gendering halloween costumes

I'm not a fan of the ho-riffic Halloween costume for women. There's no need for any female to dress like a trick, especially when she's a kid.

This cartoon from Sociological Images sums up my point quite nicely.

quotable

To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness & the world's deep hunger. -Frederick Buechner

sweet dreams

"Sweet Deams" by Kirsten Lepore was named for a Special Jury Award at SXSW 2009.

The film follows the sugar-coated journey of a cupcake who longs to head out on the open sea. When he finally scrapes together the courage to set out, it isn’t long before he is marooned on a lone island. I won’t spoil the ending for you...

instruction manual for life

Why does everyone have to have the same cupboard? This seemingly simple question sparks the journey of one kid who grew up under the influence of intolerant and fearful parents.
Via Matador Travel

consuming kids: the commercialization of childhood

Consider this -- prior to 1981, children's spending rose 4% each year. Since Reagan's deregulation, children's spending has risen by 35% yearly. That's no accident. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not place limits on advertising and marketing to children.

Marketers have created entirely new segments of consumers (tweens, and other age-compressed categories) using sophisticated techniques (the nag factor) to ensure cradle-to-grave mindshare. The trouble is, kids (especially young children) don't have the ability to differentiate between advertising and the truth.

It's bigger than sugary cereal and soda in schools. It is more sophisticated than simple product placement or a toy in a Happy Meal. It is Webkins, an online environment that is only accessible after a child or parent purchases a $15 toy with an access code. And movies whose sole purpose is to spin off a merchandising empire. And the emergence of the luxury clothing market for kids (baby Pumas, Dior kids jeans, Abercrombie Kids sweaters) who will outgrow the item before it's even worn in. And mani/ pedis for six year-olds. And ho-rrific dolls with bling in miniskirts that all but reveal the doll's anatomically incorrect ass. And the GIA's slumber party in a box that gets girl "agents" to gather market data on their friends in exchange for a free product.

Beyond this, many of the messages (and their implications) are quite troubling. Our culture is increasingly embracing the idea that you are what you own. While it's fine to have and appreciate nice things, a child's self-worth shouldn't be driven by the designer labels her parents can afford to buy for her. Others play up narcissim and entitlement. It gets even uglier when the message is about appearance/ body types/ beauty and sexualizes girls in a way that short-circuits childhood's innocence and creates unhealthy body image. The message to girls is what you wear, how you look, and how sexy you are determine how valuable you are. The message to boys is that "real men" only use violence, power, and domination to solve differences.

But it begins much earlier. Researchers are finding that edutainment (Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, Leapfrog) doesn't work. Putting a kid in front of an electronic screen just teaches that kid to watch more. It is no substitute for face-to-face interaction and the tactile manipulation of objects in order to learn. Free and unstructured time and play are essential to the cognitive, physical, and emotional well-being of children. Creative play, which has declined by 94% among 9-12 year olds in the past decade, is the foundation of learning, problem solving, and empathy. But kids are being sold on the idea that they can't just play pirates or wizards, they have to own the official accoutrements from Pirates of the Caribbean or Harry Potter. The fundamental message is that kids need to have something outside themselves in order to play. That is tragic. It is also creating a future generation of superconsumers with ADD, diabetes, and hypertension. Juliet Schor's research found that the more media (TV, video games, internet) a child consumed, the more likely that child was to suffer from depression or anxiety.

I recently watched the "Consuming Kids" video series, which looks at how marketers target kids, both for their own spending power and for their influence over parents’ spending. I came away outraged. Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing and already know a fair amount about techniques and market segments. But this seven-part series is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.

musical youth, mashed up

My love of music defies genres. So it makes sense that I dig mashups. A few years ago, my neighbor Zach introduced me to the joys of Party Ben and the Kleptones. As soon as I heard Closer to the Boxer, I was hooked. The song includes tons of samples, and it seamlessly blends The Cure, Simon and Garfunkel, and DJ Asheru.

Other faves:

the sounds of my childhood

I got my love of music from my father. His tastes, like mine, are eclectic. My dad will listen to almost anything, and his collection ranges from folk to soul to rock to pop to country to world to gospel. For as long as I can remember, music has played in the background wherever my father is.

Over the years, I've spent countless hours with his records, tapes, CDs, and reel-to-reels, getting a musical education that defied classification. The Beatles and the Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Diana Ross and the Supremes, June Carter and Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys and BB King, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye, Willie Nelson and the Byrds, Waylon Jennings and ABBA, Don McLean and Roberta Flack, Parliament and Elton John ... all of these are the sounds of my childhood.

There were also concerts, usually at the county fair. By the time I got to high school, my dad started letting me go to concerts with friends (and a responsible adult). Once I reached adulthood, music and live shows were a staple. I've enjoyed festivals like Bonnaroo and have many happy memories of wonderful performances. And a few years ago, I decided to surprise my dad and take him to a concert that we would both never forget.

Once the dates were announced, I called and asked him if he could be in San Diego to join me for a surprise nighttime event. He asked what he should wear, I suggested that he dress for a ball game. When the day arrived, I told him that we were going to a concert and that I was pretty sure he'd like it. He gamely smiled and we headed off to SDSU. Once we walked into the arena and he realized that we were seeing Simon and Garfunkel's 2003 reunion tour, his eyes went wide and his smile got even wider.

There was no opening band, and we were on our feet (along with the rest of the crowd) for about 90 minutes when Paul and Art finally took a break. We were both surprised when the Everly Brothers took the stage for nearly half an hour before Paul and Art came back and rocked for another 90 minutes. My dad clapped his hands and grinned the whole night, thanking me repeatedly for the surprise. I responded honestly -- I had great time, too and never would've been there if it weren't for his old records and love of good music.

toxic exposures and the secret history of the war on cancer

***Update: My test results came back negative. The good scientists at John's Hopkins are 97% certain that I do not have genetic abnormalities consistent with VHL.

Six years ago last Friday, surgeons carved my right kidney out of my body, removing malignant cells that, left untreated, would have led to certain death. The tumors that my doctors later biopsied indicated that I had the most common form of kidney cancer - clear cell. My medical record was updated to read "T1N0M0".

After absorbing the shock of my diagnosis and proceeding to my straightforward and relatively easy treatment (I say that because I have many friends who endured much worse in their battles with cancer), I was left with two key questions:

1. Why did this happen?
   
2. And how do I keep it from happening again?

To answer these questions, I had to learn a great deal more about my cancer. The American Cancer Society's Cancer Facts & Figures 2009 will tell you that kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer in the US; the five-year survival rate is about 67%. It will also provide trend data for who the "typical" kidney cancer patient is.

The American Society for Clinical Oncology explains how cells mutate and the role that genes play:

Genes control how a cell functions, including how quickly it grows, how often it divides, and how long it lives. To control these functions, genes produce proteins that perform specific tasks and act as messengers for the cell. Therefore, it is essential that each gene have the correct instructions or "code" for making its protein so that the protein can perform the proper function for the cell.

Cancer begins when one or more genes in a cell are mutated (changed), creating an abnormal protein or no protein at all. The information provided by an abnormal protein is different from that of a normal protein, which can cause cells to multiply uncontrollably and become cancerous.

A person may either be born with a genetic mutation in all of their cells (germline mutation) or acquire a genetic mutation in a single cell during his or her lifetime. An acquired mutation is passed on to all cells that develop from that single cell (called a somatic mutation). Most kidney cancers (about 95%) are considered sporadic, meaning that the damage to the genes occurs by chance after a person is born. Inherited kidney cancers are less common (about 5%) and occur when gene mutations are passed within a family, from one generation to the next.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has correlated environmental factors (smoking, obesity, and occupational hazards such as asbestos, cadmium, organic solvents, and petroleum) with kidney cancer, yet stops short of proclaiming causality. (Agent Orange is another suspect substance.) You'll notice that although researchers can characterize the abnormal growth and correlate the incidence of cancer with genetics and some substances, they can't tell us with certainty what causes it. Part of that is because more research needs to occur, but can't because industry and government make it difficult for that research to take place (see the article below).

Barbara Ehrenrich's amazing essay, Welcome to Cancerland, forever changed how I think about the role of the environment in my health. It also set me down a path to try and answer the Why and How questions I grappled with immediately after diagnosis. But like most cancer patients, I'll probably never know exactly what caused my body to turn on itself when I was 28. However, unlike most cancer patients, I've gotten a step closer to knowing if my genes are the reason for my illness.

A few months ago, I saw a genetic counselor. I chose to do so because Leo and I hope to start a family soon. I wanted to know the risk factors for certain hereditary conditions. Most of all, I wanted to know if my cancer was something that I could pass on to our children. Over the years, I've casually researched the topic and given up the hope of ever finding out if there was a genetic basis for my cancer, in short because every time I broached the topic with medical professionals, they would immediately tell me that I'd already had kidney cancer, so they already knew I was at a higher risk for having it. With this context, you can only imagine how dumbfounded I was when, after asking me a series of questions, the genetic counselor asked if I had heard of Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome (VHL) and suggested that I be tested for it.

Last week, the counselor called me back to let me know that my HMO had agreed for me to be tested for VHL because it is the most common cause of clear cell kidney cancer (and a host of other life-threatening issues). Setting aside the interesting Hatfield-McCoy connection, it's some seriously scary stuff. If I do have it, those same skeptical medical professionals will now need to routinely screen me for a whole host of other medical issues that have nothing to do with my cancer history. Also, if I do have the VHL genetic mutation, there's a 50% chance that I'll pass it along to my children.

Setting VHL aside, I'm still unsure if the mutation that caused my cancer (whether it occurred in me or started in my parents or grandparents) happened because of something I ate, drank, breathed, or absorbed. All of this puts me back at square one in this maddening, dizzying recursive loop of what triggered the chain of events that led to my current health.

So ... I'm back to casually researching the connections between cancer and our environment and disgusted to see how, for the past century, our government and industry have failed to act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer. Read on to learn more about the ugly toxic exposures and the secret history of the war on cancer ...

Theories of cancer: How paradigms shift and culprits change in the fight against the disease, and what concerned citizens can do about it
Sandra Steingraber -- From The Times Literary Supplement
January 30, 2008

Devra Davis
SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER
505pp. Basic Books. £16.99.
978 0 465 01566 5

Phil Brown
TOXIC EXPOSURES
Contested illnesses and the environmental health movement
356pp. New York: Columbia University Press. £19 (US $29.50).
978 0 231 12948 0

One advantage of being a long-time cancer survivor – besides the obvious – is that it provides a front-row seat in the auditorium of ideas about the disease’s causation. Theories go in and out of fashion over the years, paradigms shift this way and that, and the patient is viewed differently by the medical community depending on which idea is currently on top.

I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1979, when I was twenty years old and just at the beginning of my career as a biologist. At that time, US newspaper headlines featured Love Canal, the upstate New York community whose residents had been evacuated a year earlier when 20,000 tons of industrial chemicals were discovered buried under their basements. Toxic-waste activism in the United States was in the ascendant, the newly formed US Environmental Protection Agency was committed and passionate, and major environmental legislation had been recently enacted by Congress to defend clean air and clean water in the name of human health.

After breaking the bad news from the pathology lab, my urologist asked me about tyres: automobile tyres. Had I ever vulcanized tyres? His second question was about textile dyes. Any exposure to the colour yellow? And had I ever worked in the aluminium industry?

Back at the university, I began to research the causes of bladder cancer. Indeed, there were data on dyes and bladder cancer going back to the nineteenth century. In fact, there was absolute proof that certain textile dyes caused bladder cancer in humans. And yet, mysteriously, this evidence had not resulted in the abolition of these chemicals from the economy. Other suspected bladder carcinogens, for which the evidence was highly troubling, if not outright damning, were produced and used by the industries in my home town. The National Cancer Institute was generating maps of cancer mortality in an attempt to unveil other possible environmental carcinogens that could explain rising rates of cancer.

And then Ronald Reagan was elected President, and everything changed. No one asked me any more about my possible environmental exposures. In fact, by the mid-1980s, I was hard-pressed to find the word “carcinogen” in any pamphlet on cancer that I collected from my doctors’ various offices. Meanwhile, in the medical literature, the search for cancer clusters that might point towards environmental contributors became a disparaged practice. The new focus of the National Cancer Institute was on “lifestyle” explanations for cancer.

As a young adult I hadn’t really had enough time to develop bad habits. In fact, I was a vegetarian who ran four miles a day. Thus there was no explanation for my situation. “Some kind of fluke”, said one of my doctors. Wherever I lived, I dutifully submitted to cancer check-ups. By the 1990s, the new explanation for cancer was genetic, and I started receiving lots of questions from young intake doctors about my family history. I had fun with this. I would describe in detail my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer, my various uncles with prostate and colon cancers, and – the crowning point – my aunt who died of the same kind of bladder cancer that I had. The young doctors took furious notes. I would always pause a few beats before adding, “Oh yeah. And I’m adopted”. (There is no evidence for a hereditary link to bladder cancer. And there never has been.)

Today, I’m a forty-eight-year-old professor in Ithaca, New York, and during my last renal ultrasound, the technician asked me casually if I’d ever worked with textile dyes. I suppose Al Gore should get the credit: the environment is once again on the collective radar screen.

Two new books expose and explicate the ongoing social contest that is at the heart of our shifting understanding about cancer. They are both important and deserve to be read together. Devra Davis’s book examines the historical forces at work when doubt is cast on the environmental evidence. Phil Brown’s book explores the opposing social movements that are struggling to rescue this evidence and to bring about public health policy change based on it.

Devra Davis’s Secret History of the War on Cancer is a big, sprawling book whose argument is more implicit than it should be. Her autobiographical style – which served her so well in her earlier treatise on public health, When Smoke Ran Like Water – often gets in the way of her analysis here. Nevertheless, Davis, who directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an epidemiologist and public-health scientist at the top of her game. In her new book, she reveals what she knows about the interlocking structures of government and corporate interests, and how these relationships have affected the social construction of knowledge about cancer. Davis deserves to be taken seriously as a former adviser to the World Health Organization, a public-health servant in both the Carter and the Clinton Administrations, and the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology in the National Academy of Sciences.

The basic thesis of this book is that 1.5 million lives have been lost, because Americans failed to act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer. This failure has been created by at least eight different factors, both acting together and independently of each other. The first is the cowardice of research scientists, who publish thoroughly referenced reports but pull their punches at the end, by claiming that more research needs to be done before action can be taken. Statements like these are then exploited by those who profit from the status quo. Like the cigarette industry during the 1960s, the chemical industry has learned how to buy time and create wholesale public doubt from small data gaps and remaining scientific uncertainties.

Meanwhile, Davis argues, regulatory agencies have become unresponsive to new scientific evidence altogether. Hamstrung by small-government-is-better reforms of the Reagan Administration, environmental and public agencies shrank even as the science began pointing to the need for more regulation. As for the government agencies and charities whose mission it is to eradicate cancer, these institutions, too, have had meaningful work on cancer prevention compromised by corporate interests. Throughout the 1980s, for example, the chief executive officer of Occidental Petroleum served as the chair of the National Cancer Institute’s advisory board. Ultimately, the so-called War on Cancer is not really a war at all, argues Davis, but a cunning re-enactment.

The evolutionary history of epidemiology itself has also played a role in muffling the evidence for environmental harm. With its necessary focus on workers – who are exposed to the highest amounts of suspected carcinogens – epidemiologists require access to industry. The price for access, too often, is the promise of secrecy. Having struck a Faustian bargain, occupational epidemiologists can have – and have had – their funds withdrawn if they go public with their results.

A further factor involves the court system. Davis shows brilliantly the ways in which various kinds of scientific evidence – such as animal research – have been gradually declared inadmissible in legal cases, thanks to clever lawyering. “Basically”, says Davis, “before you can collect damages, you must get cancer or some other awful disease, show that someone else already got it from the same things you did, prove that you had specific exposures to a particular agent, find the firm that caused your harm and can now pay for it, and prove that they knew the exposure was harmful.”

The last two factors involve outright harassment of researchers, including Davis herself, and plain old terrible timing, which has occurred at least twice in the last century, as when major treatises on the environmental contributors to cancer were released, first on the brink of the First World War, and then again right before the Second World War. Indeed, Davis’s crowning achievement with this book is her resuscitation of old publications, along with secret memos and various other original manuscripts, which show how much we used to know about the role that chemical exposures play in the burden of cancer. Some of these were subsequently doctored to serve particular purposes.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer is a remarkable piece of sleuthing from one of our most brave and knowledgeable scientists, on a topic that affects millions. Having closed Davis’s book, one should immediately open Phil Brown’s Toxic Exposures, which focuses on the ways in which environmental- health activists and their advocates in science are challenging the carcinogen-deniers that Davis writes about. Like Devra Davis, Brown, a medical sociologist at Brown University, has been a researcher in the field of environmental health for several decades, beginning with his groundbreaking work on the Woburn cancer cluster, made famous in the Hollywood movie A Civil Action. His new book represents many years of work. Toxic Exposures can be read as a guidebook for those wishing to understand the environmental-health movement, which, according to Brown, is the Civil Rights movement of our times. As he demonstrates, almost all cases of cancer clusters and contaminated communities, from Love Canal onwards, have been discovered by citizen activists – not by scientists, nor government agencies. This is because no governmental agency or scientific body engages in routine surveillance that would uncover sentinel health events. It is also because cancer registries, which could function as early-warning systems, publish their results in obscure almanacs and do not actively investigate communities where cancer rates are elevated. Often, as Brown notes, these communities are never even informed that their cancer rates are statistically excessive.

But, in the cases where citizens have engaged in their own lay epidemiology and have become environmental detectives in their own communities, new avenues of scientific research have been made possible, which, in turn, have spurred on better environmental decisions. When sympathetic scientists work hand in hand with these activists, new forms of knowledge are created that challenge the lifestyle and hereditary foci of conventional epidemiology.

In one my favourite examples from the book, Brown describes how science alone failed to produce regulations sufficient to reduce lead poisoning among children. It was only the efforts of black and Latino rights groups – most notably the Black Panthers and the Young Lords – in the 1960s that finally led to the social changes necessary to get lead away from children’s brains. Once that happened, science had the human experiment it needed to prove that exposures to an environmental toxicant at levels once considered acceptable and unavoidable were not safe or necessary after all.

Brown’s book systematically examines citizen-science alliances in three disease areas: breast cancer, asthma and Gulf War Syndrome as reported by US veterans of the first Iraq war. While individual readers who are not sociologists will no doubt be drawn, by personal experience, to one of the three, all offer important lessons about the construction of scientific knowledge. It was fascinating to learn, for example, how environmental -justice activists working on asthma clusters in urban areas are now forcing scientists to investigate the health effects of very fine particles, which are not yet regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the end, Phil Brown’s analysis of contested illnesses makes a strong case for better health tracking to monitor diseases, and better chemicals tracking to monitor the flow of hazardous substances in consumer goods, in the jet stream, in our groundwater, and in our tuna-fish sandwiches. Toxic Exposures also makes clear that neither will happen without citizen participation in the scientific process.

Sandra Steingraber is the author of Living Downstream: An ecologist looks at cancer and the environment, 1997, and Having Faith: An ecologist's journey to motherhood, 2001.

the princess problem

I'm decidedly anti-princess. Hopefully, I'll never have a daughter who lives for Disney.

Enough With the Princesses! Forget about whether the new Disney princess is black or white. The problem is with princesses. Period.
By: Monique Fields
Posted: June 2, 2009 at 6:59 AM

There was Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Tiana arrives this fall in the first Disney film featuring a black American princess.

Set in 1920s New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog tells the story of a young waitress and gifted chef who dreams of following her father’s lead and owning a restaurant. The trailer can be viewed online [1] or on the big screen in the previews of Disney Pixar’s Up, which opened May 29.

Tiana’s creation has been lauded as a milestone. She is a first in a long succession of Disney princesses, which began more than 70 years ago. The toys she inspires will acknowledge the beauty of young black women as children of all colors identify with Tiana.

Still, as the mother of two young girls, I fear I will be doing damage control for years after the credits roll.

In a recent New York Times article, critics railed on whether or not Tiana conquers racial stereotypes [2]. Forget about all that. The problem is with the princess mentality.

The princess mentality is pervasive in our society. Everything from baby bibs to bicycles is scrawled with the P-word. A mother has to shop long and hard to find clothing that isn’t glittery or pierced with rhinestones. Just when you think you’ve defeated the princess marketing monster, someone else shows up on your doorstep with the cutest thing ever.

I’m not the wicked stepmother when it comes to princesses. I just want a dash of reality thrown into my daughter’s entertainment from time to time.

Unlike princesses, my daughters, 4 and 2, will be disappointed. They will want something my husband and I can’t afford, or they will miss the mark for some achievement. There will be no magic wand to go poof and make their dreams come true.

While I’d like for them to run away with a prince and live happily ever after, they had better get college degrees first. All princesses need to have their own money.

Sure, they can dress up for dance recitals, prom and other events, but I’ll be sure to warn them that outward superficialities like glitter and makeup will not compensate for any deeper flaws some women try to hide.

Disney and other toymakers are selling a fantasy, pure and simple. What is troubling is when fantasy mingles with reality. Some little girls are telling anyone who will listen that they want to be princesses when they grow up. If nothing else, I expect a more ambitious and attainable goal from children who haven’t yet learned to read or write. Their goals don’t have to be engraved in their scrapbooks, but thoughts of becoming lawyers, doctors or entrepreneurs is a start.

A princess? Whatever in the world do princesses do? More importantly, how do they get paid? Real life is not a fairy tale, and few folks live happily ever after. So just what are we telling our girls when we dress them up in frilly dresses, dust them with makeup and put glitter in their hair before they really know who they are? We’re telling them outward beauty is more valuable than being responsible, trustworthy citizens who don’t always get what they want. If we aren’t clear what’s acceptable now, we’re setting them up for a time in the not-too-distant future when they want something they can’t have and have no way of dealing with rejection.

Consider this: Simone is my oldest child, and a few days ago, she rushed up to a dress in a department store and cooed, “Oooh, sparkles.”

I have what is called a girly girl—a child who only wants to wear dresses or what she calls big tutus. These days she even casts aside skirts, known to her as little tutus. Shorts and pants aren’t even part of her wardrobe. So she spotted this big tutu from afar, and it looked a lot like, well, a wedding dress—and she wanted it.

“We’re not buying today,” I told her. I distracted her with some more modest dresses, and then we walked away.

Not two minutes later, she scampered up to a counter. “Ooh, sparkles.”

This time she was in the jewelry department.

When the salesman asked if there was anything he could show me, as I arrived a good five paces behind Simone, I informed him we weren’t in the market for engagement rings and wedding bands.

Simone gladly skipped off to the next thing. She didn’t ask for or expect anything. But I shot my husband a concerned look. If she does this at 4, what is she going to be like at 14, when she may not be as easily distracted? Many girls grow out of the princess fascination, while others request the star treatment from their parents and friends for the rest of their lives.

I’m not going to wait around to find out, especially with a black princess making her debut later this year. As soon as I see an opening, the evil stepmother in me is going to pull Simone aside and tell her that princesses don’t make any money.

Monique Fields is a regular contributor to The Root.

quotable

"We know that a peaceful world cannot long exist, one-third rich and two thirds hungry." -Jimmy Carter

can't-fail parisian piecrust

Can't-fail Parisian piecrust
Marlena Spieler
Sunday, August 23, 2009

Remember T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "My sister (or parents, grandma, best friend, whoever) went to Paris and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"? But sometimes a T-shirt is just what you need; it might not be lavish, but it is a gift.

A gift means that someone was thinking of you while he was far away, thinking of you enough to buy a little something even with a bad exchange rate, thinking of you enough to stash it into a suitcase when every ounce of luggage matters. It might be just a T-shirt, but it is also a way to share a bit of the trip with you.

I thought about this because I just went to Paris, and I've brought you back a gift. You can't wear it. It took up no space whatsoever in my suitcase. But it's so wonderful, I can hardly wait to give it to you - in fact, I'm giving it to you right now because of the delicious onslaught of summery goodness that is in markets and gardens at this very minute. You'll probably want to keep it close through autumn, winter and spring, too.

My gift is the recipe for a pastry crust. It's delicious, easy, totally unthreatening. It's a crust you can whip up without thinking, a crust that will never let you down.

With such a great crust under your belt, so to speak, you can face summer with a smile, thinking of berries, peaches, nectarines and figs. Then you're ready for autumn, when persimmons, grapes, cranberries and pomegranates come into their own. You'll face the holiday baking season with confidence, with its cornucopia of pumpkin, apples, pears and nuts.

In winter, when all is gray, you'll have a delicate, buttery crust for showcasing oranges, limes and irresistible Meyer lemons. Then, it's spring, with that first pink rhubarb that's always a challenge to use. Take my advice: Make a tart.

I learned to make the crust from Paule Caillat, owner and operator of Promenades Gourmandes, which offers cooking classes and food walking tours in Paris. (For information, go to promenadesgourmandes.com.)

The Caillat crust is utterly and endlessly forgiving. It will not let you down. You can't overwork it - any bits that get scraggly can just be tossed back into the mixture.

No worries about chilling the dough or keeping your hands cool, and no worries about rolling the dough on a cool surface, because you don't roll it out at all - you just press it into a pan and bake it. You don't even need to add beans or baking weights - just prick it a bit. It obediently sets itself down, ready for the luscious fruit of any season.

The Sweet Caillat Crust

Makes one 9-inch single layer tart crust

* 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
* 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
* 3 tablespoons water
* -- Pinch salt
* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 4 tablespoons sugar

Instructions: Preheat over to 400°. Place the butter, oil, water and salt in a small saucepan and heat on high just until the butter melts and bubbles form around the edge; a slight browning will result in a slightly nutty flavor, which is delicious. You can also heat the mixture in a microwave. Set aside for a few minutes to cool.

With an electric mixer or wooden spoon, add 1 cup of the flour and all the sugar to the butter mixture; beat together, slowly adding more flour until the mixture forms a ball, then add more flour until the mixture doesn't stick to the sides of bowl or pan.

Turn dough out into a 9-inch pie pan or tart pan with a removable bottom, and press it into an even layer over the bottom and sides.

To bake completely, bake for 10-15 minutes, or until crust is golden; watch the edges so that they do not burn.

To par-bake (for accompanying tart recipe), bake 5-8 minutes, or until crust is just firm.

Remove from oven and cool, then fill as desired.
The Tart that Takes You Through the Year

Serves 8-10

You can use almost any fruit - stone fruit, berries, figs, grapes, persimmons, apples, pears, citrus, and so on. Watch the juiciness of the fruit, and adjust accordingly. The amount of sugar also depends on the sweetness of the fruit, but the more sugar the juicier the fruit will become. Also keep an eye on the tart as it bakes; tent it if it starts to overbrown.

* 1 par-baked Sweet Calliat Crust (see recipe)
* 1 cup ground almonds or hazelnuts
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 3 cups sliced nectarines and blackberries, or other fruit (see above)
* -- About 2 tablespoons butter, cut in small pieces
* -- About 1 tablespoon almond extract, Amaretto, lemon juice, framboise or anisette
* 3 tablespoons jam
* 1 tablespoon water or lemon juice

Instructions: Place the par-baked crust, still in its pan, on the counter. Preheat oven to 400°.

Combine ground almonds and 1/4 cup sugar and sprinkle into the bottom of the tart crust. Arrange the nectarines and berries in the tart shell. Sprinkle with another 1/4 cup or so sugar, or to taste. Dot the top with butter, and sprinkle with almond extract or other moistener. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until edges of crust are golden light brown and fruit is tender; watch carefully.

Combine jam and water or lemon juice in a small saucepan and heat through. Brush over top of baked tart. Let cool, then cut into wedges to serve.

Per serving: 309 calories, 3 g protein, 40 g carbohydrate, 16 g fat (6 g saturated), 25 mg cholesterol, 5 mg sodium, 2 g fiber.

Wine pairing: Ground almonds provide a nuttiness that complements the fruit. To match, try a botrytized white dessert wine.

Marlena Spieler is a freelance food writer and cookbook author. E-mail her at food@sfchronicle.com or go to her Web site, marlenaspieler.com.

This article appeared on page K - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/21/FDJS1990BM.DTL#recipe2#ixzz0PjS8y14u

indeed

choosing family, but not marriage

Interesting.

Out-of-Wedlock Birthrates Are Soaring, U.S. Reports
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: May 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — Unmarried mothers gave birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States in 2007, a share that is increasing rapidly both here and abroad, according to government figures released Wednesday.

Before 1970, most unmarried mothers were teenagers. But in recent years the birthrate among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s has soared — rising 34 percent since 2002, for example, in women ages 30 to 34. In 2007, women in their 20s had 60 percent of all babies born out of wedlock, teenagers had 23 percent and women 30 and older had 17 percent.

Much of the increase in unmarried births has occurred among parents who are living together but are not married, cohabitation arrangements that tend to be less stable than marriages, studies show.

The pattern has been particularly pronounced among Hispanic women, climbing 20 percent from 2002 to 2006, the most recent year for which racial breakdowns are available. Eleven percent of unmarried Hispanic women had a baby in 2006, compared with 7 percent of unmarried black women and 3 percent of unmarried white women, according to government data drawn from birth certificates.

Titled “Changing Patterns of Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States,” the report was released by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Out-of-wedlock births are also rising in much of the industrialized world: in Iceland, 66 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; in Sweden, the share is 55 percent. (In other societies, though, the phenomenon remains rare — just 2 percent in Japan, for example.)

But experts say the increases in the United States are of greater concern because couples in many other countries tend to be more stable and government support for children is often higher.

“In Sweden, you see very little variation in the outcome of children based on marital status. Everybody does fairly well,” said Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “In the U.S., there’s much more disparity.”

Children born out of wedlock in the United States tend to have poorer health and educational outcomes than those born to married women, but that may be because unmarried mothers tend to share those problems.

Decades ago, pregnant women often married before giving birth. But the odds of separation and divorce in unions driven by pregnancy are relatively high. So when a woman gets pregnant, are children better off if their parents marry, cohabitate or do neither? That question is still unresolved, Dr. Manning said.

Some experts speculate that marriage or cohabitation cements financial and emotional bonds between children and fathers that survive divorce or separation, improving outcomes for children. But since familial instability is often damaging to children, they may be better off with mothers who never cohabitate or marry than with those who form unions that are later broken.

“There is no consensus on those questions,” Dr. Manning said.

In an enduring mystery, birthrates for unmarried women in the United States stabilized between 1995 and 2002 and declined among unmarried teenagers and black women. But after 2002, the overall birthrate among unmarried women resumed its steady climb. In 1940, just 3.8 percent of births were to unmarried women.

The District of Columbia and Mississippi had the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births in 2007: 59 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The lowest rate, 20 percent, was in Utah. In New York, the rate was 41 percent; in New Jersey, 34 percent; and in Connecticut, 35 percent. Sarah S. Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit advocacy group, said sex and pregnancy were handled far too cavalierly in the United States, where rates of unplanned pregnancies, births and abortions are far higher than those of other industrialized nations.

“These trends may meet the needs of young adults,” she said, “but it’s far from clear that it’s helpful for children.”

so we're okay, we're fine.

I've come to believe that you never really know someone until you've been through a crisis together. In our time as a couple, Leo and I have weathered a few storms (including a tropical cyclone). But in the past few days, I've learned that there are no limits to his love and that I can trust him with anything.

It's wonderful to have a partner who gives as much as he gets. It's also incredibly comforting when things don't go according to plan and life doesn't just disappoint you -- it kicks you in the teeth.

But I'm okay. I'm fine. And I fervently believe in The Power of Two.

We'll look at them together
Then we'll take them apart
Adding up the total of a love that's true
Multiply life by the power of two.

You know the things that I am afraid of
I'm not afraid to tell
And if we ever leave a legacy
It's that we loved each other well.

english as a second (or third) language

I have a complicated relationship with my mother, but I will be forever grateful to her for forcing me to be bilingual.

Spanish is her mother tongue, but she also speaks English, Portuguese, French, Italian, and some German, Greek, and Latin. She spoke nothing but Spanish to me as an infant and small child because Spanish was also a necessity for me to be able to communicate with my Paraguayan grandparents. My father, who double-majored in Mathematics and Industrial Arts, does not have a slot in his brain for language, thus he spoke nothing but English to me. My parents tell me that I spoke, read, and walked very early compared to my peers. Clearly, being bilingual didn't slow down my speaking skills ... and I got used to speaking in both languages. It also made it much easier for me to learn a third language as an adult.

I'm lucky. We lived in Spain when I was very young (age 3-6), and I was literally immersed in the language, as most of my cartoons, songs, and socializing at home were in Spanish. We lived in base housing (my father was in the US Air Force), so my neighbors, playmates, and many of my parent's friends only spoke English. My parents also sent me to Anglican (and then US government) schools, where everything was taught in English. I even had books in both languages -- my favorite book was "Little Bear" ("Osito"). Because I lived between binary worlds (on-base versus off-base, mom versus dad, Little Bear versus Osito), I got in the habit of speaking to people in whatever language they spoke to me.

When I was six years old, we moved to Southern California. I went to an elementary school filled with immigrant children. Their parents had fled civil wars and poverty in Central America, Romania, Vietnam, and other far-flung lands. I suppose that I was shy because I had just moved there, so the first friends I made were the other newcomers -- the immigrant children. Most of them spoke Spanish, so I did, too. My first grade teacher knew that I'd moved from Spain and heard me speaking Spanish on the first day of classes, so she immediately enrolled me in ESL (English as a Second Language) because she thought I needed remedial tutoring to get my English skills up to snuff. That lasted about one hour.

When the Mexican-American ESL resource specialist began the skills assessment, she gave me instructions in Spanish, informing me that when she showed me a flashcard with an image on it, I was to tell her the name of the animal. I asked her whether she wanted the English word or the Spanish word for the animal (in Spanish, of course). She stopped, then said (in English) "both -- if you know the words."

I still remember the first card she showed me -- a shark. The funny thing is that I knew the word in English, but had to think really hard before saying tiburón in Spanish. After breezing through a few decks, she quickly moved to having me write down the words (in English and Spanish) as I said them. A few minutes later, she asked me to read aloud from books in both languages. When she took me back to my classroom, she flagged down my elderly English-only-speaking teacher and informed her that I was bilingual and already read at the third-grade level. In one hour, I had gone from ESL to being the only kid who used the "Webs on Wheels" reader. I was fortunate, because I got plenty of one-on-one time with the teacher's aide as it was just the two of us in my reading group, so my reading skills continued to advance much faster than they would have if I had simply kept pace with my classmates.

At some point (I think I was nine or ten), I rebelled and quit speaking Spanish to my mother. Her response was to inform me that if I wanted anything from her (food, clothes, even permission to be excused from the dinner table), I'd have to ask for it politely, en español. Each time I asked for anything in English, my mother would feign deafness. Finally, it sunk in.

By the time I got to junior high, I rebelled again and insisted on taking Spanish (she wanted me to take French, as I "already knew Spanish"), but I told her that I was taking Spanish because I couldn't read and write it very well. I took Spanish from the eighth grade through my freshman year of college, but quit speaking it unless I was in a situation that demanded it. Gradually, my skills went dormant and I forgot most of the complicated verb conjugations that I'd never really learned, but memorized right before a test.

The summer after college graduation, I toyed with the idea of learning Italian at Mesa College, but couldn't bring myself to go to class again so soon. Several years later, I decided to enroll in French classes at City College, because it seemed to be the next logical language to learn given my wanderlust and how many countries use French as an official language. I threw myself into it with a true passion, asking arcane questions of many professors, and really learning the language through coursework and a study abroad in Paris. I found the pronunciation rules maddening, as they were completely different than those of Spanish, but had a big advantage in the vocabulary department because there are so many Spanish /French cognates. I eventually moved from speaking Spench and Franglais and generally sounding like a redneck toddler when I spoke to speaking French with my mother on the phone for a bit, before switching rapidly from Spanish to French to English and back again. Then came Leo, my Uruguayan boyfriend.

His spoken English is accent-free, so much so that people are always amazed when they learn that he isn't a native speaker and didn't begin learning English until he was about 10 years old. His writing is also flawless, so much so that I admire and envy his complete mastery of both languages. Once it was clear that we planned to be a couple, I started asking for him to speak Spanish with me. He refused. Years later, he finally told me why -- speaking in Spanish with me lowers the discourse. It's true, but it's also something that I can remedy. For years now, I've told him that my trump card is the day that I get pregnant, when he'll have no choice but to speak Spanish with me for at least an hour each day, if nothing else because neither of us wants to raise a child who speaks Spanish like a redneck.

Meanwhile, I practice every chance I get. We watch Spanish films with the subtitles on, and I only glance at them if I don't understand a particular word or if there's a lot of country-specific slang. I speak Spanish with his parents 95% of the time. I took a Spanish for native speakers class during my MBA, working to improve my grammar and orthography. I'm looking to take another one, because I want to raise our children with Spanish and English at home, knowing that they will also learn the dominant languages of wherever we happen to live.

But when they rebel, I'll feign deafness and ask for them to repeat the question en español, just as my mother did.

Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
Tue Jul 21, 3:08 am ET

WASHINGTON – The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?

New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English — "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process. You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."

Yet a soon-to-be-released survey from the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization that researches language issues, shows U.S. elementary schools cut back on foreign language instruction over the last decade. About a quarter of public elementary schools were teaching foreign languages in 1997, but just 15 percent last year, say preliminary results posted on the center's Web site.

What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language — TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.

But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.

"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."
__
EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

quotable

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.
-John Quincy Adams

canine editorial

Via Sandra

dude. seriously?

As photographed by my colleague, David, in the break room.

quotable

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen

steamed green beans with tomato-garlic vinaigrette

It's summer and we're in love with the Northeastern Flat Green Beans we get in our CSA share through J.R. Organics. In fact, we liked them so much that we planted some green beans in our container garden today, so that we'll have some later in the season, as well.

We've been enjoying them in a variety of seasonings and sauces over the past month or so and prepared them this way last night. We ate our beans while they were still warm, but think that this would also be awesome cold.

Steamed Green Beans with Tomato-Garlic Vinaigrette
The heady, tangy vinaigrette complements the crisp, sweet green beans. Use a garlic press, if you have one, to crush the garlic for this summery dressing; a press crushes garlic into small pieces, encouraging good-for-you compounds to develop.

Prep / cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 3/4 cup)

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar (we used champagne vinegar)
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves, crushed and minced
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup seeded chopped tomato
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
1 pound green beans, trimmed

Preparation

1. Combine first 5 ingredients in a medium bowl; slowly add oil, whisking to combine. Stir in tomato and thyme; let stand 10 minutes.
2. Steam beans, covered, 7 minutes or until crisp-tender. Cut into 2-inch pieces; add to tomato mixture, tossing gently to coat.

Nutritional Information: Calories: 73 (44% from fat) | Fat: 3.6g (sat 0.5g,mono 2.5g,poly 0.5g) | Protein: 2.4g | Carbohydrate: 9.8g | Fiber: 4.2g | Cholesterol: 0.0mg | Iron: 1.4mg | Sodium: 162mg | Calcium: 48mg

Jackie Mills, MS, RD, Cooking Light, JULY 2008

right-wing rage pimps

For the past eight years, liberal activists peacefully protested against a president whose policies were anathema to their core values. They did so without resorting to the kinds of violence we've witnessed from the extreme right over the past two weeks. This terrorism -- the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious -- is horrifying.

• On May 31, Scott Roeder entered the Reformation Lutheran Church during Sunday services and slaughtered Dr. George Tiller as he handed out the church bulletin. Tiller was one of only a few doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions.
• Yesterday, James von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum in Washington on a mission of mass murder. Steven Tyrone Johns, the 39-year-old black security guard who stepped in front of von Brunn's gun, sacrificed his own life to prevent a larger tragedy.

It's sickening to watch members of the far right take matters into their own hands, using violent means to support their political ideologies. But it's not entirely surprising when you stop and think about it.

The election of Barrack Obama is a sea change and represents a seismic shift in the sensibilities of many Americans. In April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, predicting a rise in white supremacist violence by white men who feel increasingly marginalized and powerless. This prompted cries of outrage from Republican leaders and serious backpedaling by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. (The GOP is strangely silent on the topic now.)

These shootings are not the first time the far right has resorted to domestic terrorism -- Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph the Olympic bomber (also a pro-life zealot), the so-called “freedmen” in Montana, and the shootout at Ruby Ridge -- all made their moves during the Clinton era. But through it all, we've had right-wing ideologues fanning the flames of hate and fueling the twisted imaginations of those like Roeder and von Brunn.

The rabid right-wing rage pimps use inflammatory rhetoric online and on television and radio airwaves, peddling lies like these:

insinuating that President Obama is a socialist, is not really American, is a friend of Islamic terrorists, encourag[ing] listeners to stockpile their money in their homes before the “one world” government nationalizes all the banks. For hours on end on talk radio, they stir up those who live on the fringes of society, with the foulest kind of slurs and insinuation. Then when something violent happens, they step back and suggest that their hands are clean.

I'm not advocating that the government intervene to abridge their freedom of speech. But I'm wondering how we got so far from the truth. It's an oversimplification to just blame News Corporation's Fox News or any of the other conglomerates that spew this hate. But it's not unrealistic to expect those organizations to self-regulate their broadcasters and to embody the journalistic ethics they so vigorously question in the news organizations they accuse of being unfair and imbalanced.

Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and sidestep questions about their role in shaping public opinion and the discourse, they've lost sight of the journalist's code of conduct (seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, be accountable), embracing distortions, chasing ratings, manufacturing news, and writing best-selling diatribes.

Somewhere along the way, something was lost from the discourse. That something is decency. Michael Rowe's thoughtful reflection on the Degradation of the American Dialogue summarizes the spiral much more eloquently than I can.

There was a time when decency, even honor, was an essential part of the American dialogue in its most ideal form, and part of its very identity. There was a time when our culture would have recoiled in horror at the vituperation flowing unchecked from radios, televisions, and the Internet, instead of applauding it as "common sense," "free speech," or "mavericky," or "a spin-free zone."

There was a time when intellectual honesty was not considered unpatriotic; when compassion for, and understanding of, your fellow man was a sign of strength, not weakness. There was a time when the phrase Have you no shame? meant something, and the First Amendment was not used as toilet paper to wipe up the excremental verbal degradation of vulnerable segments of the American population. A time when it was expected that citizens would understand the difference between free speech and irresponsible speech. Somewhere along the line, a cancerous segment of American popular culture and media cunningly exploited the long-standing, honorable American "cowboy" motif and mentality. They grafted cruelty, divisiveness, and ignorance to it, making the two appear indistinguishable, and natural allies. And they are neither, or at least ought not to be.

It's time for these organizations to do the honorable thing. And it's time for these broadcasters (O'Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, M. Savage) and politicians to do the right thing. More than anything, it's time for folks on the political right to speak truth to power and tell their broadcasters and politicians to stop using the rhetoric of hate.

Learn more about why I'm calling them out in the essay below.

Death at the Holocaust Museum and the Degradation of the American Dialogue
Michael Rowe, Award-winning journalist and author of Other Men's Sons
Posted: June 11, 2009 01:53 AM

Ann Coulter, the self-described "conservative Christian" right-wing talking head, is much on my mind as I contemplate the horrifying images that came out of Washington from the Holocaust Museum, where white supremacist James von Brunn opened fire in an attempted mass-murder of Jews. His killing spree was cut short by security guard Stephen Tyrone Jones who put himself in the line of fire and died so others might live.

I am remembering an October 2007 segment of the Donny Deutsch Show where Coulter asserted that America would be better off if everyone was Christian and that "the Jews" merely needed to be "perfected" through conversion.

Coulter has made her fortune by generating, fanning, and nurturing hatred and contempt for a variety of people, including liberals, Democrats, gays, foreign nationals, 9/11 widows, feminists, single mothers, Muslims, and any other group she could throw to her disenfranchised readership as shark bait.

To Coulter, referring to Jews as "imperfect" on a talk show hosted by an observant Jewish host must have seemed like just another day at the office. Coulter shook her blond hair and tittered, as though waiting to be found witty, charming, and adorably irascible. Oh Ann, you minx! You're just pushing everyone's buttons, aren't you? Shame on you, you dead-sexy fascist pin-up. Stop teasing. You don't really mean that. I mean, not really, right? Right?

Deutsch, clearly appalled, pointed out that the comment was not only patently absurd, but also hateful. Coulter giggled. A gold crucifix gleamed against her bony clavicle. "No," she said, "it's not hateful at all."

This week, nearly two years later, James von Brunn, driven by his own twisted version of Coulter's publicly-proclaimed perspectives regarding the "imperfection" of Jews, entered the Holocaust Museum in Washington and put them into action, with tragic and deadly consequences.

Much the same thing happened on May 31st when Scott Roeder entered the Reformation Lutheran Church during Sunday services and slaughtered abortion provider provider Dr. George Tiller. Media analysts continue to explore a possible continuum between Tiller's murder and FOX host Bill O'Reilly's well-documented on-air tirades against the doctor, whom he repeatedly called "Tiller the Baby Killer." O'Reilly broadcast his vendetta to millions and millions of FOX viewers already infected with evangelical superstitions and a horror of science, especially science as it applies to a woman's right to choose.

If O'Reilly had been a serious journalist or broadcaster instead of a sclerotic, chronically-aggravated right-wing rage pimp, he might have had the professional self-awareness or ethical sense to realize that he was putting George Tiller's life in danger over the more than 28 broadcasts in which he used Tiller's name. But O'Reilly, like, for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and indeed Coulter herself (to name only the gratin of that particular food chain) is neither of those things.

As a group, they are the pop culture equivalent of necrotic carrion beetles, crawling with insectile determination from one infected open wound in the American psyche to another. The wounds include fear of race, fear of foreigners, fear of sexuality, fear of difference, hysterical religious fundamentalism, violent nationalism, and paranoia. They lay their eggs in the infected abrasion, then scuttle away. When the eggs hatch, disgorging rage and discontent, they start counting money.

When challenged on the inherently destructive nature of their enterprise, they invariably claim that their First Amendment right to free speech is being abrogated. Or, like Ann Coulter defensively does in those instances, they cite their place on the New York Times bestseller list. Or the ratings. In other words, since people buy it, watch it, or listen to it in huge numbers, it must have merit, and it must be right.

The difference between John McCain and Sarah Palin became clearest to me in the middle of the campaign last summer.

At a town hall meeting, McCain was confronted by an elderly woman who told McCain that she was a supporter of his because Obama was "an Arab." McCain was clearly uncomfortable, and it was patently obvious why. It had nothing to do with McCain's feelings about Arabs. It had to do with an old-school Republican accidentally moving the rock, and coming face to face with what actually lived beneath it. He recognized that the woman was making an unambiguously racist statement about his opponent, and he was mortified to be asked to answer it. Even though McCain famously and horribly bungled his answer ("No ma'am, he isn't. He's a decent family man.") I knew when he meant. He was addressing the intended racial slur and disavowing it, however badly.

In that moment, I felt deeply for my Republican friends who, on some level, must also be experiencing the embarrassment and discontent of recognizing that their party had been hijacked by racists and religious fanatics who derided education and achievement as "elitist."

Sarah "Screw the Political Correctness" Palin, on the other hand, seemed right at home. She marched into those same crowds grinning and winking, and "Yoo betcha-ing" like she was onstage at the Miss Alaska pageant. While her supporters waved watermelon slices and stuffed monkeys, Palin talked about who the "real Americans" were, and who was "palling around with terrorists." She refused to address the blatant racism of her fans, or address the obvious exploitation of Obama's middle name, Hussein, and the implication she herself was making with her "terrorist" comments.

She was, after all, playing to the accurately-named Republican "base," the same crowd to whom George Bush had sold his second presidential term by pandering to their darkest and most cowardly aspect. This time out it was fear of gay marriage and adoption, carefully tended fear of another 9/11, fear of more fallout from a war they still didn't believe he'd lied about.

One can almost appreciate the horrible honesty of the racists among the McCain-Palin supporters who were able to admit what the others obfuscated: that they didn't want a black man in the White House. Certain videos from their rallies are deeply disturbing. They showcase the seething racism of her most ardent followers.

History has already recorded their obsession with Obama's origins, his religious background, and his citizenship, which remains an obsession among them today.

Obama's citizenship was reportedly also something of an obsession for von Brunn, and likely very much on his mind when he walked into the museum and opened fire to make a statement about what "his" America ought to look like. I have no trouble imagining which radio stations he listened to, or which pundits best represented his baseline political ideology. And why. Even FOX's Shep Smith has said he's disturbed by the escalating virulence and menace of the anti-Obama emails the station is receiving.

There was a time when decency, even honor, was an essential part of the American dialogue in its most ideal form, and part of its very identity. There was a time when our culture would have recoiled in horror at the vituperation flowing unchecked from radios, televisions, and the Internet, instead of applauding it as "common sense," "free speech," or "mavericky," or "a spin-free zone."

There was a time when intellectual honesty was not considered unpatriotic; when compassion for, and understanding of, your fellow man was a sign of strength, not weakness. There was a time when the phrase Have you no shame? meant something, and the First Amendment was not used as toilet paper to wipe up the excremental verbal degradation of vulnerable segments of the American population. A time when it was expected that citizens would understand the difference between free speech and irresponsible speech. Somewhere along the line, a cancerous segment of American popular culture and media cunningly exploited the long-standing, honorable American "cowboy" motif and mentality. They grafted cruelty, divisiveness, and ignorance to it, making the two appear indistinguishable, and natural allies. And they are neither, or at least ought not to be.

There is no Environmental Protection Agency to measure hate pollution in national dialogue, and no mechanism in place to warn us when the poisonous rage spewed into the national consciousness by shock-jocks, poisonous television pundits, megachurch leaders, and oh-so-subtle politicians, has reached dangerously toxic levels.

No, there is only the result: widows, orphans, collective grief, and an absolute refusal on the part of our loudest, coarsest voices to take any responsibility for their part in the carnage.

Via Aaryn and Bill

quotable

"...it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies." - Pico Iyer

the antidote to a funeral

When I got home from a memorial for a friend's husband this afternoon, I was feeling totally down and my eyes were so sore that I simply couldn’t cry any more. I sat there, dazed, trying to wrap my brain around how my friend, a 36-year-old woman with three children under the age of 4 (the youngest was born just 6 weeks ago), was going to face each day without her partner and best friend.

A few minutes later, Ruby came over, licked my elbow, flirted with me, and ran out of the room. I followed her to the front door (her sign that she needs to go out), grabbed the leash, and took her for a pit stop.

We ran into my new downstairs neighbor, who has a very young (just old enough to be adopted) German Shepherd puppy. Ruby took care of business out front and couldn’t wait to come back and play with Leysi, who weighs about 10 lbs and is about 12 inches long and 8 inches tall. They played for a while in the courtyard, with Ruby play bowing then laying down so that she didn't totally freak out the puppy.

The puppy was scared at first, but curiosity and moxie won out ... she started boxing with Ruby (who feinted left and right), hopped into my lap (I sat on the stairs and watched with my neighbor), and even barked back at Ruby once. When another neighbor's adult dogs came down and wanted to roughhouse -- first backing the puppy into a corner, then growling -- Ruby stepped in and regulated the big dogs, stopping the adults from overdoing it with the puppy.

Dogs are the best. And my pup is a very special pooch indeed.

today's speakeasies

The speakeasy of today has little in common with those of the Prohibition era, but the allure of the illicit remains.

Bar? What Bar?
By WILLIAM GRIMES
June 3, 2009

ON a nondescript block in Williamsburg, not far from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a new bar and restaurant called Rye opened last week.

Try to find it.

There’s no sign out front. The facade, an artfully casual assemblage of old wooden slats, gives the place a boarded-up, abandoned look. It does have a street number, painted discreetly on a glass panel above the front doors, but that’s it. Like a suspect in a lineup, it seems to shrink back when observed.

There are a lot of bars like this right now. They can be found all over the United States, skulking in the shadows. Obtrusively furtive, they represent one of the strangest exercises in nostalgia ever to grip the public, an infatuation with the good old days of Prohibition.

Their name is legion: the Varnish in Los Angeles; Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco; Speakeasy in Cleveland; the Violet Hour in Chicago; Manifesto in Kansas City, Mo.; Tavern Law in Seattle (scheduled to open later this month). Everywhere, it seems, fancy cocktails are being shaken in murky surroundings.

New York has fallen hard for this fad. Sasha Petraske, the cocktail artist behind Milk & Honey, has just opened Dutch Kills on a bleak commercial strip in Long Island City, Queens. A small sign that says “BAR” is the only tip-off to its existence.

At the Hideout, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, aspiring customers ring the bell at a forbidding-looking garage door and then stand there as a pair of eyes scrutinize them through a 1920s-style peephole.

The ultimate in speakeasy mystification takes place at PDT (Please Don’t Tell) on St. Marks Place in the East Village. Patrons have to enter through Crif Dogs, the hip hot dog place, then step into a phone booth and identify themselves by speaking into the receiver. A buzzer opens a secret door, revealing a strange, twilight world where artisanal cocktails are consumed under the watchful eyes of a stuffed jackelope and raccoon, and a bear wearing a bowler hat.

Whoopee!

“Speakeasy is a funny term, since the business is legal,” said Eric Alperin, a partner and head bartender at the Varnish. “What people are referring to is the allure, almost like an opium den.”

Brian Sheehy, an owner of Bourbon & Branch, agreed. “People have an affection for this period of American history, and they want the mystery,” he said. To enhance the backroom ambience, Bourbon & Branch assigns customers a password, to be spoken into an intercom, when they make a reservation. Once inside the bar, customers are expected to abide by house rules. “Speak easy,” is one of them, enforced by bartenders when necessary.

Password or no password, deluxe or down-low, all these bars have something in common. None of them really resemble an actual speakeasy from the 1920s, although Bourbon & Branch, oddly enough, sits on top of one, reached through a trap door leading to the basement.

A little history, please.

Prohibition, which took effect in January 1920 and finally ended in December 1933, was the worst cocktail era in the history of the United States, for obvious reasons. Half the liquor was homemade or adulterated, forcing the great classic drinks of the early 20th century to exit the stage. In their places appeared cocktails designed to mask poor ingredients, like rye and ginger ale, or the Alexander, a repellent mixture of gin, crème de cacao and cream.

“The basic raw materials then available, and I use the term raw advisedly, made it imperative that they be polished or doctored or decorated,” Frank Shay wrote in a 1934 Esquire article bidding farewell to the Great Experiment. “Also it was essential that their rougher edges be smoothed down in order that they might pass to their true goal without too great distress to the drinker.”

The Alexander merited a place of honor on Esquire’s list of “the pansies,” the worst drinks of the Prohibition era. These included long-forgotten abominations like the Sweetheart, the Fluffy Ruffles, the Pom Pom and the Cream Fizz.

Real cocktails fled the country, along with a lot of professional bartenders, who took up residence at American bars in Havana, London and Paris. In these civilized outposts, the serious work of cocktail invention continued, reflected in books like “The Savoy Cocktail Book,” while Americans made do with “Wet Drinks for Dry People,” subtitled “A Book of Drinks Based on the Ordinary Home Supplies.”

Bad-tasting cocktails were the least of it. Some of the drinks could kill. During the 1926 holiday season in New York, 47 people died after drinking poisoned liquor, bringing that year’s body count to 741.

“This ‘speakeasy’ business must be the most independent and prosperous business in the world, especially in New York, for no other industry in the world could afford to kill its customers off like that,” Will Rogers wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1928. “They must run an undertaking business on the side.”

Extract of Jamaica ginger, a patent medicine with a high alcohol content, found favor with a certain class of drinker. Unfortunately, “jake,” as it was called, contained a neurotoxin that caused its devotees to lose the use of their hands and feet. All things considered, it required a certain amount of nerve to lift a glass to the lips in the otherwise fabulous Jazz Age.

Not surprisingly, bars like the Violet Hour — unmarked, with a lone bulb outside to indicate, with a faint glow, when drinks are being served inside — do not specialize in Prohibition cocktails, only in a Prohibition vibe. Virtually every new wave speakeasy makes a point of showcasing purist cocktails made with fresh fruit juices, house-infused liquors, recherché bitters and hand-chipped ice. The ethos lies somewhere between 1890 and 1910, the golden age of cocktails.

You get the drift at Rye, where the abbreviated list of signature drinks includes a rye old-fashioned with orange and Angostura bitters and Demerara sugar, and an “improved” tequila cocktail with maraschino, bitters and a dash of absinthe. This is not the sort of cocktail that Americans were drinking in 1925.

Likewise the décor. The rough floorboards, dark wood and stamped-tin ceiling, not to mention the Cinerama-scale mahogany bar, screams 1910. So does the interior at the undeniably impressive Hotel Delano bar, on the other side of Williamsburg, which, like so many of the nouvelle speakeasies, is visually a good old-fashioned pre-Prohibition saloon.

The Raines Law Room, in Chelsea, puts the issue front and center with its name, an allusion to the prohibition that came before Prohibition. The Raines Law, passed by the New York State Legislature in 1896, banned the sale of liquor on Sundays, except at hotels, where guests could be served drinks during meals. Overnight, hundreds of bars put a few beds and chairs in their upstairs rooms, called themselves hotels, and kept a few plates of nominal food at hand to put in front of drinking customers. One of the great artifacts of the Gay 90s was the Raines Law sandwich, a desiccated slice of ham between two slices of stale bread that no customer ever touched. As a pivot point for nostalgia, the Raines Law seems like an odd choice.

Speakeasy time travel, in other words, is vague, the images dreamy. At the Violet Hour, patrons pass through the boarded-up facade to enter a lush interior with saturated colors, heavy fabrics and ornate chandeliers. In the Back Room, on the Lower East Side, the drinks are served in teacups, a pointless exercise in deception. At Speakeasy, in Cleveland, which really does go the extra mile down the nostalgia highway by distilling its own gin, a chandelier over a basement stairwell indicates the way to passers-by on the sidewalk. “When it’s on, the speakeasy is open,” said Sam McNulty, the owner.

The reality of Prohibition was quite otherwise. “A speakeasy could be a table, a bottle and two chairs, or it could be ‘21,’ ” said Daniel Okrent, whose book “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” is to be published by Scribner next year. “Most were closer to the lower end. They were dives where you drank bad liquor from a bottle with a counterfeit label and woke up with a headache in the morning.”

In the early years of Prohibition, when agents pursued enforcement with some zeal, patrons needed passcards or passwords, but corruption and inertia took over fairly quickly. In “Manhattan Oases,” Al Hirschfeld’s 1932 cartoon survey of New York speakeasies, a fake cigar store called the Dixie is ridiculed as “one of those quaint, old-fashioned places (circa 1925), which still think it needs a false front.”

Everywhere else, the speaking was anything but easy. In cities like New York, San Francisco, Detroit and New Orleans, the game ended almost before it started, and bars operated with the merest pretense of discretion. “The secret aspect in New York was over by 1928 or 1929,” Mr. Okrent said. “To run a speakeasy you just bribed the local cop. There was not a lot of secrecy.”

It is true, though, that illegal liquor added a certain excitement to nightlife. On this score, Rye and Dutch Kills and the Violet Hour and all the rest have their finger on something genuine. In an age when virtually nothing is hidden or forbidden, the idea of a secret hideaway takes on an undeniable allure.

The flappers of 1920 felt it, too. When mild-mannered Asaph Holliday, the put-upon protagonist of Elmer Davis’s Prohibition satire, “Friends of Mr. Sweeney,” ventures into a series of Manhattan speakeasies by accident, he discovers a world strange to his middle-aged eyes. Night spots that he would have considered nothing special when he was young are now regarded as thrilling. “Mr. Holliday realized at last why a nation tolerated the Volstead Act,” the narrator writes. “It made any place at all that contained liquor look like a wild cafe.”

Make it illegal, and they will come. If the authorities will not oblige, make it feel illegal. Nothing quite hits the spot like a martini in a ceramic mug.