Some more Times articles
Feb. 3rd, 2006 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A Lives article about a woman who hid... everything about herself, near as I can tell, when she was a teenager.
Teenage Angst in Texas
By GAIL CALDWELL
In the mid-1960's, the wind-swept plains of the Texas Panhandle could be a languid prison for an adolescent girl with a wild spirit and no place to go. I buried myself in Philip Roth novels and little acts of outrage, and on lonesome afternoons, I would drive my mother's Chevrolet out onto the freeway and take it up to 90 m.p.h., smoking endless cigarettes and aching with ennui. I was bored by the idea of mainstream success and alienated from what the world seemed to offer — one of my poems from those days weighs heavily on the themes of coffins, societal hypocrisy and godlessness. And yet I cannot locate the precise source of my anger. For years I thought all teenagers were fueled by a high-octane mix of intensity and rage; I only know that what sent me onto the highways and into my own corridors of gloom was inexplicable to others and confusing to me.
Around this time my father began what I dismally thought of as our Sunday drives. As kids, my sister and I were bored but tolerant when we had to tag along on his treks, which were always aimless. But now his itinerary was to chart the path of my dereliction, and that meant getting me alone in the car so that we could "talk": about my imminent doom, about my mother's high blood pressure. Thus incarcerated, slouched in the shotgun seat with my arms folded against my chest, I responded to his every effort by either staring out the window or yelling back. I don't remember a word I said. What I still feel is the boulder on my heart — the amorphous gray of the world outside the car window, signaling how trapped I felt, by him and by the hopeless unawareness of my age.
My father, far more than I, seemed to sense that the country was raging, that it was a bad time to surrender your daughters to strange lands. But these things — a war somewhere far away, a civil rights movement over in the Deep South — belonged to the evening news, not to the more intimate treacheries of car rides and deceits and disappointments, and so were rarely addressed on any personal level, not yet. Instead we fought about curfews or bad boyfriends; we fought about straightening up and flying right. We fought about everything but the truth, which was that I would be leaving soon.
I had already seen two casualties claimed by history, men who were lighting out for the territory to avoid the 1-A draft notices they had just received. The first was a boy who stopped by the house to say goodbye a few days before leaving for Toronto. When the other young man disappeared, the federal authorities came sniffing around my high school, and I covered for him without a shred of hesitation. I told them I thought he went east, to his mother's in Missouri, when I knew it was the one place he would never go.
These losses and the lies they demanded frightened me, in vague and then inarticulable ways, about just who was in charge — about the dangers posed by the institutions that were supposed to keep you safe. It was difficult in those days to care much about the College Boards, or to think that the path in front of me would hold the traditional landscapes of marriage and family. In some ways the tempests of my adolescence had set me against myself; I'd found that introspection couldn't buy you love, that poetry helped only momentarily, that straight A's and spelling bees were no guarantee of knowing where to turn. Worse and more pervasive, I was maturing under the assumption that you should never let men know how smart you were, or how mouthy — a girl's intelligence, brazenly displayed, was seen as impolite, unfeminine and even threatening.
So I kept quiet; when I dated a boy who liked George Wallace, I rolled my eyes and looked out the window. The smarter you were, the more subversive you had to be. Girls could excel in English, say, or languages, as long as they didn't flaunt it or pretend to be superior to males. But God forbid they should try to carve a life out of such achievements. God forbid they display a pitcher's arm, or an affinity for chemistry or analytic prowess in an argument with a man.
In the end, my own revisionism was unconscious but thorough. I neglected anymore to mention the mysterious test, taken at age 7, that resulted in my skipping second grade. Toward the end of high school, I began lying to my peers about my high scores on placement exams, and I blew admission, with half-intention and private relief, into the National Honor Society. The summer before college, in 1968, I had to declare a major; I took a deep breath and wrote "mathematics" on my admission forms. And when friends asked me what I'd chosen, I lied about that too.
About a family's 200 years of letters, interesting.
In 200 Years of Family Letters, a Nation's Story
By KIRK JOHNSON
BOULDER, Colo., Jan. 27 — To most college students, instant messages, or I.M.'s, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address. One flicker and gone.
Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his I.M.'s on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise.
Mr. Cowan comes from a long line of savers — really, really dedicated savers.
"It's in the genes," said his mother, Linda Cowan.
Beginning more than 200 years ago, Mr. Cowan's family has kept the messages — people called them letters in those days — written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling.
The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years, genealogy experts say. It has been stored in attics, sheds and storage lockers over the years, and most recently in the Cowans' home here in Boulder, where they were interviewed on a recent morning. Its contents cover the scandalous (a relative jailed for embezzlement), the intriguing (a runaway slave seeking refuge in the North) and the historic (the settling of Chicago).
Now the current owner of the collection, Mr. Cowan's grandmother, Mary Leslie Wolff, who is 82, is negotiating to donate the papers — called the Ames Family Historical Collection, for her father's branch of the tree — to a historical society somewhere back East, where the family began. Ms. Wolff declined to say where the collection might go because discussions were continuing.
Historians and librarians say the collection is probably as remarkable for its intellectual vigor as for its age and size. It is essentially a dialogue of history: one well-educated, middle-class family's long conversation, and its interaction with the issues that defined the early nation and its westward tide, including the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, the early rise of feminism and the discoveries of geology that were shaking religious assumptions about the age of the earth. The family's writers talked all of it through, often at length. Letters of 10 to 12 pages were common.
"Whenever anyone finds a record like this that speaks to one family in depth, it's a gold mine," said David S. Ouimette, who manages the genealogy collection for the Family History Library, run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.
"And it sounds like they weren't just observing the events of the day, they were participants," added Mr. Ouimette, who has not seen the collection. "That's what puts flesh on the bones."
One series of letters, for example, talks about a runaway slave named Mary Walker who took shelter with an abolitionist branch of the family in Philadelphia, the Leslies, during a visit by her master in the 1850's. Ms. Walker, after being hidden for a time, was eventually sent farther north to live with Leslie relatives in Massachusetts.
But the story did not end there. As the Civil War tore the country apart, the letters show an effort to reunite Ms. Walker with her family in North Carolina. A friend who was an officer in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army, then advancing south, was asked to look out for Ms. Walker's children, and he apparently succeeded, because they ultimately made their way north to join her.
Another series of letters offers a vivid early glimpse of the still-raw settlement of Chicago by a family member who had journeyed west from Philadelphia in 1836 to Missouri to see some land he had bought. The land was not much to speak of, wrote the author, Peter Leslie — Ms. Wolff's great-great grandfather — in a letter to his children. But when he arrived at what he called "Chicago on Lake Michigan," Mr. Leslie immediately knew a rising force when he saw it.
"The town has more natural advantages than any place I have yet seen and is destined to be the N. York of the West," he wrote in a letter describing the construction and the bustle of the new city, then a few years old. Hotels were springing up, land fever was in the air and ambition was everywhere.
"The people of the West have a town-making mania," he wrote. "This one must succeed."
Ms. Cowan, Ms. Wolff's daughter, said she had recently been working through the letters of Mr. Leslie's son, J. Peter Leslie, who was a geologist in Philadelphia later in the 19th century. Many of those letters, she said, read like a novel: you start one, and you just have to find out what happens next.
"Right now there's a relative in jail for embezzlement," she said. "He ran off to Canada, then his conscience got the better of him and he came back and gave himself up."
Why this family saved the things that many others threw away or lost remains a mystery, Ms. Wolff said. An early progenitor in Massachusetts apparently got the ball rolling in the 1700's; that branch's attic-size collection was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society many years ago.
Beginning in Massachusetts and Philadelphia, where the first immigrants of the family settled after arriving from Scotland, the letters piled up as the clan, like so many others of the day, gradually moved west — to Minnesota in the 1850's, then Colorado a century later.
"I think a lot of people have the urge, but at some point they just give up and throw it out," Ms. Wolff said.
Ms. Cowan spoke up. "These people didn't — they didn't throw out anything."
In today's era of the instantaneous and disposable, even the paper on which the letters were written can seem alien — so durable, at least through the 1850's vintage, that neither coal dust from furnace-room storage nor glue from an ancestor's zealous scrapbook-making apparently harmed it.
Even some of the subjects that gripped people back then can seem new again with time, like poetry. Family members transcribed poems they loved, or perhaps wrote themselves, into a book that Ms. Cowan said nobody had tried to go through yet.
"We don't even know what's in it," she said.
Mr. Cowan, a junior at Oberlin College in Ohio who said he thought of becoming an author someday, looked up sharply at the mention of unread 19th-century poetry.
"Whoa, can I check that out?" he asked.
An article about The Onion, now in New York!
An Onion Uprooted, Without Tears
By JAKE MOONEY
Correction Appended
WHEN Joe Garden, the 35-year-old features editor of the satirical paper The Onion, thinks about the publication’s move five years ago this month from Madison, Wis., to New York, he thinks about his first encounter with a staff member of The New Yorker. The emissary from the sleek Condé Nast building had traveled to The Onion’s cavelike office in West Chelsea.
“She said to me, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re still wearing pleats!’” Mr. Garden recalled recently, his indignation unfaded by time. “I guess that was my introduction to provincialism.”
Still, as Mr. Garden recounted the incident, there were hints that after five years big-city life has gotten better. “Everyone else I’ve met from The New Yorker has been great,” he continued. “But that’s because we play them in softball and in bowling, and it’s mostly the cartoonists.”
And then there is Mr. Garden’s sartorial growth. “If you will notice,” he said with a cocked eyebrow, “these jeans are not pleated.” He lifted the bottom of his “Hee Haw” T-shirt to prove it.
A half-decade after The Onion landed on Manhattan’s shores, much about its 14-member staff is unchanged: Wisconsinites still predominate, and many of the writers still resemble the stoners and indie rockers the paper regularly lampoons. The 18-year-old paper is still wildly popular — more so than ever, with a circulation of 100,000 in New York alone and its 16th seventh compendium of fake newspaper articles, published by Three Rivers Press, currently in bookstores.
The paper’s Web site, which turns 10 this year, gets four million readers a month. And its minute-long daily Onion Radio News dispatches, a longtime feature on the paper’s Web site that is now in syndication, topped the list of most popular podcasts on the Apple iTunes Music Store only a week after the store began offering them for download.
For a staff that did little to discourage a thinly veiled look-at-the-rubes condescension in the news media coverage of its arrival, life is now slightly more polished. The dark office in Chelsea is gone, left behind a year ago for an airy new space in SoHo, just down Broadway from Dean & DeLuca. Its modern blue cubicles are stocked with as many PowerBooks as the Apple store a few blocks away, and the new managing editor, a 25-year-old former intern named Peter Koechley, is a Type A personality who grew up in Madison but joined the paper full time only after graduating from Columbia.
And every now and then, something happens — like an encounter with a comedy hero, or a cease-and-desist letter from the White House over the paper’s use of the presidential seal — that reminds the staff how far it has come from its scruffy comedic roots.
“It’s so funny how we’re still using it,” Todd Hanson, the head writer, mused about the letter from the White House, which involved the presence of the seal on a Web page parodying President Bush’s weekly radio address. “Did we even get a follow-up letter about that?”
Mr. Garden, meanwhile, has launched a grass-roots campaign to become the next host of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” complete with Web site, brochures and a slogan (“Hasn’t Carson Daly had enough shows?”), and cultivated his entrepreneurial spirit by buying cases of soda at the Costco in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and reselling them to co-workers at a modest markup.
He lives in Windsor Terrace, near several other Onion writers, who say that the neighborhoods around Prospect Park, with their greenery and college-town pace, remind them of Madison.
There are other reminders of their roots. “I have clogged arteries and a bad heart from all the cheese I ate living in Wisconsin, all the fat that I crammed down my throat,” Mr. Garden said, tapping his chest. “So that’s part of me. You can’t remove it, or it will destroy me.”
In fact, the absence of solid Midwestern comfort food has posed a challenge for the paper’s art department, which requires a certain girthiness of many of the people who pose for the fake news photos.
“Some of our writers, who we would use as body doubles of older Congress people, have started losing weight since we’ve been here,” Chad Nackers, the associate graphics editor, said one afternoon. “That killed us. We used to be able to do Dennis Hastert if we wanted.” And Mike Loew, the graphics editor, chimed in, “Oh, yeah, we had all the options, before everyone started eating sushi and getting all svelte.”
In response, the two have resorted to photographing visiting Wisconsin relatives when they need, say, a woman with a certain hairdo, or a burly man with a large mustache.
The new home has had other editorial implications. One staffer had to ask a friend to drive him to Secaucus, N.J., to find a Wal-Mart to photograph for the cover of the latest book. And gone are the days when a trash-strewn alley across the street from the old office in Madison was the stand-in for all things New York.
Not that staff members don’t remember the Midwest fondly.
“I still want to eventually have an eye towards moving back,” said John Krewson, the sports editor. “When I think back on all the rent I’ve paid in Park Slope, I’m like, ‘I’ve bought two farmhouses on 40 acres in Wisconsin.’”
MR. KREWSON, whose wedding was crashed by a fellow Madison native, Chris Farley, said he had been discomfited to find a touch of urban snobbery creeping into his demeanor on visits home, a compulsion to pass his views on urban planning along to his former neighbors. As uncomfortable as those urges make him, Mr. Krewson said, relating to Middle America is no harder than it used to be.
“We used to do jokes about people who sat on the couch and played video games and ate the whole bag of chips,” he said. “And just this weekend, I sat on the couch, played video games and ate the whole bag of chips. Of course, the video game I was playing was made on the next block by the guys at Rockstar.”
Still, for many of the staffers, after hanging around Madison for years working at minimum-wage jobs, New York is a strange place to have arrived. “None of us have a background in comedy, none of us have a background in journalism,” said Mr. Hanson, the head writer. “Most of us don’t have a background in anything at all, to be honest. We were just punching the clock, working cash registers, and all of this happened to us accidentally.”
He thought for a second. “I guess the lesson is, if your life is going nowhere, don’t try, and it’ll all work out.”
On the newest city holiday - Diwali.
A Parking Holiday of Their Own
By STEVEN KURUTZ
ASIDE from being the Sam of Sam & Raj Appliance Discount Center, an electronics store in Jackson Heights, Queens, Subhash Kapadia is an energetic booster of the Indian people. A boisterous 62-year-old who immigrated to New York from India in 1973, Mr. Kapadia has been helping to transform 74th Street, where his store is, into a "Little India" brimming with jewelry stores and Indian restaurants.
Along the way, Mr. Kapadia has promoted city observance of India's independence, helped found the Jackson Heights Merchants' Association, and, last year, invited Mayor Bloomberg as the guest at a dinner held by the group. But fulfilling as it was to break nan with the mayor, Mr. Kapadia's proudest moment came last month, when, after several years of lobbying, the City Council recognized Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, as an official city holiday.
"For Muslims there are four or five holidays," Mr. Kapadia said the other day, sitting in a small, cramped office in the rear of his store that was decorated with half a dozen 2006 calendars. "Jews have more. There was no Hindu holiday."
•
For Hindus, Diwali is the most important religious holiday of the year, a "celebration of the triumph of good over evil," as Mr. Kapadia put it. The city's Hindus have informally celebrated the holiday by holding a four- or five-day festival on 74th Street, dancing to peppy music called Bangla and eating sweets, or mithai, in which sugar is a staple. ("It cannot be an Indian festival without sugar," a Sam & Raj employee said.)
Now the festivities will carry a governmental seal of approval. Besides marking Diwali on all its calendars — the holiday begins this year on Oct. 21 — the city will acknowledge the day with the time-honored gesture of suspending alternate-side parking rules, at least for the first day. With the City Council vote, which was Dec. 8, Diwali will become the 34th city holiday, among them Asian Lunar New Year and Id al-Adha, during which New Yorkers are relieved of the duty of moving their cars for street cleaning.
"This is a big satisfaction for us," Mr. Kapadia said. "When I moved to this block, nobody was here. The street was mainly residential, but I had a dream to form a Little India. Slowly it came true. A restaurant moved in and then a grocery store." Indians from Connecticut and Philadelphia went to Queens to buy items, like Bollywood DVD's, that recalled their South Asian roots.
Now, "there are almost 250 stores within three blocks," Mr. Kapadia said, speaking of the area between 72nd and 74th Streets.
Shoppers can buy turmeric and other South Asian spices at Patel Brothers, or a lychee fruit drink, or a whole goat, like the one that was being carved up at an Indian grocer's one recent afternoon.
•
As Little India has grown, so has the city's Indian population, reaching 171,000 in the 2000 census. Many are Hindus, as are some immigrants from the Caribbean and Guyana. Mr. Kapadia is proud of his people's contribution to the city. "Look at any hospital — you will find Indian surgeons," he said. "There are many Indian professionals."
Lifting the parking rules for Diwali may seem like a minor victory, but in the eyes of Mr. Kapadia, the move will increase the visibility of the city's Hindus. Councilman John Liu, the chairman of the transportation committee and a supporter of the Diwali bill, agrees. "In October, New Yorkers will wake up and hear on the radio that alternate-side parking has been suspended for Diwali," he said. "They will appreciate not having to move their car, but they'll also learn more about the Hindu faith."
And for Mr. Kapadia, the recognition of Diwali is only the beginning. Along with his friend Shiv Dass, the regal-looking, gray-haired president of the Jackson Heights Merchants' Association, he is busy lobbying for a Hindu prayer center at Kennedy Airport and hopes to see construction finished within a year on a senior center in Jackson Heights that would cater to Indians.
"After a long time," Mr. Kapadia said, "we are finally being noticed."
On people's use of alternative medicine. It brings to mind this post on science and politics, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sclerotic_rings
When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void
By BENEDICT CAREY
A few moments before boarding a plane from Los Angeles to New York in January, Charlene Solomon performed her usual preflight ritual: she chewed a small tablet that contained trace amounts of several herbs, including extracts from daisy and chamomile plants.
Ms. Solomon, 56, said she had no way to know whether the tablet, an herb-based remedy for jet lag, worked as advertised. Researchers have found no evidence that such preparations are effective, and Ms. Solomon knows that most doctors would scoff that she was wasting her money.
Yet she swears by the tablets, as well as other alternative remedies, for reasons she acknowledges are partly psychological.
"I guess I do believe in the power of simply paying attention to your health, which in a way is what I'm doing," said Ms. Solomon, who runs a Web consulting business in Los Angeles. "But I also believe there are simply a lot of unknowns when it comes to staying healthy, and if there's a possibility something will help I'm willing to try it."
Besides, she added, "whatever I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it."
The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.
They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.
This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening.
Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment.
Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous.
Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements.
"I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, " said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine.
Dr. Barnes added, "People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."
Healthy and Dabbling
Ms. Solomon's first small steps outside the mainstream came in 1991, after she watched her mother die of complications from a hysterectomy.
"I saw doctors struggling to save her," she said. "They were trying really hard, and I have great respect for what they do, but at that point I realized the doctors could only do so much."
She decided then that she needed to take more responsibility for her own health, by eating better, exercising more and seeking out health aids that she thought of as natural, meaning not prescribed by a doctor or developed by a pharmaceutical company.
"I usually stay away from drugs if I can, because the side effects even of cough and cold medicines can be pretty strong," she said.
The herbal preparations she uses, she said, "have no side effects, and the difference in my view is that they help support my own body's natural capability, to fight off disease" rather than treat symptoms.
If these sentiments are present in someone like Ms. Solomon, who regularly consults her internist and describes herself as "pretty mainstream," they run far deeper in millions of other people who use nontraditional therapies more often.
In interviews and surveys, these patients often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause.
Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the "rightness of fit" above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system.
Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show.
"I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. "The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head."
From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful.
To best way to validate this, said Ms. Newman and many others who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy "and listen to your own body."
Opting Out
Cynthia Riley effectively opted out of mainstream medicine when it seemed that doctors were not listening to her.
During a nine-year period that ended in 2004, Ms. Riley, 47, visited almost 20 doctors, for a variety of intermittent and strange health complaints: blurred vision, urinary difficulties, balance problems so severe that at times she wobbled like a drunk.
She felt unwell most of the time, but doctors could not figure out what she had.
Each specialist ordered different tests, depending on the symptom, Ms. Riley said, but they were usually rushed and seemed to solicit her views only as a formality.
Undeterred, Ms. Riley, an event planner who lives near New London, Conn., typed out a four-page description of her ordeal, including her suspicion that she suffered from lead poisoning. One neurologist waved the report away as if insulted; another barely skimmed it, she said.
"I remember sitting in one doctor's office and realizing, 'He thinks I'm crazy,' " Ms. Riley said. "I was getting absolutely nowhere in conventional medicine, and I was determined to get to the root of my problems."
Through word of mouth, Ms. Riley heard about Deirdre O'Connor, a naturopath with a thriving practice in nearby Mystic, Conn., and made an appointment.
In recent years, people searching for something outside of conventional medicine have increasingly turned to naturopaths, herbal specialists who must complete a degree that includes some standard medical training in order to be licensed, experts say. Fourteen states, including California and Connecticut, now license naturopaths to practice medicine. Natural medicine groups are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including New York.
Licensed naturopaths can prescribe drugs from an approved list in some states, but have no prescribing rights in others.
Right away, Ms. Riley said, she noticed a difference in the level of service. Before even visiting the office, she received a fat envelope in the mail containing a four-page questionnaire, she said. In addition to asking detailed questions about medical history — standard information — it asked about energy level, foods she craved, sensitivity to weather and self-image: "Please list adjectives that describe you," read one item.
"It felt right, from the beginning," Ms. Riley said.
Her first visit lasted an hour and a half, and Ms. O'Connor, the naturopath, agreed that metal exposure was a possible cause of her symptoms. It emerged in their interview that Ms. Riley had worked in the steel industry, and tests of her hair and urine showed elevated levels of both lead and mercury, Ms. O'Connor said.
After taking a combination of herbs, vitamins and regular doses of a drug called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA, to treat lead poisoning, Ms. Riley said, she began to feel better, and the symptoms subsided.
Along the way, Ms. O'Connor explained the treatments to Ms. Riley, sometimes using drawings, and called her patient regularly to check in, especially during the first few months, Ms. Riley said.
Other doctors said they could not comment on Ms. Riley's case because they had not examined her. Researchers who specialize in lead poisoning say that it is rare in adults but that it can cause neurological symptoms and bladder problems and is often missed by primary care doctors.
Dr. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist who directs the lead research group at the University of Pittsburgh, said DMSA was the pharmaceutical treatment of choice for high blood lead levels.
Researchers say there is little or no evidence that vitamins or herbs can relieve symptoms like Ms. Riley's. Still, she said, "I look and feel better than I have in years."
Life and Death
Diane Paradise bet her life on the uncertain benefits of natural medicine, after being burned physically and emotionally by conventional doctors.
In 1995, doctors told Ms. Paradise, now 35, that she had Hodgkin's disease. After a six-month course of chemotherapy and radiation, she said, she was declared cancer free, and she remained healthy for five years.
But in 2001 the cancer reappeared, more advanced, and her doctors recommended a 10-month course of drugs and radiation, plus a marrow transplant, she said.
Ms. Paradise, a marketing consultant in Rochester, N.Y., balked.
"I was burned badly the first time around, third-degree burns, and now they were talking about 10 months," she said in an interview, "and they were giving me no guarantees; they said it was experimental. That's when I started looking around. I really had nothing to lose, and I was focused on quality of life at that point, not quantity."
When she told one of her doctors that she was considering an alternative treatment in Arizona, the man exploded, she said.
"His exact words were, 'That's not treatment, that's a vacation — you're wasting your time!' " she said.
And so ended the relationship. With help from friends, Ms. Paradise raised about $40,000 to pay for the Arizona clinic's treatment, plus living expenses while there.
"I had absolutely no scientific reason for choosing this route, none," she said. "I just think there are times in our life when we are asked to make decisions based on our intuition, on our gut instinct, not based on evidence put in front of us, and for me this was one of those moments."
Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease.
But Ms. Paradise said that her relationship with the natural medicine specialist in Arizona had been collaborative and that she had felt "more empowered, more involved" in the treatment plan, which included large doses of vitamins, as well as changes in diet and sleep routines. After four months on the regimen, she said, she felt much better.
But the cancer was not cured. It has resurfaced recently and spread, and this time Ms. Paradise has started an experimental treatment with an oncologist in New York.
She is complementing this treatment, she said, with another course of alternative therapy in Arizona. She moved in with friends near Phoenix and started the alternative regime in January.
"It's 79 degrees and beautiful here," she said by phone in mid-January. "Let's hope that's a good sign."
For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in "personal growth or spirituality" predicted alternative medicine use.
Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate. David Wood, a naturopath who with his wife, Cheryl, runs a large, Christian-oriented practice in Lynnwood, Wash., said he treated patients of all faiths.
"We pray with patients, with their permission," said Mr. Wood, who also works with local medical doctors when necessary. "If patients would not like us to pray for them, we don't, but it's there if needed."
He added, "Our goal here is to help people get really well, not merely free of symptoms."
That is exactly the sentiment that many Americans say they feel is missing from conventional medicine. Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually recharged.
"I don't hate doctors or anything," Ms. Newman said. "I just know they can make mistakes, and so often they refer you on to see another doctor, and another."
Seeing a naturopath, she said, "I feel I'm known, they see me as a whole person, they listen to what I say."
"Oil Habit Hard to Break under NY's Tax Code"
Oil Habit Is Hard to Break Under New York Tax Code
By DANNY HAKIM
ALBANY, Feb. 2 — In his address to the nation on Tuesday, President Bush said the United States must move to wean itself from foreign oil.
But New York's energy policies show just how hard that goal may be, with a tax code that offers more than $1 billion worth of breaks for gasoline and diesel.
And on the day of Mr. Bush's speech, the State Senate passed a bill that would grant a tax cut to giant oil companies, even as they are reporting record profits, as well as to independent distributors that bring oil into the state.
Such tax breaks not only encourage continued dependence on fossil fuels, but may make it harder to accomplish what Mr. Bush, along with Gov. George E. Pataki, is calling for: the wider development and use of alternative fuels.
Many of the more than $1 billion in tax breaks that New York grants for conventional fuels — plain old gasoline and diesel — have been built up over Mr. Pataki's nearly dozen years in office, sometimes as incentives to keep businesses in the state. State gasoline and diesel taxes are discounted for commercial fishermen, farmers, nonprofit groups, private and parochial schools, private bus companies that have contracts with the state, commuter ferries, manufacturers, mining companies and veterans' groups, among others.
Republican lawmakers continue to press for more. In addition to the tax cut for oil distributors, which the Senate also passed last year, other recent measures it has passed include a reimbursement of taxes on diesel fuel paid by small businesses that charter boats for sports fishermen. Both ideas have so far stalled in the Democratic Assembly.
This legislation comes as Mr. Pataki has proposed tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to promote alternative fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. His measures are aimed, as he put it in his State of the State address last month, at "reducing our dependence on expensive, polluting, terror-promoting foreign oil." Mr. Bush appeared to echo that call on Tuesday, saying that "America is addicted to oil" and should increase spending on alternatives.
Seeking to expand tax breaks for both regular and alternative fuels may seem counterproductive. One school of thought among some policymakers, and even Detroit auto executives, is that the surest way to wean America from its oil addiction is to follow the lead of Europe, where high gasoline taxes are a powerful incentive to buy fuel-efficient cars.
"You have to ask the question in 2006," said State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, "when we all agree we should be decreasing our dependence on foreign petroleum and increasing our use of alternative and renewable resources, why we continue to give tax expenditures, exemptions, credits and refunds for the use of petroleum and even have bills coming to the floor that would expand those."
"It seems to be a net lose-lose proposition to use the tax code to encourage alternative fuels while also allowing the same tax code to encourage the expanded use of petroleum," she added.
At the same time, Americans — particularly lower-income Americans — have been battered by the run-up in oil prices, as have many of their employers, so potential tax breaks for traditional fuels are politically popular. The biggest current tax break is for diesel fuel used in residential heating, costing the state a projected $276.7 million in lost revenue annually.
"With the price of fuel the way it is, it's killing me," said Mike Albronda of Long Island, a captain of the charter boat Montauk. The measure passed by the Senate would help considerably, he said, because fuel taxes typically cost him about $900 a year.
Michael Marr, a spokesman for Mr. Pataki's budget division, said, "The governor does not believe that raising taxes is the way to address the need to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.
"The governor has advanced a comprehensive plan to help New York transition out of our current overreliance on foreign energy sources by providing the state with the means to develop the alternative energy sources of tomorrow while also creating a market for those new energy sources," he said.
The governor's budget proposal includes $30 million for projects aimed at promoting the use of alternative fuels, including giving money to gas stations as incentives to offer such fuels to consumers. An additional $20 million would be set aside to support the construction of a new kind of refinery that produces ethanol through a more environmentally efficient process than producing it from corn.
Mr. Pataki also seeks a $2,000 tax credit for people who buy hybrid gas-and-electric cars, costing the state $10 million when fully phased in, and he wants to waive the modest taxes that exist on some alternative fuels.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group, New York has the nation's highest state and local gasoline taxes, at more than 40 cents a gallon, on top of the 18.4 cents in federal taxes consumers must pay.
State fuel taxes are generally levied on oil companies or businesses that distribute fuel to gas stations, then passed along to consumers. The bill passed by the State Senate on Tuesday would cut sales taxes on gasoline at prices above $2 a gallon, or by about 4 cents a gallon at current prices. Over all, the measure is projected to cost the state $200 million in lost revenue.
The bill's sponsor, Senator Joseph E. Robach, a Rochester Republican, said he believed that oil companies would pass the savings to retailers, who would pass them to consumers. "That is free enterprise," he said. "At least one hungry entrepreneur will use that to lower prices."
But the bill does not require that the tax breaks be passed on to consumers, and the industry has not seemed inclined to share its profits. This week, Exxon Mobil reported a $36.1 billion profit for 2005, the largest ever for an American company.
"To say that is going to translate to the end consumer when you have a lot of people in the distribution chain is hard to anticipate," said Cathy Kenny, an associate director at a New York arm of the American Petroleum Institute. "If you're a retailer, why would you lower your price 4 cents?"
Democrats contend that tax relief for lower-income families should be accomplished in other ways, like income tax relief.
Ms. Krueger, who voted against the bill the Senate passed on Tuesday, said, "This isn't a tax return to consumers; this is a reduction in taxes to the wholesalers with no ability to hold them accountable to pass that savings along to the consumer."
Plans for a public school upsets local Hassidic families who would like to buy the building and make a new yeshiva.
Plans for a Public School Upset Brooklyn Hasidim
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
With 772 students, Montauk Intermediate School in Brooklyn is nearly half empty.
So when the Department of Education decided to place one of 36 new, small secondary schools it is opening next year inside the Montauk building, it seemed like a fine plan.
But the Montauk school happens to be in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood where virtually all residents send their children to private yeshivas. And the plan for the new school has angered community leaders, who say that any one of the neighborhood's yeshivas would be thrilled to buy the building for a fair price.
"The yeshivas are bursting — every time you turn around, there's more going up, and boy, would our community like to get those schools that are empty," said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat who represents the area.
He said of the neighborhood: "It is basically Hasidic, and one of the things in good government is you adjust to the changes. It's such an obvious thing to recognize, that our community is what it is. It is a wonderful community, a taxpaying community, it is a community of one of the lowest rates of crimes." He added, "We'd like to keep it that way."
The dispute is another wrinkle in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to create and find spots for hundreds of new small schools. It is also laced with the delicate ethnic mix of Brooklyn. While Borough Park is virtually exclusively Hasidic, the new school, the Kingsborough Early College School, would probably serve mostly black and Hispanic students.
The mayor has already created 149 small middle and high schools, as his chief tactic for combating the city's graduation rate of about 54 percent. But the new schools have to have somewhere to go, and finding those spots has not been easy.
In previous years, the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have drawn fire for the decision to place small schools in enormous school buildings that were in some cases already overcrowded. This time, education officials say they took great pains to place the new schools inside buildings with extra space. The latest plan drew praise from Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president, who called it "a good step."
But opposition had been brewing in Brooklyn. Mr. Hikind said he first heard about the plan to place a new small school inside the Montauk building, at 4200 16th Avenue, about two months ago. He immediately balked at the plan and said he discussed his objections with Michelle Fratti, the regional superintendent in charge of Region 7, which includes Borough Park.
Soon, he said, fliers were being distributed at synagogues and in the streets, urging residents to protest the plan at meetings of the local Community Education Council.
"These students will be imported from out of Boro Park and will have to walk through our streets during many hours of the day," read one such flier. "Can't you shudder to think what will become of our peaceful neighborhood?"
Mr. Hikind said he thought that some of the fliers did not represent community sentiment, and could have been distributed not by residents but by teachers at Montauk, who may fear that their school will eventually be closed.
Mr. Hikind said Ms. Fratti assured him that he and other leaders would be notified before any decision on the school's placement was made, but that he was surprised to learn of the plan only on Wednesday, when the mayor announced the 36 new schools.
Kelly Devers, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said Ms. Fratti had promised Mr. Hikind only to notify him as soon as she learned of the decision, which she did, leaving him a message the night before the Mayor's announcement.
Still, Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott said he planned to meet with Borough Park leaders next week to "clarify the issues" and apologize for any misunderstandings. "If there were gaps in communication, those gaps will be corrected," he said.
But at a time when the Education Department is so squeezed for space that it is trying to lease old Roman Catholic school buildings, he said, there is no room to spare.
"Our goal is to try to make sure we take full advantage of our public schools to expand options and address the need for more seats in our schools," Mr. Walcott said. "We've always taken a look at the buildings of the New York City public schools to maximize those options, and that's what we've done in this particular case."
Teenage Angst in Texas
By GAIL CALDWELL
In the mid-1960's, the wind-swept plains of the Texas Panhandle could be a languid prison for an adolescent girl with a wild spirit and no place to go. I buried myself in Philip Roth novels and little acts of outrage, and on lonesome afternoons, I would drive my mother's Chevrolet out onto the freeway and take it up to 90 m.p.h., smoking endless cigarettes and aching with ennui. I was bored by the idea of mainstream success and alienated from what the world seemed to offer — one of my poems from those days weighs heavily on the themes of coffins, societal hypocrisy and godlessness. And yet I cannot locate the precise source of my anger. For years I thought all teenagers were fueled by a high-octane mix of intensity and rage; I only know that what sent me onto the highways and into my own corridors of gloom was inexplicable to others and confusing to me.
Around this time my father began what I dismally thought of as our Sunday drives. As kids, my sister and I were bored but tolerant when we had to tag along on his treks, which were always aimless. But now his itinerary was to chart the path of my dereliction, and that meant getting me alone in the car so that we could "talk": about my imminent doom, about my mother's high blood pressure. Thus incarcerated, slouched in the shotgun seat with my arms folded against my chest, I responded to his every effort by either staring out the window or yelling back. I don't remember a word I said. What I still feel is the boulder on my heart — the amorphous gray of the world outside the car window, signaling how trapped I felt, by him and by the hopeless unawareness of my age.
My father, far more than I, seemed to sense that the country was raging, that it was a bad time to surrender your daughters to strange lands. But these things — a war somewhere far away, a civil rights movement over in the Deep South — belonged to the evening news, not to the more intimate treacheries of car rides and deceits and disappointments, and so were rarely addressed on any personal level, not yet. Instead we fought about curfews or bad boyfriends; we fought about straightening up and flying right. We fought about everything but the truth, which was that I would be leaving soon.
I had already seen two casualties claimed by history, men who were lighting out for the territory to avoid the 1-A draft notices they had just received. The first was a boy who stopped by the house to say goodbye a few days before leaving for Toronto. When the other young man disappeared, the federal authorities came sniffing around my high school, and I covered for him without a shred of hesitation. I told them I thought he went east, to his mother's in Missouri, when I knew it was the one place he would never go.
These losses and the lies they demanded frightened me, in vague and then inarticulable ways, about just who was in charge — about the dangers posed by the institutions that were supposed to keep you safe. It was difficult in those days to care much about the College Boards, or to think that the path in front of me would hold the traditional landscapes of marriage and family. In some ways the tempests of my adolescence had set me against myself; I'd found that introspection couldn't buy you love, that poetry helped only momentarily, that straight A's and spelling bees were no guarantee of knowing where to turn. Worse and more pervasive, I was maturing under the assumption that you should never let men know how smart you were, or how mouthy — a girl's intelligence, brazenly displayed, was seen as impolite, unfeminine and even threatening.
So I kept quiet; when I dated a boy who liked George Wallace, I rolled my eyes and looked out the window. The smarter you were, the more subversive you had to be. Girls could excel in English, say, or languages, as long as they didn't flaunt it or pretend to be superior to males. But God forbid they should try to carve a life out of such achievements. God forbid they display a pitcher's arm, or an affinity for chemistry or analytic prowess in an argument with a man.
In the end, my own revisionism was unconscious but thorough. I neglected anymore to mention the mysterious test, taken at age 7, that resulted in my skipping second grade. Toward the end of high school, I began lying to my peers about my high scores on placement exams, and I blew admission, with half-intention and private relief, into the National Honor Society. The summer before college, in 1968, I had to declare a major; I took a deep breath and wrote "mathematics" on my admission forms. And when friends asked me what I'd chosen, I lied about that too.
About a family's 200 years of letters, interesting.
In 200 Years of Family Letters, a Nation's Story
By KIRK JOHNSON
BOULDER, Colo., Jan. 27 — To most college students, instant messages, or I.M.'s, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address. One flicker and gone.
Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his I.M.'s on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise.
Mr. Cowan comes from a long line of savers — really, really dedicated savers.
"It's in the genes," said his mother, Linda Cowan.
Beginning more than 200 years ago, Mr. Cowan's family has kept the messages — people called them letters in those days — written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling.
The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years, genealogy experts say. It has been stored in attics, sheds and storage lockers over the years, and most recently in the Cowans' home here in Boulder, where they were interviewed on a recent morning. Its contents cover the scandalous (a relative jailed for embezzlement), the intriguing (a runaway slave seeking refuge in the North) and the historic (the settling of Chicago).
Now the current owner of the collection, Mr. Cowan's grandmother, Mary Leslie Wolff, who is 82, is negotiating to donate the papers — called the Ames Family Historical Collection, for her father's branch of the tree — to a historical society somewhere back East, where the family began. Ms. Wolff declined to say where the collection might go because discussions were continuing.
Historians and librarians say the collection is probably as remarkable for its intellectual vigor as for its age and size. It is essentially a dialogue of history: one well-educated, middle-class family's long conversation, and its interaction with the issues that defined the early nation and its westward tide, including the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, the early rise of feminism and the discoveries of geology that were shaking religious assumptions about the age of the earth. The family's writers talked all of it through, often at length. Letters of 10 to 12 pages were common.
"Whenever anyone finds a record like this that speaks to one family in depth, it's a gold mine," said David S. Ouimette, who manages the genealogy collection for the Family History Library, run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.
"And it sounds like they weren't just observing the events of the day, they were participants," added Mr. Ouimette, who has not seen the collection. "That's what puts flesh on the bones."
One series of letters, for example, talks about a runaway slave named Mary Walker who took shelter with an abolitionist branch of the family in Philadelphia, the Leslies, during a visit by her master in the 1850's. Ms. Walker, after being hidden for a time, was eventually sent farther north to live with Leslie relatives in Massachusetts.
But the story did not end there. As the Civil War tore the country apart, the letters show an effort to reunite Ms. Walker with her family in North Carolina. A friend who was an officer in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army, then advancing south, was asked to look out for Ms. Walker's children, and he apparently succeeded, because they ultimately made their way north to join her.
Another series of letters offers a vivid early glimpse of the still-raw settlement of Chicago by a family member who had journeyed west from Philadelphia in 1836 to Missouri to see some land he had bought. The land was not much to speak of, wrote the author, Peter Leslie — Ms. Wolff's great-great grandfather — in a letter to his children. But when he arrived at what he called "Chicago on Lake Michigan," Mr. Leslie immediately knew a rising force when he saw it.
"The town has more natural advantages than any place I have yet seen and is destined to be the N. York of the West," he wrote in a letter describing the construction and the bustle of the new city, then a few years old. Hotels were springing up, land fever was in the air and ambition was everywhere.
"The people of the West have a town-making mania," he wrote. "This one must succeed."
Ms. Cowan, Ms. Wolff's daughter, said she had recently been working through the letters of Mr. Leslie's son, J. Peter Leslie, who was a geologist in Philadelphia later in the 19th century. Many of those letters, she said, read like a novel: you start one, and you just have to find out what happens next.
"Right now there's a relative in jail for embezzlement," she said. "He ran off to Canada, then his conscience got the better of him and he came back and gave himself up."
Why this family saved the things that many others threw away or lost remains a mystery, Ms. Wolff said. An early progenitor in Massachusetts apparently got the ball rolling in the 1700's; that branch's attic-size collection was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society many years ago.
Beginning in Massachusetts and Philadelphia, where the first immigrants of the family settled after arriving from Scotland, the letters piled up as the clan, like so many others of the day, gradually moved west — to Minnesota in the 1850's, then Colorado a century later.
"I think a lot of people have the urge, but at some point they just give up and throw it out," Ms. Wolff said.
Ms. Cowan spoke up. "These people didn't — they didn't throw out anything."
In today's era of the instantaneous and disposable, even the paper on which the letters were written can seem alien — so durable, at least through the 1850's vintage, that neither coal dust from furnace-room storage nor glue from an ancestor's zealous scrapbook-making apparently harmed it.
Even some of the subjects that gripped people back then can seem new again with time, like poetry. Family members transcribed poems they loved, or perhaps wrote themselves, into a book that Ms. Cowan said nobody had tried to go through yet.
"We don't even know what's in it," she said.
Mr. Cowan, a junior at Oberlin College in Ohio who said he thought of becoming an author someday, looked up sharply at the mention of unread 19th-century poetry.
"Whoa, can I check that out?" he asked.
An article about The Onion, now in New York!
An Onion Uprooted, Without Tears
By JAKE MOONEY
Correction Appended
WHEN Joe Garden, the 35-year-old features editor of the satirical paper The Onion, thinks about the publication’s move five years ago this month from Madison, Wis., to New York, he thinks about his first encounter with a staff member of The New Yorker. The emissary from the sleek Condé Nast building had traveled to The Onion’s cavelike office in West Chelsea.
“She said to me, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re still wearing pleats!’” Mr. Garden recalled recently, his indignation unfaded by time. “I guess that was my introduction to provincialism.”
Still, as Mr. Garden recounted the incident, there were hints that after five years big-city life has gotten better. “Everyone else I’ve met from The New Yorker has been great,” he continued. “But that’s because we play them in softball and in bowling, and it’s mostly the cartoonists.”
And then there is Mr. Garden’s sartorial growth. “If you will notice,” he said with a cocked eyebrow, “these jeans are not pleated.” He lifted the bottom of his “Hee Haw” T-shirt to prove it.
A half-decade after The Onion landed on Manhattan’s shores, much about its 14-member staff is unchanged: Wisconsinites still predominate, and many of the writers still resemble the stoners and indie rockers the paper regularly lampoons. The 18-year-old paper is still wildly popular — more so than ever, with a circulation of 100,000 in New York alone and its 16th seventh compendium of fake newspaper articles, published by Three Rivers Press, currently in bookstores.
The paper’s Web site, which turns 10 this year, gets four million readers a month. And its minute-long daily Onion Radio News dispatches, a longtime feature on the paper’s Web site that is now in syndication, topped the list of most popular podcasts on the Apple iTunes Music Store only a week after the store began offering them for download.
For a staff that did little to discourage a thinly veiled look-at-the-rubes condescension in the news media coverage of its arrival, life is now slightly more polished. The dark office in Chelsea is gone, left behind a year ago for an airy new space in SoHo, just down Broadway from Dean & DeLuca. Its modern blue cubicles are stocked with as many PowerBooks as the Apple store a few blocks away, and the new managing editor, a 25-year-old former intern named Peter Koechley, is a Type A personality who grew up in Madison but joined the paper full time only after graduating from Columbia.
And every now and then, something happens — like an encounter with a comedy hero, or a cease-and-desist letter from the White House over the paper’s use of the presidential seal — that reminds the staff how far it has come from its scruffy comedic roots.
“It’s so funny how we’re still using it,” Todd Hanson, the head writer, mused about the letter from the White House, which involved the presence of the seal on a Web page parodying President Bush’s weekly radio address. “Did we even get a follow-up letter about that?”
Mr. Garden, meanwhile, has launched a grass-roots campaign to become the next host of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” complete with Web site, brochures and a slogan (“Hasn’t Carson Daly had enough shows?”), and cultivated his entrepreneurial spirit by buying cases of soda at the Costco in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and reselling them to co-workers at a modest markup.
He lives in Windsor Terrace, near several other Onion writers, who say that the neighborhoods around Prospect Park, with their greenery and college-town pace, remind them of Madison.
There are other reminders of their roots. “I have clogged arteries and a bad heart from all the cheese I ate living in Wisconsin, all the fat that I crammed down my throat,” Mr. Garden said, tapping his chest. “So that’s part of me. You can’t remove it, or it will destroy me.”
In fact, the absence of solid Midwestern comfort food has posed a challenge for the paper’s art department, which requires a certain girthiness of many of the people who pose for the fake news photos.
“Some of our writers, who we would use as body doubles of older Congress people, have started losing weight since we’ve been here,” Chad Nackers, the associate graphics editor, said one afternoon. “That killed us. We used to be able to do Dennis Hastert if we wanted.” And Mike Loew, the graphics editor, chimed in, “Oh, yeah, we had all the options, before everyone started eating sushi and getting all svelte.”
In response, the two have resorted to photographing visiting Wisconsin relatives when they need, say, a woman with a certain hairdo, or a burly man with a large mustache.
The new home has had other editorial implications. One staffer had to ask a friend to drive him to Secaucus, N.J., to find a Wal-Mart to photograph for the cover of the latest book. And gone are the days when a trash-strewn alley across the street from the old office in Madison was the stand-in for all things New York.
Not that staff members don’t remember the Midwest fondly.
“I still want to eventually have an eye towards moving back,” said John Krewson, the sports editor. “When I think back on all the rent I’ve paid in Park Slope, I’m like, ‘I’ve bought two farmhouses on 40 acres in Wisconsin.’”
MR. KREWSON, whose wedding was crashed by a fellow Madison native, Chris Farley, said he had been discomfited to find a touch of urban snobbery creeping into his demeanor on visits home, a compulsion to pass his views on urban planning along to his former neighbors. As uncomfortable as those urges make him, Mr. Krewson said, relating to Middle America is no harder than it used to be.
“We used to do jokes about people who sat on the couch and played video games and ate the whole bag of chips,” he said. “And just this weekend, I sat on the couch, played video games and ate the whole bag of chips. Of course, the video game I was playing was made on the next block by the guys at Rockstar.”
Still, for many of the staffers, after hanging around Madison for years working at minimum-wage jobs, New York is a strange place to have arrived. “None of us have a background in comedy, none of us have a background in journalism,” said Mr. Hanson, the head writer. “Most of us don’t have a background in anything at all, to be honest. We were just punching the clock, working cash registers, and all of this happened to us accidentally.”
He thought for a second. “I guess the lesson is, if your life is going nowhere, don’t try, and it’ll all work out.”
On the newest city holiday - Diwali.
A Parking Holiday of Their Own
By STEVEN KURUTZ
ASIDE from being the Sam of Sam & Raj Appliance Discount Center, an electronics store in Jackson Heights, Queens, Subhash Kapadia is an energetic booster of the Indian people. A boisterous 62-year-old who immigrated to New York from India in 1973, Mr. Kapadia has been helping to transform 74th Street, where his store is, into a "Little India" brimming with jewelry stores and Indian restaurants.
Along the way, Mr. Kapadia has promoted city observance of India's independence, helped found the Jackson Heights Merchants' Association, and, last year, invited Mayor Bloomberg as the guest at a dinner held by the group. But fulfilling as it was to break nan with the mayor, Mr. Kapadia's proudest moment came last month, when, after several years of lobbying, the City Council recognized Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, as an official city holiday.
"For Muslims there are four or five holidays," Mr. Kapadia said the other day, sitting in a small, cramped office in the rear of his store that was decorated with half a dozen 2006 calendars. "Jews have more. There was no Hindu holiday."
•
For Hindus, Diwali is the most important religious holiday of the year, a "celebration of the triumph of good over evil," as Mr. Kapadia put it. The city's Hindus have informally celebrated the holiday by holding a four- or five-day festival on 74th Street, dancing to peppy music called Bangla and eating sweets, or mithai, in which sugar is a staple. ("It cannot be an Indian festival without sugar," a Sam & Raj employee said.)
Now the festivities will carry a governmental seal of approval. Besides marking Diwali on all its calendars — the holiday begins this year on Oct. 21 — the city will acknowledge the day with the time-honored gesture of suspending alternate-side parking rules, at least for the first day. With the City Council vote, which was Dec. 8, Diwali will become the 34th city holiday, among them Asian Lunar New Year and Id al-Adha, during which New Yorkers are relieved of the duty of moving their cars for street cleaning.
"This is a big satisfaction for us," Mr. Kapadia said. "When I moved to this block, nobody was here. The street was mainly residential, but I had a dream to form a Little India. Slowly it came true. A restaurant moved in and then a grocery store." Indians from Connecticut and Philadelphia went to Queens to buy items, like Bollywood DVD's, that recalled their South Asian roots.
Now, "there are almost 250 stores within three blocks," Mr. Kapadia said, speaking of the area between 72nd and 74th Streets.
Shoppers can buy turmeric and other South Asian spices at Patel Brothers, or a lychee fruit drink, or a whole goat, like the one that was being carved up at an Indian grocer's one recent afternoon.
•
As Little India has grown, so has the city's Indian population, reaching 171,000 in the 2000 census. Many are Hindus, as are some immigrants from the Caribbean and Guyana. Mr. Kapadia is proud of his people's contribution to the city. "Look at any hospital — you will find Indian surgeons," he said. "There are many Indian professionals."
Lifting the parking rules for Diwali may seem like a minor victory, but in the eyes of Mr. Kapadia, the move will increase the visibility of the city's Hindus. Councilman John Liu, the chairman of the transportation committee and a supporter of the Diwali bill, agrees. "In October, New Yorkers will wake up and hear on the radio that alternate-side parking has been suspended for Diwali," he said. "They will appreciate not having to move their car, but they'll also learn more about the Hindu faith."
And for Mr. Kapadia, the recognition of Diwali is only the beginning. Along with his friend Shiv Dass, the regal-looking, gray-haired president of the Jackson Heights Merchants' Association, he is busy lobbying for a Hindu prayer center at Kennedy Airport and hopes to see construction finished within a year on a senior center in Jackson Heights that would cater to Indians.
"After a long time," Mr. Kapadia said, "we are finally being noticed."
On people's use of alternative medicine. It brings to mind this post on science and politics, by
sclerotic_ringsWhen Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void
By BENEDICT CAREY
A few moments before boarding a plane from Los Angeles to New York in January, Charlene Solomon performed her usual preflight ritual: she chewed a small tablet that contained trace amounts of several herbs, including extracts from daisy and chamomile plants.
Ms. Solomon, 56, said she had no way to know whether the tablet, an herb-based remedy for jet lag, worked as advertised. Researchers have found no evidence that such preparations are effective, and Ms. Solomon knows that most doctors would scoff that she was wasting her money.
Yet she swears by the tablets, as well as other alternative remedies, for reasons she acknowledges are partly psychological.
"I guess I do believe in the power of simply paying attention to your health, which in a way is what I'm doing," said Ms. Solomon, who runs a Web consulting business in Los Angeles. "But I also believe there are simply a lot of unknowns when it comes to staying healthy, and if there's a possibility something will help I'm willing to try it."
Besides, she added, "whatever I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it."
The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.
They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.
This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening.
Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment.
Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous.
Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements.
"I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, " said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine.
Dr. Barnes added, "People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."
Healthy and Dabbling
Ms. Solomon's first small steps outside the mainstream came in 1991, after she watched her mother die of complications from a hysterectomy.
"I saw doctors struggling to save her," she said. "They were trying really hard, and I have great respect for what they do, but at that point I realized the doctors could only do so much."
She decided then that she needed to take more responsibility for her own health, by eating better, exercising more and seeking out health aids that she thought of as natural, meaning not prescribed by a doctor or developed by a pharmaceutical company.
"I usually stay away from drugs if I can, because the side effects even of cough and cold medicines can be pretty strong," she said.
The herbal preparations she uses, she said, "have no side effects, and the difference in my view is that they help support my own body's natural capability, to fight off disease" rather than treat symptoms.
If these sentiments are present in someone like Ms. Solomon, who regularly consults her internist and describes herself as "pretty mainstream," they run far deeper in millions of other people who use nontraditional therapies more often.
In interviews and surveys, these patients often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause.
Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the "rightness of fit" above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system.
Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show.
"I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. "The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head."
From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful.
To best way to validate this, said Ms. Newman and many others who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy "and listen to your own body."
Opting Out
Cynthia Riley effectively opted out of mainstream medicine when it seemed that doctors were not listening to her.
During a nine-year period that ended in 2004, Ms. Riley, 47, visited almost 20 doctors, for a variety of intermittent and strange health complaints: blurred vision, urinary difficulties, balance problems so severe that at times she wobbled like a drunk.
She felt unwell most of the time, but doctors could not figure out what she had.
Each specialist ordered different tests, depending on the symptom, Ms. Riley said, but they were usually rushed and seemed to solicit her views only as a formality.
Undeterred, Ms. Riley, an event planner who lives near New London, Conn., typed out a four-page description of her ordeal, including her suspicion that she suffered from lead poisoning. One neurologist waved the report away as if insulted; another barely skimmed it, she said.
"I remember sitting in one doctor's office and realizing, 'He thinks I'm crazy,' " Ms. Riley said. "I was getting absolutely nowhere in conventional medicine, and I was determined to get to the root of my problems."
Through word of mouth, Ms. Riley heard about Deirdre O'Connor, a naturopath with a thriving practice in nearby Mystic, Conn., and made an appointment.
In recent years, people searching for something outside of conventional medicine have increasingly turned to naturopaths, herbal specialists who must complete a degree that includes some standard medical training in order to be licensed, experts say. Fourteen states, including California and Connecticut, now license naturopaths to practice medicine. Natural medicine groups are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including New York.
Licensed naturopaths can prescribe drugs from an approved list in some states, but have no prescribing rights in others.
Right away, Ms. Riley said, she noticed a difference in the level of service. Before even visiting the office, she received a fat envelope in the mail containing a four-page questionnaire, she said. In addition to asking detailed questions about medical history — standard information — it asked about energy level, foods she craved, sensitivity to weather and self-image: "Please list adjectives that describe you," read one item.
"It felt right, from the beginning," Ms. Riley said.
Her first visit lasted an hour and a half, and Ms. O'Connor, the naturopath, agreed that metal exposure was a possible cause of her symptoms. It emerged in their interview that Ms. Riley had worked in the steel industry, and tests of her hair and urine showed elevated levels of both lead and mercury, Ms. O'Connor said.
After taking a combination of herbs, vitamins and regular doses of a drug called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA, to treat lead poisoning, Ms. Riley said, she began to feel better, and the symptoms subsided.
Along the way, Ms. O'Connor explained the treatments to Ms. Riley, sometimes using drawings, and called her patient regularly to check in, especially during the first few months, Ms. Riley said.
Other doctors said they could not comment on Ms. Riley's case because they had not examined her. Researchers who specialize in lead poisoning say that it is rare in adults but that it can cause neurological symptoms and bladder problems and is often missed by primary care doctors.
Dr. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist who directs the lead research group at the University of Pittsburgh, said DMSA was the pharmaceutical treatment of choice for high blood lead levels.
Researchers say there is little or no evidence that vitamins or herbs can relieve symptoms like Ms. Riley's. Still, she said, "I look and feel better than I have in years."
Life and Death
Diane Paradise bet her life on the uncertain benefits of natural medicine, after being burned physically and emotionally by conventional doctors.
In 1995, doctors told Ms. Paradise, now 35, that she had Hodgkin's disease. After a six-month course of chemotherapy and radiation, she said, she was declared cancer free, and she remained healthy for five years.
But in 2001 the cancer reappeared, more advanced, and her doctors recommended a 10-month course of drugs and radiation, plus a marrow transplant, she said.
Ms. Paradise, a marketing consultant in Rochester, N.Y., balked.
"I was burned badly the first time around, third-degree burns, and now they were talking about 10 months," she said in an interview, "and they were giving me no guarantees; they said it was experimental. That's when I started looking around. I really had nothing to lose, and I was focused on quality of life at that point, not quantity."
When she told one of her doctors that she was considering an alternative treatment in Arizona, the man exploded, she said.
"His exact words were, 'That's not treatment, that's a vacation — you're wasting your time!' " she said.
And so ended the relationship. With help from friends, Ms. Paradise raised about $40,000 to pay for the Arizona clinic's treatment, plus living expenses while there.
"I had absolutely no scientific reason for choosing this route, none," she said. "I just think there are times in our life when we are asked to make decisions based on our intuition, on our gut instinct, not based on evidence put in front of us, and for me this was one of those moments."
Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease.
But Ms. Paradise said that her relationship with the natural medicine specialist in Arizona had been collaborative and that she had felt "more empowered, more involved" in the treatment plan, which included large doses of vitamins, as well as changes in diet and sleep routines. After four months on the regimen, she said, she felt much better.
But the cancer was not cured. It has resurfaced recently and spread, and this time Ms. Paradise has started an experimental treatment with an oncologist in New York.
She is complementing this treatment, she said, with another course of alternative therapy in Arizona. She moved in with friends near Phoenix and started the alternative regime in January.
"It's 79 degrees and beautiful here," she said by phone in mid-January. "Let's hope that's a good sign."
For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in "personal growth or spirituality" predicted alternative medicine use.
Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate. David Wood, a naturopath who with his wife, Cheryl, runs a large, Christian-oriented practice in Lynnwood, Wash., said he treated patients of all faiths.
"We pray with patients, with their permission," said Mr. Wood, who also works with local medical doctors when necessary. "If patients would not like us to pray for them, we don't, but it's there if needed."
He added, "Our goal here is to help people get really well, not merely free of symptoms."
That is exactly the sentiment that many Americans say they feel is missing from conventional medicine. Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually recharged.
"I don't hate doctors or anything," Ms. Newman said. "I just know they can make mistakes, and so often they refer you on to see another doctor, and another."
Seeing a naturopath, she said, "I feel I'm known, they see me as a whole person, they listen to what I say."
"Oil Habit Hard to Break under NY's Tax Code"
Oil Habit Is Hard to Break Under New York Tax Code
By DANNY HAKIM
ALBANY, Feb. 2 — In his address to the nation on Tuesday, President Bush said the United States must move to wean itself from foreign oil.
But New York's energy policies show just how hard that goal may be, with a tax code that offers more than $1 billion worth of breaks for gasoline and diesel.
And on the day of Mr. Bush's speech, the State Senate passed a bill that would grant a tax cut to giant oil companies, even as they are reporting record profits, as well as to independent distributors that bring oil into the state.
Such tax breaks not only encourage continued dependence on fossil fuels, but may make it harder to accomplish what Mr. Bush, along with Gov. George E. Pataki, is calling for: the wider development and use of alternative fuels.
Many of the more than $1 billion in tax breaks that New York grants for conventional fuels — plain old gasoline and diesel — have been built up over Mr. Pataki's nearly dozen years in office, sometimes as incentives to keep businesses in the state. State gasoline and diesel taxes are discounted for commercial fishermen, farmers, nonprofit groups, private and parochial schools, private bus companies that have contracts with the state, commuter ferries, manufacturers, mining companies and veterans' groups, among others.
Republican lawmakers continue to press for more. In addition to the tax cut for oil distributors, which the Senate also passed last year, other recent measures it has passed include a reimbursement of taxes on diesel fuel paid by small businesses that charter boats for sports fishermen. Both ideas have so far stalled in the Democratic Assembly.
This legislation comes as Mr. Pataki has proposed tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to promote alternative fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. His measures are aimed, as he put it in his State of the State address last month, at "reducing our dependence on expensive, polluting, terror-promoting foreign oil." Mr. Bush appeared to echo that call on Tuesday, saying that "America is addicted to oil" and should increase spending on alternatives.
Seeking to expand tax breaks for both regular and alternative fuels may seem counterproductive. One school of thought among some policymakers, and even Detroit auto executives, is that the surest way to wean America from its oil addiction is to follow the lead of Europe, where high gasoline taxes are a powerful incentive to buy fuel-efficient cars.
"You have to ask the question in 2006," said State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, "when we all agree we should be decreasing our dependence on foreign petroleum and increasing our use of alternative and renewable resources, why we continue to give tax expenditures, exemptions, credits and refunds for the use of petroleum and even have bills coming to the floor that would expand those."
"It seems to be a net lose-lose proposition to use the tax code to encourage alternative fuels while also allowing the same tax code to encourage the expanded use of petroleum," she added.
At the same time, Americans — particularly lower-income Americans — have been battered by the run-up in oil prices, as have many of their employers, so potential tax breaks for traditional fuels are politically popular. The biggest current tax break is for diesel fuel used in residential heating, costing the state a projected $276.7 million in lost revenue annually.
"With the price of fuel the way it is, it's killing me," said Mike Albronda of Long Island, a captain of the charter boat Montauk. The measure passed by the Senate would help considerably, he said, because fuel taxes typically cost him about $900 a year.
Michael Marr, a spokesman for Mr. Pataki's budget division, said, "The governor does not believe that raising taxes is the way to address the need to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.
"The governor has advanced a comprehensive plan to help New York transition out of our current overreliance on foreign energy sources by providing the state with the means to develop the alternative energy sources of tomorrow while also creating a market for those new energy sources," he said.
The governor's budget proposal includes $30 million for projects aimed at promoting the use of alternative fuels, including giving money to gas stations as incentives to offer such fuels to consumers. An additional $20 million would be set aside to support the construction of a new kind of refinery that produces ethanol through a more environmentally efficient process than producing it from corn.
Mr. Pataki also seeks a $2,000 tax credit for people who buy hybrid gas-and-electric cars, costing the state $10 million when fully phased in, and he wants to waive the modest taxes that exist on some alternative fuels.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group, New York has the nation's highest state and local gasoline taxes, at more than 40 cents a gallon, on top of the 18.4 cents in federal taxes consumers must pay.
State fuel taxes are generally levied on oil companies or businesses that distribute fuel to gas stations, then passed along to consumers. The bill passed by the State Senate on Tuesday would cut sales taxes on gasoline at prices above $2 a gallon, or by about 4 cents a gallon at current prices. Over all, the measure is projected to cost the state $200 million in lost revenue.
The bill's sponsor, Senator Joseph E. Robach, a Rochester Republican, said he believed that oil companies would pass the savings to retailers, who would pass them to consumers. "That is free enterprise," he said. "At least one hungry entrepreneur will use that to lower prices."
But the bill does not require that the tax breaks be passed on to consumers, and the industry has not seemed inclined to share its profits. This week, Exxon Mobil reported a $36.1 billion profit for 2005, the largest ever for an American company.
"To say that is going to translate to the end consumer when you have a lot of people in the distribution chain is hard to anticipate," said Cathy Kenny, an associate director at a New York arm of the American Petroleum Institute. "If you're a retailer, why would you lower your price 4 cents?"
Democrats contend that tax relief for lower-income families should be accomplished in other ways, like income tax relief.
Ms. Krueger, who voted against the bill the Senate passed on Tuesday, said, "This isn't a tax return to consumers; this is a reduction in taxes to the wholesalers with no ability to hold them accountable to pass that savings along to the consumer."
Plans for a public school upsets local Hassidic families who would like to buy the building and make a new yeshiva.
Plans for a Public School Upset Brooklyn Hasidim
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
With 772 students, Montauk Intermediate School in Brooklyn is nearly half empty.
So when the Department of Education decided to place one of 36 new, small secondary schools it is opening next year inside the Montauk building, it seemed like a fine plan.
But the Montauk school happens to be in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood where virtually all residents send their children to private yeshivas. And the plan for the new school has angered community leaders, who say that any one of the neighborhood's yeshivas would be thrilled to buy the building for a fair price.
"The yeshivas are bursting — every time you turn around, there's more going up, and boy, would our community like to get those schools that are empty," said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat who represents the area.
He said of the neighborhood: "It is basically Hasidic, and one of the things in good government is you adjust to the changes. It's such an obvious thing to recognize, that our community is what it is. It is a wonderful community, a taxpaying community, it is a community of one of the lowest rates of crimes." He added, "We'd like to keep it that way."
The dispute is another wrinkle in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to create and find spots for hundreds of new small schools. It is also laced with the delicate ethnic mix of Brooklyn. While Borough Park is virtually exclusively Hasidic, the new school, the Kingsborough Early College School, would probably serve mostly black and Hispanic students.
The mayor has already created 149 small middle and high schools, as his chief tactic for combating the city's graduation rate of about 54 percent. But the new schools have to have somewhere to go, and finding those spots has not been easy.
In previous years, the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein have drawn fire for the decision to place small schools in enormous school buildings that were in some cases already overcrowded. This time, education officials say they took great pains to place the new schools inside buildings with extra space. The latest plan drew praise from Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president, who called it "a good step."
But opposition had been brewing in Brooklyn. Mr. Hikind said he first heard about the plan to place a new small school inside the Montauk building, at 4200 16th Avenue, about two months ago. He immediately balked at the plan and said he discussed his objections with Michelle Fratti, the regional superintendent in charge of Region 7, which includes Borough Park.
Soon, he said, fliers were being distributed at synagogues and in the streets, urging residents to protest the plan at meetings of the local Community Education Council.
"These students will be imported from out of Boro Park and will have to walk through our streets during many hours of the day," read one such flier. "Can't you shudder to think what will become of our peaceful neighborhood?"
Mr. Hikind said he thought that some of the fliers did not represent community sentiment, and could have been distributed not by residents but by teachers at Montauk, who may fear that their school will eventually be closed.
Mr. Hikind said Ms. Fratti assured him that he and other leaders would be notified before any decision on the school's placement was made, but that he was surprised to learn of the plan only on Wednesday, when the mayor announced the 36 new schools.
Kelly Devers, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said Ms. Fratti had promised Mr. Hikind only to notify him as soon as she learned of the decision, which she did, leaving him a message the night before the Mayor's announcement.
Still, Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott said he planned to meet with Borough Park leaders next week to "clarify the issues" and apologize for any misunderstandings. "If there were gaps in communication, those gaps will be corrected," he said.
But at a time when the Education Department is so squeezed for space that it is trying to lease old Roman Catholic school buildings, he said, there is no room to spare.
"Our goal is to try to make sure we take full advantage of our public schools to expand options and address the need for more seats in our schools," Mr. Walcott said. "We've always taken a look at the buildings of the New York City public schools to maximize those options, and that's what we've done in this particular case."
