Venezuelans Vote in a Landmark Election

CARACAS, Venezuela — Voters across this country turned out in large numbers on Sunday, standing in lines that snaked around city blocks to cast ballots in a landmark presidential election that could give the fiery socialist Hugo Chávez a new term or replace him with a youthful, more moderate challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

Voting, and then the counting, appeared likely to continue well into the night. Though the balloting mostly went smoothly around the country, there were a few reports of hitches — mainly technical problems with electronic voting machines — that caused long delays at some locations, and polling places were instructed to keep working until everyone on line at closing time had the chance to vote. Results were not expected until after the voting was complete at every polling station.

The day began as early as 3 a.m. in poor neighborhoods where Mr. Chávez enjoys strong support, as activists drove around on motorcycles and trucks, blowing bugles and air horns and blaring his campaign music to rouse people to go out to vote. In some neighborhoods, residents turned out before the polls opened at 6 a.m. By early morning, the lines at some locations in the capital were around the block.

“I’ve been voting here my whole life and it’s the first time I’ve seen such a long line,” said Elsi Fernandes, 33, who waited with her 6-year-old daughter for more than two hours before casting her vote for Mr. Capriles at a school in Catia, a poor area of central Caracas. Television reports showed long lines in other parts of the country as well.

“There’s enthusiasm, but it’s also very quiet,” Ms. Fernandes, a teacher, said of those waiting outside. “That’s not very much like us Venezuelans.”

Ms. Fernandes said she sensed a nervous expectation among voters in line. Soldiers in green fatigues were stationed at the polling places, as is customary in Venezuelan elections.

Mr. Chávez has won each of his previous elections by margins of 22 percent or more, but expectations rose on Sunday that the outcome this time would be much closer.

During the campaign, Mr. Chávez vowed that he would give the opposition an epic beating. But speaking to reporters after he cast his vote in Caracas, the president dismissed any suggestion that he would refuse to acknowledge an opposition victory if the vote count ran against him.

“You should not have any doubt that we will recognize the results, whatever they are,” Mr. Chávez told reporters at his polling place. “Whether it is a one-vote difference or three million votes, responsible political participants have to recognize the results.”

Venezuela is a major oil supplier to the United States and was a longtime American ally, but during his tenure Mr. Chávez has steered his country away from Washington. He is close to countries like Cuba and Iran, and has been a thorn in the side of the United States in Latin America, leading a bloc critical of American policies.

At home, Mr. Chávez has championed social programs that provide education, housing and subsidized food to the poor, and he has sought to create a socialist economy, nationalizing many businesses. He has governed with autocratic reach, undercutting the independence of the country’s legislature and courts.

The president started the race with a large lead in opinion polls. But Mr. Capriles ran a strong campaign, making inroads in poor areas that were fiercely loyal to Mr. Chávez, and in recent weeks his support appeared to surge.

Mr. Capriles jabbed away at widespread corruption, government mismanagement and out-of-control violent crime. He called for Venezuelans to work together, a contrast to Mr. Chávez, who delights in demeaning and insulting his opponents.

And Mr. Capriles promised to keep and improve Mr. Chávez’s signature social programs. Mr. Capriles has crisscrossed the country, keeping up a manic pace for months. Mr. Chávez, who has been battling cancer, sometimes went two or three days without a campaign appearance.

In Cumaná, a city in the northeast, broken voting machines delayed voting for hours at a polling place at the National Open University. Finally, at around 1 p.m., the authorities began allowing voters to use paper ballots instead.

“I’d rather wait six hours in line than endure six years more of this Chávez government,” said Antonio de la Rosa, 63, who had been at the polling station since 6:30 a.m.

In the Catia neighborhood of the capital, María Elena Severine, 59, a cleaning woman for a bank, said that Mr. Chávez was still as fresh a candidate as when he first ran in 1998. “I like my president,” she said. “He is the revolution. He is change.”

Source & Image : New York Times

A Big Laser Runs Into Trouble

After spending more than $5 billion to build and operate a giant laser installation the size of a football stadium, the Energy Department has not achieved its goal of igniting a fusion reaction that could produce energy to generate power or simulate what happens in a nuclear weapon.

The latest deadline for achieving ignition was last Sunday, Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2012, but it passed amid mounting concerns that the technical challenges were too great to be mastered on a tight time schedule.

Congress will need to look hard at whether the project should be continued, or scrapped or slowed to help reduce federal spending.

The idea of using lasers to trigger fusion reactions to produce energy dates back many decades, but the idea of using laser fusion for weapons research became more important when underground nuclear testing was curtailed by treaty in the 1990s.

The new laser facility, built between 1997 and 2009 and known as the National Ignition Facility, uses 192 lasers to fire light beams at tiny targets, smaller than peppercorns, filled with hydrogen atoms. The resulting compression and heat are supposed to fuse the atoms into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy. But technical reviews this year of the experiments conducted so far have made it clear that the scientists in charge do not fully understand how the process is working and may not be able to achieve ignition quickly.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif., which operates the facility, cite numerous technical advances gained in more than 1,000 experiments, including firing the world’s most powerful laser bursts and developing unsurpassed diagnostic instruments to measure what happens under intense heat and pressure. The review panels cite scientific and technological progress but also say that progress has been slower than anticipated.

As William Broad reported in The Times last Sunday, there is a sharp split among experts on whether the project — one of the most expensive federally financed projects ever — is worth the money. Just operating it costs roughly $290 million a year.

The laboratory’s supporters say the facility deserves continued funding because it conducts advanced research and will play an important role in assessing whether fusion will someday become a feasible energy source. They also say that it keeps highly talented weapons designers at work on important national security issues.

If the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels, we suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use.

Even if ignition is achieved in the laboratory in the next several years, scaling up to a demonstration plant will cost billions and may ultimately show that fusion is not a practical source of power.

The fallback argument — that laser fusion allows scientists to simulate conditions at the core of a nuclear explosion and verify the reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile without having to test a weapon — is disputed by some experts who think the stockpile will be reliable for decades.

Congress will need to look hard at whether these “stockpile stewardship” and long-term energy goals can be pursued on a smaller budget.

Source & Image : New York Times

Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether

TATOOSH ISLAND, Wash. — From a stretch of rocky shoreline on this tiny island, one can, on any given morning, watch otters floating on their backs, elephant seals hauling out of the water and a bald eagle flying past murres huddled along a cliff face. The startled birds perform a synchronized dive into the sea, their ovoid black-and-white bodies resembling miniature penguins.

It appears as if the island’s wildlife is thriving at this remote outpost, which is also a former Coast Guard station crowned by a decommissioned lighthouse. It was also once a whaling base for the Makah tribe, who maintain treaty rights to the land.

But for over four decades, with the blessing of Makah leaders, Tatoosh has been the object of intense biological scrutiny, and scientists say they are seeing disturbing declines across species — changes that could prove a bellwether for oceanic change globally.

Cathy Pfister and Timothy Wootton, both biology professors at the University of Chicago, have been trekking to the island since the 1980s, often accompanying their former graduate adviser, Robert T. Paine, a nominally retired zoology professor from the University of Washington. At 79, Dr. Paine still returns to Tatoosh several times a year to continue the ecological research he began in the 1960s.

Dr. Pfister and Dr. Wootton met and fell in love while studying the island’s species with Dr. Paine. Now married, they often bring their two children on research trips, where the family sleeps in bunk beds in a one-room cabin, a former Coast Guard facility affectionately dubbed the “Winter Palace.”

On their frequent visits to the island, usually lasting several days each, the researchers haul duffel bags of clothing and equipment up a steep path cut into the rock until the landscape plateaus into a field of salmonberry bramble. It is no quiet retreat. The dull roar of the surf, the screeching gulls, the groaning seals and a distant foghorn all layer into a cacophony on the island. Even the mussel beds creak and crackle.

Among the declines the researchers are noticing: historically hardy populations of gulls and murres are only half what they were 10 years ago, and only a few chicks hatched this spring. Mussel shells are notably thinner, and recently the mussels seem to be detaching from rocks more easily and with greater frequency.

Goose barnacles are also suffering, and so are the hard, splotchy, wine-colored coralline algae, which appear like graffiti along rocky shorelines.

While not entirely understood, the declines are not entirely mysterious. Biologists suspect that the shifts are related to huge declines in the water’s pH, a shift attributed to the absorption of excess carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in ever-greater amounts by the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

As the carbon dioxide is absorbed, it alters the oceanic water chemistry, turning it increasingly acidic. Barnacles, oysters and mussels find it more difficult to survive, which can cause chain reactions among the animals that eat those species, like birds and people.

During a research trip in 2000, Dr. Pfister and Dr. Wootton first began testing the pH of water samples. They found the water around Tatoosh and along nearby coastlines to be 10 times as acidic as what accepted climate change models were predicting. Even after collecting seven years of data, when they published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, their data were met with skepticism.

“People think we just don’t know how to use the instrument — I still hear that,” Dr. Pfister said. “Luckily for our reputations, I guess, this has been corroborated by a lot of other people.”

It was on this island and a nearby mainland shore that Dr. Paine developed his keystone species hypothesis, which describes how top predators dominate an ecosystem, often to the benefit of species diversity.

Now, the island species are once again helping to solve important biological questions. Mussels appear to be succumbing more easily to crashing waves, with barren patches on the rocks growing larger and appearing with greater frequency, said Dr. Wootton, who carefully documents patch sizes at various island sites.

“We all agree, it just looks different,” Dr. Pfister said, pointing to a weedy-looking barren area near where Dr. Paine conducted his studies. More research needs to be done to definitively explain what is happening, she added.

While their parents are out counting barnacles or collecting water samples, the children, Anna, 9, and Ben, 12, lie in their bunks and read. Or they head out to try to catch a fish for dinner, hopping and skipping their way across slippery rocks and past several dark caves to a perch on the island’s north end.

What the researchers call “happy time” comes in the afternoon when the tides return and they gather — along with a rotating cadre of graduate students — outside the Winter Palace on an old dock laid out on the lawn to compare notes, gossip and have a snack.

Everyone gets a brownie, courtesy of Dr. Pfister, but only one — and everyone keeps close watch.

“Being a graduate adviser is like doing a second round of parenting,” Dr. Paine said.

He speaks of the calcareous sponges that live in the caves of Tatoosh and, like hard-shell species, use dissolved calcium carbonate, in this case to form their skeletons or spicules, thus making them vulnerable in more acidic waters.

“Almost nothing is known about this species,” Dr. Paine said.

“No one in their right mind has the time to sample calcareous sponges, let alone recognize them,” he added. “They’re likely to disappear.”

While some species may be able to adapt to new oceanic conditions, many will not.

“You can predict change,” Dr. Paine said, “and most of the changes are going to be in a direction we don’t want.”

Source & Image : New York Times

A Suite Called Home

NEW YORK’S hotels are hives of urban velocity, where strangers live out epic adventures in a few days, then return home to spend the rest of their lives retelling them. Then there are the guests who never leave.

Twenty-eight years ago, Habiba Ali moved from the Y.W.C.A. into Room 320 in the Hotel Wales on Madison Avenue near 93rd Street, with few illusions of grandeur.

“It was a dilapidated old building,” she said the other day. The rent was $225 a week — more than she could afford, but the neighborhood was tranquil, and she would be close to the American woman who had been like a mother to her since she arrived from Pakistan. The ceilings in some rooms were falling down at the time, she said. Her neighbors were mostly older people living on fixed incomes.

Ms. Ali, who reluctantly gave her age as 60, sat on a creamy leather-upholstered chair in the hotel’s elegant second-floor Pied Piper room as jazz played softly in the background. Gone are the old mattresses, broken furniture, sinks and bathtubs that filled the room when she first moved in; gone are the old neighbors, too. Gone, even, are several generations of renovations.

But Ms. Ali and her roommate, Pamela Downing, who came to “crash” with Ms. Ali for a few weeks in 1985, have remained. In a hotel that has spiffed up, changed clientele, changed ownership several times, changed décor about as often — where various owners have offered them tens of thousands of dollars to leave and once, they said, tried padlocking their door — they have been a rare constant, coexisting in peace or disharmony in the unrenovated 450 square feet for which they now pay a rent-stabilized sum of $1,135 a month, utilities and weekly linen service included.

Let the room next door, which goes for about $500 a night, change occupants every day or two; Ms. Ali and Ms. Downing are not going anywhere.

Did you happen to notice the words “linen service”?

“Every week we get washed, crisp linen,” Ms. Ali said, beaming at the thought. “I said: ‘This I cannot get on my own anywhere. So I better stay here.’ My sisters say, Just for the linen and the tissue paper she sacrificed everything. I say, No.”

The story of Habiba Ali and Pamela Downing in the Hotel Wales is a reminder that time moves at different speeds in New York — not merely at the indomitable pace of real estate and commercial churn, but also at slower, more human paces, immune or resistant to market forces. Even in New York, intransigence sometimes carries the day. In a hallway of doors opened by magnetic cards, theirs still opens with a metal key. A red cowbell by the side of the door, hung by Ms. Ali, announces visitors.

On a recent afternoon in the suite they share — they are roommates, not a couple — the women corrected each other, completed each other’s sentences and described the advantages of the hotel’s rougher days.

“Sometimes we had arguments, which resulted in me being ejected from the apartment,” Ms. Downing said. When downstairs was a store room, she added, “I could stay the night there. There used to be quite a number of characters here.”

In their modest dress, the women say they pass largely unnoticed among the hotel’s wealthier guests, even after they were profiled by a City University journalism student this year.

“There’s a certain elegance to them,” said Bernard Goldberg, who bought the Wales in 1988 and converted it from a single-room-occupancy residence to a well-heeled boutique hotel, before selling it a decade later. “They’re very gentle and cultured. Maybe their clothes are not as expensive, but they were always well groomed. It was really nice to have them. They’re the only guests that I really miss.”

When Mr. Goldberg bought the building, he said, “people were sitting in the lobby on the floor eating out of paper bags, with bottles all around. It looked like a homeless shelter.”

His aim was to clear the building and maximize room rates. He offered residents money to leave and helped them find apartments.

Source & Image : New York Times

Bloomberg Pushes a Plan to Let Midtown Soar

London, Tokyo and other metropolises have created central business districts with forests of skyscrapers in recent years, seeking to meet the needs of globe-trotting corporate tenants.

But New York’s premier district, the 70-block area around Grand Central Terminal, has lagged, Bloomberg officials say, hampered by zoning rules, decades old, that have limited the height of buildings.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to overhaul these rules so that buildings in Midtown Manhattan can soar as high as those elsewhere. New towers could eventually cast shadows over landmarks across the area, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. They could rise above the 59-story MetLife Building and even the 77-story Chrysler Building.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal reflects his effort to put his stamp on the city well after his tenure ends in December 2013. Moving swiftly, he wants the City Council to adopt the new zoning, for what is being called Midtown East, by October 2013, with the first permits for new buildings granted four years later.

His administration says that without the changes, the neighborhood around Grand Central will not retain its reputation as “the best business address in the world” because 300 of its roughly 400 buildings are more than 50 years old. These structures also lack the large column-free spaces, tall ceilings and environmental features now sought by corporate tenants.

The rezoning — from 39th Street to 57th Street on the East Side — would make it easier to demolish aging buildings in order to make way for state of-the-art towers.

Without it, “the top Class A tenants who have been attracted to the area in the past would begin to look elsewhere for space,” the administration says in its proposal.

The plan has stirred criticism from some urban planners, community boards and City Council members, who have contended that the mayor has acted hastily. They said they were concerned about the impact of taller towers in an already dense district where buildings, public spaces, streets, sidewalks and subways have long remained unchanged.

Mr. Bloomberg has encouraged high-rise development in industrial neighborhoods, including the Far West Side of Manhattan, the waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in Long Island City, Queens. But with the proposal for Midtown, which is working its way through environmental and public reviews, he is tackling the city’s commercial heart.

“Unlocking the development potential in this area will generate historic opportunities for investment in New York City,” Deputy Mayor Robert K. Steel said.

The initiative would, in some cases, allow developers to build towers twice the size now permitted in the Grand Central area. The owner of the 19-story Roosevelt Hotel at Madison and 45th Street could replace it with a 58-story tower under the proposed rules. Current regulations permit no more than 30 floors.

Administration officials acknowledged that the current market for new office buildings across Manhattan was relatively weak. For example, a 40-story office tower at 11 Times Square, at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, which was completed in 2010, is still not full.

But the officials said major changes in zoning were intended to make it possible to build when demand returned, as history suggests it inevitably will. In promoting the proposal, the administration has repeatedly stressed that Midtown Manhattan needed to keep pace with business districts in other world capitals. And New York does compete with London for some financial firms.

But many of New York’s prominent corporations, law firms and other businesses are not about to decamp for a spectacular skyscraper in Hong Kong anytime soon. Part of the obsession with taller buildings is about prestige and worldwide bragging rights, for size and architectural supremacy.

By the city’s estimates, the new towers would be home to an additional 16,000 employees in a neighborhood that now has 230,000 office workers. That could strain the Lexington Avenue subway line, which runs through Grand Central and is already operating well above capacity.

“Massive new buildings could be constructed,” said Michael B. Gerrard, an environmental lawyer working with the Municipal Art Society to review the proposal.

“They’re proceeding at a breakneck pace,” he said, referring to Bloomberg aides. “The administration wants to get all this done before the gate closes.”

Source & Image : New York Times

Emory Confronts a Legacy of Bias Against Jews

Early in the summer of 1952, after his first year of dental school at Emory University in Atlanta, Perry Brickman received a letter from the dean. It informed him that he had flunked out.

Mr. Brickman was mystified. He had been a B-plus student in biology as an Emory undergraduate and had earned early admission to dental school. He had never failed a course in his life.

Over the next few weeks of that summer, Mr. Brickman found out that three of his classmates had also been failed. All of them happened to be Jewish. Yet instead of fighting back, Mr. Brickman and his friends searched for other dental schools and swallowed a shame that lasted decades.

“Your parents said, ‘Why didn’t you work harder?’ ” Mr. Brickman, 80, recalled recently. “My mother said, ‘What have you done to me?’ It was almost like being a rape victim. No one believed us. It couldn’t be this one-sided story. Emory was a great university, right? So we went off with the tail between our legs.”

Sixty years later, Mr. Brickman has helped to see belated justice done. In large part because of his personal research into the anti-Semitic record of Emory’s dental school, the university has invited many Jewish former students to a private meeting on Wednesday with its president, James W. Wagner, and that same night it will host the premiere of a documentary film about the scandal.

The evidence of bias against Jewish students in Emory’s dental school under the reign of its dean, John E. Buhler, from 1948 to 1961 has been known for decades. Until now, however, the university had neither admitted the bias nor apologized for it.

“We need to be fearless in confronting our past as individuals and an institution,” said Gary S. Hauk, Emory’s vice president. “There are often things we regret about our past, but there is the possibility of making amends and of building on the acknowledgment of those things. Part of our vision of Emory is being ethically engaged, and that means wrestling about what it means to have these warts.”

Emory’s event this week is part of a larger inquiry and atonement for anti-Semitic practices at elite universities for much of the 20th century. Two major books, “The Chosen,” by Jerome Karabel, and “Joining the Club,” by Dan Oren, exposed the details of anti-Jewish quotas on admission at Ivy League schools. James O. Freedman, while serving as president of Dartmouth College in the 1990s, publicly spoke of its history of discrimination.

Like the Ivies, Emory has become a drastically different place since the 1960s. Its student body is roughly 20 percent Jewish, according to Mr. Hauk, and its faculty includes prominent Jewish scholars like the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. In fact, it was an exhibition by one of her academic colleagues, Eric Goldstein, that set Mr. Brickman on his quest.

As part of commemorating the 30th anniversary of Emory’s Jewish studies program in 2006, Professor Goldstein assembled a display on the Jewish experience at the school. It included news articles about a 1962 book on American anti-Semitism written by two staff members of the Anti-Defamation League, which had a chapter about Emory’s dental school.

During Mr. Buhler’s years as dean, the book showed, 65 percent of Jewish students were either flunked out or forced to repeat entire years of classes. Jewish enrollment at the dental school plummeted, and it adopted an application designating prospective students as “Caucasian, Jew or Other.”

While Mr. Buhler resigned after the Anti-Defamation League brought that application form to the attention of Emory leaders, the university denied that there was any connection between the two events. The dental school’s practices, never acknowledged by Emory, were simply dropped, and the affair faded from collective memory over passing generations. (Mr. Buhler, who later became dean of the dental school at the University of South Carolina, died in 1976.)

Viewing the Goldstein exhibit, however, Mr. Brickman felt stirred to action. “It was the first time I’d seen those figures of how many people had flunked,” he said. “I had no idea how many there were. It was obvious that it was a systemic problem.”

So he tracked down dozens of the Jewish students who had been affected, most of them still holding a complicated mix of anger and embarrassment. Mr. Brickman taped interviews with many of them, and that video became the foundation of the coming documentary, “From Silence to Recognition,” by David Hughes Duke.

“Can you imagine trying to study,” one former student recalls in the film, “knowing that whatever you did was not acceptable to a dean who was committed to flunking you out?”

Another recounts being told by Mr. Buhler: “Why do you Jews want to go into dentistry? You don’t have it in the hands.”

As for Mr. Brickman, he eventually went to dental school at the University of Tennessee and graduated fourth in his class.

Source & Image : New York Times

Obama and Democrats Raise $181 Million in September

3:17 p.m. | Updated President Obama and the Democrats shattered the election cycle’s fund-raising record with a $181 million haul for September, the campaign announced on Saturday morning.

The amount — a mix of funds raised directly by the campaign and large checks taken in by the Democratic National Committee — was even more than some earlier reports had suggested. And while it did not quite match the roughly $191 million Mr. Obama and the Democrats raised during the same month four years ago, the announcement offered a jolt of good news for Mr. Obama’s supporters in the wake of a lackluster debate performance on Wednesday that left many of them worried.

The campaign began e-mailing supporters early Saturday morning and announced the news on Twitter shortly after 10 am.

“The people and the stories behind these numbers are what make this grass-roots organization so powerful,” Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, wrote in the e-mail. The announcement also contained testimonials from grass-roots donors who had contributed.

Mitt Romney has not yet announced his fund-raising totals for the month. But a Romney spokeswoman said that the Republicans had done well after Wednesday’s debate, raising $12 million online in less than 48 hours, more than in the wake of Mr. Romney’s selection of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate. Sixty percent of the money came from first-time donors, according to the campaign.

September is often a strong month for presidential campaign fund-raising, as voters begin to focus on the race and candidates’ hard-core supporters begin ramping up for the general election. Mr. Obama’s September fund-raising included money contributed during the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., when the president, his wife, Michelle, and former President Bill Clinton all delivered major speeches.

The president and his party had received donations from close to four million people since Mr. Obama announced his re-election bid last year, the campaign said. September’s totals included contributions from 1,825,813 people, 567,000 of them new donors, the campaign said.

The September totals mark a second strong fund-raising month in a row for Mr. Obama, at a time when his campaign is bracing for an onslaught of late advertising from Republican-aligned “super PAC’s” and other outside groups. In August, Mr. Obama and the Democratic committee raised $114 million, more than the $111.6 million raised by Mr. Romney and the Republicans.

Mr. Obama did not announce how much cash his campaign had on hand going into October, and his campaign does not have to file detailed disclosures with the Federal Election Commission until later this month. But he is likely to show strong donations from small donors relative to Mr. Romney, a difference that gave Mr. Obama a critical advantage in cash flow over Mr. Romney in August, when the Republican candidate borrowed $20 million to get through the summer.

While Mr. Obama has raised more than half of his total cash on donations of under $200, Mr. Romney has relied far more on large donors giving the maximum check to the candidate and his party. Without a large stream of grass-roots money, Mr. Romney has had to spend more time fund-raising in recent months than his campaign would like, leaving less time to meet voters in swing states.

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Follow Nicholas Confessore on Twitter at @nickconfessore.

Source & Image : New York Times

For a Mother, Grief and Anger After the Police Fatally Shoot Her Son

Standing on a sidewalk in Queens, Cecilia Reyes, struggled to get the words out. She pressed the palm of her hand to her mouth in an attempt to mute her sobs. She used her other hand to wipe her tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just lost my son.”

For the relatives and friends who encircled her at 1:30 a.m. on Friday - less than 24 hours after a police detective shot and killed her son, Noel Polanco, during a traffic stop on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens - her grief needed no explanation.

They had gathered outside the lounge in Astoria, Queens, where Mr. Polanco, 22, had worked to offer their support. They lighted candles and placed bouquets of flowers at the base of a traffic light on the corner of 33rd Street and Broadway. Photocopied images of Mr. Polanco were taped to a metal pole. The crowd parted and cleared a path for Ms. Reyes. Someone handed her a black marker, which she held aloft and pressed against a photo of her son dressed in Army fatigues. “Mom loves you,” she wrote, adding balloon-like hearts as bookends on either side of those three words.

On Thursday at about 5:15 a.m., the police said, Mr. Polanco was driving erratically on the Grand Central, switching lanes while speeding, and twice cutting off two police trucks carrying several officers with the Emergency Service Unit. The officers, members of the unit’s apprehension team, had just executed a warrant in the Bronx and were headed to Brooklyn to execute another warrant, and were traveling eastbound on the parkway near La Guardia Airport, the police said.

Mr. Polanco had just left Ice NYC, where he worked part time in the hookah lounge, filling and serving tobacco water pipes. Though he was not working, he had gone to the club to pick up a bartender, Diane Deferrari, and Ms. Deferrari’s friend, Vanessa Rodriguez, an off-duty police officer. Mr. Polanco offered to drive the two women home in his Honda. All three lived near one another in an apartment complex in Corona.

The two police trucks forced Mr. Polanco to stop after one truck went in front of the Honda while the second truck maneuvered behind. After the car stopped, along a median of the busy highway, two officers approached the car, a sergeant at the driver’s side and the detective at the passenger’s side where the windows were open, the police said.

Ms. Deferrari later told the police that she had heard the officers order those inside the car to show their hands. In an interview, she said that Mr. Polanco had no time to comply and that, in that instant, the detective, Hassan Hamdy, 39, fired the shot. Ms. Deferrari said she believed the shooting was the result of a case of police road rage.

No weapons were found inside Mr. Polanco’s car, the police said.

Mr. Polanco’s mother said she did not learn that her son was dead until about 2 p.m. on Thursday. She was at her job as a clerical assistant at Elmhurst Hospital Center when the police told her, she said.

On Friday morning, Ms. Reyes said no one from the Police Department had reached out to her to explain what happened or to express condolences. Her emotions cast a wide pendulum, swinging from anger to anguish.

“They are going to pay for this,” she said. “This is not going to stay like this. They are going to get justice.”

Mr. Polanco’s younger sister, Amanda, 15, who accompanied her mother to the lounge early Friday, said she had faith that the justice system would work.

The shooting is under investigation by the Police Department and the Queens district attorney’s office, which is routine practice for all police-involved shootings.

Ms. Reyes, 46, said that her son would never harm anyone and that she was certain he posed no threat to the officers. Mr. Polanco was a member of the Army National Guard and was assigned to a company headquartered in Kingston, N.Y.

“They are trying to make him look like he was a bad person, but that’s not going to happen,” she said. “I’m going to make sure that his name does not get taken down in the mud.”

She added: “This is my son. This is my life. I don’t know how they could have not thought about that.”

The shooting was the latest in a series of encounters in which police officers have shot or wounded civilians. The killing of Mr. Polanco was different because, so far, the police have not been able to provide an explanation about what prompted Detective Hamdy to fire his gun.

“We want the truth. We want the honest truth,” said Joseph Thomas, 26, one of Mr. Polanco’s friends who joined the crowd outside the lounge in Astoria.

“No one feels safe,” Mr. Thomas added. “This isn’t the first time in which an innocent young man was gunned down. How are they protecting us when they are gunning us down? They are out here shooting us.”

One woman, Claudia Gonzalez, 46, said Mr. Polanco had worked for her providing security at a dance hall she operated in Corona. But he left his job with her, she said, because he thought it was too dangerous and he did not like to break up fights.

“I know a list of kids that I could say, ‘O.K., he had it coming; he didn’t listen.’ Not Noel,” she said. “Innocent blood was truly shed here.”

Source & Image : New York Times

Jobs News Makes Obama’s Case Easier

Whenever a new set of jobs numbers is announced, it is important to keep in mind just how noisy the data can be.

Forecasts of the monthly growth in nonfarm payrolls miss by 68,000 jobs on average. That means that the margin of error on the forecasts, enough to cover 95 percent of all possible outcomes, is wider still: plus or minus about 170,000 jobs.

This is not merely because economic forecasting is difficult. It is also because the economy is a hard thing to measure, and the initial estimates of jobs growth are crude. On average, the initial monthly jobs numbers are eventually revised upward or downward by 70,000 jobs.

Nor do the monthly revisions necessarily cancel out. Instead, whole seasons, and indeed whole years, can sometimes be revised.

Last month, for instance, the government estimated that 386,000 more jobs than it had originally reported were created between April 2011 and March 2012, or about 32,000 per month. These estimates will be refined and officially incorporated into the numbers, when the government announces its benchmark revisions to the labor numbers on Feb. 1, 2013.

Thus, the threshold for what counts as an economically and politically significant jobs report ought to be fairly high. Not every month’s report can or should be a “game-changer.” Indeed, the public has often reacted more calmly to both good and bad monthly jobs reports than the political cognoscenti do.

Was Friday’s jobs report, which showed 114,000 jobs added in September and the unemployment rate dropping to 7.8 percent, strong enough to be one of the exceptional cases?

My view is that the answer is yes: this report really does warrant some attention.

The reported payrolls growth figure for September, 114,000 jobs, was incredibly close to consensus forecasts of about 115,000 jobs added. But everything else about the report considerably beat expectations. Jobs figures were revised upward by 40,000 in July, and by 46,000 in August. Combined with the jobs growth in September, that means the economy added 200,000 more jobs than we thought previously.

The unemployment rate is calculated through a separate survey — one of households rather than business establishments. The data from the household survey tends to be even noisier than that from the establishment survey.

But unlike last month, when a decline in the unemployment rate was caused by the exit of workers from the labor force, the household survey also reflected genuinely good news in September. According to that survey, 413,000 workers joined the labor force in September. But 873,000 more people became employed, causing the unemployment rate to fall to 7.8 percent.

If the September numbers resulted in part from statistical variance, it is certainly possible that there will be some payback in the October report, which will be released the Friday before the Nov. 6 election.

But it is also possible that the strength shown in the government’s report on Friday reflects it playing catch up. The firm ADP, which tracks private-sector payrolls, had reported that an average of 170,000 private-sector jobs had been created each month so far this year. The ADP reports are much maligned because they do not always match the government’s payroll figures over the short run. But in the long run, the numbers tend to converge.

Furthermore, there has been a fairly consistent pattern of upward revisions to the government’s jobs reports recently.

The jobs numbers are certainly not enough to change the basic story of a slow economic recovery, and it will take many years for the economy to get back to full employment.

However, the jobs numbers are one of the more hopeful signs for the economy on balance. An average of 146,000 jobs have been created per month over the past year, or closer to 157,000 with the government’s anticipated benchmark revisions accounted for.

Those aren’t great numbers by any means, and would translate to an annualized growth rate of 1.4 percent. But over the past 25 years, payroll jobs have grown at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent, or the equivalent of about 125,000 jobs added per month given today’s population. By this measure, it’s been a fairly average economic year, although certainly not enough to make up for the productivity that was lost from the economy in 2008 and 2009.

The rate of jobs growth is now just slightly behind the one that was enough to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, when an average of 168,000 jobs were created between January and September 2004.

Although the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, the recent trajectory now looks more favorable. Unemployment has fallen by 0.7 percent since December 2011, to 7.8 percent from 8.5 percent.

Historically, there has been no relationship at all between the unemployment rate on Election Day and the incumbent’s performance.

However, there has been a relationship between the change in the unemployment rate in the months leading up to the election and how well the incumbent does. The decline in unemployment under Mr. Obama this year since December is the largest in an election year since Ronald Reagan’s re-election bid, when it declined to 7.3 percent in Sept. 1984 from 8.3 percent in Dec. 1983.

The drop in unemployment alone is no guarantee of re-election — there was also a considerable drop in unemployment in 1976, and Gerald Ford lost.

However, the FiveThirtyEight economic index, which accounts for the payrolls numbers along with six other economic data series, would project a narrow re-election for Mr. Obama by about 3 percentage points — similar to Mr. Bush’s margin over John Kerry in 2004. Especially with the Friday jobs report, the economic numbers now seem just strong enough to make the incumbent a favorite for re-election, based on the way the public has evaluated their presidents historically.

I’m less inclined to predict what immediate effect the numbers will have on the polls — whether Friday’s news outweighs, for instance, Mr. Obama’s poor performance in Wednesday night’s debate. Mr. Obama did not win the election on Friday any more than he lost it on Wednesday.

But for the first time in a long while, Mr. Obama should be happy if the discussion turns toward the economy.

Source & Image : New York Times

Polls: Little to No Bounce for Romney

Several new polls show that in the immediate days after the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, did not see much of a boost to his campaign, although slightly more Americans now see him as someone who can understand the needs of the middle class.

A Gallup daily tracking poll conducted Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 showed that Mr. Romney’s support after the convention stood at 46 percent of registered voters, no different than the 47 percent who supported him in the days before the speeches and festivities in Tampa, Fla.

According to Gallup’s analysis of polling results after previous conventions, Mr. Romney is the third nominee in recent history — and the first Republican — to gain little or no improvement in the polls in the days after his party’s convention. The other nominees who saw little movement were George McGovern in 1972 and Senator John Kerry in 2004.

A CNN/ORC poll conducted at the same time as Gallup’s recent one showed Mr. Romney’s support at 48 percent in the wake of the convention. He is tied with President Obama, but at virtually the same level of support among likely voters polled Aug. 22 to 23.

However, the CNN poll did show a small tightening of the gap that existed on which candidate was more in touch with the problems facing middle-class Americans. Before the Republican convention, Mr. Obama held a 14-point advantage among likely voters over Mr. Romney on the issue; afterward, Mr. Obama held a 6-point edge.

Perhaps most tellingly, nearly half of registered voters said what they saw or read of the Republican convention made them less likely to vote for Mr. Romney than said it made them more likely to vote for him, while just over a third said they were more likely, and 1 in 8 said it made no difference. And the 46 percent who said they were less likely to vote for Mr. Romney was the highest negative response for either party’s candidate following conventions going back to 1984, according to CNN polls.

But the Democrats will also have their work cut out for them during their time in Charlotte, N.C. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll found Mr. Obama’s favorability at 47 percent, his lowest rating since December among registered voters. In the poll, Mr. Romney had a slight 5-point boost in his favorability post-convention, but at 43 percent, he is experiencing the same doldrums as his opponent.

And the CNN poll also found that a majority of registered voters said the Republicans spent too much of their convention criticizing the Democrats and saying positive things about themselves, including 58 percent of independents. Just about a third said the Republicans maintained the right balance.

At the opening day of their convention, Democrats did their fair share of attacking the other party, and it remains to be seen if that approach will help or hurt their own candidate.

The Gallup tracking surveys interviewed 1,827 registered voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The CNN/ORC poll interviewed 1,005 adults, including 877 registered voters and 735 likely voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points for the likely voters. All three surveys included cellphones and landlines. The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted Aug. 29 to Sept. 2 among 1,002 adults and 842 registered voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four points for the registered voters.

Source & Image : New York Times

Champagne Headphones on a Beer Budget

After a steady diet of earbuds – good earbuds – I wasn’t expecting to hear much improvement from a $100 pair of over-the-ear headphones. But I was in for sonic equivalent of a $14.95 all-you-can eat buffet — but one serving lobster, caviar and truffles. From the first note, the lush fidelity of the Grado SR80i headphones was a delightful shock.

The secret to the sound really is a secret, said John Chen, director of sales for Grado Labs, a Brooklyn-based audio manufacturer that makes its headphones in the United States.

Part of the secret is that the speakers for the headphones are hand tested to make sure they match. That matters because no two speakers perform exactly alike, but the more closely they match, the better the stereo effect. That means you hear more details and the sounds are more convincingly spread out around you.

But how they match them is a secret, said Mr. Chen.

It smacks of bit of the lofty and sometimes dubious theories found throughout the stereo business, but whatever – the things sound great at a bargain price.

Mr. Chen sent me the SR80i’s to try, but also the $400 SR325i’s to compare.

While the SR325i’s certainly had more definition and nuance (I could more easily pick out individual instruments) it was really only an advantage on detailed recordings like symphonic music and the famously fussy Steely Dan discs.

On more pedestrian recordings, like banging garage rock and movie music, the more dramatic SR80i’s were punchy and more than up to the job. That is tacitly acknowledged by the 3.5mm jack that comes on the 80’s, meaning it’s ready for iProducts (it does come with a 1-inch standard adapter to fit the headphone hack on most stereos). The 325’s only come with a 1-inch jack.

I would have liked to try the lower line, $80 SR60i’s. While there is a risk of getting a less than perfectly matched set of drivers, you might luck out. Or you could just consider the extra $20 for the 80’s a bit of insurance.

Source & Image : New York Times

The ‘Busy’ Trap

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

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Anxiety, Friendship, modern life, Time

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs  who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s  make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Brecht Vandenbroucke

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I  Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

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More From Anxiety

Read previous contributions to this series.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)

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Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, “The Pain — When Will It End?” has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.

Source & Image : New York Times

A Thing for Lamé and Condemned Men

NICOLE KIDMAN, movie star, Oscar winner and red-carpet regular, recently played a cow. Talk about your glamour roles.

The performance was for an enactment of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which took place in her Nashville home as she was putting her 4-year-old daughter, Sunday, to bed. She also impersonated the fairy tale’s stem-climbing hero while her husband, the country singer Keith Urban, played the magic beans. “I’m like, ‘I can’t read this book again for the hundredth time,’ so I said, ‘We’re going to do it!’ ” Ms. Kidman, 45, said. (The couple also has a 19-month-old daughter, Faith, and Ms. Kidman has a daughter, Isabella, 19, and a son, Connor, 17, from her marriage to Tom Cruise.)

“Sunday sat on her bed and watched us. She was into it,” she said. Then she laughed. “Well, she didn’t tell us to stop.”

After nearly 30 years of making movies, no one is telling Ms. Kidman to stop taking on roles that challenge both her and what moviegoers think they know about her. Over a cappuccino at a Manhattan hotel last month she discussed her career and her latest unlikely role: as a Southern floozy in the intentionally pulpy drama “The Paperboy,” opening Oct. 5. Directed by the maker of “Precious,” Lee Daniels, the film earned both cheers and jeers for its audacity when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Ms. Kidman, an elegant blonde, is strikingly tall (she’s nearly 5 foot 11) and looked even taller in a chic black pantsuit. She spoke precisely but with an easy sense of humor. “You can ask me pretty much anything,” she volunteered. “There’ll be things I’ll go, ‘That feels a little too personal.’ But most things I don’t have a fear of being asked about.”

She said her career was founded on a drive to get inside the characters she plays. When she was younger, acting was about escaping her own insecurities by becoming someone else. Now, she said, “it’s the desire to study the human condition, the desire for collaboration, to learn and absorb, and to lead a well-examined life.”

Asked to name a role model for the next decade or two of her career, she instantly picked the French actress Isabelle Huppert. “I love the danger in her career,” Ms. Kidman said.

The director Baz Luhrmann, her friend, fellow Aussie and two-time collaborator (“Moulin Rouge!” and “Australia”), said that Ms. Kidman was a rare breed. “Nicole is a serious actor and an iconic movie star,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This combination doesn’t come along all that often.” Off screen, he said, “she can be fantastically down to earth, straight to the point, and a whole lot of fun, with a particularly Aussie sense of humor that doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

Another close friend, the actress Naomi Watts, praised Ms. Kidman’s way of navigating between commercial and independent films. “I think Nic has a wild streak in her and a very practical streak, and she manages to balance both very well, and that’s evident in her work,” Ms. Watts said in a phone interview. “She’s a fascinating and complicated woman full of contradictions, and that’s what makes her work so deep and interesting.”

Put “The Paperboy” in the wild streak column. Based on the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter, the movie features Ms. Kidman as a seemingly hot-to-trot woman named Charlotte, a resident of a small town in Florida in 1969. She writes romantic letters to prison inmates and cavorts about in derrière-hugging gold lamé pants, tight tops and straightened, teased blond hair. “I think straight hair gives me class,” Charlotte mistakenly observes.

Ms. Kidman’s risqué “Paperboy” scenes include a steamy jailhouse make-out session, sans physical contact, with Charlotte’s fiancé, a condemned murderer (played by John Cusack), and an already much-discussed beach scene in which she urinates on a worshipful young man (Zac Efron) in an effort to counteract his jellyfish stings. (In a line likely to become an instant camp classic, Charlotte, in shooing away other female, would-be Good Samaritans, proclaims that if anyone is going to urinate on the young man, “it’s gonna be me.”)

“I wanted something raw, and I wanted to work with a director who was going to access something different in me,” Ms. Kidman said of taking the part. “The script was really strong, so I was grateful to get the role.” Mr. Daniels, who had directed only “Precious” and “Shadowboxer” (2005) before “The Paperboy,” said that Ms. Kidman’s formidable résumé had him feeling intimidated initially. (Besides an Academy Award for her role as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” from 2002, she has earned two more Oscar nominations and worked in nearly 40 films). But “she said, ‘Lee, if you’re going to direct me, you’ve got to understand that I’m just a plain working girl,’ ” he said. “And she was.”

On the first day of shooting — Mr. Daniels doesn’t believe in rehearsals — he had Ms. Kidman and Mr. Efron jump straight into the jellyfish scene. “You just go for it,” she said. “I think we did three takes, but it felt like a hundred.”

Mr. Efron said he admired Ms. Kidman’s willingness to go full throttle in that scene — she slapped him so hard trying to revive him that she apologized afterward for hurting him — and the ones that followed. As a young actor he found it inspiring and instructive to see her “go unabashedly into a part like this and just let go,” he recalled. “She’s so unafraid. There are no walls up.”

Source & Image : New York Times

Separate and Unequal

Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, “The Price of Inequality,” is the single most comprehensive counter­argument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories. While credible economists running the gamut from center right to center left describe our bleak present as the result of seemingly unstoppable developments — globalization and automation, a self-­replicating establishment built on “meritocratic” competition, the debt-driven collapse of 2008 — Stiglitz stands apart in his defiant rejection of such notions of inevitability. He seeks to shift the terms of the debate.

It is not uncontrollable technological and social change that has produced a two-tier society, Stiglitz argues, but the exercise of political power by moneyed interests over legislative and regulatory processes. “While there may be underlying economic forces at play,” he writes, “politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” But politics, he insists, is subject to change.

Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate and a professor of economics at Columbia (where I too teach, but we are not personally acquainted). He holds a commanding position in an intellectual insurgency challenging the dominant economic orthodoxy. Among his allies are Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (the authors of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class”); Lawrence Lessig (“Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It”); Timothy Noah (“The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It”) and Paul Krugman (“End This Depression Now!”). The collective argument of these dissidents is not only that inequality violates moral values, but that it also interacts with a money-driven political system to grant excessive power to the most affluent. In short, those with power use it to insulate themselves from competitive forces by winning favorable tax treatment, government-­protected market share and other forms of what economists call “rent seeking.”

Conservative advocates of pure free markets, in this view, fail to acknowledge how concentrated economic power converts into political power. The right, for example, has hailed the evisceration of the estate tax and the lifting of restrictions on campaign contributions, despite evidence that such policies work to restrict competition — by further concentrating wealth in the case of the estate tax, and by further empowering corporate America to control political decisions in the case of campaign finance.

Stiglitz and his allies argue that a free and competitive market is highly beneficial to society at large, but that it needs government regulation and oversight to remain functional. Without constraint, dominant interests use their leverage to make gains at the expense of the majority. Concentration of power in private hands, Stiglitz believes, can be just as damaging to the functioning of markets as excessive regulation and political control.

The importance of Stiglitz’s contribution (and that of other dissidents) to the public debate cannot be overestimated. The news media and the Congress are ill-­equipped to address the role of economic power in shaping policy. Both institutions are, in fact, unaware of the extent to which they themselves are subject to the influence of money.

Stiglitz describes the economic capture of regulatory authorities by the interests under their jurisdiction — and the more subtle intellectual capture of policy makers of all kinds. The calculated and purposeful shaping of public discussion allowed conservative analyses to dominate debate in the years before the collapse of 2008, and in the years since they have been dominant as well.

Source & Image : New York Times

Michelle Obama’s Dress in High Definition

IT says a lot about politics today that it was possible, during a speech by Michelle Obama that was described as “genius” for its subtlety by both David Brooks and Mark Shields, that a parallel conversation was happening online, and in real time, about her shimmering brocade dress and matching fingernails. If you were following along on Twitter, where comments reportedly reached a peak of 28,000 a minute by the end of her speech, you might wonder how many people were really listening to what she was saying.

Like it or not, this election season has shown that clothes are probably more important than words, or at least a more effective means of communication.

We have discussed the significance of Ann Romney’s Oscar de la Renta shirtdress at the Republican convention, so fairness demands an examination of Mrs. Obama’s dress, by Tracy Reese. By most accounts, Mrs. Obama came up the winner, in a beautifully fitted dress that was a savvy choice in the era of high-definition television.

From a distance, the dress had a shimmering effect, like wet paint in a blast of unreadable pastels, but in close-ups, viewers could practically study the pattern of the gold brocade. You could imagine a group of handlers backstage considering this choice with the calculation of Cinna in “The Hunger Games,” when he creates a gown of flames for the big-screen debut of Katniss Everdeen. They were asking the same question, anyway: What would it look like on television? The dress was sleeveless, as is Mrs. Obama’s signature, playing to her message of physical fitness.

Her hair and makeup were also praised, but not her silver-blue fingernails. If you think that is being too nitpicky, try Googling “Condoleezza Rice” and “lipstick.”

Even the choice of designer sent a message. Mrs. Obama has frequently worn dresses by Ms. Reese, a self-made businesswoman who happens to be African-American, which in fashion is a rare breakthrough. Ms. Reese’s prices are also in the middle ground. While the dress Mrs. Obama wore has not yet been produced, very similar styles from Ms. Reese cost $395 to $450, which fits perfectly with the Democratic pitch to the middle class. Mrs. Obama’s pink pumps were from J. Crew.

Mrs. Romney’s dress cost $1,990.

Source & Image : New York Times

Sept. 4: The Simple Case for Why Obama Is the Favorite

I’ve been tiptoeing around this point, because I don’t think that our forecast model ought to represent the totality of our analysis about the election.

But if you look at the right-hand column of this page, you’ll notice that our forecast has moved toward President Obama over the past several days. It now gives him about a three-in-four chance of winning the Electoral College on Nov. 6.

I’ll explain a little bit more about how the model comes to that conclusion in a moment, but the intuition behind it is pretty simple:

1. Polls usually overrate the standing of the candidate who just held his convention.
2. Mitt Romney just held his convention. But he seems to have gotten a below-average bounce out of it. The national polls that have come out since the Republican National Convention have shown an almost exact tie in the race.
3. If the polls overrate Mr. Romney, and they show only a tie for him now, then he will eventually lose.

The first point is the simplest of all, but perhaps the most important. There is a lot of focus on the bounce that a candidate gets after his convention — that is, how the polls conducted just after the convention compare with the ones taken immediately beforehand.

But the more instructive comparison may be how the post-convention polls track with the actual election result — it’s Nov. 6 that we’re really concerned about, after all.

On average, between 1968 and 2008, the challenging candidate led by 10 percentage points in polls conducted just after his convention. By comparison, the challenging candidate eventually lost the popular vote by an average of three points in these years. That means the post-convention polls overrated the challenger by an average of 13 points.

The good news for Mr. Romney is that this tendency has been growing smaller over time. However, it hasn’t necessarily disappeared. In 1992, Bill Clinton led by more than 20 points after his convention, but his actual winning margin was only about six. In 2000, George W. Bush came out of his convention in Philadelphia with about a 10-point lead in the polls — but he eventually lost the popular vote. John Kerry, in 2004, got very little bounce from his convention. But Mr. Kerry nevertheless came into his convention with a lead, and he maintained it — then he lost the popular vote by about two points instead.

There were also two recent cases in which the post-convention polls did not overrate the standing of the challenging candidate. In 1996, Bob Dole trailed by about nine points immediately after the Republican convention in San Diego, which is the same margin by which he eventually lost to Mr. Clinton. And in 2008, Mr. Obama led by about four points after his convention in Denver, but won by a wider margin, seven points, instead.

Both 1996 and 2008 are slightly odd cases, however. In 1996, the polls had Mr. Clinton ahead of Mr. Dole by double-digits almost the whole way through the campaign, including on Election Day itself; the period right after the Republican convention that year was about the lone exception. So this may have been a case of two wrongs making a right: the polls were persistently biased toward Mr. Clinton, and Mr. Dole’s convention bounce counteracted that temporarily.

And in 2008, it’s not quite clear what would have happened if not for the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which occurred about two weeks after the party conventions. Mr. Obama very probably still would have won, but it might have been by a smaller margin had the economic problems not become so acute so quickly.

Certainly, Mr. Romney could benefit from a parallel to either of these circumstances. The election is close enough that if there is even a modest bias in the polls toward Mr. Obama, the president’s chances will be tenuous.

And the economic recovery is tepid enough that if there is some intervening event, such as in Europe, then some voters who were willing to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt may change their minds.

But that isn’t how you draw these things up. You don’t want your chances to come down to the residual chance of a polling error or an October surprise. You want to be ahead after your party convention — not just tied, something that even Walter F. Mondale had (very briefly) managed to do in 1984.

The forecast model had no expectation of a double-digit bounce for Mr. Romney. This year the polls have been hard to move for any reason. By the model’s logic, that implies that the conventions wouldn’t move them much either.

But since Mr. Romney’s deficit with Mr. Obama was very narrow (he trailed by about two percentage points heading into the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla.) it wouldn’t have taken much of a bounce to put him ahead.

Specifically, the model’s assumption was that the post-Tampa polls would overrate Mr. Romney’s eventual finish by about four percentage points. That’s why the forecast has moved toward Mr. Obama over the last several days. It sees a bunch of polls showing a tie in the race, and interprets them as tantamount to a four-point Obama lead, since they were taken in the midst of what should be a high point for Mr. Romney.

Now that the Democratic convention has begun in Charlotte, N.C., the pressure will be on Mr. Obama. For two weeks or so after Thursday, the model will subtract a point or two from Mr. Obama’s column in the polls.

But Mr. Obama seems to have more control of his own destiny right now. If he carries even a modest bounce out of Charlotte, he’ll remain in the front-runner’s position.

And if Mr. Obama gets a bounce that’s a bit better than modest — say, he leads in the national polls by in the neighborhood five or six points next week, as Mr. Bush did following his convention in 2004 — Mr. Romney’s position will start to look fairly grim.

It may be presumptuous, of course, to assume that Mr. Obama will get any bounce at all. And even a strong speech in Charlotte could seem futile if we get a poor jobs report on Friday. By this time next week, we could be talking about how Mr. Romney’s two-point bounce looks good compared with Mr. Obama’s zero-point bounce.

But we have to evaluate the data as it comes in. Being only tied in the polls immediately after his own convention is unambiguously a bearish sign for Mr. Romney — and probably the most tangible sign to date that Mr. Obama is the favorite.

Source & Image : New York Times