will be the iPhone on steroids.
Europe is using $7-a-gallon gasoline to stimulate the market for electric cars; China is using $5-a-gallon and naming electric cars as one of the industrial pillars for its five-year growth plan. And America? President Obama has directed stimulus money at electric cars, but he is unwilling to do the one thing that would create the sustained consumer pull required to grow an electric car industry here: raise taxes on gasoline. Price matters. Sure, the Moore’s Law of electric cars — “the cost per mile of the electric car battery will be cut in half every 18 months” — will steadily drive the cost down, says Agassi, but only once we get scale production going. U.S. companies can do that on their own or in collaboration with Chinese ones. But God save us if we don’t do it at all.
Two weeks ago, I visited the Coda Automotive battery facility in Tianjin, China — a joint venture between U.S. innovators and investors, China’s Lishen battery company and China National Offshore Oil Company. Yes, China’s oil company is using profits to develop batteries.
Kevin Czinger, Coda’s C.E.O., who drove me around Manhattan in his company’s soon-to-be-in-production electric car last week, laid out what is going on. The backbone of the modern U.S. economy was locally made cars powered by locally produced oil. It started us on a huge growth spurt. In recent decades, though, that industry was supplanted by foreign-made cars run on foreign oil, so “now every time we buy a car we’re exporting $15,000 of capital, paying for it with borrowed money and running it on foreign energy sources,” says Czinger. “We’ve gone from autos being a middle-class-making-machine to a middle-class-destroying-machine.” A U.S. electric car/battery industry would reverse that.
The Coda, 14,000 of which will be on the road in California over the next year and can travel 100 miles on one overnight charge, is a combination of Chinese-made batteries and complex American-system electronics — all final-assembled in Oakland (price: $37,000). It is a win-win start-up for both countries.
If we both now create the market incentives for consumers to buy electric cars, and the plug-in infrastructure for people to drive them everywhere, it will be a win-win moon shot for both countries. The electric car industry will flourish in the U.S. and China, and together we’ll tackle the next challenge: using auto battery innovations to build big storage batteries for wind and solar. However, if only China puts the gasoline prices and infrastructure in place, the industry will gravitate there. It will be a moon shot for them, a hobby for us, and you’ll import your new electric car from China just like you’re now importing your oil from Saudi Arabia.
Achieving Techno-Literacy
This past year my wife and I home-schooled our eighth-grade son. One school day, he and I decided we would make fire the old way — out of nothing but plant materials and our own hustle. Our son watched a seemingly endless series of instructional survival videos on YouTube as part of his research. He chose the bow method based on our physics class about friction. He then constructed a bow from a branch in the woods, carved a stick for the spindle and added a fiber string. It was mighty tough going. We spent hours refining the apparatus. He was surprised by the enormous amount of bodily energy required to focus onto a very small spot, and how a minuscule, nearly invisible bit of fuel, once sparked, can quickly amplify into a flame and then a fire. Chemistry, physics, history and gym all in one lesson. And, man, when you are 13 years old and Prometheus, it’s exhilarating!
One day our student would dissect and diagram the inside organs of flowers; the next he’d write short stories or poems and then revise them; and the next day we’d solve logic problems with algebra, then he’d work on plans for a chicken coop and maybe we’d do a field trip to a car factory. He also went through eighth-grade textbooks in history, grammar, geometry and the like. This type of home-schooling is really nothing special. Our son was merely one of more than a million students home-schooled in the United States last year. Our reasons for home-schooling were not uncommon, either. We wanted to create an ideal learning environment. For the previous seven years, our son was enrolled in challenging schools. His grades were excellent, but the amount of homework was grinding him down. The intense high school he was planning to attend promised even more work. He asked if he could be home-schooled for his last year before high school, and by a quirk of life, this was a year our schedules would permit our role as home-school teachers.
Now that the year is done, I am struck that the fancy technology supposedly crucial to an up-to-the-minute education was not a major factor in its success. Of course, technology in the broadest sense was everywhere in our classroom. There was an inexpensive microscope on the kitchen table and an old digital camera to record experiments. There was a PC always on for research. Our son was also a big user of online tutorials. Of particular note is Khan Academy, which offers nearly 1,600 short high-quality tutorials on algebra, chemistry, history, economics and other subjects — all created by one guy, and all free. The Internet was also essential for my wife and me as we researched the best textbooks, the best projects, the best approaches.
But the computer was only one tool of many. Technology helped us learn, but it was not the medium of learning. It was summoned when needed. Technology is strange that way. Education, at least in the K-12 range, is more about child rearing than knowledge acquisition. And since child rearing is primarily about forming character, instilling values and cultivating habits, it may be the last area to be directly augmented by technology.
Even so, as technology floods the rest of our lives, one of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy — and we made sure it was part of our curriculum. By technological literacy, I mean the latest in a series of proficiencies children should accumulate in school. Students begin with mastering the alphabet and numbers, then transition into critical thinking, logic and absorption of the scientific method. Technological literacy is something different: proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm. We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful. Rather, we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.
Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the kind of literacy that we tried to impart:
• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.
• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.
I don’t think my son mastered all those principles in one year, but he got a start. For the most part, learning at home is more demanding than learning in a classroom because it requires more self-direction. On one particularly long day, with books piled up and papers spread out, my son was slumped in his chair.
“Is everything O.K.?” I asked.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I not only have to be the student, I also have to be the teacher.”
“Yes! So what have you learned about being a teacher?”
“You have to teach the student — that’s me — not only to learn stuff but to learn how to learn.”
“And have you?”
“I think I am doing better as the student than the teacher. I’m learning how to learn, but I can’t wait till next year when I have some real good teachers — better than me.”
He had learned the most critical thing: how to keep learning. A month ago he entered high school eager to be taught — not facts, or even skills, but a lifelong process that would keep pace with technology’s rapid, ceaseless teaching.
If we listen to technology, and learn to be proficient in its ways, then we’ll be able to harness this most powerful force in the world. If not, we’ll be stuck at the bottom of the class.
The Disease Called Perfection.
Time Lapse video of a compost pile
This WTF? inducing post by Nikki Grimes
An article on getting boys to read that confirms that literacy does not mean you understand logic.
"Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken."
Or maybe boys who prefer video games to books are more likely to have video games than books.
"The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books. "
And you're also going to keep them from playing sports, you're going to keep them from exploring outside, you're going to keep them from having swordfights inside, you're going to keep them from masturbating, you're going to keep them from doing chores, right? Because the choice is screentime or books, not books and EVERYTHING ELSE, right?
That link comes from here which ultimately I got from here.
On bikeshare programs (and similar)
"But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American. "
Yup, you got it, a business model that allows you to pay to share a bike is un-American. Capitalism isn't American!
Can Americans share? Or, at least, not steal?
That question hung over the rows of identical fire-red bicycles lined up last week for the start of Capital Bikeshare in Washington, the nation’s largest bike-sharing program.
Similar programs also began this year in Denver and Minneapolis, with another to start in Miami this fall. At the same time, start-up companies with names like SnapGoods, Share Some Sugar and NeighborGoods are trying to make money by using social networks to let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a fee.
These companies are looking to join a familiar list — including Netflix, Zipcar and Pandora, the online radio service — built on access to goods and services, rather than ownership.
But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American.
But some scholars say that the Internet — by fostering collaboration on a communal, open platform — has changed the way Americans think about sharing and ownership. Collaborative habits online are beginning to find expression in the real world.
“I thought that online was an exception,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, whose coming book, “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” focuses on the explosion of cooperative endeavors, both online and off. “I now am more confident that the phenomenon is not limited to online but is a general phenomenon of human behavior.”
So far, he said, there have been no formal studies into whether the Internet has affected offline cooperation or attitudes about ownership.
But an ethic of sharing has long found a place in the United States, like cooperative farming and car-pooling, which is the second most common form of commuting. Bike sharing, too, is nothing new. Early efforts, beginning with shared bikes on college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s, relied mostly on trust. That model worked in some small towns like Crested Butte, Colo., but tended to collapse quickly in urban environments. (In 2005, a bike-sharing program started in Edmonton, Canada; 95 percent of its bikes were stolen after three years.)
The bike share programs now spreading to cities like Paris, Washington and Hangzhou, China, follow a subscription model and use electronic tracking to deter theft. (By contrast, college campuses use a library model, with bikes loaned for extended periods of time.)
And like most share programs, a credit card is required for collateral. There may also be membership fees and escalating usage charges. (The first 30 minutes are generally free.) So, while it may be sharing, its success is based on technology — and a deposit.
Companies trying to make money from what is called collaborative consumption are not very big and very new. Each counts its members in the thousands, and together they have a few million dollars in goods available to share.
But it is surprising that consumers are even willing to try it. “Everyone thought we were completely crazy two years ago,” said Micki Krimmel, 32, the founder of NeighborGoods, a sharing service. She said her success was based on a “a desire for community, a desire to be more sustainable and, frankly, it’s the economy.”
Publishers have taken note, with books like Lisa Gansky’s “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing” and Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’s “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption,” published this month.
In a 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin wrote that resources held in common would inevitably be ruined by individual self-interest and therefore needed forceful regulation.
But scholars like Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University and a Nobelist in economics, are revisiting this thesis. Her research focused on instances in which social norms and local understandings led groups to share scarce resources. In other words, people don’t always misuse or destroy the commons simply because it doesn’t belong to them personally.
Yet in the case of shared bicycles, sustainability is still in question. In Paris, vandalism and theft have plagued the city’s bike share program, started in 2007, with most of its 20,000 bikes needing either repair or replacement. “The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” the newspaper Le Monde wrote in an editorial last year.
And in a nod to our darker side, some advocates of sharing are betting that success is based on, well, self-interest.
“Sharing takes away all the headaches of ownership, and people see that pretty clearly,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing, a nonprofit that runs the program.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Lauren Statman, 23, a Washington resident investigating a bike station last Sunday. She just started biking again this month, she said, but is between jobs and not likely to buy her own bike right now.
“It seems cool,” she said, “because you don’t have to commit.”
Some Obama Allies Fear School Lunch Bill Could Rob Food Stamp Program
In her campaign to reduce childhood obesity and improve school nutrition, Michelle Obama has become entangled in a fight with White House allies, including liberal Democrats and advocates for the poor.
At issue is how to pay for additional spending on the school lunch program and other child nutrition projects eagerly sought by the White House. A bill that the House is expected to consider within days would come up with some of the money by cutting future food stamp benefits.
When the Senate passed the bill in early August, Mrs. Obama said she was thrilled. But anti-hunger groups were not. They deluged House members on Thursday with phone calls and e-mails expressing alarm.
“It is wrong to take money from food stamps to finance child nutrition programs,” said Edward M. Cooney, executive director of the Congressional Hunger Center, an advocacy group. “You are taking money from low-income people in one program and spending it on low-income people — maybe the same people — in another program.”
The Food Research and Action Center and Catholic Charities USA said they supported expanding child nutrition programs but opposed cutting money for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
More than 100 House Democrats, including leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing the use of food stamp money to pay for the expansion of child nutrition programs. Labor unions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Education Association, and women’s groups have sent similar letters.
Administration officials are pushing House Democrats to pass the Senate bill. The House Democratic whip, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, sent an e-mail to colleagues this week asking if they supported it.
House Democratic leaders said the House could consider the Senate bill under an expedited procedure that prohibits amendments and requires a two-thirds majority for passage.
Martha B. Coven, a senior staff member at the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the bill “would make a historic investment in school meal programs and go a long way toward achieving Mrs. Obama’s goal of ending the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation.”
“We support the bill as a whole,” Ms. Coven said. “We strongly support House passage of the Senate bill.” She declined to comment on criticism of the food stamp changes.
Lawmakers from both parties and child nutrition advocates have praised many provisions of the Senate bill. It gives the secretary of agriculture the authority to establish nutrition standards for foods sold in schools during the school day, including vending machine items. And it would require schools to serve more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products.
Also, for the first time in over three decades, it would increase federal reimbursement for school lunches beyond inflation — to allow for the cost of higher-quality meals. It would also allow more than 100,000 children on Medicaid to qualify for free school meals, without filing applications.
Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “I want to pass a child nutrition bill. I am committed to the first lady’s campaign. I want to be helpful. But I won’t vote for a bill that robs Peter to pay Paul. The White House needs to work with us to find a better way to offset the cost.”
Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, “While I want a strong and robust reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, we cannot do it on the backs of the unemployed, underemployed and chronically poor.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City weighed in too. He wrote that he was concerned about the health and welfare of the more than one million students in the city’s public schools. But he said that Congress should not try to help them at the expense of food stamp recipients.
By reducing future food stamp benefits, Mr. Bloomberg said, the Senate bill “would reduce the availability of nutritious food at children’s homes in order to provide those very same children nutritious options at school.”
Nationwide, more than 41 million people receive food stamps, nearly half of them children. The number of recipients has increased 51 percent since the recession began in December 2007. The average monthly benefit is $133 a person, about $4.40 a day.
The Senate bill would save $2.2 billion over 10 years by eliminating an increase in benefits provided by the 2009 economic stimulus law. Food price inflation has been lower than expected, so the increase could be ended early, in November 2013, proponents say.
Ellen S. Teller of the Food Research and Action Center said the cuts “would increase poverty and could increase obesity because shoppers would try to stretch their dollars by buying cheaper, calorie-dense food that has low nutritional value.”
Old West Traditions, and Tensions, at Rodeo
The sign at the entrance to the rodeo’s bleachers said “Wrist Bands Required.” So Reggie Queampts dutifully wore his: “2010 Round-Up NDN Seating.”
“That’s NDN — as in ‘Indian,’ ” said Mr. Queampts, a member of the Yakama Nation. “This is where they usually put the Indians, the cheap seats.”
The Pendleton Round-Up — which celebrated its centennial last weekend — did not become one of the West’s oldest, biggest and most beloved rodeos by bucking tradition. The arena where it is held just underwent an $8.5 million renovation, but the bulls still burst out of weathered old wooden bucking shoots. The names of corporate sponsors are not splashed on the arena walls. No motorized vehicles are allowed at the “Westward Ho!” parade that coincides with the rodeo, only people and horses and wagon wheels. Even rodeo riders are impressed with the frontier authenticity of this high-desert town in eastern Oregon.
“This one is different,” said Paul Eaves, a Texan who travels the country roping steer on the rodeo circuit. “This is a cowboy town.”
And that, some Indians say, can be a problem. Some are offended by the sun-scorched bleachers where they get to sit for free (anyone can pay to sit in the shaded grandstand). Others are uncomfortable with Indians’ daily appearances in traditional dress in the rodeo arena — where they are applauded but not expected to stay long. Some say the Round-Up sends mixed signals to the Native Americans who have lived here for thousands of years: we want you, in your place.
That is an attitude with plenty of Western tradition as well.
“They did all these renovations and improvements but the Indians are still sitting out in the sun,” said Fred Hill, a board member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, which includes the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla tribes. “Everybody has taken notice of it.”
One Indian woman, gesturing toward those in the Indian section on a hot afternoon, said, “It’s a subclass.”
Yet Indians have been choosing to come to Round-Up since it began, and this year’s turnout was particularly strong.
“The story, as it goes,” said Carl Culham, a Round-Up board member and the publicity director, “is that the first board of directors in determining what the Pendleton Round-Up was, decided that we need Native American participation but it had to be more realistic than things like Bill Cody Wild West Shows.”
With the help the owners of the Pendleton Woolen Mills, a system of bartering and stipends was developed in which Indians were given food and blankets and paid to set up teepees in the Teepee Village, directly outside the arena. Some were paid — and many still are — to participate in an outdoor theater performance that still goes on called “Happy Canyon.” Adults recall appearing in the arena as children in traditional Indian dress, then receiving silver dollars from rodeo organizers as they made their exit.
A century later, the mill still provides blankets, and families are still paid to appear, $5 per person each day at the arena. Beef and vegetables are provided, as are tokens for other food. The winner of the “Best Dressed Indian Award” at the parade gets 50 silver dollars. The winner of the “Oldest Indian Couple Award” gets 100 silver dollars in a pouch.
Blankets are also among the gifts for the “All-Around Cowboy Award,” though silver dollars are not. And there have long been prominent Indian riders in the regular rodeo, in addition to those who ride bareback in the raucous Indian relay races.
One of the Round-Up’s most famous rodeo champions is Jackson Sundown, a Nez Perce Indian who won it all in 1916 when he was over 50 years old. Earlier, in 1911, after judges denied first place to a popular black rider, George Fletcher, the crowd roared its disapproval and soon collected money on his behalf, more than he would have received had he won, according to historical accounts.
The weeklong event goes on now much as it did before. Over the years, many Indians said, the artificial gathering evolved into a traditional one, bringing together disparate tribes from the Northwest. Many said they loved sharing the tradition with their children. More than 300 teepees were set up this year, a larger number than organizers could remember.
“We could be clear up in the mountains and we’d have to get back to the reservation to get ready for Round-Up,” recalled Jesse Jones Jr., chief of the Cayuse tribe. “But it’s not a place to get rich. My mother stressed that to us. It’s about tradition.”
For all the complaints about the Indian seating, some Indians said they did not mind, particularly since the seats were free, compared with $20 for those in the shade. Mr. Culham noted that Round-Up is run largely by 1,500 volunteers, many of whom are given vouchers to buy meals in return for their service, but not free seats.
Speaking of the Native Americans, he said, “They get a special section to sit in plus they get access to the Round-Up grounds like the volunteers do.”
But volunteers do not bring their children and grandparents out to the rodeo in traditional dress, make their way on horseback and on foot from the Teepee Village to the historic arena, smiling and waving and singing and dancing.
Before the procession this year, Wayne Brooks, the rodeo announcer, called local Indians “our friends, our family” and during the procession he handed over the microphone to Jess Nowland, who spoke for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla.
“We’re all glad to welcome all of you here to our homeland,” Mr. Nowland said.
Mr. Nowland described the tribes’ long history here on the Columbia River plateau, how they had “ceded” much of their land to white settlers but were now striving to improve tribal social and economic health through projects as varied as improving salmon habitat and the steadily expanding Wildhorse Resort and Casino, which opened in 1995.
It was then that a man in the crowd called out, “To suck us all dry! So we can spend all our money there.”
Not everyone heard the heckler. Most people were polite and took pictures. The casino is now a sponsor of the Round-Up. Soon enough, out came the water truck to wet down the dirt so the rodeo could resume.
“This,” Mr. Brooks said, “concludes the Indian portion of our show.”
At Sukkah City, Religion Meets Whimsy
Over by the subway entrance, a Trotskyite with a megaphone was mounting his soap box. On the steps, some artfully unbathed skatepunks were laughing and smoking. And from across the street, the unholy trinity of ShoeMania, Whole Foods and Forever 21 were bathing the scene in a multicolor neon glow. It was another Sunday night in Union Square Park.
Just one thing was different. Well, 11 things: In the midst of this most decidedly secular of settings, 11 sukkahs, the temporary shelters Jews erect each year for the harvest festival Sukkot, were standing watch, and in turn being closely watched by the teeming crowd.
These shelters would have been unrecognizable to most rabbis, and most other inhabitants of earth, for that matter. They were architectural fun houses, one-offs made from stunty materials like giant bubble wrap, long spiky reeds, cardboard signs hand-lettered by homeless people, huge panes of glass balanced perilously on edge and what looked like a million jumbo clothespins reaching to the sky.
These fanciful experiments inspired a fair bit of news media attention but little apparent religious practice (for which many of them were poorly suited in any case). All the same, I started to wonder if their presence in the park could serve as a new model for spiritual life in the city. Could this point the way toward open-source religion?
New York is home to a thousand different religious traditions. Still, there is far less religious cross-fertilization than, say, racial. (We may work side by side. We don’t pray side by side.) As cosmopolitan as we like to think of ourselves, that’s a good recipe for distrust.
Is it just a coincidence that while Islamic institutions far and wide have come under suspicion since 9/11, only Park51, the proposed Islamic community center and mosque, could be puffed up into a national controversy? Who knew before this summer that there were other mosques within blocks of ground zero? How many New Yorkers even know what would go on at a new one?
The wild structures in Union Square Park were finalists in Sukkah City, an architectural competition conceived by the writer Josh Foer and the Jewish cultural provocateurs known as Reboot (one of whose workshops I attended several years ago). Some of the 624 people from 43 countries who submitted designs were Jewish, but others were Christians, Muslims, Baha’i, devout, irreverent, oblivious. The finalists, selected by a panel of architects and designers were plunked in the middle of a crowded park, and all of New York was invited to judge them. More than 17,000 people cast ballots, and Monday night, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the winner.
The traditional way to celebrate the week-long holiday of Sukkot is to eat in a temporary shelter. That worked fine at the larger shelter in Bryant Park, but city inspectors wisely ruled the prospect out for these more experimental and ephemeral designs. That limitation did not stop hundreds of people from checking it all out.
On one visit, I saw children on a school field trip taking notes, a studious-looking Sikh taking photographs, a serviceman wandering around in fatigues, a gaggle of young women in the midst of wedding planning — all poking, exploring, discussing, debating and then continuing on their way to the subway, to dinner or to buy leopard-print thongs at Forever 21.
For some, it was a goofy design stunt; for others, a learning opportunity, or an act of mockery, or an inspiration or even just a roadblock. Around 4 a.m. Sunday, a bunch of motocross riders turned Sukkah City into an obstacle course, to the distress of some of the architects, who had curled up inside their creations in hope of a catnap. And with no one to adjudicate, all those opinions and all those unexpected uses bore equal authority.
“I think it’s wonderful,” said Rabbi Michael Shmidman, the Orthodox rabbi of Congregation Orach Chaim on the Upper East Side. As to the question of whether the sukkahs were “kosher,” Rabbi Shmidman explained, it was irrelevant.
At this moment of national religious anxiety, it’s tempting to ask what would happen if other religious rituals were turned inside out and opened to public view. If the people behind the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural complex had put all their plans forward and invited the entire city to comment, could outside observers have made them sound so scary? One of the Sukkah City architects wrote about the goal of making a structure “transparent enough to be inclusive, but dense enough to create a sense of belonging.” Inshallah.
I returned to Union Square Park on Wednesday night, as the actual holiday began, worried that the winning (and by then only remaining) structure might have devolved into a battleground, with different tribes of Jews trying to lay public claim to it. But I found no black hats and gray beards wielding prayer books. No blissed-out Israeli ravers eating organic produce from Whole Foods. No observance of any kind. The sukkah was roped off and ignored.
It seemed sad that a competition that spawned such excitement about design and open-mindedness made no effort to also support actual religious practice. But on the Upper West Side, where one of the runner-up sukkahs had been deposited on a sidewalk, a few neighborhood families that discovered it had run home and grabbed food, then reconvened for dinner under the stars.
Never underestimate the odd synergies of art and religion. Or the lengths to which New Yorkers will go for outdoor seating.
This house is only a few blocks from mine
Pics!
IN 1888, a German-born beer baron named George Bechtel, who was said to be the richest man on Staten Island, gave his 21-year-old daughter Annie an extraordinary wedding present.
Annie was betrothed to a German-American named Leonard Weiderer, and the gift was a three-story, 24-room Victorian mansion in the Queen Anne style. The 4,500-square-foot showpiece, on the street known as Mud Lane (later rechristened St. Paul’s Avenue), was outfitted with eight bedrooms, two kitchens and six fireplaces, each of a different design.
Annie’s bridal home included virtually every detail of Victorian domestic architecture — hipped roofs, gables, fish-scale shingles, chimneys, bay windows, dormer windows, even a turret. Garlanding the exterior were a series of porches and balconies. Two dozen imported stained-glass windows, courtesy of the glass factory Mr. Weiderer owned, exploded with stars, sunbursts, crescent moons and floral designs pricked in luminous primary colors. Chestnut and oak paneling covered nearly every available inch of wall space.
But the couple’s time in the house was brief. Three years into the marriage, tuberculosis claimed Mr. Weiderer’s life. His young widow moved to Germany and married a second time, but just five years later, in 1899, she died also. She was 31.
Annie’s sister Agnes lived in the house until 1928, followed by the Teitelbaums (1928-48), the Fraziers (1948-88) and, from 1988 to 1999, a chef who painted the exterior what one paint consultant described, not intending to pay a compliment, as a “Lucille Ball shade” of pink.
Through all these incarnations, the house proved a hardy survivor, the undisputed but neglected star among nearly a hundred handsome Victorian dwellings in the Stapleton area. What it lacked was someone who valued its lustrous past.
That person turned out to be a soft-spoken Montana-born doctor named Ted Brown. Dr. Brown, 63, who is the director of the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Institute for Basic Research, and whose specialty is autism research, works out of offices on Staten Island.
At the time he began house-hunting on the island, he and his family were ensconced in a 200-year-old farmhouse in Port Washington, on Long Island, and he was developing a taste for living close to the past. When he was shown what a real estate agent modestly described as an “older house of character,” he was blown away.
“Maybe I was crazy, but I just thought it would be fun to live there,” Dr. Brown said in his understated way as he and his wife, Donna, sat side by side in what they call their formal parlor, an octagonal space framed by a sweeping archway.
Ms. Brown, a speech therapist who works with autistic schoolchildren (the couple met in 1985 at a genetics conference in Australia), viewed the situation differently.
“When I first saw the house,” she said, “I thought Ted had lost it.”
And remind us why she went along with the idea?
“Because I love him,” Ms. Brown said with an adoring smile.
When the couple bought the house in 1999 for $525,000, they set aside $250,000 for renovations, a figure that ballooned to $400,000. Before moving in, they worked for six months on the interior; once in residence, they tackled the exterior. Painting the facade — using sun-drenched colors like squash, copper, antique gold and seven others — took five months.
“The first couple of years, the house was really in sad shape,” Ms. Brown said. “We were really overwhelmed. Then we began to love it.”
But they know the work will never be finished, in part because the family, which includes the couple’s son, Hunter, 17; their daughter, Montana, 19; and two dogs, use all 24 rooms, amazing as that seems.
The room where the Browns were sitting on this day had the look of a perfectly appointed stage set for some forgotten Victorian-era drama. Furnishings include Persian carpets from Dr. Brown’s childhood home, an inlaid chessboard atop an inlaid table and a piano with Debussy on the music stand. (Dr. Brown, who in 1964 was a Montana state chess champion, plays both the game and the instrument.)
The mantel is almost hidden by an assortment of crystal — bells, goblets, paperweights, teardrop candlesticks. A velvet shawl with ivory fringe is draped over one chair, and needlepoint pillows nestle in the corners of the sofa.
The couple are justly proud of the grand staircase, which looks like a puzzle composed of intricately braided chestnut spindles and a matching woven screen, each tiny curl milled separately. At the base of the stairs, a pair of linked circlets have been carved into the wood. It is an emblem, Ms. Brown thinks, of the union of the young couple whose time in the house was so brief and so tragic.
The second floor is devoted to bedrooms, and the third, the onetime servants’ quarters, with its tiny rooms and low ceilings, is a teenage boy’s paradise; Hunter has his own bedroom, kitchen and video area.
The third floor is also the entrance to the little two-story room at the top of the turret. On a Web site that lists the Brown house as a location for filming and fashion shoots, the passageway to the turret is described as a “creepy, coffin-shaped tunnel.”
Creepy is the word.
“When we first moved in, the kids used to play there,” Dr. Brown said, “and someone was always being dragged in and locked away and had to be rescued.”
After he moved to Stapleton, Dr. Brown joined the Mud Lane Society, the preservation group that helped get 92 Victorians designated as city landmarks. The group’s president since 2007, he knows more than most people about what life in this part of the city was like a century ago. Along the staircase hang photographs giving a vivid picture of the brewers who were island royalty before Prohibition brought them low, and through eBay Dr. Brown has amassed a collection of old bottles from the Bechtel brewery.
He has discovered that living in such an over-the-top house was just as he thought it would be — fun. Total strangers stop and take pictures, in part thanks to www.forgotten-ny.com, a Web site that proclaims 387 St. Paul’s Avenue as “possibly the most gorgeous private dwelling on Staten Island and a contender for most beautiful building in NYC.” And at least for the Browns, who see themselves as caretakers of a piece of Staten Island history, the poignant history of the house only enhances its appeal.
“This was a wedding gift for a bride,” Ms. Brown pointed out. “Don’t you wish you could give your child such a gift?”
Their Moon Shot and Ours
China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.
Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.
This contrast is not good. I was recently at a Washington Nationals baseball game. While waiting for a hot dog, I overheard the conversation behind me. A management consultant for a big national firm was telling his colleagues that his job was to “market products to the Department of Homeland Security.” I thought to myself: “Oh, my! Inventing studies about terrorist threats and selling them to the U.S. government, is that an industry now?”
We’re out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.
The electric car industry is pivotal for three reasons, argues Shai Agassi, the C.E.O. of Better Place, a global electric car company that next year will begin operating national electric car networks in Israel and Denmark. First, the auto industry was the foundation for America’s manufacturing middle class. Second, the country that replaces gasoline-powered vehicles with electric-powered vehicles — in an age of steadily rising oil prices and steadily falling battery prices — will have a huge cost advantage and independence from imported oil. Third, electric cars are full of power electronics and software. “Think of the applications industry that will be spun out from electric cars,” says Agassi. It will be the iPhone on steroids.
Europe is using $7-a-gallon gasoline to stimulate the market for electric cars; China is using $5-a-gallon and naming electric cars as one of the industrial pillars for its five-year growth plan. And America? President Obama has directed stimulus money at electric cars, but he is unwilling to do the one thing that would create the sustained consumer pull required to grow an electric car industry here: raise taxes on gasoline. Price matters. Sure, the Moore’s Law of electric cars — “the cost per mile of the electric car battery will be cut in half every 18 months” — will steadily drive the cost down, says Agassi, but only once we get scale production going. U.S. companies can do that on their own or in collaboration with Chinese ones. But God save us if we don’t do it at all.
Two weeks ago, I visited the Coda Automotive battery facility in Tianjin, China — a joint venture between U.S. innovators and investors, China’s Lishen battery company and China National Offshore Oil Company. Yes, China’s oil company is using profits to develop batteries.
Kevin Czinger, Coda’s C.E.O., who drove me around Manhattan in his company’s soon-to-be-in-production electric car last week, laid out what is going on. The backbone of the modern U.S. economy was locally made cars powered by locally produced oil. It started us on a huge growth spurt. In recent decades, though, that industry was supplanted by foreign-made cars run on foreign oil, so “now every time we buy a car we’re exporting $15,000 of capital, paying for it with borrowed money and running it on foreign energy sources,” says Czinger. “We’ve gone from autos being a middle-class-making-machine to a middle-class-destroying-machine.” A U.S. electric car/battery industry would reverse that.
The Coda, 14,000 of which will be on the road in California over the next year and can travel 100 miles on one overnight charge, is a combination of Chinese-made batteries and complex American-system electronics — all final-assembled in Oakland (price: $37,000). It is a win-win start-up for both countries.
If we both now create the market incentives for consumers to buy electric cars, and the plug-in infrastructure for people to drive them everywhere, it will be a win-win moon shot for both countries. The electric car industry will flourish in the U.S. and China, and together we’ll tackle the next challenge: using auto battery innovations to build big storage batteries for wind and solar. However, if only China puts the gasoline prices and infrastructure in place, the industry will gravitate there. It will be a moon shot for them, a hobby for us, and you’ll import your new electric car from China just like you’re now importing your oil from Saudi Arabia.
Achieving Techno-Literacy
This past year my wife and I home-schooled our eighth-grade son. One school day, he and I decided we would make fire the old way — out of nothing but plant materials and our own hustle. Our son watched a seemingly endless series of instructional survival videos on YouTube as part of his research. He chose the bow method based on our physics class about friction. He then constructed a bow from a branch in the woods, carved a stick for the spindle and added a fiber string. It was mighty tough going. We spent hours refining the apparatus. He was surprised by the enormous amount of bodily energy required to focus onto a very small spot, and how a minuscule, nearly invisible bit of fuel, once sparked, can quickly amplify into a flame and then a fire. Chemistry, physics, history and gym all in one lesson. And, man, when you are 13 years old and Prometheus, it’s exhilarating!
One day our student would dissect and diagram the inside organs of flowers; the next he’d write short stories or poems and then revise them; and the next day we’d solve logic problems with algebra, then he’d work on plans for a chicken coop and maybe we’d do a field trip to a car factory. He also went through eighth-grade textbooks in history, grammar, geometry and the like. This type of home-schooling is really nothing special. Our son was merely one of more than a million students home-schooled in the United States last year. Our reasons for home-schooling were not uncommon, either. We wanted to create an ideal learning environment. For the previous seven years, our son was enrolled in challenging schools. His grades were excellent, but the amount of homework was grinding him down. The intense high school he was planning to attend promised even more work. He asked if he could be home-schooled for his last year before high school, and by a quirk of life, this was a year our schedules would permit our role as home-school teachers.
Now that the year is done, I am struck that the fancy technology supposedly crucial to an up-to-the-minute education was not a major factor in its success. Of course, technology in the broadest sense was everywhere in our classroom. There was an inexpensive microscope on the kitchen table and an old digital camera to record experiments. There was a PC always on for research. Our son was also a big user of online tutorials. Of particular note is Khan Academy, which offers nearly 1,600 short high-quality tutorials on algebra, chemistry, history, economics and other subjects — all created by one guy, and all free. The Internet was also essential for my wife and me as we researched the best textbooks, the best projects, the best approaches.
But the computer was only one tool of many. Technology helped us learn, but it was not the medium of learning. It was summoned when needed. Technology is strange that way. Education, at least in the K-12 range, is more about child rearing than knowledge acquisition. And since child rearing is primarily about forming character, instilling values and cultivating habits, it may be the last area to be directly augmented by technology.
Even so, as technology floods the rest of our lives, one of the chief habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy — and we made sure it was part of our curriculum. By technological literacy, I mean the latest in a series of proficiencies children should accumulate in school. Students begin with mastering the alphabet and numbers, then transition into critical thinking, logic and absorption of the scientific method. Technological literacy is something different: proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm. We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful. Rather, we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.
Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the kind of literacy that we tried to impart:
• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.
• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.
I don’t think my son mastered all those principles in one year, but he got a start. For the most part, learning at home is more demanding than learning in a classroom because it requires more self-direction. On one particularly long day, with books piled up and papers spread out, my son was slumped in his chair.
“Is everything O.K.?” I asked.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I not only have to be the student, I also have to be the teacher.”
“Yes! So what have you learned about being a teacher?”
“You have to teach the student — that’s me — not only to learn stuff but to learn how to learn.”
“And have you?”
“I think I am doing better as the student than the teacher. I’m learning how to learn, but I can’t wait till next year when I have some real good teachers — better than me.”
He had learned the most critical thing: how to keep learning. A month ago he entered high school eager to be taught — not facts, or even skills, but a lifelong process that would keep pace with technology’s rapid, ceaseless teaching.
If we listen to technology, and learn to be proficient in its ways, then we’ll be able to harness this most powerful force in the world. If not, we’ll be stuck at the bottom of the class.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 07:17 am (UTC)One proposal, as I understand it, is to give people on “Hartz IV” welfare a card that will let them into certain cultural events such as piano lessons or museums, and free school lunches.
But I wonder whether that would work unless everybody needs a card to get into such places, or everybody gets free lunches.
Because otherwise people going into judo class would take note of the kids who used a card to get in, and people at school would take note of the kids at the "free lunch" table, and I wonder how many children would take advantage of such programs if they're subjected to such scrutiny.
If everyone needs a card to pay for their entrance, then you can't see whether the card was topped up by Mum and Dad or by the government, and if everyone gets a free lunch, then children from poor families aren't put on a display every day, and that might get them to use them.
But otherwise? You've got to be pretty self-confident (or desperate, or oblivious) to use programs that shout "My family is poor and can't afford to provide me with this program without government assistance!".
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 12:54 pm (UTC)Lunch programs in the US are largely opting to go onto a fill-a-card option or a pay-in-advance option right now for just that reason. That and because they don't want that one kid who realizes halfway through the line that he forgot his lunch money, but also so that nobody has to know who pays or doesn't pay.
However, many schools are largely segregated socioeconomically. If you take free or reduced lunch, chances are that a lot of your classmates do too.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 01:00 pm (UTC)Uh, won't you have the same problem with "that one kid who realises halfway through the line that the balance on his card has run out"?
I thought that first that that would happen less often, but it would depend on how often the card gets topped up - if parents are supposed to do it once at the beginning of the semester, it's unlikely to happen often, but if they do it $5 at a time or once a week or whatever (say, because their pay cheques aren't that huge so they can't afford a whole school year's worth of school lunches at once), then won't that happen, too, if they forgot to add money that week (or had no money left due to an emergency)?
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 04:15 pm (UTC)It's probably less of a hold-up because then they have an easy record of the problem in the computer system and can send the family a bill in the mail. This is what they'd do if the kid forgot his lunch money, they wouldn't make the kid go hungry they'd just write down the name and send a note home later - except that writing down the name not only slows down the line, it stigmatizes the kid in question. When it's already in the computer they can deal with it privately when they have the time.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 01:13 pm (UTC)That said, it sounds like the attitude toward free lunch is different there than what I experienced. Those that paid or packed where either indifferent or slightly jealous, because they didn't have to worry about forgetting their lunch or money.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 04:16 pm (UTC)But then, if schoolkids riot nobody gets very hurt.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 05:00 pm (UTC)Even worse, the bar for "good school meals" is measured solely in calories, so they have something like 50 cents per child ($1.65 minus overhead costs) to give them 500-700 calories.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 01:22 pm (UTC)The more I see going on with our schools, the more compelled I am to just homeschool my kids...
no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 11:11 pm (UTC)It's a bit like talking about the effects of eating food. Sure, there is some extent to which you can generalize, but it really does make a big difference which foods you are eating.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 11:03 pm (UTC)*sigh*
The bull comes out of a chute, not a shoot. (Not that there wasn't plenty of bull being slung at the last shoot I participated in....but I digress.)
It sounds to me as though the organizers need to rename the cheap seats, but other than that I can't really see much to pick at.
Re: Techno-literacy
The bowdrill is your last desperate fire attempt AFTER you lose your matches, flint, tinder, steel and charcloth. I am also informed that wood choice makes a big difference (no, never done it myself, I stick with flint & steel).
I applaud and endorse the thought process behind it, though. (Your most important tool is your MIND, dammit.)