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Some NYTimes articles...
A Lives article, about a man whose father is CIA.
Spies in the House
By JOHN H. RICHARDSON
It's the summer of 1969, just before my father tells me that he works for the C.I.A., and I am beginning my own secret life. I'm 14 years old, and down in Georgetown, a few blocks west of the White House, a string of new shops burn incense, blast rock music and sell Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead posters. My friend's older brother, Joe, is painting Blue Meanies on a wall of his room. I know something's going on, but I'm not quite getting it. I'm convinced that grown-ups hide everything. Then Joe puts down his paintbrush and pulls out a plastic baggie. ''You guys ever smoke grass?''
I don't even hesitate, and soon I'm noticing my peripheral vision and especially my peripheral thoughts. Before long, I'm sneaking down to Georgetown regularly. One day I buy some acid from a hippie in engineer's pants. When I come home, my mother insists on talking to me, so I sit babbling about school or the weather or Mrs. Banfield's azalea garden, and my lips seem to be moving normally even though the hair on my arm is growing at an alarming rate. After a while she seems satisfied, and I realize she doesn't even see me.
A few weeks later, my father asks me to join him in the study. I sit down in one of the red leather chairs and he sits down in the other, tapping his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. He has been posted to Korea, he says. We will be moving there soon. And there's something else.
''You've reached the age when you're old enough to know what it is I do,'' he says.
He keeps it vague. ''Special assistant to the ambassador'' is just a cover story. Then he asks me if I want to go with the family or stay in the States at a boarding school. And that's it. He doesn't regale me with tales of chasing Nazi spies on the battlefields of Italy, or the time he recruited history's first Soviet double agent. He doesn't mention his role in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. He doesn't explain why we're going to live 30 miles from the most totalitarian country in the world, or why it's so important to him. It will be years before I learn much of this. Maybe he thinks it's all covered under his oath of secrecy, along with the rest of his life.
At first, it sounds implausible to me. My father, a spy? The guy wears a suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He goes to the office every day and reads all night. He worries about the ivy on the hill. He badgers me to cut the lawn. He's a dad. There's an unreality to the whole idea, an unreality that seems consistent with this strange new world where the song lyrics make no sense and you can watch the hair grow on your arm.
From TV and Time magazine, I have developed the vague impression that people think the C.I.A. is a bad thing, which is intriguing. And there's James Bond and ''In Like Flint,'' the movie in which James Coburn fights off an international conspiracy of playmates. Maybe the old man is cooler than I thought. Maybe our secrets will bind us together. It's a natural reaction, I understand later. People can't help thinking that secrets are a kind of magic, that only mysteries reveal the truth.
One night, a man from the C.I.A. sleeps at our house, something that has never happened before. When he and my father drive off in the morning, I snoop through the man's luggage and find a reel-to-reel tape. Carefully peeling back the seal, I take it downstairs and put it on my father's giant Teac tape player. It's something about Kennedy and foreign policy. I'm meticulous about replacing the tape and repacking his suitcase exactly as I found it. (Tradecraft, Mr. Bond.)
Another time, I go poking for clues in my dad's dresser drawers, and lo and behold, hidden under the perfectly folded handkerchiefs and boxer shorts, I find a loaded snub-nosed .38 with a gleaming oil-slick barrel and his initials -- our initials -- carved into the ivory handle.
A thrill runs through me. In my excitement, I show it to one of my friends. We sneak out to the woods, and I aim it at a tree.
In the years to come, I will want to know everything I can about my father. I'll look for him in old letters and yellowing newspapers. I'll even call the C.I.A. and ask for his personnel records. A pleasant man will ring back with the official response: ''Not only no, but hell no -- and if you pursue this, we will have to contact John Richardson Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath.''
But at 14, I'm not ready for whatever the gun has to tell me. When I pull the trigger, the crack of the gunshot explodes so loud across the hills that we take off running and keep running until I get the damn thing back in the drawer. This is a little too much reality. I'm happy to keep our secrets for now.
The next time I go to find the .38 in his drawer, just to take another look, it's gone.
One on shared cars in Europe
Slowly, the Shared Car Is Making Inroads in Europe
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
International Herald Tribune
AMSTERDAM - When Mariane Polfliet discovered she had an emergency meeting in a hard to reach suburb of Amsterdam recently, there was no need for panic: within minutes, she had used her computer-coded key to drive away in one of the hundreds of shared cars that are now scattered around the quaint canals of this city's center.
There was something incongruous about the package: Ms. Polfliet, dressed for a Mercedes in an elegant tan suit with her lawyerly leather briefcase, driving the small bright red Peugeot with neon green wheels and "Greenwheels" stenciled amid swirls on the door.
But for thousands of people in the Netherlands, and hundreds of thousands worldwide, car-sharing groups like Greenwheels have filled the gap between private car ownership and public transportation. For cities where it has taken hold, the concept is helping to relieve traffic and reduce pollution, studies have found.
"Some lawyers don't want to visit clients in a car like this, but I don't care, because this idea has changed my life," said Ms. Polfliet, who uses Greenwheels instead of owning a private car. With it, she takes her boyfriend to hockey practice, buys wine in bulk for parties, shops at Ikea.
Although car sharing has been a mythic, green concept for decades, it has only become a larger-scale reality in the past few years - and then only in a handful of places, like Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, where it has been commercialized by a small number of companies. Over all, far more car-sharing ventures have failed than succeeded in the past 15 years, or have remained too tiny to have a major impact. Still, as urban centers face ever more serious traffic snarls and new technology makes car sharing simpler, dozens of cities in Europe, North America, and Asia - from Singapore to Turin to Minneapolis - are re-exploring the idea.
In January, representatives from a number of cities met in Brussels at a conference organized by a European Union initiative to promote car sharing. "We see a big potential for European cities," the report concluded, estimating that at least 500,000 private vehicles could be replaced in Europe by car sharing.
But the debate continues over whether car sharing is a boutique industry that works well in slightly offbeat places, like Amsterdam, or whether it can become an essential part of urban transportation, like buses and taxis. "I think it's going to be another 10 years before it's going to have a really big impact generally," said Dave Brook, an independent car consultant in the United States. "But we can say now that it's definitely a viable niche, and it's going to be a damn big niche as well."
Private companies, including some giants of the car industry like Hertz and Shell, have begun investing in or operating commercial car sharing to a limited extent. About 300,000 people are involved in car sharing worldwide, with the majority in Europe, according to Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Mobility, the largest single company, with locations all over Switzerland, has 60,000 members and 2,400 cars. In the United States, there are just over 1,000 shared cars in all.
Companies in the United States, like Zipcar, often require drivers to book cars in advance, not unlike renting a car. Here, much of the use is more spontaneous, with customers using the Internet to book one of the many cars in their neighborhoods.
Car sharing logic is simple: Owning a car is both expensive and impractical in many cities. Here in Amsterdam, city center parking permits take six years to obtain, while bicycles ply the narrow streets and bridges with enviable ease.
But what happens when a child misses a school bus? Or someone needs to load up on groceries, or take a guest to the airport? With Greenwheels, members pay as little as 5 euros a month, a little over $6, in base fees, then substantially more for mileage or hourly rates, to tackle these tasks in a car.
"We were haunted by the idea that you could use technology to make this idea into a large scale, professional operation that would be very convenient for customers," said Jan Borghuis, co-founder of Greenwheels - dressed in the de facto company uniform of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, in the company's ramshackle Rotterdam office surrounded by bicycle tires rather than auto parts. "We know it would have a good effect on the environment."
The actual environmental impact is less than straightforward, although researchers say it relieves traffic congestion and pollution to some degree by reducing car ownership. Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles, Ms. Shaheen said. The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer.
"On the whole, this is very good for the environment," said Rens Meijkamp, a Dutch researcher, who found that nearly 50 percent of Greenwheels clients used the service as a replacement for either a first or second private car.
On the other hand, there are customers who would otherwise take the bus, meaning that the concept inspires some additional driving.
But the industry is still trying to define itself - not yet mature even in Europe and "still in its adolescence" in the United States, Mr. Brook said. In some places, companies are developing partnerships with state railroads or supermarkets to place cars outside of them. In others, cities have given shared cars the right to drive in bus lanes. "
"I think the demand will develop as far as the supply will become more attractive, simple, and closer to each inhabitant," said J. B. Schmider, manager of the fledgling French Autopartage Network, which to date has only 2,500 members nationwide.
Car rental companies like their fleets to be rented out all the time. But car-sharing companies have a slightly different take on the financial equation. By having a huge number of members, and an excess capacity of cars in the right places, they hope to be able to provide a nearby car within minutes.
On a recent Friday, there was a rare public transportation strike in the Netherlands. It was, Mr. Borghuis said, "our moment of truth," since most Greenwheels customers take trains to work. "In most places, there were cars available when people needed them," he said. "That made us happy."
One on the Ethnologue
How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages
By MICHAEL ERARD
Correction Appended
Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.
Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.
Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."
Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a quandary that has long perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken on the planet?
Estimates have ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, but Ethnologue confidently counts 6,912 languages. Curiously, this edition adds 103 languages to the 6,809 that were listed in its 2000 edition - at a time when linguists are making dire predictions that hundreds of languages will soon become extinct.
"I occasionally note in my comments to the press," said Nicholas Ostler, the president of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, "the irony that Ethnologue's total count of known languages keeps going up with each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone the factoid that a language dies out every two weeks."
This dissonance points to a more basic problem. "There's no actual number of languages," said Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist at Stanford whose own count is "around" 4,580. "It kind of depends on how one defines dialects and languages."
The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the distinctions can be indistinct. "We tend to see languages as basically marbles, and we're trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count how many marbles we have," said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages the Ethnologue database (www.ethnologue.com) and will edit the 16th edition. "Language is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are some clearly defined units but it's very fuzzy around the edges."
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously said, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot" (or "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"). To Ethnologue, and to the language research organization that produces it, S.I.L. International, a language is a dialect that needs its literature, including a Bible.
Based in Dallas, S.I.L. (which stands for Summer Institute of Linguistics) trains missionaries to be linguists, sending them to learn local languages, design alphabets for unwritten languages and introduce literacy. Before they begin translating the Bible, they find out how many translations are needed by testing the degree to which speech varieties are mutually unintelligible. "The definition of language we use in the Ethnologue places a strong emphasis," said Dr. Lewis, "on the ability to intercommunicate as the test for splitting or joining."
Thus, the fewer words from Dialect B that a speaker of Dialect A can understand, the more likely S.I.L. linguists will say that A and B need two Bibles, not one. The entry for the Chadian language of Bernde, for example, rates its similarity to its six neighboring languages from 47 to 73 percent. Above 70 percent, two varieties will typically be called dialects of the same language.
However, such tests are not always clear-cut. Unintelligible dialects are sometimes combined into one language if they share a literature or other cultural heritage. And the reverse can be true, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian.
In Guatemala, Ethnologue counts 54 living languages, while other linguists, some of them native Mayan speakers, count 18. Yet undercounting can be just as political as overcounting.
Colette Grinevald, a specialist in Latin American languages at Lumière University in Lyon, France, notes that the modern Maya political movement wants to unite under one language, Kaqkchikel. "They don't want that division of their language into 24 languages," she said. "They want to create a standard called Kaqkchikel."
Beyond its political implications, the Ethnologue also carries the weight of a religious mission. The project was founded by Richard Pittman, a missionary who thought other missionaries needed better information about which languages lacked a Bible. The first version appeared in 1951, 10 mimeographed pages that described 40 languages.
"Hardly anyone knew about the Ethnologue back then," said Barbara Grimes, who edited the survey from 1967 to 2000. "It was a good idea, but it wasn't very impressive." In 1971, Ms. Grimes and her husband, Joseph Grimes, a linguistics professor at Cornell, extended the survey from small languages to all languages in the world.
What emerged was just how daunting a global Bible translation project was. "In 1950, when we joined S.I.L., we were telling each other, maybe there are about 1,000 languages, but nobody really knew," Ms. Grimes said. In 1969, Ethnologue listed 4,493 languages; in 1992, the number had risen to 6,528 and by 2000 it stood at 6,809.
The number will probably continue to rise - 2,694 languages still need to be studied in detail, and in 2000, S.I.L. officials projected that at the current rate of work, a complete survey would not be completed until 2075. (They now say they are working to speed it up.) As for their goal of translating the Bible, Ethnologue's figures show that all or some of it is available in 2,422 languages.
Ethnologue lists 414 languages as nearly extinct in 2000, a figure that rises to 497 in the new edition.
However, a few linguists accuse the publisher of promoting the trends it says it want to prevent. Denny Moore, a linguist with the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, said via e-mail: "It is absurd to think of S.I.L. as an agency of preservation, when they do just the opposite. Note that along with the extermination of native religion, all the ceremonial speech forms, songs, music and art associated with the religion disappear too."
Dr. Moore, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1999 for his 18 years of linguistic work in Brazil, adds: "There is no way to resolve this contradiction. The only options are fooling yourself about it or not."
S.I.L. officials say missionaries are giving another option to people who are already experiencing cultural shift. "The charge of destroying cultures has been around for a long time," said Carol Dowsett, a spokeswoman for the publisher. "Basically we're interested in people, and we're interested in helping them however we can."
Though the Ethnologue is intended to help spread the word of God, it is being mined for more secular reasons. Computer companies that are developing multilingual software for foreign markets turn to the Ethnologue.
"You've got a developer in Silicon Valley, and a person in the field calls them and says, 'We need to provide support for Serbian' or some language the developer's never heard of, so they can pop open the Ethnologue and find out, 'What is this thing?' " says Peter Constable, a former S.I.L. linguist who now works at Microsoft.
Ray Gordon, the editor, says producers of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" once contacted him, and according to Brian Homoleski, the manager of the publisher's bookstore, several copies were bought after the Sept. 11 attacks by "a U.S. government agency." According to S.I.L. staff members, the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Olympic Committee and AT&T all called for help.
Ethnologue's newest step toward worldwide influence has been in the arcane world of the International Organization of Standards. The survey assigns a three-letter code to each language (English is "eng"), and the 7,000-plus codes (for living and dead languages) is near acceptance in library indexing and multilingual software standards. The codes also form the backbone of the Open Language Archives Community, a Web-based technical infrastructure.
Most linguists are unfazed at S.I.L.'s affiliations. "If you took away all the literature done by the S.I.L. people done in the last 60 years," said Dr. Ruhlen of Stanford, "you'd be taking away a lot of language documentation for a lot of languages for which there's nothing at all."
Another article on the war
All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, July 23 - The Bush administration's rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war.
From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?
There is no serious talk of a draft to share the burden of fighting across the broad citizenry, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing for a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions.
There are not even concerted efforts like the savings-bond drives or gasoline rationing that helped to unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past.
"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology.
Members of the military who discussed their sense of frustration did so only when promised anonymity, as comments viewed as critical of the civilian leadership could end their careers. The sentiments were expressed in more than two dozen interviews and casual conversations with enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers, midlevel officers, and general or flag officers in Iraq and in the United States.
Charles Moskos, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University specializing in military sociology, said: "My terminology for it is 'patriotism lite,' and that's what we're experiencing now in both political parties. The political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifice, which doesn't speak too highly of the citizenry."
Senior administration officials say they are aware of the tension and have opened discussions on whether to mobilize brigades of Americans beyond those already signed up for active duty or in the Reserves and National Guard. At the Pentagon and the State Department, officials have held preliminary talks on creating a Civilian Reserve, a sort of Peace Corps for professionals.
In an interview, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said that discussions had begun on a program to seek commitments from bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, electricians, plumbers and solid-waste disposal experts to deploy to conflict zones for months at a time on reconstruction assignments, to relieve pressure on the military.
When President Bush last addressed the issue of nationwide support for the war effort in a formal speech, he asked Americans to use the Fourth of July as a time to "find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom by flying the flag, sending a letter to our troops in the field or helping the military family down the street."
In the speech, at Fort Bragg, N.C., on June 28, Mr. Bush mentioned a Defense Department Web site, Americasupportsyou.mil, where people can learn about private-sector efforts to bolster the morale of the troops. He also urged those considering a career in the military to enlist because "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces."
While officers and enlisted personnel say they enjoy symbolic signs of support, and the high ratings the military now enjoys in public opinion polls, "that's just not enough," said a one-star officer who served in Iraq. "There has to be more," he added, saying that the absence of a call for broader national sacrifice in a time of war has become a near constant topic of discussion among officers and enlisted personnel.
"For most Americans," said an officer with a year's experience in Iraq, "their role in the war on terror is limited to the slight inconvenience of arriving at the airport a few hours early."
David C. Hendrickson, a scholar on foreign policy and the presidency at Colorado College, said, "Bush understands that the support of the public for war - especially the war in Iraq - is conditioned on demanding little of the public."
Mr. Hendrickson said that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, just as after the recent London bombings, political leaders urged the population to continue life as normal, so as not to give terrorists a moral victory by giving in to the fear of violence.
But he said the stress of the commitment to the continuing mission in Iraq was viewed by the public in a different light than a terrorist attack on home soil.
"The public wants very much to support the troops" in Iraq, he said. "But it doesn't really believe in the mission. Most consider it a war of choice, and a majority - although a thin one - thinks it was the wrong choice."
Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., who served as commandant of the Army War College and is now retired, said: "Despite the enormous impact of Sept. 11, it hasn't really translated into a national movement towards fighting the war on terrorism. It's almost as if the politicians want to be able to declare war and, at the same time, maintain a sense of normalcy."
General Scales said he had heard a heavy stream of concerns from current officers that "the military is increasingly isolated from the rest of the country."
"People associate being an officer with the priesthood," he added. "You know, there is an enormous amount of respect, but nobody wants to sign up for celibacy."
Private organizations like the Navy League of the United States that support the individual armed services have identified the tension and are using this theme to urge greater contributions from members now in the civilian world.
"We have recognized that and we have tried to sound the alarm," said Rear Adm. Stephen R. Pietropaoli, retired, the executive director of the Navy League.
"As an organization that is committed to supporting them by ensuring they have the weapons and tools and systems to fight and win, and also at the grass-roots level by providing assistance to families," Admiral Pietropaoli said, "we are aware that the burden has fallen almost solely on the shoulders of the uniformed military and security services and their families. We have used that in our calls to action by our members. We have said: 'We are at war. What have you done lately?' "
Morten G. Ender, who teaches sociology at West Point, has been interviewing soldiers, their spouses and cadets since the Iraq war started in 2003. Because the all-volunteer military is a self-selecting body and by definition is not drawn from a cross-section of America, he said, those with direct involvement constitute a far smaller percentage of the country than in past wars.
Mr. Ender said that the "rhetoric from the top" of the civilian leadership of the United States "doesn't move people towards actions."
Most Americans support the military, he said, and "feel like there is somebody out there taking care of the job."
"They say, 'I'm going to support those people, I believe in those people and God bless those people,' " he said. "By doing that, they can wash their hands of it."
Really cool one on somebody who wrote all about the city of 100 years (more!) ago.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
By GILLEN D'ARCY WOOD
IF a tourist visiting New York wants to get from Battery Park to Harlem, she checks her Rough Guide, then takes the No. 5 train. But what about the historical novelist, the wide-eyed tourist of the past? How can he escort his heroine across a single street of Manhattan on, say, a summer's day in 1820, without knowing what she might see, smell, or put her foot in, let alone what style of shoe might grace that foot? Where, in short, is the Rough Guide to Old New York?
It was this question I faced in writing my novel of the 19th-century city, when my first draft died on the page for want of literary oxygen, for the sensual minutiae that makes a historical novel worth the reading. The past as I wanted it should not be worn with cardigan comfort, but close against the skin like a rough wool chemise. Making it all up was not an option. Nineteenth-century Manhattan was not Middle Earth. So how was I to get my 1820 heroine from Maiden Lane to Water Street without having her trip over an anachronism, or run down by an egregious anomaly?
Fortune favored me in a gloomy aisle of the Columbia Library, where I came across one Charles Haswell and his remarkable volume, "Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian," published in 1896. Haswell was one of the grand old men of the city who, a decade before the end of his nearly 98 years, was persuaded by his friends to publish his journals in which he had kept a meticulous year-by-year account of his beloved city, beginning in 1816 at the tender age of 7.
As an observer of 19th-century life in New York, the forgotten Haswell has no equal. The better-known diarists Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong offer voluminous records, but only of their own privileged circles. Whitman's New York, the most celebrated of all, is also vague and light on fact: the poet himself strides down Broadway like a Colossus, but obscures the view.
Haswell's history, by contrast, is American democracy in prose: Lafayette's triumphal visit to the city sits side by side with derelict vendors hawking Rockaway clams; Andrew Jackson's shutting down the Wall Street banks fights for space with a Belgian valet washed up in a rowboat, who passed himself off as a baron and almost married an heiress.
Haswell has the inclusive, peripatetic gaze of the great 19th-century novelists. One unimaginable winter, he walks from Battery Park to Jersey City across the ice. In the summer, he spots "a piratical vessel" off Sandy Hook, then mingles in the crowd gazing at an exhibition of bananas outside a Broadway emporium, where he observes the white gloves the grocers wear, the absence of tomatoes (considered beautiful but poisonous), and the amazement of foreign visitors at the sight of such consumer luxury (at odds with their notions of America's republican simplicity).
Reading the entire volume at a gulp, as I did, the cumulative effect of Haswell's omniscience is staggering. His argument for his approach, too, is compelling: 19th-century life in New York did not simply include trivia, it fed on trivia. "I offer no apology for the mention of trivialities," Haswell writes defiantly, "because under the conditions of the period - the small size of New York and the dearth of more significant general news - trifles became important, and were made the subjects of towntalk." His duty as memorialist, he concludes, "is to reveal New York as it actually was near eighty years ago, not to maintain 'the dignity of history.' "
My novelist's heart throbbed with fellow feeling when I read these lines. It was from this champion of the trivial pursuit that I learned the precise year (1816) that the mustache made its controversial debut on Broadway. Haswell was the kind of gifted pedant who gives you both the exact price of cigars and the social protocols governing their use: "no man" he records, "who was known to smoke a cigar in the streets or at his office in business hours, could have procured a discount at any bank in the city."
FOR the modern reader, Haswell is a weird mix: part history, part almanac, part gossip column. Too dry and undiscriminating for armchair reading. but for a desperate historical novelist, his "Reminiscences" were a mouth-watering feast. Without Haswell, my poor heroine would still be standing at the (flagstone!) curb of Maiden Lane, oblivious to the bucket-wielding slaves and barefoot waifs at the water pump on the corner. Without the Great Octogenarian, I could not have known that the cluster of young men over whom I might have her pass a wistful eye would be dressed in peacock colors, not the funereal business black of a later age.
Without the trivia-loving Haswell brain, she would certainly never have trusted to the attractiveness of her "Leghorn" bonnet or the false bangs plastered to her head. Nor could I possibly have read her mind, which was less likely to be concerned with flirting than with avoiding one of the hundreds of pigs that roamed Lower Manhattan as wandering garbage disposal units, and the steady drizzle of tobacco juice ejected from the gobs of the dockhands. Of course, when I first read Haswell, I still didn't have a good reason for my heroine to be crossing the street in the first place, but what is plot and character to a novelist when he has a gantlet of hogs and tobacco juice to spice up the action?
Charles Haswell was actually a famous author in his time, but not for his "Reminiscences." He was an engineer by profession, and his "Mechanics' and Engineers' Pocket Book" (1842) was a best seller, passing through no fewer than 74 editions up to World War I and becoming known as "the Engineer's Bible."
And what a holy oddity it is, Engineering 101 meets Ripley's Believe It or Not. What brain-dead undergraduate of today would not be piqued to learn that the gestation period of a beaver is 17 weeks? Or that in 1846 a native of the Sandwich Islands swam seven miles with a live pig under his arm?
Clearly, Haswell could not help himself. He was a great New York omnivore, a glutton for urban life, our very own Pepys in engineer's boots. And though he can be boring, he obviously never experienced boredom for himself. His life spanned almost the whole of his bustling, booming New York century, and he himself took the care to remember everything that he had ever seen, heard, or learned before time and his voracious city could swallow it up.
One about a daycamp program which actively seeks out blind kids to include
Young Sailors, Making Their Way by Touch and Sound
By ABEER ALLAM
The Pioneer, a two-masted schooner, pulled out of Pier 16 in Lower Manhattan last week, creating soft ripples as it glided into the Hudson River. The 18 students aboard took up positions on either side of the boat and prepared for action.
"Reach! Pull!" several instructors cried in unison. "Reach! Pull!"
The students, with hands clinched firmly on halyards connected to the two sails, bent their knees and pulled down. They cheered loudly as the wrinkled white sails unraveled and inched toward the sky.
It could have been a scene from any summer sailing camp, but this one was a little different. Half the campers are blind or partly blind, and many rarely leave home other than to attend school.
"It is very exciting here," said Bryan Velasquez, 14, a blind student in his second year at the camp, which consists of day trips. "It is good for kids who want to enjoy the summer. You learn how to put up sail, how to coil, how to navigate, and how to look at charts."
He explained why he preferred being onboard a 120-year-old ship to visiting a museum: "Here you get to touch the ship. You get to touch and smell history."
The five-day sailing camp for fourth through eighth graders, which ended Friday, is part of Science and Seamanship, an educational program organized by the South Street Seaport Museum. Run twice in July, it allows students with severe sight problems to mingle with peers who have normal vision.
Most of the students with sight problems are from lower-income families who would not otherwise afford the cost of the camp, $500. Their fees are donated by Lavelle Fund for the Blind, a charitable foundation in New York City. Most of the students with normal vision are relatives of the blind students.
Those with vision problems gradually learn that seeing is not the only way to enjoy nature and outdoor activities. And while the process may be slower for them - and in some cases intimidating - their other senses help guide them.
At the back of the boat, Bryan ran his hands along every inch of the steering wheel before taking charge of the boat. As the boat captain sat behind him whispering instructions, Bryan was able to steer the boat to the right and left.
"This is an opportunity for kids to get out of the traditional activities and enjoy their success," said Ken Struve, director of school and social services at the South Street Seaport Museum. "A couple of parents wanted to come over with their kids, but we discouraged them. This is about independence. Without this program, these kids would be at home listening to the radio."
For the students with normal vision, the organizers said, the course helps increase tolerance and understanding. Those with good vision, sometimes cranky at the beginning, eventually get used to working at the slower pace of their blind peers.
After the Pioneer's crew gave hands-on instructions, the children immediately started applying what they had learned.
Daniel Gillen, 11, who is blind, was asked to say which direction the boat should go to get to Riverside Church. He folded his walking cane, ran his fingers on a Braille compass and replied that the boat needed to head north. Other students came up with the same answer using a Braille map.
Their instructor, Maggie Flanagan, explained that the finger-shaped lines they were feeling on the map represented the piers in the Hudson.
When the ship arrived at Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, the instructors helped the students learn about a variety of boats by holding their hands and placing them on the vessels. They also touched the fuel pumps and ice machines. For most of the children, it was the first time.
"We are trying to make it a multisensor experience," Ms. Flanagan said.
When the students were back on the Pioneer, Ms. Flanagan asked if they could say how big the boats passing by were by the sound of the engine and strength of the waves.
"There are many signals you can hear on the water to help you stay safe," she told them, instructing them to stay quiet for a couple of minutes.
They remained silent as the sun shimmered off the sails. There were no sounds except wind clanking the halyards against the mast and the water slapping against sides of the boats. Then suddenly a loud crack was heard, and the waves went as high as the deck, cooling off hot feet. "It is a big motorboat," one student said.
As the students heard each boat pass, they also applied a lesson about sailing etiquette: waving.
Many of the students were excited about learning skills associated with the water. Francesco Magisano, 10, who is partly blind, said that he was looking forward to fishing.
"I have been wanting my own boat since I was 8," Francesco said. "Fishing is like surprise; you never know when the fish will bite. You always have to be ready. With the stuff I have learned here, I think I'm ready to set sail and go fishing."
Spies in the House
By JOHN H. RICHARDSON
It's the summer of 1969, just before my father tells me that he works for the C.I.A., and I am beginning my own secret life. I'm 14 years old, and down in Georgetown, a few blocks west of the White House, a string of new shops burn incense, blast rock music and sell Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead posters. My friend's older brother, Joe, is painting Blue Meanies on a wall of his room. I know something's going on, but I'm not quite getting it. I'm convinced that grown-ups hide everything. Then Joe puts down his paintbrush and pulls out a plastic baggie. ''You guys ever smoke grass?''
I don't even hesitate, and soon I'm noticing my peripheral vision and especially my peripheral thoughts. Before long, I'm sneaking down to Georgetown regularly. One day I buy some acid from a hippie in engineer's pants. When I come home, my mother insists on talking to me, so I sit babbling about school or the weather or Mrs. Banfield's azalea garden, and my lips seem to be moving normally even though the hair on my arm is growing at an alarming rate. After a while she seems satisfied, and I realize she doesn't even see me.
A few weeks later, my father asks me to join him in the study. I sit down in one of the red leather chairs and he sits down in the other, tapping his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. He has been posted to Korea, he says. We will be moving there soon. And there's something else.
''You've reached the age when you're old enough to know what it is I do,'' he says.
He keeps it vague. ''Special assistant to the ambassador'' is just a cover story. Then he asks me if I want to go with the family or stay in the States at a boarding school. And that's it. He doesn't regale me with tales of chasing Nazi spies on the battlefields of Italy, or the time he recruited history's first Soviet double agent. He doesn't mention his role in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. He doesn't explain why we're going to live 30 miles from the most totalitarian country in the world, or why it's so important to him. It will be years before I learn much of this. Maybe he thinks it's all covered under his oath of secrecy, along with the rest of his life.
At first, it sounds implausible to me. My father, a spy? The guy wears a suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He goes to the office every day and reads all night. He worries about the ivy on the hill. He badgers me to cut the lawn. He's a dad. There's an unreality to the whole idea, an unreality that seems consistent with this strange new world where the song lyrics make no sense and you can watch the hair grow on your arm.
From TV and Time magazine, I have developed the vague impression that people think the C.I.A. is a bad thing, which is intriguing. And there's James Bond and ''In Like Flint,'' the movie in which James Coburn fights off an international conspiracy of playmates. Maybe the old man is cooler than I thought. Maybe our secrets will bind us together. It's a natural reaction, I understand later. People can't help thinking that secrets are a kind of magic, that only mysteries reveal the truth.
One night, a man from the C.I.A. sleeps at our house, something that has never happened before. When he and my father drive off in the morning, I snoop through the man's luggage and find a reel-to-reel tape. Carefully peeling back the seal, I take it downstairs and put it on my father's giant Teac tape player. It's something about Kennedy and foreign policy. I'm meticulous about replacing the tape and repacking his suitcase exactly as I found it. (Tradecraft, Mr. Bond.)
Another time, I go poking for clues in my dad's dresser drawers, and lo and behold, hidden under the perfectly folded handkerchiefs and boxer shorts, I find a loaded snub-nosed .38 with a gleaming oil-slick barrel and his initials -- our initials -- carved into the ivory handle.
A thrill runs through me. In my excitement, I show it to one of my friends. We sneak out to the woods, and I aim it at a tree.
In the years to come, I will want to know everything I can about my father. I'll look for him in old letters and yellowing newspapers. I'll even call the C.I.A. and ask for his personnel records. A pleasant man will ring back with the official response: ''Not only no, but hell no -- and if you pursue this, we will have to contact John Richardson Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath.''
But at 14, I'm not ready for whatever the gun has to tell me. When I pull the trigger, the crack of the gunshot explodes so loud across the hills that we take off running and keep running until I get the damn thing back in the drawer. This is a little too much reality. I'm happy to keep our secrets for now.
The next time I go to find the .38 in his drawer, just to take another look, it's gone.
One on shared cars in Europe
Slowly, the Shared Car Is Making Inroads in Europe
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
International Herald Tribune
AMSTERDAM - When Mariane Polfliet discovered she had an emergency meeting in a hard to reach suburb of Amsterdam recently, there was no need for panic: within minutes, she had used her computer-coded key to drive away in one of the hundreds of shared cars that are now scattered around the quaint canals of this city's center.
There was something incongruous about the package: Ms. Polfliet, dressed for a Mercedes in an elegant tan suit with her lawyerly leather briefcase, driving the small bright red Peugeot with neon green wheels and "Greenwheels" stenciled amid swirls on the door.
But for thousands of people in the Netherlands, and hundreds of thousands worldwide, car-sharing groups like Greenwheels have filled the gap between private car ownership and public transportation. For cities where it has taken hold, the concept is helping to relieve traffic and reduce pollution, studies have found.
"Some lawyers don't want to visit clients in a car like this, but I don't care, because this idea has changed my life," said Ms. Polfliet, who uses Greenwheels instead of owning a private car. With it, she takes her boyfriend to hockey practice, buys wine in bulk for parties, shops at Ikea.
Although car sharing has been a mythic, green concept for decades, it has only become a larger-scale reality in the past few years - and then only in a handful of places, like Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, where it has been commercialized by a small number of companies. Over all, far more car-sharing ventures have failed than succeeded in the past 15 years, or have remained too tiny to have a major impact. Still, as urban centers face ever more serious traffic snarls and new technology makes car sharing simpler, dozens of cities in Europe, North America, and Asia - from Singapore to Turin to Minneapolis - are re-exploring the idea.
In January, representatives from a number of cities met in Brussels at a conference organized by a European Union initiative to promote car sharing. "We see a big potential for European cities," the report concluded, estimating that at least 500,000 private vehicles could be replaced in Europe by car sharing.
But the debate continues over whether car sharing is a boutique industry that works well in slightly offbeat places, like Amsterdam, or whether it can become an essential part of urban transportation, like buses and taxis. "I think it's going to be another 10 years before it's going to have a really big impact generally," said Dave Brook, an independent car consultant in the United States. "But we can say now that it's definitely a viable niche, and it's going to be a damn big niche as well."
Private companies, including some giants of the car industry like Hertz and Shell, have begun investing in or operating commercial car sharing to a limited extent. About 300,000 people are involved in car sharing worldwide, with the majority in Europe, according to Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Mobility, the largest single company, with locations all over Switzerland, has 60,000 members and 2,400 cars. In the United States, there are just over 1,000 shared cars in all.
Companies in the United States, like Zipcar, often require drivers to book cars in advance, not unlike renting a car. Here, much of the use is more spontaneous, with customers using the Internet to book one of the many cars in their neighborhoods.
Car sharing logic is simple: Owning a car is both expensive and impractical in many cities. Here in Amsterdam, city center parking permits take six years to obtain, while bicycles ply the narrow streets and bridges with enviable ease.
But what happens when a child misses a school bus? Or someone needs to load up on groceries, or take a guest to the airport? With Greenwheels, members pay as little as 5 euros a month, a little over $6, in base fees, then substantially more for mileage or hourly rates, to tackle these tasks in a car.
"We were haunted by the idea that you could use technology to make this idea into a large scale, professional operation that would be very convenient for customers," said Jan Borghuis, co-founder of Greenwheels - dressed in the de facto company uniform of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, in the company's ramshackle Rotterdam office surrounded by bicycle tires rather than auto parts. "We know it would have a good effect on the environment."
The actual environmental impact is less than straightforward, although researchers say it relieves traffic congestion and pollution to some degree by reducing car ownership. Studies suggest that one shared car replaces 4 to 10 private cars, as people sell their old vehicles, Ms. Shaheen said. The result is a 30 to 45 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled for each new customer.
"On the whole, this is very good for the environment," said Rens Meijkamp, a Dutch researcher, who found that nearly 50 percent of Greenwheels clients used the service as a replacement for either a first or second private car.
On the other hand, there are customers who would otherwise take the bus, meaning that the concept inspires some additional driving.
But the industry is still trying to define itself - not yet mature even in Europe and "still in its adolescence" in the United States, Mr. Brook said. In some places, companies are developing partnerships with state railroads or supermarkets to place cars outside of them. In others, cities have given shared cars the right to drive in bus lanes. "
"I think the demand will develop as far as the supply will become more attractive, simple, and closer to each inhabitant," said J. B. Schmider, manager of the fledgling French Autopartage Network, which to date has only 2,500 members nationwide.
Car rental companies like their fleets to be rented out all the time. But car-sharing companies have a slightly different take on the financial equation. By having a huge number of members, and an excess capacity of cars in the right places, they hope to be able to provide a nearby car within minutes.
On a recent Friday, there was a rare public transportation strike in the Netherlands. It was, Mr. Borghuis said, "our moment of truth," since most Greenwheels customers take trains to work. "In most places, there were cars available when people needed them," he said. "That made us happy."
One on the Ethnologue
How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages
By MICHAEL ERARD
Correction Appended
Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.
Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.
Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."
Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a quandary that has long perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken on the planet?
Estimates have ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, but Ethnologue confidently counts 6,912 languages. Curiously, this edition adds 103 languages to the 6,809 that were listed in its 2000 edition - at a time when linguists are making dire predictions that hundreds of languages will soon become extinct.
"I occasionally note in my comments to the press," said Nicholas Ostler, the president of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, "the irony that Ethnologue's total count of known languages keeps going up with each four-yearly edition, even as we solemnly intone the factoid that a language dies out every two weeks."
This dissonance points to a more basic problem. "There's no actual number of languages," said Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist at Stanford whose own count is "around" 4,580. "It kind of depends on how one defines dialects and languages."
The linguists behind the Ethnologue agree that the distinctions can be indistinct. "We tend to see languages as basically marbles, and we're trying to get all the marbles in our bag and count how many marbles we have," said M. Paul Lewis, a linguist who manages the Ethnologue database (www.ethnologue.com) and will edit the 16th edition. "Language is a lot more like oatmeal, where there are some clearly defined units but it's very fuzzy around the edges."
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich once famously said, "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot" (or "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"). To Ethnologue, and to the language research organization that produces it, S.I.L. International, a language is a dialect that needs its literature, including a Bible.
Based in Dallas, S.I.L. (which stands for Summer Institute of Linguistics) trains missionaries to be linguists, sending them to learn local languages, design alphabets for unwritten languages and introduce literacy. Before they begin translating the Bible, they find out how many translations are needed by testing the degree to which speech varieties are mutually unintelligible. "The definition of language we use in the Ethnologue places a strong emphasis," said Dr. Lewis, "on the ability to intercommunicate as the test for splitting or joining."
Thus, the fewer words from Dialect B that a speaker of Dialect A can understand, the more likely S.I.L. linguists will say that A and B need two Bibles, not one. The entry for the Chadian language of Bernde, for example, rates its similarity to its six neighboring languages from 47 to 73 percent. Above 70 percent, two varieties will typically be called dialects of the same language.
However, such tests are not always clear-cut. Unintelligible dialects are sometimes combined into one language if they share a literature or other cultural heritage. And the reverse can be true, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian.
In Guatemala, Ethnologue counts 54 living languages, while other linguists, some of them native Mayan speakers, count 18. Yet undercounting can be just as political as overcounting.
Colette Grinevald, a specialist in Latin American languages at Lumière University in Lyon, France, notes that the modern Maya political movement wants to unite under one language, Kaqkchikel. "They don't want that division of their language into 24 languages," she said. "They want to create a standard called Kaqkchikel."
Beyond its political implications, the Ethnologue also carries the weight of a religious mission. The project was founded by Richard Pittman, a missionary who thought other missionaries needed better information about which languages lacked a Bible. The first version appeared in 1951, 10 mimeographed pages that described 40 languages.
"Hardly anyone knew about the Ethnologue back then," said Barbara Grimes, who edited the survey from 1967 to 2000. "It was a good idea, but it wasn't very impressive." In 1971, Ms. Grimes and her husband, Joseph Grimes, a linguistics professor at Cornell, extended the survey from small languages to all languages in the world.
What emerged was just how daunting a global Bible translation project was. "In 1950, when we joined S.I.L., we were telling each other, maybe there are about 1,000 languages, but nobody really knew," Ms. Grimes said. In 1969, Ethnologue listed 4,493 languages; in 1992, the number had risen to 6,528 and by 2000 it stood at 6,809.
The number will probably continue to rise - 2,694 languages still need to be studied in detail, and in 2000, S.I.L. officials projected that at the current rate of work, a complete survey would not be completed until 2075. (They now say they are working to speed it up.) As for their goal of translating the Bible, Ethnologue's figures show that all or some of it is available in 2,422 languages.
Ethnologue lists 414 languages as nearly extinct in 2000, a figure that rises to 497 in the new edition.
However, a few linguists accuse the publisher of promoting the trends it says it want to prevent. Denny Moore, a linguist with the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, said via e-mail: "It is absurd to think of S.I.L. as an agency of preservation, when they do just the opposite. Note that along with the extermination of native religion, all the ceremonial speech forms, songs, music and art associated with the religion disappear too."
Dr. Moore, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1999 for his 18 years of linguistic work in Brazil, adds: "There is no way to resolve this contradiction. The only options are fooling yourself about it or not."
S.I.L. officials say missionaries are giving another option to people who are already experiencing cultural shift. "The charge of destroying cultures has been around for a long time," said Carol Dowsett, a spokeswoman for the publisher. "Basically we're interested in people, and we're interested in helping them however we can."
Though the Ethnologue is intended to help spread the word of God, it is being mined for more secular reasons. Computer companies that are developing multilingual software for foreign markets turn to the Ethnologue.
"You've got a developer in Silicon Valley, and a person in the field calls them and says, 'We need to provide support for Serbian' or some language the developer's never heard of, so they can pop open the Ethnologue and find out, 'What is this thing?' " says Peter Constable, a former S.I.L. linguist who now works at Microsoft.
Ray Gordon, the editor, says producers of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" once contacted him, and according to Brian Homoleski, the manager of the publisher's bookstore, several copies were bought after the Sept. 11 attacks by "a U.S. government agency." According to S.I.L. staff members, the American Bar Association, the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Olympic Committee and AT&T all called for help.
Ethnologue's newest step toward worldwide influence has been in the arcane world of the International Organization of Standards. The survey assigns a three-letter code to each language (English is "eng"), and the 7,000-plus codes (for living and dead languages) is near acceptance in library indexing and multilingual software standards. The codes also form the backbone of the Open Language Archives Community, a Web-based technical infrastructure.
Most linguists are unfazed at S.I.L.'s affiliations. "If you took away all the literature done by the S.I.L. people done in the last 60 years," said Dr. Ruhlen of Stanford, "you'd be taking away a lot of language documentation for a lot of languages for which there's nothing at all."
Another article on the war
All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, July 23 - The Bush administration's rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war.
From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?
There is no serious talk of a draft to share the burden of fighting across the broad citizenry, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing for a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions.
There are not even concerted efforts like the savings-bond drives or gasoline rationing that helped to unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past.
"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology.
Members of the military who discussed their sense of frustration did so only when promised anonymity, as comments viewed as critical of the civilian leadership could end their careers. The sentiments were expressed in more than two dozen interviews and casual conversations with enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers, midlevel officers, and general or flag officers in Iraq and in the United States.
Charles Moskos, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University specializing in military sociology, said: "My terminology for it is 'patriotism lite,' and that's what we're experiencing now in both political parties. The political leaders are afraid to ask the public for any real sacrifice, which doesn't speak too highly of the citizenry."
Senior administration officials say they are aware of the tension and have opened discussions on whether to mobilize brigades of Americans beyond those already signed up for active duty or in the Reserves and National Guard. At the Pentagon and the State Department, officials have held preliminary talks on creating a Civilian Reserve, a sort of Peace Corps for professionals.
In an interview, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said that discussions had begun on a program to seek commitments from bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, electricians, plumbers and solid-waste disposal experts to deploy to conflict zones for months at a time on reconstruction assignments, to relieve pressure on the military.
When President Bush last addressed the issue of nationwide support for the war effort in a formal speech, he asked Americans to use the Fourth of July as a time to "find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom by flying the flag, sending a letter to our troops in the field or helping the military family down the street."
In the speech, at Fort Bragg, N.C., on June 28, Mr. Bush mentioned a Defense Department Web site, Americasupportsyou.mil, where people can learn about private-sector efforts to bolster the morale of the troops. He also urged those considering a career in the military to enlist because "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces."
While officers and enlisted personnel say they enjoy symbolic signs of support, and the high ratings the military now enjoys in public opinion polls, "that's just not enough," said a one-star officer who served in Iraq. "There has to be more," he added, saying that the absence of a call for broader national sacrifice in a time of war has become a near constant topic of discussion among officers and enlisted personnel.
"For most Americans," said an officer with a year's experience in Iraq, "their role in the war on terror is limited to the slight inconvenience of arriving at the airport a few hours early."
David C. Hendrickson, a scholar on foreign policy and the presidency at Colorado College, said, "Bush understands that the support of the public for war - especially the war in Iraq - is conditioned on demanding little of the public."
Mr. Hendrickson said that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, just as after the recent London bombings, political leaders urged the population to continue life as normal, so as not to give terrorists a moral victory by giving in to the fear of violence.
But he said the stress of the commitment to the continuing mission in Iraq was viewed by the public in a different light than a terrorist attack on home soil.
"The public wants very much to support the troops" in Iraq, he said. "But it doesn't really believe in the mission. Most consider it a war of choice, and a majority - although a thin one - thinks it was the wrong choice."
Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., who served as commandant of the Army War College and is now retired, said: "Despite the enormous impact of Sept. 11, it hasn't really translated into a national movement towards fighting the war on terrorism. It's almost as if the politicians want to be able to declare war and, at the same time, maintain a sense of normalcy."
General Scales said he had heard a heavy stream of concerns from current officers that "the military is increasingly isolated from the rest of the country."
"People associate being an officer with the priesthood," he added. "You know, there is an enormous amount of respect, but nobody wants to sign up for celibacy."
Private organizations like the Navy League of the United States that support the individual armed services have identified the tension and are using this theme to urge greater contributions from members now in the civilian world.
"We have recognized that and we have tried to sound the alarm," said Rear Adm. Stephen R. Pietropaoli, retired, the executive director of the Navy League.
"As an organization that is committed to supporting them by ensuring they have the weapons and tools and systems to fight and win, and also at the grass-roots level by providing assistance to families," Admiral Pietropaoli said, "we are aware that the burden has fallen almost solely on the shoulders of the uniformed military and security services and their families. We have used that in our calls to action by our members. We have said: 'We are at war. What have you done lately?' "
Morten G. Ender, who teaches sociology at West Point, has been interviewing soldiers, their spouses and cadets since the Iraq war started in 2003. Because the all-volunteer military is a self-selecting body and by definition is not drawn from a cross-section of America, he said, those with direct involvement constitute a far smaller percentage of the country than in past wars.
Mr. Ender said that the "rhetoric from the top" of the civilian leadership of the United States "doesn't move people towards actions."
Most Americans support the military, he said, and "feel like there is somebody out there taking care of the job."
"They say, 'I'm going to support those people, I believe in those people and God bless those people,' " he said. "By doing that, they can wash their hands of it."
Really cool one on somebody who wrote all about the city of 100 years (more!) ago.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
By GILLEN D'ARCY WOOD
IF a tourist visiting New York wants to get from Battery Park to Harlem, she checks her Rough Guide, then takes the No. 5 train. But what about the historical novelist, the wide-eyed tourist of the past? How can he escort his heroine across a single street of Manhattan on, say, a summer's day in 1820, without knowing what she might see, smell, or put her foot in, let alone what style of shoe might grace that foot? Where, in short, is the Rough Guide to Old New York?
It was this question I faced in writing my novel of the 19th-century city, when my first draft died on the page for want of literary oxygen, for the sensual minutiae that makes a historical novel worth the reading. The past as I wanted it should not be worn with cardigan comfort, but close against the skin like a rough wool chemise. Making it all up was not an option. Nineteenth-century Manhattan was not Middle Earth. So how was I to get my 1820 heroine from Maiden Lane to Water Street without having her trip over an anachronism, or run down by an egregious anomaly?
Fortune favored me in a gloomy aisle of the Columbia Library, where I came across one Charles Haswell and his remarkable volume, "Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian," published in 1896. Haswell was one of the grand old men of the city who, a decade before the end of his nearly 98 years, was persuaded by his friends to publish his journals in which he had kept a meticulous year-by-year account of his beloved city, beginning in 1816 at the tender age of 7.
As an observer of 19th-century life in New York, the forgotten Haswell has no equal. The better-known diarists Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong offer voluminous records, but only of their own privileged circles. Whitman's New York, the most celebrated of all, is also vague and light on fact: the poet himself strides down Broadway like a Colossus, but obscures the view.
Haswell's history, by contrast, is American democracy in prose: Lafayette's triumphal visit to the city sits side by side with derelict vendors hawking Rockaway clams; Andrew Jackson's shutting down the Wall Street banks fights for space with a Belgian valet washed up in a rowboat, who passed himself off as a baron and almost married an heiress.
Haswell has the inclusive, peripatetic gaze of the great 19th-century novelists. One unimaginable winter, he walks from Battery Park to Jersey City across the ice. In the summer, he spots "a piratical vessel" off Sandy Hook, then mingles in the crowd gazing at an exhibition of bananas outside a Broadway emporium, where he observes the white gloves the grocers wear, the absence of tomatoes (considered beautiful but poisonous), and the amazement of foreign visitors at the sight of such consumer luxury (at odds with their notions of America's republican simplicity).
Reading the entire volume at a gulp, as I did, the cumulative effect of Haswell's omniscience is staggering. His argument for his approach, too, is compelling: 19th-century life in New York did not simply include trivia, it fed on trivia. "I offer no apology for the mention of trivialities," Haswell writes defiantly, "because under the conditions of the period - the small size of New York and the dearth of more significant general news - trifles became important, and were made the subjects of towntalk." His duty as memorialist, he concludes, "is to reveal New York as it actually was near eighty years ago, not to maintain 'the dignity of history.' "
My novelist's heart throbbed with fellow feeling when I read these lines. It was from this champion of the trivial pursuit that I learned the precise year (1816) that the mustache made its controversial debut on Broadway. Haswell was the kind of gifted pedant who gives you both the exact price of cigars and the social protocols governing their use: "no man" he records, "who was known to smoke a cigar in the streets or at his office in business hours, could have procured a discount at any bank in the city."
FOR the modern reader, Haswell is a weird mix: part history, part almanac, part gossip column. Too dry and undiscriminating for armchair reading. but for a desperate historical novelist, his "Reminiscences" were a mouth-watering feast. Without Haswell, my poor heroine would still be standing at the (flagstone!) curb of Maiden Lane, oblivious to the bucket-wielding slaves and barefoot waifs at the water pump on the corner. Without the Great Octogenarian, I could not have known that the cluster of young men over whom I might have her pass a wistful eye would be dressed in peacock colors, not the funereal business black of a later age.
Without the trivia-loving Haswell brain, she would certainly never have trusted to the attractiveness of her "Leghorn" bonnet or the false bangs plastered to her head. Nor could I possibly have read her mind, which was less likely to be concerned with flirting than with avoiding one of the hundreds of pigs that roamed Lower Manhattan as wandering garbage disposal units, and the steady drizzle of tobacco juice ejected from the gobs of the dockhands. Of course, when I first read Haswell, I still didn't have a good reason for my heroine to be crossing the street in the first place, but what is plot and character to a novelist when he has a gantlet of hogs and tobacco juice to spice up the action?
Charles Haswell was actually a famous author in his time, but not for his "Reminiscences." He was an engineer by profession, and his "Mechanics' and Engineers' Pocket Book" (1842) was a best seller, passing through no fewer than 74 editions up to World War I and becoming known as "the Engineer's Bible."
And what a holy oddity it is, Engineering 101 meets Ripley's Believe It or Not. What brain-dead undergraduate of today would not be piqued to learn that the gestation period of a beaver is 17 weeks? Or that in 1846 a native of the Sandwich Islands swam seven miles with a live pig under his arm?
Clearly, Haswell could not help himself. He was a great New York omnivore, a glutton for urban life, our very own Pepys in engineer's boots. And though he can be boring, he obviously never experienced boredom for himself. His life spanned almost the whole of his bustling, booming New York century, and he himself took the care to remember everything that he had ever seen, heard, or learned before time and his voracious city could swallow it up.
One about a daycamp program which actively seeks out blind kids to include
Young Sailors, Making Their Way by Touch and Sound
By ABEER ALLAM
The Pioneer, a two-masted schooner, pulled out of Pier 16 in Lower Manhattan last week, creating soft ripples as it glided into the Hudson River. The 18 students aboard took up positions on either side of the boat and prepared for action.
"Reach! Pull!" several instructors cried in unison. "Reach! Pull!"
The students, with hands clinched firmly on halyards connected to the two sails, bent their knees and pulled down. They cheered loudly as the wrinkled white sails unraveled and inched toward the sky.
It could have been a scene from any summer sailing camp, but this one was a little different. Half the campers are blind or partly blind, and many rarely leave home other than to attend school.
"It is very exciting here," said Bryan Velasquez, 14, a blind student in his second year at the camp, which consists of day trips. "It is good for kids who want to enjoy the summer. You learn how to put up sail, how to coil, how to navigate, and how to look at charts."
He explained why he preferred being onboard a 120-year-old ship to visiting a museum: "Here you get to touch the ship. You get to touch and smell history."
The five-day sailing camp for fourth through eighth graders, which ended Friday, is part of Science and Seamanship, an educational program organized by the South Street Seaport Museum. Run twice in July, it allows students with severe sight problems to mingle with peers who have normal vision.
Most of the students with sight problems are from lower-income families who would not otherwise afford the cost of the camp, $500. Their fees are donated by Lavelle Fund for the Blind, a charitable foundation in New York City. Most of the students with normal vision are relatives of the blind students.
Those with vision problems gradually learn that seeing is not the only way to enjoy nature and outdoor activities. And while the process may be slower for them - and in some cases intimidating - their other senses help guide them.
At the back of the boat, Bryan ran his hands along every inch of the steering wheel before taking charge of the boat. As the boat captain sat behind him whispering instructions, Bryan was able to steer the boat to the right and left.
"This is an opportunity for kids to get out of the traditional activities and enjoy their success," said Ken Struve, director of school and social services at the South Street Seaport Museum. "A couple of parents wanted to come over with their kids, but we discouraged them. This is about independence. Without this program, these kids would be at home listening to the radio."
For the students with normal vision, the organizers said, the course helps increase tolerance and understanding. Those with good vision, sometimes cranky at the beginning, eventually get used to working at the slower pace of their blind peers.
After the Pioneer's crew gave hands-on instructions, the children immediately started applying what they had learned.
Daniel Gillen, 11, who is blind, was asked to say which direction the boat should go to get to Riverside Church. He folded his walking cane, ran his fingers on a Braille compass and replied that the boat needed to head north. Other students came up with the same answer using a Braille map.
Their instructor, Maggie Flanagan, explained that the finger-shaped lines they were feeling on the map represented the piers in the Hudson.
When the ship arrived at Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, the instructors helped the students learn about a variety of boats by holding their hands and placing them on the vessels. They also touched the fuel pumps and ice machines. For most of the children, it was the first time.
"We are trying to make it a multisensor experience," Ms. Flanagan said.
When the students were back on the Pioneer, Ms. Flanagan asked if they could say how big the boats passing by were by the sound of the engine and strength of the waves.
"There are many signals you can hear on the water to help you stay safe," she told them, instructing them to stay quiet for a couple of minutes.
They remained silent as the sun shimmered off the sails. There were no sounds except wind clanking the halyards against the mast and the water slapping against sides of the boats. Then suddenly a loud crack was heard, and the waves went as high as the deck, cooling off hot feet. "It is a big motorboat," one student said.
As the students heard each boat pass, they also applied a lesson about sailing etiquette: waving.
Many of the students were excited about learning skills associated with the water. Francesco Magisano, 10, who is partly blind, said that he was looking forward to fishing.
"I have been wanting my own boat since I was 8," Francesco said. "Fishing is like surprise; you never know when the fish will bite. You always have to be ready. With the stuff I have learned here, I think I'm ready to set sail and go fishing."
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