Lizard Meme

Time Apart

2006-08-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed that the Lizard and I haven't been on speaking terms for a while. We haven't spoken for almost three months, in fact! Maybe the time apart will do us good.

I just can't get past the feeling that the Lizard is secretly wasting my time. I'm too old to be wasting time (at least that's what I think).

I don't yet know if we'll ever reconcile--the Lizard and I. You might have to meet me someplace else, someplace less . . . restrictive, someplace with more of a purpose.

What do you do with a worn out meme?

Bread

2006-05-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

For the last nearly two years, I've been trying to recreate the bread that we enjoyed while living in Germany. I've made crusty bread, and dense bread, and dark bread, but I've never quite achieved my goal. I know I won't be able to match the results of professional bakers and centuries of tradition, but getting close enough to fool our aging memories would be good enough.

Yesterday I made a loaf that signals some potential.

When I pointed out all of the different kinds of bread that I particularly enjoyed, our German friend told me they were all sourdough, using mixed grains. So I tried to create my own sourdough starter, but ended up with a smelly, gooey mass. And my research told me that it can take months, if not years, for a sourdough culture to mature and stabilize. I continued searching.

I eventually found this website: Carl Griffith's 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter. Carl, now deceased, was in possession of a sourdough culture that had been in his family for over 150 years! It was his policy to send a small portion of his dried starter to anyone who sent him a self-addressed stamped envelope. The tradition is being carried on by his friends and beneficiaries.

I received my dried starter earlier this week. After a few days of reviving and feeding, I finally had enough to bake a batch of bread. It turned out great for a first try! I have two cultures going now--both wheat and rye versions. This bread was the rye version, which I hope will eventually result in a passable German loaf. I was going to take a picture, but we've already devoured a portion, and it doesn't look so pretty anymore.

I adapted the starter to use in this recipe: Ray's Sourdough Rye Bread. It's hard to believe that so much flavor can be achieved using only flour, water and salt.

I'm looking forward to more experimenting. I especially love the history that is associated with every loaf I bake. I think 150 years is pretty good for an American tradition. And it's fun to think that the same culture probably passed through our area on a covered wagon. If you feel the need to incorporate even more history, look at the old world cultures available from Sourdoughs International.

Pollan Blogs

2006-05-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollan, one of my favorite nonfiction authors, has started writing a blog for the New York Times, focusing on food and its many connections to politics, economics, health, etc. But, if you click on the link to the blog, you'll discover that you must pay to read Mr. Pollan's thoughts. Those bastards! I hate NYTimes Select. I signed up for a free trial in order to get a taste.

I've copied Mr. Pollan's first three posts to give you a sample of his style and subject matter. (Maybe I'll be getting a call from the NYTimes legal team.)

In lieu of following his thought process on a daily basis, you can satiate your appetite for his writing by going to his website. He has links to most of his published articles on the Writing page. You can also look at his speaking schedule. I see he was in Portland last night--Deb, did you go? He will be in DC on May 19 & 21, Dupont Circle Farmers Market on the latter date. Will my friends be going to hear him speak? Living in Kansas, I don't get to take in special events like this very often, so I must live vicariously through my friends.

Here are the blog posts:

May 11, 2006
9:06 pm
Why Eating Well Is ‘Elitist’

Thanks for all the great posts from readers — you’ve given me a lot to chew on, and there are many questions and comments I plan to address in future posts. But for today, I want to look briefly at the “elitism” issue raised by several of you. As you will see it also ties into the good question raised by Paul Stamler about whether consumer action — voting with your forks — is adequate to the task of changing the American way of eating.

It is a fact that to eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. Indeed, the rules of the game by which we eat create a situation in which it is actually rational to eat poorly.

Let’s say you live on fixed income, and struggle to keep your family fed. When you go to the supermarket, you are, in effect, foraging for energy — calories — to keep your family alive. So what are you going to buy with your precious food dollar? Fresh produce? Or junk food?

A 2004 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Adam Drewnowski and S.E. Specter offers some devastating answers. One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket — the aisles in the middle of the store — will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you’re in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk.

Mr. Drewnowski explains that we are driven by our evolutionary inheritance to expend as little energy as possible seeking out as much food energy as possible. So we naturally gravitate to “energy-dense foods” — high-calorie sugars and fats, which in nature are rare and hard to find. Sugars in nature come mostly in the form of ripe fruit and, if you’re really lucky, honey; fats come in the form of meat, the getting of which requires a great expense of energy, making them fairly rare in the diet as well. Well, the modern supermarket reverses the whole caloric calculus: the most energy-dense foods are the easiest — that is, cheapest — ones to acquire. If you want a concise explanation of obesity, and in particular why the most reliable predictor of obesity is one’s income level, there it is.

The question is, how did energy-dense foods become so much cheaper in the supermarket than they are in the state of nature? This is not a function of the free market. It is very simply a function of government policy: our farm policies subsidize the most energy-dense and least healthy calories in the supermarket. We write checks to farmers for every bushel of corn and soy they can grow, and partly as a result they grow vast quantities of the stuff, driving down the cost of the processed foods we make from those commodities. In effect, we’re subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we’re not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli. Put another way, our tax dollars are the reason that the cheapest calories in the market are the least healthy ones.

That situation is a public problem and can be addressed only through public action — by rewriting the rules of the game by which we eat. We need farm policies that will somehow right this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones — so that it becomes rational for someone with little to spend on food to buy the carrots instead of the cookies, the orange juice instead of the Sprite. Until that happens, eating well will remain “elitist.”

May 10, 2006
8:57 pm
Taking Food Seriously

Whenever I’m in the company of other journalists and the conversation turns to our respective beats, mine — food — usually draws a silent snicker. It’s deemed a less-than-serious subject, and I suppose compared to covering war or national security, it can be viewed that way. Even when someone is ostensibly complimenting a food story, as a colleague of mine recently did, it comes out backhanded, like so: “You wouldn’t think a piece about food could be so … interesting.”

No? Excuse me, but are you not dependent on the stuff?

This disdain for food journalism has several springs. One of them surely is sexism: at least in some quarters, food is traditionally women’s work; therefore journalism about it is, too. In general, journalism that deals with everyday life close to home will never enjoy the prestige of the exotic dateline. Another source of this low esteem is the venue in which much food journalism is found: the Wednesday food supplements of daily newspapers, the historical purpose of which has been to keep full-page supermarket advertisements from bumping into one another. Tremendous quantities of fluff journalism have been committed in the name of covering food.

But this is changing: look again at your paper’s Wednesday food section, and you’ll find it brimming with issues of politics, economics and health, not to mention agriculture and cultural politics. Today, instead of “Great Dishes for Which We Have Campbell’s Soup to Thank,” you’re much more likely to find tough pieces on school board battles to drive fast food from the cafeteria, the links between E.P.A. air pollution rules and methyl mercury levels in tuna, backdoor efforts to weaken federal standards for organic agriculture—or as in today’s Times, profiles of mukraking journalists like Eric Schlosser. If you’re interested in reading sharp coverage of political economy, Wednesday newspapers have become one of the best places to find it.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,” John Muir once wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Some of these things are better hitched than others, and food is surely one of them. We don’t ordinarily think about it this way, but eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world — it transforms the world by remaking the landscape more than any other human activity, and it transforms, and defines, us. Whenever a biologist wants to understand the role of a creature in the ecosystem, the first question he or she asks is, What does that creature eat, and what eats it? What, in other words, is its place in the food chain? Well, Homo sapiens is no exception. As William Ralph Inge, the English essayist, wrote early in the last century, “all of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.” Even the eating of a Twinkie represents transactions between species, though in the case of the Twinkie I’d be hard pressed to name all the species involved. (Have you read a Twinkie ingredient list lately? It’s long and full of surprises, one of which is beef.)

I teach a course at Berkeley’s graduate journalism school called “Following the Food Chain,” and what my students quickly discover as they go down that trail is that it takes them to a great many unexpected places. Food connects us to nature, first and foremost, but it also attaches us to all the other large systems that organize our lives — from energy and economics to politics, public health and cultural identity.

In recent years we’ve all come to appreciate the critical links between oil and things like the health of our economy and the conduct of our foreign policy. Crises have a way of laying bare such connections. I’ll wager that food will soon take its place alongside energy as an issue of national security. This would be nothing new. Often in the past, when food has been in short supply or the desire for certain kinds of it (like spices) has been sufficiently powerful, food has shaped the destiny of nations. The fact that we don’t think about food in these terms today is probably a testament to what a good job the food industry has done keeping us well (or at least abundantly) fed, our supermarkets fabulously stocked and our attention fixed on the glossy new products and “value meals,” rather than on the way the food is produced or what it does to us when we eat it. During the last 50 years we’ve been living in a kind of fool’s food paradise, marked by astounding bounty and apparent choice.

Immediately after 9/11, we had a brief taste of the national security implications of the way we feed ourselves. There was much anxious talk about the terrorist threat to our “food security,” a term unfamiliar to most Americans. People in Congress and the Food and Drug Administration worried publicly about the high degree of centralization in the industrial food supply. In a situation where a single meat-processing plant is supplying hamburger – typically ground together from hundreds of cows from many countries on multiple continents — to hundreds of thousands of Americans at a time, a single act or accident of contamination could sicken or kill vast numbers of people. (Only four corporations process 80 percent of the beef consumed in America today.)

There was talk in Congress of reorganizing our food safety system, now Balkanized among several far-flung federal bureaucracies. But that moment passed; the industry wanted to keep things as they are. And although security has since been tightened at many big food plants (incidentally, making it more difficult for journalists to gain access), no one had the stomach to confront the larger problem: that in an era of terrorism threats (and widespread concern about food-borne illness), a highly centralized food supply system is precisely what you don’t want. No, what you want is a food system that is redundant and highly decentralized, so that a crisis in one region doesn’t become a national crisis. In his farewell press conference as outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security, Tommy Thompson broke the silence on this threat once again: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do.”

Sooner or later, the inexorable trend toward free world trade also will force the food security issue to the forefront of our attention. Economists will tell you that when we stop subsidizing American farmers (and the pressure to do so is mounting, from an unlikely alliance of the World Trade Organization, developing world countries and U.S. agribusiness companies) and protecting their market with tariffs, our food will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. That means it will come from countries where land is cheapest and environmental laws most lax. This is precisely where the logic of free trade is taking us: the iron law of competitive advantage dictates that we should put our land to “higher uses” — like houses — rather than doing something as old-fashioned with it as growing food. And indeed I’ve heard projections from people working for the governor of California suggesting that by the end of this century, the Central Valley – where most of America’s fresh produce is grown — will be wall-to-wall houses and highways: no more farming.

Where will our food come from then? From Mexico, South America and, increasingly, China. And how do you feel about that? I find that, whatever people may think about free trade in sneakers and electronics, they are distinctly uncomfortable about giving up our ability to feed ourselves. Food feels different from other commodities, which may explain why, worldwide, many of the most powerful protests against globalization have centered around food: the protests against genetically modified crops, the movement to defend local food against the global tide of homogenization. We see every day how our dependence on foreign energy has crippled our foreign policy. Imagine how much more debilitating a dependence on foreign food would be. Make no mistake, how we feed ourselves is about to become a national security issue.

May 7, 2006
8:30 pm
Voting With Your Fork

To someone who’s spent the last few years thinking about the American food chain, a visit to Manhattan’s Union Square in the spring of 2006 feels a little like a visit to Paris in the spring of 1968 must have felt, or perhaps closer to the mark, Peoples Park in Berkeley in the summer of 1969. Not that I was in either of those places at the appointed historical hour, or that the stakes are quite as high. (Isn’t hyperbole an earmark of Internet literary style? O.K. then.) But today in these few square blocks of lower Manhattan, change is in the air, and the future — at least the future of food — is up for grabs.

When Whole Foods planted its flag on 14th Street last year, setting up shop an heirloom tomato’s throw from one of the nation’s liveliest farmer’s markets, two crucial visions of an alternative American food chain — what I call, somewhat oxymoronically, Industrial Organic and Local — faced off. And then this spring Trader Joe’s opened in Union Square, further complicating the picture (for both the farmer’s market and Whole Foods) with its discount take on both organic and artisanal food.

The shopping choices laid out so succinctly for New Yorkers in Union Square today neatly encapsulate the kinds of question we will all be grappling with over the next few years as we navigate an increasingly complex, politicized and ethically challenging food landscape. The organic strawberry or the conventional? The grass-fed or the organic beef? And, if the grass-fed, the Whole Foods steak from New Zealand or the Hudson Valley steak across the street? The organic tomato or the New Jersey beefsteak? The omega-3 fortified eggs or the cage-free eggs? (That last phrase is one of my favorite snatches of recent supermarket prose: I mean, does an egg really care whether it’s caged or not?) The ultra-pasteurized milk or the raw? The farmed fish or the wild? In January, the jet-setting winter asparagus from Argentina or the rutabaga from Upstate? And how do you cook a rutabaga, anyway?

I’ve been doing a lot of food reporting over the past couple years and have discovered there are no simple, one-size-fits-all answers to these questions (several of which I hope to take up in future columns). But it seems to me the crucial thing is that such questions about how we should eat, and how what we eat affects both our health and the health of the world, confront us today in a way they never before have. My explorations of the American food chain — or now, food chains — have convinced me that these questions (except perhaps the one about rutabaga) are actually political questions, and much depends on how we choose to answer them. The market for alternative foods of all kinds — organic, local, pasture-based, humanely raised — represents the stirrings of a movement, or rather a novel hybrid: a market-as-movement. Over the next month I plan to use this column as a place to conduct a conversation with readers (or “r-eaters,” as someone at a lecture proposed the other night) about the politics of food.

Union Square, which 75 years ago served as the red-hot center of the labor movement, is now, at least symbolically, ground zero of the food movement. And while much separates the various choices and philosophies on offer here, it’s important to recognize what unifies the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and the farmer’s market, and what has brought so many of us 21st century food foragers to Union Square and all places like it: the gathering sense that there is something very wrong with our conventional food system — what I call the industrial food chain, by which I mean typical supermarket and fast food.

It has become a commonplace to say that the industrial food system is not “sustainable” — indeed, even Monsanto now acknowledges that American agriculture is not sustainable. (Which is why it supposedly needs the company’s genetically modified organisms in place of pesticides.) But it’s worth taking a moment to think through exactly what it means to say that a system is unsustainable, lest the word lose its force. What it means, very simply, is that a practice or activity cannot go on as it has much longer — that, because of various internal contradictions, it will sooner or later break down.

This is the the case with our industrial food chain: evidence of failure is all around us. While it is true that this system produces vast quantities of cheap food (indeed, the vastness and cheapness is part of the problem), it is not doing what any nation’s food system foremost needs to do: that is, maintain its population in good health. Historians of the future will marvel at the existence of a civilization whose population was at once so well-fed and so unhealthy. This is unprecedented. For most of history, the “food problem” has been a problem of quantity. Our shocking rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, foodborne illness and nutrient deficiency suggest that quantity is not the problem — or the solution.

To say a system is unsustainable also means it cannot endure indefinitely for the simple reason that it is using up the very resources it depends on: it is eating its seed corn. Certainly this is the case in industrial agriculture, which is literally consuming the soil and the genetic diversity on which it depends: there’s half as much topsoil in Iowa today as there was a century ago, and our single-minded focus on a tiny number of crops (and within those crops a tiny number of varieties) is driving untold numbers of plant and animal varieties to extinction. These are genes whose disappearance we will rue when our monocultures fail, as all monocultures sooner or later do.

“Unsustainable” also means a system can’t go on indefinitely paying the costs of doing business as it has been doing. In the case of the industrial food chain, that includes the cost to the treasury ($88 billion in agricultural subsidies over the last five years); to the environment (water and air pollution, especially from our factory animal farms); and to the public health. Cheap food, it turns out, is unbelievably expensive. Many of the costs of cheap food are invisible to us, but they will soon force themselves onto our attention. Take energy, for example. The industrial food system is at bottom a system founded on cheap fossil fuel, which we depend on to grow the crops (the fertilizers and pesticides are made from petroleum), process the food, and then ship it hither and yon. Fully a fifth of the fossil fuel we consume in America goes to feeding ourselves, more than we devote to personal transportation. (Unfortunately the industrial organic food chain guzzles nearly as much fossil fuel as the nonorganic.) If the era of cheap energy is really drawing to a close, as it appears, so will the era of cheap industrial food.

The last sense in which the industrial food chain is unsustainable is that it depends on our ignorance of how it works for its continued survival. Indeed, our ignorance of its methods is as important to its workings as cheap energy. If I’ve learned anything over the past several years, as I’ve followed the industrial food chain from the supermarkets and fast food outlets back through the meatpacking plants and C.A.F.O.’s (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and food science laboratories and farm fields, it is that the more you know about this food, the less appetizing it becomes to eat. If people could peer over the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture they would surely change the way they eat.

Increasing numbers of Americans aren’t waiting: they’re changing now. This desire for something better — something safer, something more sustainable, something more humane and something tastier — is what’s bringing people to the Whole Foods and the farmer’s market, as well as to C.S.A.’s (community-supported agriculture programs, about which more in a subsequent post) and directly to farmers over the Internet. Taken together the fastest growing segment of the American food system are these alternatives to it. Change is indeed in the air.

And this change is not limited to the marketplace. A vibrant grass-roots movement to change food (and beverages) in the schools is rapidly spreading across the country — witness last week’s tactical retreat of the soda makers from school cafeterias. A debate is just getting underway about food policy at the federal level, as Congress starts work on the next farm bill; it will have to decide whether the government should continue to subsidize high-fructose corn syrup at a time when we have an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. Animal rights groups are forcing the fast food industry to change the miserable condition in which billions of food animals now live.

I write from the road, where I’m on tour promoting my book, and I’m hearing a lot of anxiety around the subject food but also a lot of hope. Indeed, of all the issues before us today, the food issue is one of the most hopeful. As the tableaux in Union Square demonstrates, we have choices. We no longer have to take the food on offer, which makes this issue unique.

A couple of weeks ago we all paid our taxes. Whenever I write that check, I can’t help but think of the various uses to which that money is put. Whatever your politics, there are activities your tax money supports that I’m sure you find troublesome, if not deplorable. But you can’t do anything about those activities — you can’t withdraw your support — unless you’re prepared to go the jail. Food is different. You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.

So this column will take the form of a discussion about how to cast those sorts of votes. I take seriously this idea of conversation. I’ve found that publishing a book in the Internet era (my last one came out in 2001, before the word blog had even been coined) is a completely new and bracing experience, far more reciprocal than writing has ever been. I get e-mail from people reporting they’re on page six and have a question they’d like answered before they go on. (This seems a bit much…) When I go on the radio and say something dubious or sloppy, inevitably someone will straighten me out within the hour. Daily, readers and listeners force me to rethink my positions or consider questions I’d never known to ask. Make no mistake: not all of these questions are so provocative. The other day a reader emailed to ask, “So what do you think about dried fruit?”

I take all these questions (well, almost all of them) as a sign of a healthy ferment rising around the politics of food, and have undertaken this blog to air the best of them in a more public way than my e-mail correspondence. So come gather around this table to talk. About anything — except, unless you absolutely insist, dried fruit.

Home

2006-05-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

I did finally get home, at midnight on Sunday. Six days of travel, with three days spent in Port North, Fla., broken down. Not a good start with a new car. Hopefully it's a fluke. The brakes locked up while I was driving 75 mph on I-75. By the time I got pulled off the interstate, the one wheel was on fire. My Nalgene came in handy . . .

I spent three nights in a really dumpy motel, walking a mile or two twice a day in scorching heat to wait in the Tuffy waiting room. As Florida seems to be the land of strip malls and subdivisions, there wasn't much to see within walking distance. One day I did find a bicycle to rent, which allowed me to go to a mineral springs resort. But I was scared off by the flock of scantily clad senior citizens. Oh well.

The strangest event of the trip was meeting Debra, from South Bend, Ind., in the Tuffy Automotive waiting room. Her husband is a professor of philosophy and law at Notre Dame. The strange part of it was that I ended up riding around in her car for an hour, to the beach to take a picture, and to the library. She was bored, in town to check up on her elderly mother, and I was obviously bored, so we had fun talking about northern Indiana. We found several common points (her husband was friends with John Howard Yoder). She grew up in Rhode Island and lived many years in San Francisco, so not quite your average midwesterner.

I watched lots of bad TV, trying to keep my mind occupied, so I wouldn't think of all the terrible things that could happen in the next 1600 miles of my trip. You see, I broke down after driving 15 miles! This experience only adds to my legendary status as the breakdown king.

While my confidence in the reliability and quality of this Mercedes has been shaken, I still think it's a good car. The brake seizure was not something that could have been predicted or identified by a mechanic. Fate and the Florida humidity were against me.

The car is noticeably crappier than what I saw in my head (most things are). The owner, who turned 89 on the day I bought her last car, did not intentionally mislead me. I'm not so sure about her son-in-law. Those no-good son-in-laws! The mechanic who inspected the car for me was less than verbose on the overall condition. I tried to pry the details out of him, but I guess I failed.

I don't regret my purchase (I did in North Port). I'm doing a thorough maintenance routine to cover everything that might have been neglected. After that, only time will tell. I'm depending on the historic reliability and toughness of German engineering.

I still plan to convert it to vegetable oil. (Sorry for being so predictable, Sarah.) A successful conversion will save us a lot of money, which might make up for the Tuffy bill and the cash I'm sinking into the car right now.

Slower than Molasses in January

2006-04-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

After nearly two years of gestation (procrastination), I'm finally putting all of our photos from Europe on the web in an organized fashion. Oh no, they're not all there for you to see, but at least I've started. Eventually I'll also be posting all of our photos since Europe, too.

We are posting to our Flickr site: J.M.K. See what you think.

I won't tell you how long I worked to get things just right. (I tend to obsess about organizational tasks like this. I often forget to eat when I'm working.) And it's probably not perfected yet. But I'm pretty happy with what I've worked out.

I'm posting photos in chronological order. The best way to start looking at them is to treat the albums on the left hand side as a menu. The top few albums will be the menu choices. For now, click on the top album (A Year in Europe), and then the structure should be clear to you. Flickr doesn't allow things to be set up exactly like I want them, but I've tweaked things to get an approximation.

I'd love to have your comments and suggestions. Let me know how easily you were able to use the site.

New Neil Young

2006-04-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

The ever-enigmatic Neil Young has a new "broadside" album available for free listen on the front page of his website: NeilYoung.com. The songs, written and recorded in the last month, comprise his response to the Iraq war, and the music's delivery (free web stream, then digital download, and finally a CD) is a result of his impatience with the slow music industry.

Read the NY Times article below, or watch this video of a recent interview with Neil, for more information. But first go to his website, so you have something to listen to while you read.

Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It
New York Times
April 28, 2006
By Jon Pareles

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.

Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.

"If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again with some pride."

Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of "Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."

The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."

On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and Out" the same evening.

Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm concerned."

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."

Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half weeks later by sending acetates — preliminary pressings — to radio stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)

After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's as big as we get."

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."

The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical material.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just a kind of a wave."

As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information — not just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings — is in the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. "Living With War" — irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate — is definitely worth a click.

Drug Policy

2006-04-29T06:41:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting report on a new Mexican drug policy likely to be put into law. On the face of it, I agree with the intentions of the law. Only time will tell how it actually affects small time drug users and big time drug distributors.

Mexico Votes to Decriminalize Some Drugs
AP
April 29, 2006
9:06 a.m. ET

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexicans would be allowed to possess small amounts of cocaine, heroin, even ecstasy for their personal use under a bill approved by lawmakers that some worry could prove to be a lure to young Americans.

The bill now only needs President Vicente Fox's signature to become law and that does not appear to be an obstacle. His office said that decriminalizing drugs will free up police to focus on major dealers.

''This law gives police and prosecutors better legal tools to combat drug crimes that do so much damage to our youth and children,'' said Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar.

The Senate approved the bill Friday in the final hours of its closing session. Mexico's lower house had already endorsed the legislation.

The measure appeared to surprise U.S. officials. State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said the department was trying to get ''more information'' about it. One U.S. diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said ''we're still studying the legislation, but any effort to decriminalize illegal drugs would not be helpful.''

Some worried the law would increase drug addiction in Mexico and cause problems with the United States. Millions of American youths visit Mexico's beach resorts and border towns each year.

''A lot of Americans already come here to buy medications they can't get up there ... Just imagine, with heroin,'' said Ulisis Bon, a drug treatment expert in Tijuana, where heroin use is rampant.

In off-the-record chats and through their communications with U.S. officials, Mexican officials tried to depict the drug bill as a simple clarification of existing laws. But the changes are clear.

Currently, Mexican law leaves open the possibility of dropping charges against people caught with drugs if they can prove they are drug addicts and if an expert certifies they were caught with ''the quantity necessary for personal use.''

The new bill drops the ''addict'' requirement, allows ''consumers'' to have drugs, and sets out specific allowable quantities, which do not appear in the current law.

Those quantities are sometimes eye-popping: Mexicans would be allowed to posses 2.2 pounds of peyote, the button-sized hallucinogenic cactus used in some Indian religious ceremonies.

Police would no longer bother with possession of up to 25 milligrams of heroin, 5 grams of marijuana (about one-fifth of an ounce, or about four joints), or 0.5 grams of cocaine -- the equivalent of about 4 ''lines,'' or half the standard street-sale quantity.

The law lays out allowable quantities for a large array of other drugs, including LSD, MDA, MDMA (ecstasy, about two pills' worth), and amphetamines.

However the bill stiffens penalties for trafficking and possession of drugs -- even small quantities -- by government employees or near schools, and maintains criminal penalties for drug sales.

Sales of all those drugs would remain illegal under the proposed law, unlike in the Netherlands, where the sale of marijuana for medical use is legal and it can be bought with a prescription in pharmacies.

And while Dutch authorities look the other way regarding the open sale of cannabis in designated coffee shops -- something Mexican police seem unlikely to do -- the Dutch have zero tolerance for heroin and cocaine.

Sen. Miguel Angel Navarro of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party argued against the bill. ''This authorizes the consumption of opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and a variety of drugs that can only be bought illicitly.''

Roman Catholic Bishop Jose Guadalupe Martin Rabago, president of the Mexican Council of Bishops, also expressed concern.

''It's not by legalizing the possession or use of drugs that drug trafficking is going to be combatted,'' the bishop told reporters, ''and that's why the government should be cautious about implementing this measure.''

The law comes at a time of heightened tensions over a U.S. proposal for immigration reform, including legalization of many of America's estimated 11 million undocumented migrants.

A demonstration by thousands of Mexican workers Friday to promote union solidarity turned into a protest against America's vast influence on the nation's economy, with many protesters saying they will take part in a boycott of U.S. products next week. The proposed boycott is timed to coincide with Monday's "Day Without Immigrants" protest in the U.S., aimed at pushing Congress to approve the immigration reform.

Ethan Nadelmann, director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, said Mexico's bill removed ''a huge opportunity for low-level police corruption.'' Mexican police often release people detained for minor drug possession, in exchange for bribes.

Punta Gorda

2006-04-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, I didn't shy away from traveling-related escapades. I've also owned my share of vehicles (10) and had a few adventures both in and with them. (Remind me to tell you about rebuilding the VW engine in the living room of the Arkansas drug dealer.) But since returning from Germany, I've become downright stodgy. So next week I'm off on another adventurous trip.

On Tuesday, at 6:45 am, I'm flying out of Wichita, bound for Ft. Myers, Florida. I will be picked up at the airport by Ann Kelly and her family, and driven to her house in Punta Gorda, Florida. Earlier this week I bought Ann's car through Cars.com, and I'm flying down to pick it up and drive it 1,600 miles home! Yes, I'll be doing this alone.

I'm buying a 1984 Mercedes-Benz 190D. It's a diesel version of the smallest Mercedes model from that era. There's currently an eBay auction underway for a car nearly identical to mine. I haven't actually seen the car I'm buying, not even a photo, but I'm told it's green with tan leather interior. This should be what it looks like.

I never imagined I would buy a Mercedes. But I recently undertook a search to find a car with some specific characteristics, and this car came up as the best match. I decided that I wanted to get a car that I can convert to run on vegetable oil. If you're not familiar with the concept, look at the Wikipedia, Greasel and Greasecar websites. All diesel engines can run on vegetable oil, with a tiny bit of modification. In fact, Rudolf Diesel intended for his engine to run on peanut oil. I plan to buy a conversion kit from Greasel.

Where does the vegetable oil come from? The primary source of vegetable oil used for fuel is the restaurant industry. Since they must pay to dispose of their waste oil, they are usually glad to have someone take it for free. The waste oil must be filtered before using it in a diesel engine, but the total cost for filters and fuel expenses generally runs about $.19 per gallon. Not bad, especially in a car that gets 40 mpg!

Mercedes diesels from the 1980s routinely last 500,000 miles or more. They are considered one of the most reliable engines ever built. There are fanatics out there who have more than a million miles on their Mercedes! The car I'm buying currently has 110,000 miles, all of them driven by a little old lady named Ann. She put 4,500 miles on the car . . . in the last 5 years! Now her kids have taken her license away, because of her age, so she has to sell her car. And I'm the lucky buyer. I could only have dreamed of getting a single-owner, senior-citizen-driven, low-mileage, Florida car! Since Mercedes cars are such a status icon, their owners usually take very good care of them. Ann and her 190D are no exception. (How can I possibly know this, you ask, since I haven't even seen a photo? Well, I had a mechanic from Punta Gorda do an inspection and give me a full report.)

Barring unforeseen disaster, I'll be puttering out of Punta Gorda sometime on Tuesday afternoon, headed for Kansas. I'll let you know how it goes.

Lizard coup d'état

2006-04-28T05:33:00.000-07:00

These folks are pathetic! Twenty-two days without a single word. They obviously need some management to get their keyboards clacking again. So I'm taking over this listing ship; we'll have things righted in no time.

And from now on there's a new policy-meme: no blogging = no blogger. That's right, Mr. Zimmer, Mr. Medalize, Dr. Ezra & Ms. Lizardé, another stint of bloggy silence and you will be silenced. Don't think I won't kick your ass off this Meme!

Which brings me to another thing. What's with your language? We need some color around here! And write something personal for once. This isn't a book club. You've all been slacking off lately.

I'll be a good dictator and start off by following my own rules. (That doesn't mean I can't change them or ignore if I want to.) But right now I'll tell you what I'm up to next week.

Low @ The Record Bar

2006-04-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I was privileged to take in one of the best shows I have ever heard! Low performed at The Record Bar in Kansas City, and we drove three hours to join them.

The room was good, the crowd of about 75 people was attentive and responsive, and the music was excellent. After cancelling the end of their tour for The Great Destroyer last year due to mental health issues, Low came back with all of the complexity and creativity I could hope for. They seem to be backing off of their recent pop exploration a bit and revisiting the dissonance and tension they've been mining for the last few albums. They also reached way back to 1994 for a rendition of Lazy off of their very first album, I Could Live in Hope. They played a couple other old songs that I think were on EPs, three or four from Trust, a bunch from The Great Destroyer, and then they threw in a few new songs for good measure.

I think the highlights of the night for me were a frighteningly gripping performance of On the Edge Of, and then a fun second encore with strobe lights and a deafening version of When I Go Deaf. Alan seemed much more relaxed and willing to improvise than I've seen before. He repeatedly tiptoed the line between artful distortion and out of control feedback, always pulling back from the edge to burst back into recognizable song just in time. Previous shows have always appeared quite scripted, and Alan commented a few years ago that he doesn't know how to solo. I think he's breaking out, and I don't think I was the only one to enjoy the experience.

If you get a chance to see them yet this tour, it's worth your money. I think they're currently at the top of their game. Speaking from experience with mental illness, no one knows how long it will last.

Book Recommendation

2006-03-31T07:15:00.000-08:00

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology
By Eric Brende

This is an interesting account of the author's experiment living among an Amish-affiliated group for 18 months. As an MIT graduate student in a technology field, Mr. Brende's goal was to attempt to figure out just how much technology was necessary to live a full and happy life. His discoveries have changed his life. He now earns his living making soap and driving a rickshaw in St. Louis (I'm sure he gets some nice book royalty payments as well). I recommend this book to everyone.

A Kansas Original

2006-03-30T16:19:00.000-08:00

God's Senator: Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
Rolling Stone
January 25, 2006
by Jeff Sharlet

Nobody in this little church just off Times Square in Manhattan thinks of themselves as political. They're spiritual -- actors and athletes and pretty young things who believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant dictation from God. They look down from the balcony of the Morning Star, swaying and smiling at the screen that tells them how to sing along. Nail-pierced hands, a wounded side. This is love, this is love! But on this evening in January, politics and all its worldly machinations have entered their church. Sitting in the darkness of the front row is Sam Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the stage in a red leather chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who has come to anoint Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for president.

Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their names. He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind the preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors who laid hands on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena Prophecy: the moment when God told Reagan that he would one day occupy the White House. And he recently dispatched one of his proteges to remind George W. Bush of the divine will -- and evangelical power -- behind his presidency.

Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington, Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics. Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

Bredesen squints through the stage lights at Brownback, sitting straight-backed and attentive. At forty-nine, the senator looks taller than he is. His face is wide and flat, his skin thick like leather, etched by windburn and sun from years of working on his father's farm just outside Parker, Kansas, population 281. You can hear it in his voice: slow, distant but warm; a baritone, spoken out of the left side of his mouth in half-sentences with few hard consonants. It sounds like the voice of someone who has learned how to wait for rain.

"He wants to be president," Bredesen tells the congregation. "He is marvelously qualified to be president." But, he adds, there is something Brownback wants even more: "And that is, on the last day of your earthly life, to be able to say, 'Father, the work you gave me to do, I have accomplished!'" Bredesen, shrunken with age, leans forward and glares at Brownback.

"Is that true?" he demands.

"Yes," Brownback says softly.

"Friends!" The old man's voice is suddenly a trumpet. "Sam . . . says . . . yes!"

The crowd roars. Those occupying the front rows lay hands on the contender.

Brownback takes the stage. He begins to pace. In front of secular audiences he's a politician, stiff and wonky. Here, he's a preacher, not sweaty but smooth, working a call-and-response with the back rows. "I used to run on Sam power," he says.

"Uh-uh," someone shouts.

To quiet his ambition, Brownback continues, he used to take sleeping pills.

"Oh, Lord!"

Now he runs on God power.

"Hallelujah!"

He tells a story about a chaplain who challenged a group of senators to reconsider their conception of democracy. "How many constituents do you have?" the chaplain asked. The senators answered: 4 million, 9 million, 12 million. "May I suggest," the chaplain replied, "that you have only one constituent?"

Brownback pauses. That moment, he declares, changed his life. "This" -- being senator, running for president, waving the flag of a Christian nation -- "is about serving one constituent." He raises a hand and points above him.

From the balcony a hallelujah, an amen, a yelp. From Bredesen's great white head, now peering up from the front row, Brownback wins an appreciative nod.

This boy, Bredesen thinks, may be the chosen one.

* * *

Back in 1994, when Brownback came to Congress as a freshman, he was so contemptuous of federal authority that he refused at first to sign the Contract With America, Newt Gingrich's right-wing manifesto -- not because it was too radical but because it was too tame. Republicans shouldn't just reform big government, Brownback insisted -- they should eliminate it. He immediately proposed abolishing the departments of education, energy and commerce. His proposals failed -- but they quickly made him one of the right's rising stars. Two years later, running to the right of Bob Dole's chosen successor, he was elected to the Senate.

"I am a seeker," he says. Brownback believes that every spiritual path has its own unique scent, and he wants to inhale them all. When he ran for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. "Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson Scherman. Lately, Brownback has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't like what he's finding. "There's some difficult material in it with regard to the Christian and the Jew," he tells a Christian radio program, voice husky with regret.

Brownback is not part of the GOP leadership, and he doesn't want to be. He once told a group of businessmen he wanted to be the next Jesse Helms -- "Senator No," who operated as a one-man demolition unit against godlessness, independent of his party. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a man with presidential ambitions of his own, gave Brownback a plum position on the Judiciary Committee, perhaps hoping that Brownback would provide a counterbalance to Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who threatened to make trouble for Bush's appointees. Instead, taking a page from Helms, Brownback turned the position into a platform for a high-profile war against gay marriage, porn and abortion. Casting Bush and the Republican leadership as soft and muddled, he regularly turns sleepy hearings into platforms for his vision of America, inviting a parade of angry witnesses to denounce the "homosexual agenda," "bestiality" and "murder."

He is running for president because murder is always on his mind: the abortion of what he considers fetal citizens. He speaks often and admiringly of John Brown, the abolitionist who massacred five pro-slavery settlers just north of the farm where Brownback grew up. Brown wanted to free the slaves; Brownback wants to free fetuses. He loves each and every one of them. "Just . . . sacred," he says. In January, during the confirmation of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, Brownback compared Roe v. Wade to the now disgraced rulings that once upheld segregation.

Alito was in the Senate hearing room that day largely because of Brownback's efforts. Last October, after Bush named his personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, Brownback politely but thoroughly demolished her nomination -- on the grounds that she was insufficiently opposed to abortion. The day Miers withdrew her name, Sen. John McCain surprised the mob of reporters clamoring around Brownback outside the Senate chamber by grabbing his colleague's shoulders. "Here's the man who did it!" McCain shouted in admiration, a big smile on his face.

Brownback is unlikely to receive the Republican presidential nomination -- but as the candidate of the Christian right, he may well be in a position to determine who does, and what they include in their platform. "What Sam could do very effectively," says the Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical activist, is hold the nomination hostage until the Christian right "exacts the last pledge out of the more popular candidate."

The nation's leading evangelicals have already lined up behind Brownback, a feat in itself. A decade ago, evangelical support for a Catholic would have been unthinkable. Many evangelicals viewed the Pope as the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon. But Brownback is the beneficiary of a strategy known as co-belligerency -- a united front between conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the culture war. Pat Robertson has tapped the "outstanding senator from Kansas" as his man for president. David Barton, the Christian right's all-but-official presidential historian, calls Brownback "uncompromising" -- the highest praise in a movement that considers intransigence next to godliness. And James Dobson, the movement's strongest chieftain, can find no fault in Brownback. "He has fulfilled every expectation," Dobson says. Even Jesse Helms, now in retirement in North Carolina, recognizes a kindred spirit. "The most effective senators are those who are truest to themselves," Helms says. "Senator Brownback is becoming known as that sort of individual."

* * *

As he gathers the forces of the Christian right around him, however, Brownback has broken with the movement's tradition of fire and brimstone. His fundamentalism is almost tender. He's no less intolerant than the angry pulpit-pounders, but he never sounds like a hater. His style is both gentler and colder, a mixture of Mr. Rogers and monkish detachment.

Brownback doesn't thump the Bible. He reads obsessively, studying biographies of Christian crusaders from centuries past. His learning doesn't lend him gravitas so much as it seems to free him from gravity, to set him adrift across space and time. Ask him why he considers abortion a "holocaust," and he'll answer by way of a story about an eighteenth-century British parliamentarian who broke down in tears over the sin of slavery. Brownback believes America is entering a period of religious revival on the scale of the Great Awakening that preceded the nation's creation, an epidemic of mass conversions, signs and wonders, book burnings. But this time, he says, the upheaval will give way to a "cultural springtime," a theocratic order that is pleasant and balmy. It's a vision shared by the mega-churches that sprawl across the surburban landscape, the 24-7 spiritual-entertainment complexes where millions of Americans embrace a feel-good fundamentalism.

When Brownback travels, he tries to avoid spending time alone in his hotel room, where indecent television programming might tempt him. In Washington, though, he goes to bed early. He doesn't like to eat out. Indeed, it sometimes seems he doesn't like to eat at all -- his staff worries when the only thing he has for lunch is a communion wafer and a drop of wine at the noontime Mass he tries to attend daily. He lives in a spartan apartment across from his office that he shares with Sen. Jim Talent, a Republican from Missouri, and he flies home to Topeka almost every Thursday. On the wall of his office, there's a family portrait of all seven Brownbacks gathered around two tree stumps, each Brownback in black shoes, blue jeans and a black pullover. The oldest, Abby, is nineteen; the youngest, Jenna, abandoned on the doorstep of a Chinese orphanage when she was two days old, is seven.

Brownback's house in Topeka perches atop a hill, shielded from the road behind a great arc of driveway in a nameless suburb so new that the grass has yet to sprout on nearby lawns. On a recent Sunday, Brownback sits in the kitchen, looking relaxed in jeans and an orange sweatshirt that says HOODWINKED, the name of his oldest son's band. Hoodwinked members drift in and out, chatting with the senator. When the band starts practice in the basement, Brownback walks downstairs, opens the door, jerks his right knee in the air and half windmills his arm. Hoodwinked shout at him to leave them alone.

When he was a boy, Brownback didn't belong to any rock bands. He grew up in a white, one-story farmhouse in Parker, where his parents still live. Brownback likes to say that he is fighting for traditional family values, but his father, Bob, was more concerned about the price of grain, and his mother, Nancy, had no qualms about having a gay friend. Back then, moral values were simple. "Your word was your word. Don't cheat," his mother recalls. "I can't think of anything else."

Her son played football ("quarterback" she says, "never very good") and was elected class president and "Mr. Spirit." "He was talkative," she adds, as if this were an alien quality. Like most kids in Parker, Sam just wanted to be a farmer. But that life is gone now, destroyed by what the old farmers who sit around the town's single gas station sum up in one word -- "Reaganism." They mean the voodoo economics by which the government favored corporate interests over family farms, a "what's good for big business is good for America" philosophy that Brownback himself now champions.

In 1986, just a few years after finishing law school, Brownback landed one of the state's plum offices: agriculture secretary, a position of no small influence in Kansas. But in 1993, he was forced out when a federal court ruled his tenure unconstitutional. Not only had he not been elected, he'd been appointed by people who weren't elected -- the very same agribusiness giants he was in charge of regulating.

The following year, he squeaked into Congress, running as a moderate. But in Washington, in the midst of the Gingrich Revolution, Brownback didn't just tack right -- he unzipped his quiet Kansan costume and stepped out as the leader of the New Federalists, the small but potent faction of freshmen determined to get rid of government almost entirely. When he discovered that the Republican leadership wasn't really interested in derailing its own gravy train, Brownback began spending more time with his Bible. He began to suspect that the problem with government wasn't just too many taxes; it was not enough God.

Brownback's wife, Mary, heiress to a Midwest newspaper fortune, married Sam during her final year of law school and boasts that she has never worked outside the home. "Basically," she says, "I live in the kitchen." From her spot by the stove, Mary monitors all media consumed by her kids. The Brownbacks block several channels, but even so, innuendos slip by, she says, and the nightly news is often "too sexual." The children, Mary says, "exude their faith." The oldest kids "opt out" of sex education at school.

Sex, in all its various forms, is at the center of Brownback's agenda. America, he believes, has divorced sexuality from what is sacred. "It's not that we think too much about sex," he says, "it's that we don't think enough of it." The senator would gladly roll back the sexual revolution altogether if he could, but he knows he can't, so instead he dreams of something better: a culture of "faith-based" eroticism in which premarital passion plays out not in flesh but in prayer. After Janet Jackson's nipple made its surprise appearance at the 2004 Super Bowl, Brownback introduced the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, raising the fines for such on-air abominations to $325,000.

On Sundays, Brownback rises at dawn so he can catch a Catholic Mass before meeting Mary and the kids at Topeka Bible Church. With the exception of one brown-skinned man, the congregation is entirely white. The stage looks like a rec room in a suburban basement: wall-to-wall carpet, wood paneling, a few haphazard ferns and a couple of electric guitars lying around. This morning, the church welcomes a guest preacher from Promise Keepers, a men's group, by performing a skit about golf and fatherhood. From his preferred seat in the balcony, Brownback chuckles when he's supposed to, sings every song, nods seriously when the preacher warns against "Judaizers" who would "poison" the New Testament.

After the service, Brownback introduces me to a white-haired man with a yellow Viking mustache. "This is the man who wrote 'Dust in the Wind,'" the senator announces proudly. It's Kerry Livgren of the band Kansas. Livgren has found Jesus and now worships with the senator at Topeka Bible. Brownback, one of the Senate's fiercest hawks on Israel, tells Livgren he wants to take him to the Holy Land. Whenever the senator met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to talk policy, he insisted that they first study Scripture together. The two men would study their Bibles, music playing softly in the background. Maybe, if Livgren goes to Israel with Brownback, he could strum "Dust in the Wind." "Carry on my . . ." the senator warbles, trying to remember another song by his friend.

* * *

One of the little-known strengths of the Christian right lies in its adoption of the "cell" -- the building block historically used by small but determined groups to impose their will on the majority. Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that the cells -- God's chosen, appointed to power -- could construct a Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they were not known at all.

"Communists use cells as their basic structure," declares a confidential Fellowship document titled "Thoughts on a Core Group." "The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four-man squad. Hitler, Lenin and many others understood the power of a small group of people." Under Reagan, Fellowship cells quietly arranged meetings between administration officials and leaders of Salvadoran death squads, and helped funnel military support to Siad Barre, the brutal dictator of Somalia, who belonged to a prayer cell of American senators and generals.

Brownback got involved in the Fellowship in 1979, as a summer intern for Bob Dole, when he lived in a residence the group had organized in a sorority house at the University of Maryland. Four years later, fresh out of law school and looking for a political role model, Brownback sought out Frank Carlson, a former Republican senator from Kansas. It was Carlson who, at a 1955 meeting of the Fellowship, had declared the group's mission to be "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," a vision of manly Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the gospel.

Over the years, Brownback became increasingly active in the Fellowship. But he wasn't invited to join a cell until 1994, when he went to Washington. "I had been working with them for a number of years, so when I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that," he says. "Washington -- power -- is very difficult to handle. I knew I needed people to keep me accountable in that system."

Brownback was placed in a weekly prayer cell by "the shadow Billy Graham" -- Doug Coe, Vereide's successor as head of the Fellowship. The group was all male and all Republican. It was a "safe relationship," Brownback says. Conversation tended toward the personal. Brownback and the other men revealed the most intimate details of their desires, failings, ambitions. They talked about lust, anger and infidelities, the more shameful the better -- since the goal was to break one's own will. The abolition of self; to become nothing but a vessel so that one could be used by God.

They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing" -- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture. The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man -- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought.

Brownback still meets with the prayer cell every Tuesday evening. He and his "brothers," he says, are "bonded together, faith and souls." The rules forbid Brownback from revealing the names of his fellow members, but those in the cell likely include such conservative stalwarts as Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee, former Rep. Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma doctor who has advocated the death penalty for abortion providers. Fellowship documents suggest that some 30 senators and 200 congressmen occasionally attend the group's activities, but no more than a dozen are involved at Brownback's level.

The men in Brownback's cell talk about politics, but the senator insists it's not political. "It's about faith and action," he says. According to "Thoughts on a Core Group," the primary purpose of the cell is to become an "invisible 'believing' group." Any action the cell takes is an outgrowth of belief, a natural extension of "agreements reached in faith and in prayer." Deals emerge not from a smoke-filled room but from a prayer-filled room. "Typically," says Brownback, "one person grows desirous of pursuing an action" -- a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy -- "and the others pull in behind."

In 1999, Brownback worked with Rep. Joe Pitts, a Fellowship brother, to pass the Silk Road Strategy Act, designed to block the growth of Islam in Central Asian nations by bribing them with lucrative trade deals. That same year, he teamed up with two Fellowship associates -- former Sen. Don Nickles and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond -- to demand a criminal investigation of a liberal group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Last year, several Fellowship brothers, including Sen. John Ensign, another resident of the C Street house, supported Brownback's broadcast decency bill. And Pitts and Coburn joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act to allow tax-free churches to endorse candidates.

The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution Restoration Act, which Brownback co-sponsored with Jim DeMint, another former C Streeter who was then a congressman from South Carolina. If passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine.

Brownback points to his friend Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under Reagan, as an example of a man who wields power through backroom Fellowship connections. Meese has not held a government job for nearly two decades, but through the Fellowship he's more influential than ever, credited with brokering the recent nomination of John Roberts to head the Supreme Court. "As a behind-the-scenes networker," Brownback says, "he's important." In the senator's view, such hidden power is sanctioned by the Bible. "Everybody knows Moses," Brownback says. "But who were the leaders of the Jewish people once they got to the promised land? It's a lot of people who are unknown."

* * *

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell -- one explicitly dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading organizations on the religious right. James Dobson's Focus on the Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from discussing the proceedings. It's a little "cloak-and-dagger," says a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win passage of Brownback's broadcast decency bill and made the president's tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to day, the VAT is instrumental."

As chairman of the Helsinki Commission, the most important U.S. human rights agency, Brownback has also stamped much of U.S. foreign policy with VAT's agenda. One victory for the group was Brownback's North Korea Human Rights Act, which establishes a confrontational stance toward the dictatorial regime and shifts funds for humanitarian aid from the United Nations to Christian organizations. Sean Woo -- Brownback's former general counsel and now the chief of staff of the Helsinki Commission -- calls this a process of "privatizing democracy." A dapper man with a soothing voice, Woo is perhaps the brightest thinker in Brownback's circle, a savvy internationalist with a deep knowledge of Cold War history. Yet when I ask him for an example of the kind of project the human-rights act might fund, he tells me about a German doctor who releases balloons over North Korea with bubble-wrapped radios tied to them. North Koreans are supposed to find the balloons when they run out of helium and use the radios to tune into Voice of America or a South Korean Christian station.

Since Brownback took over leadership of the VAT in 2002, he has used it to consolidate his position in the Christian right -- and his influence in the Senate. If senators -- even leaders like Bill Frist or Rick Santorum -- want to ask for backing from the group, they must talk to Brownback's chief of staff, Robert Wasinger, who clears attendees with his boss. Wasinger is from Hays, Kansas, but he speaks with a Harvard drawl, and he is still remembered in Cambridge twelve years after graduation for a fight he led to get gay faculty booted. He was particularly concerned about the welfare of gay men; or rather, as he wrote in a campus magazine funded by the Heritage Foundation, that of their innocent sperm, forced to "swim into feces." As gatekeeper of the VAT, he's a key strategist in the conservative movement. He makes sure the religious leaders who attend VAT understand that Brownback is the boss -- and that other senators realize that every time Brownback speaks, he has the money and membership of the VAT behind him.

VAT is like a closed communication circuit with Brownback at the switch: The power flows through him. Every Wednesday at noon, he trots upstairs from his office to a radio studio maintained by the Republican leadership to rally support from Christian America for VAT's agenda. One participant in the broadcast, Salem Radio Network News, reaches more than 1,500 Christian stations nationwide, and Focus on the Family offers access to an audience of 1.5 million. During a recent broadcast Brownback explains that with the help of the VAT, he's working to defeat a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and lesbians. Members of VAT help by mobilizing their flocks: An e-mail sent out by the Family Research Council warned that the hate-crime bill would lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christianity.

Brownback recently muscled through the Judiciary Committee a proposed amendment to the Constitution to make not just gay marriage but even civil unions nearly impossible. "I don't see where the compromise point would be on marriage," he says. The amendment has no chance of passing, but it's not designed to. It's a time bomb, scheduled to detonate sometime during the 2006 electoral cycle. The intended victims aren't Democrats but other Republicans. GOP moderates will be forced to vote for or against "marriage," which -- in the language of the VAT communications network -- is another way of saying for or against the "homosexual agenda." It's a typical VAT strategy: a tool with which to purify the ranks of the Republican Party.

* * *

Eleven years ago, Brownback himself underwent a similar process of purification. It started, he says, with a strange bump on his right side: a melanoma, diagnosed in 1995.

Brownback is sitting in the Senate dining room surrounded by back-slapping senators and staffers, yet he seems serene. His press secretary tries to stop him from talking -- he considers Brownback's cancer epiphany suitable only for religious audiences -- but Brownback can't be distracted. His eyes open wide and his shoulders slump as he settles into the memory. He starts using words like "meditation" and "solitude." The press secretary winces.

The doctors scooped out a piece of his flesh, Brownback says, as if murmuring to himself. A minor procedure, but it scared him. In his mind, he lost hold of everything. He asked himself, "What have I done with my life?" The answer seemed to be "Nothing."

One night, while his family was sleeping, Brownback got up and pulled out a copy of his resume. Sitting in his silent house, in the middle of the night, a scar over his ribs where cancer had been carved out of his body, he looked down at the piece of paper. His work, the laws he had passed. "This must be who I am," he thought. Then he realized: Nothing he had done would last. All his accomplishments were humdrum conservative measures, bureaucratic wrangling, legislation that had nothing to do with God. They were worth nothing.

Brownback turns, holds my gaze. "So," he says, "I burned it."

He smiles. He pauses. He's waiting to see if I understand. He had cleansed himself with fire. He had made himself pure.

"I'm a child of the living God," he explains.

I nod.

"You are, too," he says. He purses his lips as he searches the other tables. Look, he says, pointing to a man across the room. "Mark Dayton, over there?" The Democratic senator from Minnesota. "He's a liberal." But you know what else he is? "A beautiful child of the living God." Brownback continues. Ted Kennedy? "A beautiful child of the living God." Hillary Clinton? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially Hillary.

Once, Brownback says, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her so much it hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hatred out like a cancer. Now, he loves her. She, too, is a beautiful child of the living God.

* * *

After his spiritual transformation, Brownback began traveling to some of the most blighted regions in the world. At times his motivation appeared strictly economic. He toured the dictatorships of Central Asia, trading U.S. support for access to oil -- but he insists that he wanted to prevent their wealth from falling into "Islamic hands." Oil may have spurred his interest in Africa, too -- the U.S. competes with China for access to African oil fields -- but the welfare of the world's most afflicted continent has since become a genuine obsession for Brownback. He has traveled to Darfur, in Sudan, and he has just returned from the Congo, where the starving die at a rate of 1,000 a day. Recalling the child soldiers he's met in Uganda, his voice chokes and his eyes fill with horror.

When Brownback talks about Africa, he sounds like JFK, or even Bono. "We're only five percent of the population," he says, "but we're responsible for thirty percent of the world's economy, thirty-three percent of military spending. We're going to be held accountable for the assets we've been given." His definition of moral decadence includes America's failure to stop genocide in the Sudan and torture in North Korea. He wants drug companies to spend as much on medicine for malaria as they do on feel-good drugs for Americans, like Viagra and Prozac. Ask him what drives him and he'll answer, without irony, "widows and orphans." It's a reference to the New Testament Epistle of James: "Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Brownback is less concerned about the world being polluted by people. His biggest financial backer is Koch Industries, an oil company that ranks among America's largest privately held companies. "The Koch folks," as they're known around the senator's office, are among the nation's worst polluters. In 2000, the company was slapped with the largest environmental civil penalty in U.S. history for illegally discharging 3 million gallons of crude oil in six states. That same year Koch was indicted for lying about its emissions of benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, and dodged criminal charges in return for a $20 million settlement. Brownback has received nearly $100,000 from Koch and its employees, and during his neck-and-neck race in 1996, a mysterious shell company called Triad Management provided $410,000 for last-minute advertising on Brownback's behalf. A Senate investigative committee later determined that the money came from the two brothers who run Koch Industries.

Brownback has been a staunch opponent of environmental regulations that Koch finds annoying, fighting fuel-efficiency standards and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. But for the senator, there's no real divide between the predatory economic interests of his corporate backers and his own moral passions. He received more money funneled through Jack Abramoff, the GOP lobbyist under investigation for bilking Indian tribes of more than $80 million, than all but four other senators -- and he blocked a casino that Abramoff's clients viewed as a competitor. But getting Brownback to vote against gambling doesn't take bribes; he would have done so regardless of the money.

Brownback finds the issue of finances distasteful. He refuses to discuss his backers, smoothly turning the issue to matters of faith. "Pat got me elected," he says, referring to Robertson's network of Christian-right organizations. Sitting in his corner office in the Senate, Brownback returns to one of his favorite subjects: the scourge of homosexuality. The office has just been remodeled and the high-ceilinged room is almost barren. On Brownback's desk, adrift at the far end of the room, there's a Bible open to the Gospel of John.

It doesn't bother Brownback that most Bible scholars challenge the idea that Scripture opposes homosexuality. "It's pretty clear," he says, "what we know in our hearts." This, he says, is "natural law," derived from observation of the world, but the logic is circular: It's wrong because he observes himself believing it's wrong.

He has worldly proof, too. "You look at the social impact of the countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage." He shakes his head in sorrow, thinking of Sweden, which Christian conservatives believe has been made by "social engineering" into an outer ring of hell. "You'll know 'em by their fruits," Brownback says. He pauses, and an awkward silence fills the room. He was citing scripture -- Matthew 7:16 -- but he just called gay Swedes "fruits."

Homosexuality may not be sanctioned by the Bible, but slavery is -- by Old and New Testaments alike. Brownback thinks slavery is wrong, of course, but the Bible never is. How does he square the two? "I've wondered on that very issue," he says. He tentatively suggests that the Bible views slavery as a "person-to-person relationship," something to be worked out beyond the intrusion of government. But he quickly abandons the argument; calling slavery a personal choice, after all, is awkward for a man who often compares slavery to abortion.

* * *

Although Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 through Opus Dei, an ultraorthodox order that, like the Fellowship, specializes in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious and political thinking is Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who served seven months in prison for his attempt to cover up Watergate. A "key figure," says Brownback, in the power structure of Christian Washington, Colson is widely acknowledged as the Christian right's leading intellectual. He is the architect behind faith-based initiatives, the negotiator who forged the Catholic-evangelical unity known as co-belligerency, and the man who drove sexual morality to the top of the movement's agenda.

"When I came to the Senate," says Brownback, "I sought him out. I had been listening to his thoughts for years, and wanted to get to know him some."

The admiration is mutual. Colson, a powerful member of the Fellowship, spotted Brownback as promising material not long after he joined the group's cell for freshman Republicans. At the time, Colson was holding classes on "biblical worldview" for leaders on Capitol Hill, and Brownback became a prize pupil. Colson taught that abortion is only a "threshold" issue, a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into every question. The two men soon grew close, and began coordinating their efforts: Colson provides the strategy, and Brownback translates it into policy. "Sam has been at the meetings I called, and I've been at the meetings he called," Colson says.

Colson's most admirable work is Prison Fellowship, a ministry that offers counseling and "worldview training" to prisoners around the world. Many of his programs receive federal funding, and Brownback is sponsoring a bill that would make it easier for more government dollars to go to faith-based programs such as Colson's. Social scientists debate whether such programs work, but politicians consider them undeniable evidence of the existence of compassionate conservatism.

And yet compassionate conservatism, as Colson conceives it and Brownback implements it, is strikingly similar to plain old authoritarian conservatism. In place of liberation, it offers as an ideal what Colson calls "biblical obedience" and what Brownback terms "submission." The concept is derived from Romans 13, the scripture by which Brownback and Colson understand their power as God-given: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

To Brownback, the verse is not dictatorial -- it's simply one of the demands of spiritual war, the "worldwide spiritual offensive" that the Fellowship declared a half-century ago. "There's probably a higher level of Christians being persecuted during the last ten, twenty years than . . . throughout human history," Brownback once declared on Colson's radio show. Given to framing his own faith in terms of battles, he believes that secularists and Muslims are fighting a worldwide war against Christians -- sometimes in concert. "Religious freedom" is one of his top priorities, and securing it may require force. He's sponsored legislation that could lead to "regime change" in Iran, and has proposed sending combat troops to the Philippines, where Islamic rebels killed a Kansas missionary.

Brownback doesn't demand that everyone believe in his God -- only that they bow down before Him. Part holy warrior, part holy fool, he preaches an odd mix of theological naivete and diplomatic savvy. The faith he wields in the public square is blunt, heavy, unsubtle; brass knuckles of the spirit. But the religion of his heart is that of the woman whose example led him deep into orthodoxy: Mother Teresa -- it is a kiss for the dying. He sees no tension between his intolerance and his tenderness. Indeed, their successful reconciliation in his political self is the miracle at the heart of the new fundamentalism, the fusion of hellfire and Hallmark.

"I have seen him weep," growls Colson, anointing Brownback with his highest praise. Such are the new American crusaders: tear-streaked strong men huddling together to talk about their feelings before they march forth, their sentimental faith sharpened and their man-feelings hardened into "natural law." They are God's promise keepers, His defenders of marriage, His knights of the fetal citizen. They are the select few who embody the paradoxical love promised by Christ when he declares -- in Matthew 10:34 -- "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."

Standing on his back porch in Topeka, Brownback looks down into a dark patch of hedge trees, a gnarled hardwood that's nearly unsplittable. The same trees grow on the 1,400 acres that surround Brownback's childhood home in Parker; not much else remains. When the senator was a boy, there were eleven families living on the land. Now there are only the Brownbacks and a friend from high school who lives rent-free in one of the empty houses. When the friend moves on, Brownback's father plans to tear the house down. The rest of the homes are already taking care of themselves, slowly crumbling into the prairie. The world Brownback grew up in has vanished.

In its place, Brownback imagines another one. Standing on his porch, he thinks back to the days before the Civil War, when his home state was known as Bloody Kansas and John Brown fought for freedom with an ax. "A terrorist," concedes Brownback, careful not to offend his Southern supporters, but also a wise man. When Brown was in jail awaiting execution, a visitor told the abolitionist that he was crazy.

"I'm not the one who has 4 million people in bondage," Brownback intones, recalling Brown's response. "I, sir, think you are crazy."

This is another of Brownback's parables. In place of 4 million slaves, he thinks of uncountable unborn babies, of all the persecuted Christians -- a nation within a nation, awaiting Brownback's liberation. Brownback, sir, thinks that secular America is crazy.

The senator stares, his face gentle but unsmiling.

He isn't joking.

Coming Soon

2006-03-23T18:00:00.000-08:00

This new book by Michael Pollan is at the top of my "To Read" list. It will be available April 11, 2006.

From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Pamela Kaufman

Pollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.

Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."

Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.

Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.

Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.

This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.

Controlling Life

2006-03-17T05:47:00.000-08:00

I don't fit neatly under one of the labels commonly thrown around in the abortion debate: pro-life/pro-choice. I find the subject much more complex and gray. I first heard Terry Gross's interview and then went back and found the article under discussion. Both pieces grabbed my attention and impressed me as the most honest and wrenching discussions of the complexities of birth, abortion and parenthood that I have heard. These two sentences capture the nuanced tone of Ms. Weil's report:

"The Brancas love the son they wish they hadn't had. My family continues to mourn the child we don't regret terminating."

If more activists on both sides of the inflammable debate could acknowledge the paradoxical emotions represented in these statements, we could have a more productive discussion and perhaps make headway toward a workable compromise.

A Wrongful Birth?
New York Times Magazine
March 12, 2006
By Elizabeth Weil

Like most American women who give birth to a severely handicapped child, Donna Branca became pregnant with A.J. well before the age of 35. Had she been older, her doctors would almost certainly have recommended amniocentesis to screen for genetic disorders. But she was 31, so they did not, despite the fact that she had an unusual pregnancy. Branca bled during her first trimester, a possible indication of birth defects, and at her midterm sonogram, when she was 20 weeks pregnant, her fetus looked smaller than it should have based on when her doctors originally presumed she conceived. Branca had not gained much weight, either, but her doctors — whom she is barred from identifying, by a legal settlement — saw no cause for alarm. "Looking back now, of course, it's easy to say I should have asked more questions or maybe been a little more concerned," she told me last fall, sitting in her grassy backyard in Orangeburg, 20 miles north of Manhattan. Branca is a pretty woman, dark and compact, with a winning suburban New York accent. She glanced at A. J., a 6-year-old with a head of dark curls and the mental capacity of a 6-month-old. Her 3-year-old twins from a subsequent pregnancy ran around collecting acorns.

On April 22, 1999, when Branca was 28 weeks pregnant — four weeks past the legal window for terminating a pregnancy in New York — she saw her regular doctor (for what would be the last time) and was reassured that her baby was fine. But three weeks later, while on vacation on the Jersey Shore, Branca began to bleed again. Her husband, Anthony, drove her to the emergency room at Southern Ocean County Hospital in Manahawkin, N.J. Anthony Branca, like his wife, is compact and mild-mannered. When the obstetrician arrived, the doctor got out a tape and measured Donna's belly, a standard procedure to gauge a fetus's size. Although such measurements are a routine part of prenatal medicine and require only a few seconds, Donna had never had her belly measured. The obstetrician on duty that day asked Donna if she had had any prenatal care at all. Then he told her, based on his calculations, her fetus appeared to be only 24 weeks old, not 31.

An emergency sonogram confirmed that the fetus was indeed abnormally small, and an amniocentesis later performed at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., revealed much worse news: Donna Branca's fetus had both a gene duplication and a gene deletion on his fourth chromosome. (It was not until after birth that it would became clear that her baby had Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which commonly includes mental retardation, physical disfigurement, inability to speak, seizures and respiratory and digestive problems.) After two weeks of bed rest, during which doctors tried to delay labor, Donna delivered A.J. Branca on June 11, 1999, about six weeks before her due date. He was 15 inches long and weighed two and a half pounds, and he didn't cry when he came out. "One of the first things the attending doctor said to me," Donna told me, "was, 'It's not hereditary, so you should just have another child right away."'

What happened next — the years in which the Brancas came to love A.J. deeply and also to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit claiming that Donna Branca's obstetrician's poor care deprived her of the right to abort him — sheds an uncomfortable light on contemporary expectations about childbearing and on how much control we believe we should have over the babies we give birth to. The technology of prenatal care has been shifting rapidly: sonograms became standard in the 80's; many new genetic tests became standard in the 90's. Our ethical responses to the information provided has been shifting as well. As in many other realms, from marriage and its definition to end-of-life issues, those ethics and standards are being hashed out in the courts, in one lawsuit after another. And what those cases are exposing is the relatively new belief that we should have a right to choose which babies come into the world. This belief is built upon two assumptions, both of which have emerged in the past 40 years. The first is the assumption that if we choose to take advantage of contemporary technology, major flaws in our fetus's health will be detected before birth. The second assumption, more controversial, is that we will be able to do something — namely, end the pregnancy — if those flaws suggest a parenting project we would rather not undertake.

The practice of terminating specific pregnancies, as opposed to aborting pregnancies so as not to have a child at all, is seldom discussed in its baldest terms. It is also poised to rise. Just this past November, scientists at Columbia University published a major paper in The New England Journal of Medicine on the effectiveness of new, noninvasive techniques for screening for Down syndrome in the first trimester, when the decision to terminate will most likely be more common and, some argue, more humane. In in vitro settings, a new technology called P.G.D. — preimplantation genetic diagnosis — allows doctors to test for genetic defects days after fertilizing an egg in a petri dish. Perhaps most important, the number of prenatal genetic tests is increasing exponentially — it jumped from 100 to 1,000 between 1993 and 2003 — and no regulations yet guide parents and doctors about fair reasons for terminating or going forward with particular births. Should it be O.K. to terminate a deaf child? What about a blind one? How mentally retarded is too mentally retarded? What if the child will develop a serious disease, like Huntington's, later in life? According to one reproductive legal scholar, Susan Crockin in Newton, Mass., "As reproductive genetics opens up new possibilities, we should expect to see more of these cases, and we should expect to see more novel issues."

At present, courts in about half the states recognize wrongful birth as a subset of medical negligence or allow lawsuits under the more general malpractice umbrella if a doctor's poor care leads to the delivery of a child the parents claim they would have chosen to terminate in utero had they known in time of its impaired health. In some of these states, like New York, where the Brancas' case was tried, emotional damages — compensation for the distress incurred by having an impaired child — cannot be recovered. No matter the legal context, terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one's first choice, but for the time being at least, when faced with a fetus that will become a severely handicapped child, all the choices are bad. At this moment, we are fairly adept at finding chromosomal flaws and horribly inept at fixing them. There is no chemical or surgical remedy if you find out your child-to-be has cystic fibrosis, fragile X, Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs, anencephaly — the list goes on and on. As Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, has noted, in prenatal cases, often the only way to cure the illness is to prevent the patient.

The first significant wrongful-birth lawsuit involving a disabled child, Gleitman v. Cosgrove, reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1966. One plaintiff was the child's mother, who had contracted rubella early in her pregnancy in 1959. Worried, she consulted her doctor and was assured that her unborn baby would be fine, despite the common understanding that rubella early in pregnancy can lead to birth defects. The baby in question was born with "substantial defects. . .in sight, hearing and speech." Interestingly, the court recognized the physicians' failure as well as the parents' anguish and attendant financial burdens although it still decided in favor of the defendants, in part, it seems, because it did not want to enter the ethical thicket inherent in finding for the parents. "A court cannot say what defects should prevent an embryo from being allowed life.. . ." the opinion reads. "Examples of famous persons who have had great achievement despite physical defects come readily to mind, and many of us can think of examples close to home.. . .The sanctity of the single human life is the decisive factor in this suit in tort. Eugenic considerations are not controlling. We are not talking here about the breeding of prize cattle."

By 1978, however, when the next significant wrongful-birth case was decided by a higher court, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had established a woman's right to choose — that is, to terminate a pregnancy. The new case, Becker v. Schwartz, involved a geriatric mother (a medical term for a pregnant woman over 35) who was not advised by her doctor that her advanced age put her unborn child at greater risk for birth defects. Her child was born with Down syndrome, and shortly thereafter the mother sued. This time, the New York State Court of Appeals found in favor of the family, declaring it had the right to seek financial damages for the added cost of raising a child with a disability. The court, however, refused to allow the claim of emotional damages. It did recognize the family's suffering, but reasoned it "may experience a love [for their child] that even an abnormality cannot fully dampen."

This paradigm — awarding financial but not emotional damages — has become the standard in contemporary wrongful-birth lawsuits. Only a few states — including Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Michigan and Utah — have barred wrongful-birth cases through legislation or case law. (Conversely, wrongful-life lawsuits in which disabled children sue doctors for the suffering they are incurring by being alive have generally been rejected. These arguments come down to "better off dead," and courts have claimed it is impossible to weigh suffering versus nonexistence.) Yet the ethical thicket that the first court feared is as thorny as ever. We may not want to give birth to disabled children, but at the same time we do not want to see ourselves as reproducing in a way that calls to mind prize cattle.

The moral quandary we find ourselves in pits the ideal of unconditional love of a child against the reality that most of us would prefer not to have that unconditional-love relationship with a certain subset of kids. "I think the reason that this topic is as loaded and painful as it is," says Adrienne Asch, a professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in New York, "is that prospective parents want to think that they are open to loving whomever comes into their families, and they don't want to think that they aren't." Asch is one of this country's most outspoken advocates for disability rights and against the "automatic assumption" that prenatal testing that reveals disability should lead to abortion. It is her observation, shared by many on both the left and right, that prenatal testing "is not a medical procedure to promote the health of the fetus. It is a procedure to give prospective parents information to decide whether or not to eliminate a possible future life."

The reasons to oppose termination are both obvious and subtle and not necessarily tied to abortion views in general. (The question of abortion rests on a single issue: is it O.K. to destroy a potential life? Termination involves an infinite number of heartbreaking queries that boil down to this: what about this life in particular?) Some argue that our desire not to raise impaired children is based on prejudice. Others claim that a choosy attitude toward fetuses brings a consumerist attitude toward childbearing and undermines the moral stature of the family. Still others maintain that the act of terminating impaired children drags us into a moral abyss — or its opposite, that raising children with impairments increases our humanity.

I had to face these very questions in my own pregnancy two years ago. I was 23 weeks pregnant with our second child when my husband and I were told that our unborn son had contracted cytyomegalovirius, or CMV, a virus that if contracted by the mother for the first time while she is pregnant and is passed along to her fetus can lead to serious birth defects. Most likely our child would be deaf, blind and have serious mental retardation — a doctor friend told me that this prognosis could make a child with Down look like a walk in the park — but no one could tell us for sure what our unborn son's health would be like. What is more, no good studies existed because most of the women in the samples terminated before birth. The uncertainty was awful: weren't we supposed to be given solid information on which to base a decision? In lieu of that, we were offered a sonogram riddled with anomalies, a 20-something genetics counselor and terrible odds. We tried to take solace in the fact that our older daughter had never picked up on the fact that there was a baby in her mother's belly. We did what seemed right at the time: we aborted.

David Wasserman, a bioethicist at the University of Maryland, wrote a paper with Asch titled "Where Is the Sin in Synecdoche?" in which the two argue that prenatal testing is morally suspect because the system leads people to reduce fetuses to a single trait, their impairment. "Since time immemorial people have felt fear and aversion toward people with impairments, but these tests legitimize those fears," Wasserman says. Parenthood, according to Wasserman, is and should remain a gamble.

Opposing this, of course, is the plain fact that a healthy newborn is the best outcome — what every parent wants. No reasonable person would choose sickness over health, and we seem to have the ability to choose. So how to proceed? Much hand wringing goes on about a sci-fi "Gattaca"-like future in which terminating kids with Down syndrome leads to selecting for only highly intelligent, physically powerful blue-eyed children. Yet in truth we are not at risk of creating a society of such supposedly perfect human beings any time soon. "There's enough evil and caprice to always assure there will be disabilities," says Laurie Zoloth, director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at Northwestern University. "But could there be fewer? When people worry about curing too many things, I'm always glad that bioethics wasn't around when people were thinking about infectious diseases or polio or yellow fever."

The Brancas have little way of making sense of how Donna's primary doctors failed to apprehend that her pregnancy was not going well except to assume that they saw too many patients, believed her baby would be fine because she was relatively young or jumped to conclusions about the Brancas' ideas about abortion based on the gold cross that Anthony wore around his neck. Whatever the case, A.J.'s first days and weeks were a horrendous roller coaster. One of the earliest, hardest moments was when a doctor approached the Brancas with a D.N.R., or Do Not Resuscitate, order. They struggled with the choice, but decided to sign.

During A.J.'s first few months, he was hooked up to oxygen tubes to help him breath and to feeding tubes to help him eat, and he lived in an incubator to regulate his temperature. He remained hospitalized for 17 weeks. Donna spent every day by his bedside, usually returning home to eat a takeout dinner with Anthony and then driving back to the hospital again with her husband. During this time, the Brancas had to decide whether to institutionalize A.J. or raise him at home. Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome is so rare that virtually every doctor who counseled the Brancas could tell them no more than what the Brancas gleaned from a single study they found on the Internet. The Brancas were also cautioned that severely disabled children are often easiest on parents both emotionally and physically when they are infants, as all infants are wholly dependent on their parents.

When A.J. was discharged in October 1999, four months after his birth, he was still "medically fragile," he needed round-the-clock care and he spent nearly as many calories trying to eat and regurgitating his food as he managed to keep down in his stomach. The Brancas feared that if they took A.J. home, he might not make it through his first year. With the encouragement of their families and A.J.'s doctors, the Brancas placed him at St. Margaret's Center for Children in Albany.

"It was just awful," Donna told me, tears streaming down her otherwise composed face as she recently described the experience of dropping him off years ago. "Anthony and I just sat in the car and cried for hours. I was a mother, and yet I didn't feel like a mother. It didn't seem natural. As a mother, you have this feeling: no matter what, you're supposed to care for your child."

Back home in Orangeburg, Anthony and Donna tried but failed to find solace in the Catholic Church. (Neither had been churchgoers before, though both were raised in religious families; both identify with Catholicism culturally but say that families at times need more leeway than the church allows on family-planning issues.) They also started hanging around their single friends because they couldn't bear hearing about children. When A.J. was 5 months, Donna returned to work in marketing for I.B.M. part time because, she says, "I just needed to think about something else, or I was going to have a nervous breakdown." Around this time, too, the Brancas started considering legal action. Anthony's mother, a court stenographer, encouraged Donna to requisition her medical records, and when Donna showed them to Dennis Donnelly, a medical malpractice lawyer in New Jersey, he immediately took the case.

Donnelly cautioned the Brancas that her doctors probably wouldn't settle — about 75 percent of medical malpractice cases are found in favor of the defendant — though he also told the Brancas that if they won, they should expect a settlement in the millions. For the trial, he prepared a video called "A Day in the Life of A.J.," since Donna and Anthony did not want A.J. to take the stand. The trial started in June 2004 and lasted three weeks. By then, Anthony and Donna had 2-year-old twins. In court, Donnelly asked the Brancas' doctors why they had never measured Donna's fundal height, particularly in light of her low weight gain, why they had been unconcerned with her first-trimester bleeding (a possible indication of chromosomal damage) and why they had not done any follow-up testing after her 20-week sonogram suggested the fetus was small. He also showed the video in which the jurors could see A.J. hooked up to a feeding tube and taking endless meds.

The defense, for its part, tried to insinuate that Donna herself had declined to seek follow-up testing and that even if she had sought such testing, the results might not have arrived in time for her to abort. Furthermore, they argued that the Brancas would not have terminated. (Donnelly used the signed Do Not Resuscitate order to argue that the Brancas would, in fact, have terminated.) The doctors conceded that the falloff in Donna's due dates should have raised a "red flag" and that a follow-up sonogram after her 20-week sonogram would have showed a further deterioration in fetal size and weight. Donna's doctors also had little recollection of Donna as a patient, so they could speak only about their practice in general and of her case based on her records.

Separately, both Donna and Anthony told me that they believed they might not have sued had Donna's doctors just called to apologize. "They never felt any remorse," Donna said, "never called me after my son was born to say, 'I'm sorry this happened."'

The jury deliberated for two hours and found the doctors guilty of medical negligence. Ultimately, all parties agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement — its exact amount is confidential — which remains in a trust for A.J.'s care.

Some people argue against the idea that we should have a right to terminate unwanted genetically flawed children on scientific, not moral, grounds. Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford professor and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, asserts that a lot of genetic testing is hyped. "Genes are not like Legos," he says, mocking the idea that the results of an amniocentisis, often delivered to parents as a neat picture of 23 chromosome pairs, can tell you who a child will be. "Our genes mix with whole societies of molecular interactions, including our environment. It's not just nature-nurture; it's cycles of momentum that get going. A lot of very sophisticated people believe there is a straight line from a gene to an expressed trait, and that is just wrong. We're going to regret we had this phrase, 'It's in our genetics."'

Serious questions have been raised by preimplantation genetic diagnosis. P.G.D. is available to families undergoing in vitro fertilization, and it works like this: an egg is fertilized and starts dividing. When the embryo reaches the eight-cell stage, a single cell is removed and tested for genetic abnormalities. If the cell's DNA looks normal, the embryo is implanted in the mother. If the DNA does not, the embryo is frozen or tossed out. But it is not so simple. In 2005, a team from Reprogenetics in West Orange, N.J., continued growing 55 embryos that previously tested as abnormal and found that a surprising number of the cells, when tested later, were genetically normal. After a few more days, an average of 48 percent of the cells were normal. After 12 days, one embryo contained 76 percent normal cells. This raises some interesting questions: do embryos containing some genetically flawed cells tend to heal themselves? How do you know if the cells selected for P.G.D. are representative? Is basing termination decisions on genetic information as solid a footing as we have thought? If not, how can we conscience the decision to abort?

Susan Crockin, the legal scholar, says she believes that P.G.D., as well as other types of prepregnancy testing, like screening donor eggs and sperm for genetic disorders, will very likely be the causes of all sorts of new lawsuits. For instance, a sperm bank in California has already found itself facing a wrongful-conception lawsuit, brought by parents who argue that their genetically impaired child would not have been conceived at all had the donated sperm been vetted properly. Egg-donor programs may soon be in the same position.

An unintended and particularly disconcerting consequence of all these new reproductive lawsuits is that they may bias the medical establishment toward termination, and some argue that such a bias already exists. This is alarming for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that several studies have shown that the raising of children with impairments is on the whole a lot less difficult and a lot less different from raising so-called normal kids than we imagine it will be. "Families with severely impaired children do not differ significantly in stresses and burdens from families with normal children," Wasserman, the bioethicist, maintains, citing articles like "The Experience of Disability in Families: A Synthesis of Research and Parent Narratives." The idea that a handicapped child will destroy a marriage is exaggerated, he told me: "A child prodigy can have just as large an impact on a family as a child with cystic fibrosis or Down."

The ways in which genetic counseling is biased toward termination are both systemic and subtle. Research suggests that counselors may steer patients toward, as one counselor said to me, "starting again with a clean slate." As another expert, Barbara Biesecker, director of the genetic-counseling training program at Johns Hopkins University, explains, "There's kind of a trend out there to call people at home and then just refer them back to the hospital" — meaning that the family who has learned that a fetus has a genetic disease is quickly referred to someone who will help get rid of it. This, according to Biesecker, is "a cop-out." Delivering the news on the phone, often without a spouse present, is, she says, "filled with assumptions about what's right for people — it assumes that they'll act," meaning terminate. "When I ask counselors why they're doing so much work on the phone, they say, 'That's what people want.' But people are in crisis; they need to slow down. I believe we're capable of making good decisions for ourselves in hard circumstances, but I think we should be putting up roadblocks to quick answers. I don't think it should be easy."

Compounding the problem, most of the news that genetic counselors provide to prospective parents about disabilities is negative and clinical. Face-to-face meetings, which often occur before amniocentesis, tend to be filled with mini-science lectures about how chromosomes replicate or how trisomies occur, not the swirling emotions that surround the news that the baby in your belly may not be the baby you dreamed of having. In an attempt to rectify the situation, Senators Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, and Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, last March sponsored the Prenatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act, a bill designed to mandate that more positive information be given to parents about the life of a disabled child. At a news conference to announce the bill was Brian Skotko, a Harvard Medical School student. Skotko published a paper in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology last spring based on his study, the largest and most comprehensive on prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome. It showed that obstetricians and genetic counselors failed to give expectant mothers who received a prenatal diagnosis of Down encouraging data about raising a Down child. One mother in Skotko's study reported that her genetic counselor "showed a really pitiful video first of people with Down syndrome who were very low tone and lethargic-looking and then proceeded to tell us that our child would never be able to read, write or count change."

Few would be against parents getting a complete and accurate picture of raising an impaired child, but how, exactly, does that picture look? Different families' experiences with similar impairments are wildly disparate, and Skotko's study has been criticized for having sample bias, because he collected his surveys through Down-syndrome family associations, groups presumably filled with people having relatively good experiences with the disease. (Skotko has a sister with Down.) Not included in his sample, for instance, was a 66-year-old woman named Wendolyn Markcrow of Buckinghamshire, England, who last year on Easter Monday gave her 36-year-old son, Patrick, 14 sleeping pills and suffocated him with a plastic bag and then attempted suicide. Patrick had Down syndrome, rarely slept at night and hit himself in the face so regularly and forcefully that he detached his retina. When arrested, Markcrow told the police that she had "snapped."

'Why does A.J. have to get on the bus?" Julia Branca, one of Donna and Anthony's 3-year-old twins, paused to ask her mother, referring to the shuttle that was taking A.J. back to St. Margaret's on a Sunday afternoon. (A.J. has since moved to the Center for Discovery, in Harris, N.Y., closer to the Brancas' home.) The sun dappled the lawn through the tall oak trees. A.J., three years older than his siblings, but about the same size, played with a LeapFrog infant piano in his wheelchair in the shade.

Julia is extremely engaged with the world of disability. At "A.J.'s house," what she used to call St. Margaret's and now calls the Center for Discovery, she says hello to all the kids, whether they respond or not, while her brother Johnny hugs Donna's leg. Julia ran off for a few minutes and returned with a cup full of acorns and set them on A.J.'s wheelchair tray. A.J. raised his head, as if to acknowledge Julia's gift, then sank back into the looping riffs of his musical toy. Nobody knows how much A.J. comprehends. He turns his head toward his family, sometimes reaches out an arm. "One time," says Anthony, "up in Albany, he started to cry when we left. He started to moan."

In A.J.'s infancy, when his son visited home, Anthony slept in the same room with A.J., often in the same bed, dispensing food and meds at one- and two-hour intervals and making sure A.J., who weighed only nine pounds at 1 year, didn't vomit and choke. When he found out Donna was pregnant with twins, he felt guilty because he "knew it was really going to take away from A.J. When the twins were born, it was like having triplets." Now, thanks to the settlement, when A.J. is home, a nurse comes at night. In some ways, being A.J.'s parents has grown harder as he has grown older. Yet despite the direst predictions from some of his doctors, A.J. is progressing, if slowly. No one expects that A.J. will ever talk, but last summer he learned to belly crawl, and his father was intensely proud. "Everyone talks about when their child says his first word," Anthony says. "With A.J., we don't have that. But I think Donna and I have more satisfaction." Anthony sounds calm but surprised, like a man long accustomed to unexpected and unsettling news. "A.J. was voted Most Improved Mobility last year at school," he told me. "I was more proud of that. Every kid who has what he's got doesn't learn to belly crawl. I felt like he'd hit a home run in the Little League World Series."

The Brancas love the son they wish they hadn't had. My family continues to mourn the child we don't regret terminating. "Anything you might say about the wrongfulness or the rightness of a birth," Laurie Zoloth, the bioethicist, says, "the particularity of that choice is only, and always, experienced by a particular set of parents in a particular family with certain grandparents, certain aunts and uncles, in a certain religion on a certain block in a certain neighborhood. These are circumstances that as professionals, and certainly as bioethicists, it's nearly impossible to fully understand. And then, of course, we have the luxury of walking away."

Elizabeth Weil lives in San Francisco. Her last article for the magazine was about childhood obesity in southern Texas.

'Wrongful Birth' and Early Testing
NPR: Fresh Air
Terry Gross
March 16, 2006

Terry interviews Elizabeth Weil, author of the NY Times Magazine article above.

DNA Art

2006-03-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

Fun With DNA

Nell Boyce
NPR: All Things Considered
March 15, 2006

Imagine a yellow smiley face. Now imagine 50 billion smiley faces floating in a single drop of water. That's what scientists have made using a new technique for building super-tiny shapes using the familiar double helix of DNA.

DNA holds our genetic code, and geneticists have studied it for decades. They have developed all kinds of tools to synthesize and manipulate this molecule. About 20 years ago, a researcher named Ned Seeman at New York University realized that scientists should be able to use all that's known about DNA to help them build nano-scale shapes that normally would be hard to engineer.

Since then, Seeman and other chemists have shown that they can use DNA to build really simple shapes such as cubes or octahedrons that are 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. They've done it by laboriously designing small snippets of DNA that will hook themselves up into the desired form.

But a new method for building things with DNA is so much faster and easier that even a high school student could think up a shape and then make a DNA version within a week, says Paul Rothemund, who came up with the idea at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"Even by the time I was making smiley faces, I didn't really believe that the method worked as well as it did," Rothemund says.

Rothemund's trick is this: Instead of custom-designing small snippets of DNA so that they fit together in a certain way, he borrows a single, long strand of DNA from a harmless virus.

"We take that very long strand of DNA -- it's about 7,000 letters long -- and we add to it about 200 short DNA strands that I call staples," Rothemund says.

The staples bring two distant parts of the DNA strand together so that it folds.

"We actually fold the DNA into any shape that we want," Rothemund says. "So in the case of the smiley faces that I made, I actually fold the DNA into a disk, but then leave two holes for the eyes and the mouth."

Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, figure out the right folding pattern, and then tell you what DNA staples you need to make that shape.

"It's really easy and fun, actually, to make whatever you want at the nano-scale. You design it in the computer, you order the DNA sequences, they come in the mail, you add a little bit of salt water, you heat it up and cool it down, and then an hour and a half later, it's ready to look at under the microscope."

In this week's issue of the journal Nature, Rothemund shows off some of his DNA art. One impressive nano-creation is a tiny map of the Americas. But the real goal of this work isn't tiny maps. Rothemund says that in the future, tiny DNA shapes could serve as scaffolds for quickly building nanostructures made of metals or other materials. Those could be useful in new kinds of electronic devices, such as faster computers.

Two Quotes

2006-03-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

A tree is never confused.

~botanist David Baker, referring to a New Orleans magnolia tree blooming in October.

I suffer from the malady of bibliomania.

~Thomas Jefferson, speaking of bookshopping in Paris, where he bought enough books to fill 250 feet of shelf space.

Prairie Fire II

2006-03-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Fields become a feast for fire
A runaway grass fire scorches the countryside and threatens homes in Butler County before it is brought under control.
By Dion Lefler
The Wichita Eagle
Thu, Mar. 09, 2006

EL DORADO - Debra Karst stood in her yard Wednesday, looking at the charred remains of a motor home and reflecting on the good times her family and friends had had taking it to motorcycle races across the country.

"The memories that went on, you can't take the memories away," she said.

Memories were about all that remained of the motor home, as well as the 1967 Chevy Camaro Karst got from her father after finishing high school about 25 years ago.

Her neighborhood, off K-196 in rural Butler County, bore the brunt of a fast-moving fire that scorched an estimated 10,500 acres of farm fields and grassland before firefighters brought it under control Wednesday evening.

Just about everyone in the small cluster of homes lost something: woodpiles, sheds, even a small, unoccupied house.

The fire was started by an accident involving a trailer on K-254, said Kathy Guy, assistant director of Butler County Emergency Management.

A sheriff's deputy had spotted a problem with the trailer and pulled the driver over to fix it. As the driver slowed, the tongue of the trailer popped off the hitch, kicking up sparks as it dragged on the pavement, Guy said.

Fed by high winds from the southwest, the fire burned a broad stripe across the countryside, leaving a blackened landscape punctuated by pillars of smoke from where at least three oil storage tanks burned.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius declared a disaster state of emergency for the county to mobilize state resources to help fight the fire. More than 34 state, county and city agencies battled the blaze.

Just before dusk, the wind died out, allowing firefighters to gain the upper hand. By sundown, it was into the mop-up stages.

The smoke caused a two-car accident on the Kansas Turnpike. A Highway Patrol dispatcher said a driver rear-ended a car that had slowed because of reduced visibility.

The turnpike was shut down for about 45 minutes because of the smoke.

As the fire moved closer to El Dorado, officials evacuated Oil Hill Elementary School as a precaution. Students were asked to walk about a half-mile to the parking lot of a nearby Verus Bank.

"We had a special field trip, and the kids walked down here very orderly," said Eliese Holt, superintendent of Circle schools in Towanda.

Sandie Pope, a registered nurse, was assisting in a shoulder replacement at Kansas Surgery and Recovery Center when she got the word that her son had been moved to the bank. As she picked her son up, she said, she had not yet been to her home, which is on K-196.

"The fire is right by our house," she said. "It's scary."

No one was injured by the fire, but it was a harrowing experience for those who watched as flames howled toward their homes.

"I was up watching it on my deck," said Jill Johnson, who lives on Parallel Road about a half-mile south of Karst's neighborhood. "The flames were headed this way from the southwest and I thought, 'it's not good.' "

Some workmen from the nearby oil fields stopped by and helped her water down the deck and other parts of the home.

"All of a sudden, this circle of fire shot this way," she said. "I booked it out of here not knowing what was going to happen."

When she got back, the fire had burned across her yard, to the edge of the detached garage and to within 5 feet of the home. Johnson and her husband, Craig, spent the rest of the afternoon squelching hot spots.

"I don't think I'll sleep tonight," she said. "I can't imagine what's going to rekindle up here."

Next door, the fire burned a corner of J.D. Reinhart's house.

He raced home after a neighbor called him at work to tell him flames were getting close to the house, where he has lived for 26 years. By the time he arrived, at least five fire trucks were around his property with hoses gushing.

"I was relieved when I saw them out there," he said.

While the home suffered minor damage, the fire left a scar by burning the rose bushes that had been tended by his wife, Shirley, who died in January.

"Two-thousand-six hasn't been good to me," he said.

Once the danger passed, he went back to his job at the El Dorado toll both on the Kansas Turnpike, leaving his son Jerry to hose down still-smoldering trees and a power pole in the yard.

George Massey wasn't quite as lucky.

His home was saved, but the fire destroyed an auxiliary one-bedroom house at the back of his property.

"Mainly, we used it for storage," he said as he watched firefighters pour water on the charred remains. His wife collects antique furniture and glassware, much of which was inside.

Wednesday's was another in a series of recent grass fires as strong winds and warm temperatures have lingered in the area, which has been without significant moisture for weeks.

Although there is a 20 percent chance of rain today, forecasters said fire danger should be lessened by temperatures that are expected to reach only into the 50s.

John Weckerling, who tracks fire statistics for the state fire marshal's office, said he didn't yet have any statewide statistics on grass fires this year. But during the past decade, he said, he didn't recall another time when nearly half the counties in the state had active burn bans.

The Wichita Fire Department, meanwhile, was urging smokers Wednesday to not discard cigarettes through automobile windows -- a practice that was blamed for three grass fires within 24 hours.

City fire officials said throwing cigarette butts out of a car is littering and carries a fine of $100 to $1,000. They said that given the current conditions, they were increasing efforts to catch those violating the ordinance.

Prairie Fire

2006-03-08T17:47:00.000-08:00

Grass fire scorches thousands of acres

By Hurst Laviana
The Wichita Eagle

A fast-moving grass fire burned a huge black swath through the center of Butler County today, forcing the evacuation of a school and several homes but causing no significant property damage.

Butler County sheriff's officials said the fire, which burned several thousand acres near the Kansas Turnpike west and north of El Dorado, caused no injuries to humans or livestock.

Smoke from the blaze, which could be seen as far away as Wichita, forced the closing of the Turnpike for about 45 minutes beginning at 4 p.m.

Fire crews said they were able to contain the blaze before sundown.

Today's fire was another in a series of grass fires have plagued south-central Kansas in recent weeks as strong winds and unseasonably warm temperatures have lingered in an area that has been without significant moisture for several weeks.

Although there is only a 20 percent chance of rain today, forecasters said fire danger should lessened by much cooler temperatures that are expected to reach only into the 50s.

John Weckerling, who tracks fire statistics for the Kansas state fire marshal's office, said he didn't yet have any statewide statistics on grass fires this year. But during the past decade, he said, he didn't recall a time other than now when nearly half the counties in the state had active burn bans.

Sedgwick County Fire Marshal Tim Millspaugh said his agency has responded to more than 90 grass fires since the first of the year.

"We've tripled what we normaly run," he said.

The Wichita Fire Department, meanwhile, was urging smokers Wednesday to not discard cigarettes through automobile windows a practice that was blamed for three grass fires within a 24-hour period.

City fire officials said throwing cigarette butts out of a car is littering in Wichita and carries a fine of $100 to $1,000. They said that given the current conditions, they were increasing efforts to catch those violating the ordinance.

Grass-fed Beef

2006-03-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

Scientists point way to greener pastures
Mark Winne
March 8, 2006

The latest health, diet, and environmental news all came from one place yesterday: the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Union's report -- "Greener Pastures: How grass-fed beef and milk contribute to healthy eating" -- finds that grass-fed cows produce meat and milk lower in unhealthy fats and higher in beneficial fatty acids, such as Omega-3 and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), than grain-fed livestock. The report also notes that grass-fed livestock farming methods do a better job of protecting water, air, and the communities that support family farms.

For those of us who routinely argue in favor of sustainable food production, the report doesn't provide any shocking revelations. Smaller herds of animals that are treated humanely, allowed to move about freely, and eat what nature intended -- grass, not grain -- are naturally going to produce healthier food. So how is it that we've reached the point where we need a team of Ph.Ds and a respected research institution to prove it?

Carefully hidden from the view of the 99% of us who aren't farmers lies the coiled serpent we call the industrial food system. In depopulated and increasingly desperate rural communities across America, remaining locals and immigrant workers have been forced into a kind of modern servitude to factory dairy, hog, cattle, and poultry farms. It is from these places that most of our food is produced today.

Slip past the security gate of Don Oppliger's Land and Cattle Feedlot in eastern New Mexico and you'll see 35,000 head of beef cattle. Confined to small dusty pens, they eat nothing but a rolled corn flake ration until they're sent to the slaughterhouse. The constant shuffling of hooves raises a bacteria-laden dust cloud that's carried by the prevailing winds into west Texas. At one end of the complex sits a giant lagoon which catches the operation's wastewater, chemicals, urine, antibiotics, and other effluvia. A tour of the feedlot requires you to roll up the truck windows tightly to keep the flies out. In the narrow strip of ground that separates the fencing from the feedlot's service roads lie the carcasses of dead cows (a.k.a. "downers"), their eyes bugged out, tongues dangling, bellies swollen in the summer heat.

While none of Oppliger's cattle will taste a blade of grass, at least they are outdoors. By comparison, indoor factory hog farms confine their animals 20,000 at a time to low-ceilinged warehouses only 100 feet in length. They generate an odor so intense it would knock a buzzard off a crap wagon. According to Anita Poole, legal counsel for the Kerr Center, an Oklahoma organization that's fought that state's capitulation to the hog industry, "The average Joe Blow who might stumble into a hog facility would never want to eat pork again."

Texas County, Oklahoma was home to 11,000 hogs in 1990, but thanks to the Seaboard Corporation and all-too-willing local officials, the county now hosts over a million hogs. Because of contaminated water run-off from the hog farms, both groundwater and surface water quality have declined. Even worse, the Ogallala Aquifer upon which the region depends for its water is being rapidly depleted. The Oklahoma Water Resource Board reported that water levels in many Texas County wells have dropped 50 to 100 feet over the last 30 years, due in large part to high water demand created by factory hog operations and the irrigated farm land that supports them.

Got Milk? Got Problems!

Got milk? Eat Taco Bell cheese? Slurp Yoplait Yogurt? Chances are increasing every day that the main ingredient for these products comes from New Mexico, now the nation's seventh largest and fastest growing dairy state. Concentrated in the state's southeast quadrant, New Mexico' factory dairy farms have increased their herd size at least five-fold in the last 10 years. And along with this increase has come a severe rise in groundwater contamination (about 60% of the state's dairy wells exceed allowable nitrate standards), air pollution (the asthma rate for this region of the state is nearly three times higher than the state average), and the cost of community services (expenses for schools, social services, police, and prisons have grown rapidly).

If you happen to be cruising down a New Mexico highway, you're likely to encounter a billboard paid for by one of the state's dairy associations that modestly proclaims the goodness of milk. The scene is of a small herd of black-and-white Holsteins grazing contentedly on very green grass with a lovely red barn in the background. If those cows were alive and really from New Mexico, they'd probably think they had died and gone to Vermont.

A real scene from one of the state's factory dairy farms would be decidedly less pleasing. The picture would be of thousands of cows slithering about in steel pens, amidst dust and manure, without a stem of grazeable grass for miles around. No frolicking about on mellow pasture for these girls, no sir; it's in and out of the 100-cow milking parlor two or three times per day until the age of 2, at most 3, when they are then sent off to the hamburger factory. In addition to regular doses of antibiotics, they will be given artificial bovine growth hormones that stimulate milk production beyond their natural limits.

When you pick up a gallon of organic or sustainably produced milk in the supermarket and say, "Zowee! This is $5.49; I can get the regular stuff for $2.89," you should know what you're paying for -- and not paying for. Smaller herds of cows spending some if not all of their lives on grass, and not pumped up with growth hormones, produce a more costly milk than factory farms. And who pays for the asthma victim's long-term health care, the contaminated water, and the escalating local school expenditures? Not the factory farm dairies that may be the cause, and not consumers who are simply grateful for cheap milk. When these costs are paid at some indefinable point in the future, they are paid by the victims, the taxpayers and, of course, the environment.

The End Game?

Dr. Charles Benbrook is a former executive director of the Board of Agriculture for the National Academy of Sciences. His professional work includes studies of the dairy industry, whose growth west of the Mississippi he finds "very perplexing." Among his comments regarding large, western dairy farms: "If the dairy industry in the Southwest was forced to pay the real cost of water, it would quickly move to the Upper Midwest and Northeast." When I asked him what he thought about the future of the Southwest dairy industry, he said that it was "patently unsustainable because in not less than five years, but surely no more than 20, the dairy waste stream will overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the local environment."

The American Public Health Association (APHA) has said essentially the same thing. In a 2004 resolution, APHA said

Considering the health and economic impacts on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) workers ... children and CAFO neighbors from exposure to large concentrations of manure ... dust, toxins, microbes, antibiotics and pollutants ... APHA urges federal, state and local governments to impose a moratorium on new CAFOs until additional scientific data ... have been collected.

The Union of Concerned Scientists' report has brought us one step closer to understanding the human health benefits of a more traditional form of livestock raising that respects the land, water, air, and animals. At the same time, the form of agriculture proponents tout as "modern" but we critics scorn as "industrial" continues to demonstrate that it lives beyond the capacity of natural systems to support it.

As consumers who want what's best for our bodies, we may have to spend a little more on food products that support smaller scale, sustainable farms. As citizens who want clean air and water, and can see the value of viable farming communities, we may need to raise a little hell with our policymakers. Shop like your life depends on it, but vote like the lives of others depend on it.

Introverts' Rights Movement

2006-03-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

Introverts of the World, Unite!

A conversation with Jonathan Rauch, the author who—thanks to an astonishingly popular essay in the March 2003 Atlantic—may have unwittingly touched off an Introverts' Rights revolution

Atlantic Unbound
February 14, 2006

Most magazine articles do not, as a general rule, inspire impassioned responses. But in 2003, when The Atlantic published a short essay by correspondent Jonathan Rauch on the trials of introversion in an extroverts' world, the reaction was overwhelming. Rauch was inundated with more enthusiastic mail about the piece than for anything else he'd ever written. And on The Atlantic's Web site, it drew (and has continued to draw) more traffic than any other piece we've posted.

"I am an introvert," Rauch declared in the piece. And as such, he contended, he is a member of one of the "most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world." By definition, he explained, introverts are those who find other people's company tiring. Yet the uncomprehending extrovert majority imposes its own gregarious expectations on extroverts and introverts alike—compelling incessant socializing, enthusiastic party-going, and easy shooting of the breeze as norms. Introverts, Rauch pointed out—though an oppressed minority—comprise a significant portion of the population. Their quiet, introspective ways, he argued, should therefore be viewed not as a deviation from standard, but as a different kind of normal.

He addressed extroverts, admonishing them to be more sensitive to their introvert peers: after all, "someone you know, respect, and interact with every day," he explained, "is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts." As for introverts, he wrote, "we can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say, 'I'm an introvert.... Now please shush.'"

If the groundswell of support for these sentiments is any indication, Rauch may soon find himself the unwitting figurehead for an Introverts' Rights Revolution. We decided to have a few words with this author, who has clearly tapped into something important.

Rauch is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. His book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, was published in 2004.

I spoke with him in early January.

—Sage Stossel

--------------------------------------

Did anything in particular inspire you to write an article about this? An especially trying plane ride seated next to an extrovert, for example?

I don't think it was any specific incident. The idea was rolling around in my head for a while. To some extent, it was the result of being partnered with an extrovert and realizing that this was a daily source of tension. So I started organizing my thoughts on the subject. Another motivation was, basically, that I thought it would be funny.

It's interesting that you've found it a source of tension to be paired with an extrovert. I've read that introvert-extrovert pairings work well because the person who doesn't like to make small talk can just let the other person do it for them.

That's true. It does work very well in some situations. But for an introvert it also makes for a constant—I guess you might call it "brain pressure." That's a better phrase than "tension," because tension implies conflict and it's not that. It's just that my partner Michael's default mode of being is to talk and interact all the time, whereas mine is to talk as little as possible. We've been together since 1996 and we've spent much of that time just learning how not to drive each other completely insane. Part of my motivation for writing this piece was to pass along some of what I've learned. I was also hoping Michael would read it, which he did.

Did it help?

By the time the piece was published he'd probably heard it all from me before. But it doesn't hurt to go on the record.

If he were a writer he could do the companion piece—"How to Care for Your Extrovert."

Exactly. But of course my view, as I say in the article, is that it's much easier for introverts to understand these things than extroverts. Extroverts really have a hard time "getting" it. And even when they do get it, they still have a hard time modifying their behavior.

You wrote that for a long time you didn't even realize you were an introvert. What caused it to finally dawn on you?

From about the age of eighteen or nineteen, when I went to college, I realized that it was just not my idea of fun to party. In fact, I couldn't see why anyone would want to—I get so monumentally bored at parties. So I realized that I had this fundamental difference with a lot of other people. I didn't put a name on it until a few years ago when a friend of mine, who reads a lot of Jung, informed me that he's an introvert and that, "by the way, Jonathan, you're an introvert, too." He explained what that means and suddenly a lightbulb went on and things fell into place.

Now that you're tuned into it, can you usually tell when you meet someone whether or not they're also an introvert?

No. There's no introvert "gay-dar" that I can tell. One reason is that a lot of introverts are actually very good at being social. It just takes a lot of work for them. I'm like that. I'm not great at small talk, but I can seem quite outgoing for spells of up to an hour or so before I completely run out of gas. So I have to kind of get to know someone before I can figure out whether they're an introvert. Not that it takes all that much getting to know. If you notice that someone's getting tired out by a long conversation, they're probably an introvert. But it's not a first impression kind of thing.

I was surprised to read in your article that it's not typical for introverts to also be anxious or shy in social settings, because I'm both.

I was wondering whether you were an introvert. When did you realize that about yourself?

I'm not sure. I guess it probably hit me in seventh grade when somebody told my older brother, "You know, Sage could be popular if she talked more." Of course, he reported this to me, and I started to brood over it.

That is so unjust. Isn't it?

Yeah—chattiness suddenly seemed like the key to social success and happiness.

That story so sums up the kind of extrovert hegemony that can make life miserable. I think it's particularly hard for girls and women. "You'd be so much more popular if you'd talk more." It seems to me that the world would be a much better place, and that people would be much more rightly popular, if they talked less. Because so little of what most people say is actually worth hearing.

True. Although sometimes it's interesting to listen to other people talk. It's too bad it's not more acceptable to go to a party and just kind of soak things up.

Yeah. They should sell skybox seats at parties for people like us.

You asked about shyness versus introversion. My limited reading on the subject suggests that, psychologically speaking, they're regarded as different things. That reflects my own experience; I'm not particularly shy myself. To me, shyness implies a real reluctance to be socially aggressive or assertive. It's very difficult for shy people to put themselves out there if they need to. For introverts, it's never easy to do, but it's more a matter of reluctance to expend the energy, because it tires us out. That's what I feel most strongly. If I have to go to a party and then a dinner afterwards, I'm completely ruined for the evening. But if I'm called upon to run a business meeting or something, I don't feel any reluctance or anxiety about it. So, in my mind there's always been a fairly clear distinction between introversion and shyness.

You also mention in the article that studies have shown that introverts process information differently from other people.

Yeah, that's something I read back when I was reporting the piece. I can't remember the details now, but it involved brain scans.

It sounds right to me that the process is different. When there's a conversation flowing around me and everyone else is so quick with their responses, I almost imagine that other people's brains are endowed with some kind of fast-acting comment-generating engine.

Yeah, I marvel at Michael who can always somehow turn the conversation right over effortlessly and keep it going even when what he says is not necessarily profound or interesting. What he comes up with is perfectly tuned to the sense and flow of the conversation. But it's not words that are particularly intended to convey ideas or mean things. It's words that socialize—that simply continue the conversation. It's chit-chat. I have no gift for that. I have to think about what to say next, and sometimes I can't think fast enough and end up saying something stupid. Or sometimes I just come up dry and the conversation kind of ends for while until I can think of another topic. This is why it's work for me. It takes positive cognition on my part. I think that's probably a core introvert characteristic that you and I have in common and which can probably be distinguished from shyness per se—that small talk takes conscious effort and is very hard work. There's nothing small about small talk if you're an introvert. But we're good at big talk. Are you good at big talk?

If I get onto a topic I'm interested in and feel strongly about then it's true that I can get animated and engaged. But I'm not so good at chatting about things like the weather.

Right. The weather's not interesting. But once an introvert gets on a subject that they know about or care about or that intrigues them intellectually, the opposite often takes hold. They get passionately engaged and turned on by the conversation. But it's not socializing that's going on there. It's learning or teaching or analyzing, which involves, I'm convinced, a whole different part of the brain from the socializing part.

Do you ever wish you were an extrovert?

Not really. That may be because my "faking it" skills are pretty good. But I do think a lot of us are tired of being told that there's something wrong with us—of this lazy assumption that if you're not an extrovert, there's something wrong with you. I think my article may speak to people in part because of its defiant message. It says, "No, I don't wish to be an extrovert. Not everyone has to be one. And why don't you people get it?"

Your article made me think of that book The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman from the 1950s. He argued that the dominant economic model of each era in a sense "creates"—or privileges—the character type that's best suited to it. So, for example, in the agricultural and industrial eras, what he called the "inner-directed" type was best suited to getting work done and transmitting certain moral and cultural values. And then, with the rise of a more consumer-oriented economy, it became beneficial for people to be gregarious and affable. So teachers started to care more about whether their students were popular and cooperative than if they were interested in the subject matter and doing well academically.

I've never thought about it in those terms. It's true that in a lot of the social jobs that require leadership—whether in politics or in corporations—being energized by dealing with people all day long is a plus. And it's also probably true that, in an urban corporate economic structure, those skills are more important than in a rural peasant economy. But I wouldn't say that it changes the character of the people particularly. I do think that there's been, in the last ten years or so, a major economic resurgence for introversion—the "geek" economy. The prototypical geek is really good at thinking, has superb powers of concentration (which tends to be an introvert trait), and works very well independently. They're often pretty awesomely brilliant people, and they're fairly defiant about being geeks. They've turned this word "geek" into a term that's almost romantic in some ways, and through the Silicon economy, they've been massively innovative and economically important. A lot of them are running circles around the extroverts who are selling shoes. So I think part of what's happened lately is that the digital economy is giving introverts a new place in the sun.

You've gotten more reader response to this article than for anything else you've written. What do you think accounts for that?

Well, I can tell you that I never saw it coming. I thought I wrote this almost for my own fun and so that I would have something to hand people to get them to understand. Part of the problem with being an introvert is that it's hard to explain yourself. You can't say to your friends, "Hey guys, I'm an introvert," and have them know how to deal with you. So I thought it would be pretty darn handy to have something on paper.

Then I got this overwhelming reaction in the mail. It's been a bigger reaction than to anything else I've written. I think it suggests that a lot of people have the same experiences you and I do, and that they haven't had a name for it or a way of understanding it. Having that is very valuable. It tells you how to understand yourself and—maybe even more importantly—it tells you that you're fine and that, in fact, a lot of the problem is with the rest of the world.

People really do seem to be having a real "eureka" reaction to this. At some level, it reminds me of what it's like to discover that you're gay. Obviously there's no structural similarity between introversion and homosexuality, but there is this sense of realizing that you're different in a way that's very meaningful. Understanding introversion as a concept kind of makes the pieces fit together. A number of people have told me that they've Xeroxed the article and given it to their friends, their families, their significant others, and so on, as a communication device.

You jokingly talk about an Introverts' Rights Movement. It seems as though, given the dramatic response to this article, there must be a lot of people out there who are just now realizing that they're introverts and that the dominant culture doesn't really take their characteristics into account in terms of what it expects of them.

Well, that's exactly right. Part of the thrill of this article is that it seems to be helping introverts discover each other. It never occurred to me when I wrote it that there would be so many other people out there with whom this would resonate so strongly. But one of the main points I see over and over again in the mail I've been getting is, "I'm not alone! There are others like me." This sense of empowerment because of not being alone is very important to people. That in itself, to the extent that that takes hold, would be a very important part of correcting the introvert/extrovert imbalance.

Your article has also been one of the most popular pages on our Web site. We posted it three years ago, and it still gets more hits than practically anything else on the site.

Yes. The Internet is the perfect medium for introverts. You could almost call it the Intronet. You know the old New Yorker cartoon with a dog sitting at a computer saying to another dog, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Well, on the Internet, no one knows you're an introvert. So it's kind of a natural that when The Atlantic put this piece online, introverts beat a path to it; it's the ideal distribution mechanism by which introverts can reach other introverts and spread the word.

Are you aware of anybody else writing about these things today?

I'm not. Some people who wrote in sent me some of their own writings on the subject. But if there are other articles I haven't seen them. We'll see over time.

So if you were to spearhead an Introverts' Rights movement what would be some of the things you'd advocate?

Massive subsidies. I think people like us should have twice as much Social Security.

I like that.

Yeah that's pretty good.

Maybe Greta Garbo could be the mascot.

Good idea. Though she may have just been shy. Did she really say, "I vant to be alone"?

That's what I've heard.

I think that was a line from her movie The Grand Hotel, though, in which case it was just her character who said that. But she could still be the patron saint. Actually, my favorite line is from Waiting for Godot. I can quote it to you exactly: "Don't talk to me. Don't speak to me. Stay with me."

That's perfect.

To me those words sum up the introvert impulse. We love people—we're not misanthropic for the most part. We just can't socialize with them all the time. We want to hold their hand or hug them or just sit quietly and read a book with them.

I was tongue-in-cheek about the introverts' rights movement, but the main principle would just be that it should be as respectable for introverts to be who they are socially as it is for extroverts. We ought to be trying to make extroverts conscious and not uncomfortable about the fact that we're here. Extroverts should understand that if someone is being quiet it doesn't mean they're having a bad time; it doesn't mean they're depressed; it doesn't mean they're lonely or need psychiatric help or medication. A lot of the battle is making the extrovert world more aware. The onus is on us to do that. Maybe this article is a start. One thing you'll notice about the article, by the way, is that it addresses extroverts. I think that's very much the strategy; we need to tell the world who we are. The first step is to understand who we are ourselves, but the second step is to educate extroverts. This is stuff extroverts need to know. They're driving us crazy. We need to tell them.

Introversy

2006-03-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

Caring for Your Introvert
The habits and needs of a little-understood group

by Jonathan Rauch
The Atlantic Monthly
March 2003

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.

I know. My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert.

Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. But at last I have self-identified and come out to my friends and colleagues. In doing so, I have found myself liberated from any number of damaging misconceptions and stereotypes. Now I am here to tell you what you need to know in order to respond sensitively and supportively to your own introverted family members, friends, and colleagues. Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs.

What is introversion? In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

How many people are introverts? I performed exhaustive research on this question, in the form of a quick Google search. The answer: About 25 percent. Or: Just under half. Or—my favorite—"a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population."

Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life. "It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert," write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

Are introverts oppressed? I would have to say so. For one thing, extroverts are overrepresented in politics, a profession in which only the garrulous are really comfortable. Look at George W. Bush. Look at Bill Clinton. They seem to come fully to life only around other people. To think of the few introverts who did rise to the top in politics—Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon—is merely to drive home the point. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, whose fabled aloofness and privateness were probably signs of a deep introverted streak (many actors, I've read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors), introverts are not considered "naturals" in politics.

Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, "Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?" (He is also supposed to have said, "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it." The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.)

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. "People person" is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private"—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, in an online review of a recent book called Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money? (I'm not making that up, either), "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."

How can I let the introvert in my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation.

Second, when you see an introvert lost in thought, don't say "What's the matter?" or "Are you all right?"

Third, don't say anything else, either.

Loss of Faith

2006-03-05T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Book of Bart
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the marrow of the bones?

In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and the listeners' questions fade.

Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible "is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit."

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."

Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.

And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.

There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of God? Both? Neither?

These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the unknowable.

"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.

"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from? How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful religion?

"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart

On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of the most popular classes on campus.

His text for today is the Gospel of John.

Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.

Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)

But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.

"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine," he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good enough."

The class files out a few minutes later.

"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's very threatening."

Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."

"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.

To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or punctuation.

Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in English, from Ehrman's book:

godisnowhere

Does it say: God is now here.

Or: God is nowhere.

Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.

One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to prove it.

"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded completely convincing," Ehrman writes.

One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and asked the Lord to come into his life.

He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again experience."

The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says, the closer he felt to God.

His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual exercise, like meditation."

He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith. Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or have physical contact with the opposite sex.

It was spiritually thrilling.

For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his execution.

What he found there began to frighten him.

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary. A professor wrote in the margin:

"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.

"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible, at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't there."

Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be facts, or there is no basis for the religion.

"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . . according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and void.' "

Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.
Dark Bubbles

It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.

Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?

Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."

For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was there a God paying attention.

"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast in hell.' "

He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone. No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his kids were grown. He stopped going to church.

"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the logic by which he reached them."

"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.

"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."

* * *

Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic." That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.

He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.

"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday."

On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides, according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell.

Ehrman's desk is filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.

Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?

Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.

Progressive Small Town Kansas

2006-03-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

This is in addition to an extensive composting program. They are also doing research into other options such as incineration of trash to produce steam, and with it, electricity. The Harvey Co. government is also open to alternative septic options such as composting toilets. A progressive gem in the middle of the prairie.

Newton Refuses Few Recyclables
BY Christina M. Woods
The Wichita Eagle

Newton, believed to be the only community in Kansas that fines people for not recycling, is out to recycle even more.

Beginning today, residents are expected to add books, sticky notes and cat litter bags to the list of things they have to recycle.

Those who throw out a shampoo bottle, cereal box or crumpled gift wrap face written warnings, $50 fines or possible appearances in municipal court.

Recycling has been mandatory in Newton since 1999.

"If we have to do it, I don't understand why Wichita doesn't have to do it," said Diane Vernon of Newton. "You guys produce 10 times the junk we do."

In Newton, the city runs the recycling program. In Sedgwick County, recycling is left up to private companies and volunteer groups.

Newton residents recycle about 25 percent of their trash, not counting grass and leaves that are mulched or composted.

Sedgwick County doesn't know what percent of its trash residents recycle because trash is hauled by private companies.

The Sedgwick County Commission has talked about increasing recycling, but has put off decisions about a new recycling program until it decides whether to build a local landfill -- a debate that's been going on for nearly a decade.

In Kansas, 129 curbside recycling programs exist. Newton is believed to be the only one that fines residents for not recycling.

"Newton is the exception to the rule in Kansas," said Chiquita Cornelius, director of the Business and Industry Recycling Program in Topeka, which advises communities on recycling programs.

"I was surprised when they took that approach," she said. "In this part of the United States, mandates don't go over well. People don't like being told what they have to do."

City officials say they receive few complaints.

Vernon, of Newton, said her only concern with the city's latest mandate is storage space. She doesn't have a garage.

Paper from envelopes, books, gift wrap, greeting cards, charcoal bags and shredders are a few of the new items required to be recycled. Vernon already has a box in her living room for newspapers. But she doesn't want cereal boxes, egg cartons or toilet tissue tubes stacked in her living room.

"We'll make it work, I suppose," she said.

Newton's compliance rate with recycling is close to 100 percent, according to Randy Jackson, Newton's street and sanitation superintendent.

Trash haulers issue about 220 warnings a month to residents who are caught throwing away recyclable items, he said.

About 27 cases were forwarded to municipal court in 2005, according to Jackson. Residents pay $18 a month for trash and recycling service.

Most Newton residents polled Tuesday said they are pleased with the city's recycling program.

"I think we should be recycling even more than what we are," said Robert Swickard of Newton. "Styrofoam is one of the biggest abusers on the earth."

Newton does not recycle Styrofoam.

Stutzman Refuse Disposal recycling center holds the city's recycling contract.

The community collects about 5 tons of aluminum products and 70 tons of paper products monthly, according to Steve Sawatzky, the recycling center's supervisor. That amount is expected to increase beginning today.

"They've put a lot of teeth in their recycling bylaws," he said. "It hasn't always made happy customers, but it has helped in achieving the goals set out for the area."

Marge Roberson, chairwoman of the Harvey County Commission, said the changes allow people to put all of their paper products in one recycling bin instead of separating them like before.

"We are committed to not only recycling but to finding better ways than just poking our trash into the ground," she said.

Harvey County mandated recycling in 1999 to reduce the amount of trash the county was shipping to distant landfills. Newton was the only community that decided to enforce that mandate through fines.

The main concern people seem to have about the change is figuring out how to keep the wind from blowing the recyclables down the street.

The recycling containers for mixed paper have no lids.

"It's not too hard to figure out," Swickard said. "All it takes is a piece of plywood and a rock."

County Commissioner Roberson said she commends Newton for setting an example for surrounding cities.

"We're making it easier," she said, "for people to do the right thing."

Wichita: Final Friday, 02-24-06

2006-02-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

I took in the Wichita Final Friday Gallery Crawl this weekend. Some of the gallery spaces were impressive, but unfortunately not much of the art followed suit. The galleries in bold type showed work which I enjoyed at least a bit.

FINAL FRIDAY - FEBRUARY 24, 2006

ABODE Home, 1330 E. Douglas
Featured Artist: Chris Frank and Brian Hinkle - Assistant Curator The Wichita Center for the Arts
Exhibition Date: February 24, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 2006, 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Regular Hours: Open everyday 10-6, Thursdays 10-8, Sunday 12-5
Contact: 267-1330

Allen-Lee Gallery, 348 N. Washington (1 Building South of 3rd St. on the East side of Washington)
Exhibition: Random Artists
Exhibition Dates: Friday, February 24, 2006 to Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 9am - 4pm
Contact: (316) 267-0167
Questions or after hours appointments call: Monika Stockton (316) 644-1124
allenleegallery@yahoo.com

Artists in Old Town, 412 E. Douglas, Suite C. (behind Gallery XII)
Exhibition: Paula Smith - "Americana"
Gallery Members: Rosemary Dugan, Maureen Walter, Judy Dove, Rita Beuttel, Judy Hull, Becky Price, Harry and Mary Ellen Williford
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:30 - 10:00 p.m.
To see studios, check on classes or see exhibits call 262-2435 to see when they are open or just stop by.
For further information you may call 262-2435 and leave a message or call Judy Dove, 721-4720, Rosemary Dugan, 722-2255, or Maureen Walter, 744-2175.

The Art Syndicate, 917 W. Douglas
GRAND OPENING: February 24, 2006, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Regular Hours: 10:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m. Sunday thru Saturday

Beyond Web Design, 501 E. Douglas
Featured Artists: Nicolette Pérez, Justin Epp, El Feyler, Mary Streepy, Shawn Freeman and others
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.
The show is free to the public, and refreshments will be served.
For more info, email finalfriday@bwdllc.com.

CityArts, 334 N. Mead
Exhibition: Fortunes in Art: Year of the Golden Dog
Exhibition Date: February 16 - 25, 2006
CITY ARTS WILL BE OPEN UNTIL 8:00 ON FINAL FRIDAY
CityArts celebrates the beginning of the Chinese New Year with a show of artwork is based on fortune cookies, the theme of the golden dog, or both.

Contact: Tabitha Bean or Charla Sanderson, 462-2787
Web: www.wichitaarts.com
New Hours at CityArts: 8am - 9pm, Monday-Thursday, 8am - 8pm, Friday, 10am - 4pm, Saturday, Closed, Sunday

Commerce Gallery, 508 S. Commerce
Exhibition: Noise: "Sofa Size" New work by Lee Shiney
Exhibition Date: February 24 - March 4, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday,February 24, 6:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Contact: Chris Gulick @ 316-945-4440
Web: www.artcontractor.com and www.leeshiney.com

Artist Statement: "The challenge of this show was to create large scale pieces based on my continued focus on mechanically-assisted processes. The result is one big piece, Sequence I, a serial work 70-90 feet in length (depending on my energy level and the available linear wall space of Commerce Gallery). Think of a triptych on crack. The individual 17x24 inch pieces can stand alone, or end-to-end in multiples to form larger pieces. It's a work in progress; more pieces will continually be added to the series. And, it's a return to the "green art" style from my earlier Detritus show, using found pallet lumber and used fencing, and cast-off latex paint."

Fiberstudio, 418 Commerce
Exhibition: paintings by: MARK FLICKINGER and Jewelry by Elfie Lacio
Exhibition Date: February 24 - March 23, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
live music by: GARY GACKSTATTER and 5-MAN TRIO
Resident artists: Marilyn Grisham, Lynda Beck, Nancy Whitaker, Jan Woolery,and Virginia Simmons
The Fiber Studio is open the last Friday of every month, and all other days by appointment, or by chance (ring the bell).
Contact: Marilyn Grisham at (316) 303-1996 or fiberstudio1@sbcglobal.net

Firehouse Gallery, 1402 W. Douglas
Exhibition: Women, Sex, and Art
Featured Artists: Amanda Dickson, Kate Johnson, Danielle Kling, Cynthia Martinez, and Megahn Regnier.
Exhibition Date: February 13 - 24, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Contact: Kelly Moody at (316) 265-6928
web: www.firehouseartgallery.com

Fisch Haus Studios, 524 S. Commerce
Exhibition: Front Room Series: Ryan Drake
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 -10:00 p.m.
Contact: Elizabeth Stevenson at (316) 263-6770 or info@fischhaus.com
Web: www.fischhaus.com

Additional info: This month, we're debuting our new Front Room Series (in, obviously, our front
gallery). These exhibitions will be presented in a more manageable format than our usual full gallery shows; designed mainly to facilitate the exhibition of work by emerging regional artists, but also open to mid-career artists who are interested in mounting smaller shows. The first artist in the series is local painter and printmaker Ryan Drake, premiering this Final Friday, February 24th, from 7-10 p.m. See you there!

The Frame Guild, 506 E. Douglas
Exhibition: Taxonomy: Kathleen Shanahan
Exhibition Date: February 24 - April 26, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:00 - 9:00
Contact: Trish Higgins @ tlhiggins@sbcglobal.net

Additional info: On friday February 24, The Frame Guild at 506 E. Douglas will open an exhibition of paintings by Kathleen Shanahan titled “Taxonomy”. Shanahan’s new paintings are vertical diptychs that resemble totums; stacked and juxtaposed images from nature with symbols of varied cultures. They are executed in intense, edgy color.

The frame shop/gallery is in a classical revival-style building built in 1913 by Bunny Mead whose own father James R. Mead was a Wichita founding father. Leader Dry Goods was the first tenant. The building was transformed easily and beautifully into gallery space with its 20ft. ceilings, original brick walls and combination of available and artificial light.

“Taxonomy”, paintings by Kathleen Shanahan, will open with a reception friday, February 24 from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition will hang through April 26. Regular hours at The Frame Guild are monday through friday 10:00 am to 5:30 pm and10:00 am to 2:00 pm on saturday. For more information about the exhibit call Trish Higgins at 316.612.1604 or Pam at 316.684.1361.

GALLERY XII, 412 E. Douglas, Wichita, KS 67202
Exhibition: Rosemary Dugan
Guest Consignment Artist; David Self
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:30 - 10:00
Regular Hours: Monday - Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Contact: Doug Billings at (316) 267-5915 or art00756@usadatanet.net
WEB SITE: www.wichitagallery12.com

Additional info: Rosemary's new works will include a series of small pastel landscapes of local Kansas scenes. She works in a very impressionistic style with strong textured marks and a bright color palette.

Along with Rosemary, Gallery XII will be exhibiting, for the first time, the enamel works of Brian Hinkle. Brian is on staff at the Wichita Center for the Arts as the assistant Gallery Director and as an instructor in painting and enameling.
Gallery XII Membership 2005:
Carole Branda (Acrylic Painter), Doug Billings (Printmaker), Judy Dove (Multimedia Artist), Rosemary Dugan (Pastels), Ruth Finnell (Pastels), Hermine Greywall (Acrylic Painter), Ann Horton (Pastel & Watercolor), Judy Millard (Oil Painter), Jo Ann Ray (Multimedia Painter), Carole Ranney (Pastel & Watercolor), Jean Shellito (Watercolor), Betty Sieler (Watercolor & Drawings), Maureen Walter (Multimedia Painter), Martha Wherry (Multimedia Artist), Mary Ellen Williford (Pastels), Cathy Fiorelli (Prints & Paintings), Marjorie Mueller (Oil Painter)

The Wichita Downtown Development Corp will once again be running the Trolley which will transport people free of charge to many of the art galleries participating in Final Friday, including Gallery XII.

During Final Friday (6:30-10:00 pm) both parking lots to the east of the building are now available to our guests. Also, the Wichita Downtown Development Corp will be running its trolley during the event. Maps are available at most of the participating galleries.

Lawrence Photo, Inc., 401 E. Douglas, Suite 100
Exhibition: Iraq & I Throw
Featured Artists:
M.Sgt. Maurice Hessel , McConnell AFB Staff Photographer
David Long, Professor Bethel College
Exhibition Date: February 24 - March 27, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
Regular Hours: Monday thru Friday 9:00 - 5:30 and Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Contact: Paul Hudson @ (316) 267-3700 or lawrencephoto@sbcglobal.net

Additional Info:

M.Sgt. Maurice Hessel from McConnell AFB will be showing his photographic work from his recent deployment in Iraq. The night of the reception will also feature additional images presented in a multimedia format.

David Long will be showing 16 of his most recent salt glazed ceramic works (our first showing of 3-diminsional work.)

This show will both excite the senses and bring a sense of the human element to the war in Iraq.

Marquee Motorcars, LC, 2938 E. Douglas ( at the corner of Douglas and Chautauqua)
Featured Artists: Amy Herd, Sarah Herd and Johnny Sutton.
Reception Date: Final Friday, January 27, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Contact: Malea Barrier @ (316) 219-4772

Monica’s Bundt Cake Co., 1328 E. Douglas Avenue (same block as the Spice Merchant on the South side of Douglas)
Exhibition: Oil paintings featuring children’s book illustrations by Carlene H. Williams will be on display. See work from the “Santa’s Stray” series, “Alice in Wonderland”, and others. Linnette Lee of Fresh Paint will display her acrylic paintings.
Exhibition Dates: Friday, February 24, 2006 to Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Shop Hours: Monday – Friday 9am – 5:30 pm; Saturday 9am – 4:00 pm . Closed Sunday
Contact: (316) 630-9555
Questions or after hour appointments call: Monica Schlegel 316-630-9555 and leave a message.

The Photographer's Gallery, 1007 West Douglas (in the historic Delano District)
Exhibition: Earl Ward, John Ellert, Vernon McGee, LeAnn Anspaugh and Ron Beeton
Exhibition Date: February 20 - March 25, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Bonus Event – Live-Model shoot set to demonstrate Gallery’s photo studio
Contact: Dave Higdon @ 316-262-4634 or 316-371-4634 or AIRSCRIBE@cox.net
Web: www.davehigdon.com
Additional info: In his first-ever public exhibit, artful Jeff Delp turns his lens toward nature, capturing scenery and landscape in a way that’s almost abstract in its appearance.

And The Photographers' Gallery also plans a live model shoot to demonstrate the capabilities of the in-house studio thanks to the efforts of professional photographer Mike Mathia.

Joining the new photographers exhibiting in The Photographers' Gallery are veterans Earl Ward, John Ellert, Vernon McGee, LeAnn Anspaugh and Ron Beeton, four photographers with their own distinct styles. All five have updated their exhibits with new images, as has resident photographer Dave Higdon

This new exhibition at The Photographers’ starts Feb. 20 and runs through March 25, when four new photographers will debut their first shows at The Gallery during the March Final Friday show.

In a first for a Final Friday, the Arts Trolley will expand its service west along Douglas as far as Seneca allowing fans of the Final Friday Gallery Crawl access to participating galleries in the Historic Delano District. The Photographers' Gallery is proud to be among the three Delano businesses sponsoring the Delano expansion of the Final Friday Trolley. We hope Final Friday participants will use the trolley to also visit sponsoring exhibitors Melange Jewelry and The Vagabond on their way to The Photographers' Gallery.

The Photographers’ Gallery is Wichita’s most unique venue for photography, featuring a fully equipped studio for the creation of photos, professional digital scanning and printing services, and a gallery devoted exclusively to the exhibition of photographers’ images. The studio and print services are available to the public at very competitive prices. Space in the Gallery is offered to photographers on a lease basis free of the steep commissions gallery operators typically levy on sales of exhibited works.

Steckline Gallery
Newman University, DeMattias Hall, 3100 McCormick Ave.
Exhibition: Figure In Space: A Sculpture Exhibit
Featured Artists: Ted Adler, Stephen Atwood, Barry Badgett, Ted Krone, Sean Corner, Susan de Wit, Marc Durfee, Dan Jensen, Beth Van Natta, Ann Zerger
Exhibition Date: February 24, 2006 – March 17, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 2006, 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Regular Hours: Monday - Friday 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Contact: Pam Bugler @ (316) 94 -4291 ext. 2480 or buglerp@newmanu.edu

Tangent Lab, 209 East William Street, Sutton Place, Second Floor.
Exhibition: A Lesson Never Learned New work by: Ian Stewart and Heather Von Feldt
Exhibition Date: February 10 - 24, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 7:00 - Midnight
Regular hours: Weekly by appointment only - email brad@tangentlab.com
Visit: www.tangentlab.com for more information.

WHERE IS THIS PLACE???: Turn South onto Broadway from Douglas. Continue going south on Broadway until you reach William. Turn West on William. Sutton Place will be on your left (south) side. The gallery is located on the second floor.

Wichita Art Museum, 1400 West Museum Boulevard
Exhibition: Successions: Prints By African American Artists from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection Organized by The Art Gallery, the Department of Art History and Archeology, and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. It is made possible by major support from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, University of Maryland, College Park. The Wichita venue is made possible in part by the City of Wichita, the Sam and Rie Bloomfield Foundation, the Sedgwick County Government, the Friends of the Wichita Art Museum, Inc. and KMUW, Wichita Public Radio.
Featured Artists: Romare Bearden, Lou Stovall, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett and many more
Exhibition Date: February 12, 2006 – June 4, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 2006, 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Regular Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m, Sunday Noon - 5 p.m.
Contact: Ashle Stratton, 316-268-4985
Web: www.wichitaartmuseum.org

Additional Info: The Final Friday of February will feature funk, food, and fine art at the Wichita Art Museum. The schedule for the evening is as follows:
5:00 p.m. - Doors Open
5:30 p.m. - Ikenga Drumming Group
6 - 8 p.m. - Soul Injection

The galleries will be open throughout the evening, and light hors ‘d oeuvres and a cash bar will be available. Together with The Kansas African American Museum, we also welcome master printmaker Lou Stovall as our special guest that evening. Collectors Jean and Robert Steele will also be in attendance. WAM, TKAAM and YPW members: Free, non-members: $3.

WSU Shift Space, 326 S. Commerce St.
Exhibition: WSU Shift Space 5: 2nd Annual WSU Sculpture Guild Juried Exhibition
Exhibition Date: February 24 - March 11, 2006
Reception Date: Final Friday, February 24, 6:00 - 10:00 p.m.

Additional info:
WSU Shift Space, in conjunction with the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, presents WSU Shift Space 4: Still/Moving/Object Explored, an exhibition of recent directions in photography and video by faculty and students in the WSU School of Art & Design. The work of exhibiting artists Chad Case, John Hammer, Kate Johnson, Cory Medina, Kyras Norman, Linda Robinson, Sarah Turner, Aaron Vague, and Robert Bubp will range from black-and-white photography to installations incorporating video, found objects, and drawing.

Contact:
Joey Capadona (316)680-6958, j.capadona@sbcglobal.net
Robert Bubp, (316) 978-7704, robert.bubp@wichita.edu
Conan Y. Fugit, (316) 207-7967, cyfugit@gmail.com
WSU School of Art & Design, (316) 978-5418

The gallery will be open Thursdays 4-7, Fridays 4-9, and Saturdays 12-5 through March 11.

For more information, call the WSU School of Art & Design at 978-3555 or visit www.shiftspace.blogs.com. Support for WSU Shift Space is provided by the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, Belford Electric, and Wichita State University.

I(finally)Pod

2006-02-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

Today I received, via UPS, my new 5th generation, 60 GB, video iPod. The greatest part? I only paid $25 for it! No kidding. I was definitely a skeptic that the system could work.

After careful research, wise advice and much hesitation, I took the plunge and signed up for one of those "Free iPod*" scams. Only this time the scam was on them. :) I outsmarted their system and didn't get ripped off as they planned. Instead I got a $399 iPod for $25 and a lot of stress!

I wouldn't recommend that you run off and sign up for your own free ___________ that they're now offering. If you're really serious about it, send me an email and I'll help you out with some advice. It takes planning and attention to detail. Careful reading and making deadlines are everything. The closest I came to getting scammed was almost clicking on a hidden link and getting charged $35 for it. But I decided to read the fine print first and saved my pocketbook.

I'm also quite good at canceling accounts--AOL, Rhapsody, PeoplePC (Earthlink). They all use the friendly Indian customer service agents (with obviously fake names like Marilyn and Randy!). Those folks are amazing at verbal sparring. Truly amazing! But I still beat them in the end.

I love getting things for cheap, and so this iPod means so much more to me than just breaking down and buying it. If you don't love the thrill of beating the system as much as I do, you should probably just fork over $379 on Amazon. Save yourself the hours of waiting on hold.