Why we treat those at the fringes of life (the very young, the very old) so dismissively I dont know. Just look at the value of those professions which deal with these groups (child care, teachers, nursing home emplyees) and you see underpaid, overworked people caring for our young and old. One day, I trust, hope, and pray that we shall value these folks more. Read this and weep.
The New York Times
May 30, 2006
Personal Health
Age Is No Barrier to Lifting Depression's Heavy Veil
By JANE E. BRODY
Depression afflicts people of all ages, but it can be particularly devastating for older people, who are less likely to seek treatment and more likely to commit suicide than younger adults similarly afflicted. The problems include the failure to recognize the symptoms of depression in the elderly and the belief that nothing can be done for people with ample reason to be depressed.
Some elderly people continue to regard depression as shameful or a sign of weakness that should not be acknowledged even to physicians. Physicians, in turn, often fail to ask the questions that will find depression in their older patients.
The elderly came of age when little could be done for depression or when the only treatments caused serious side effects. These are some of the quite different facts about the problem:
•Depression is an illness of the brain, no different from diseases of other organs. It should be diagnosed and treated just like any other disease.
•Regardless of health, treating depression is as effective in the elderly as in younger people.
•Relieving depression for an older person not only improves mood, outlook and enjoyment, but it can also reduce physical symptoms and prolong life. Even among those with dementia, effective treatment often reduces their symptoms.
•Treatments have come an extremely long way in recent years. There are now many choices of effective antidepressants, including those with minimal side effects, and even the much-feared "electroshock" therapy is much safer today.
Diagnosis Can Be Tricky
The size of the problem is startling in itself. One person in seven over 65 suffers from depression, but 70 to 90 percent, depending on who's counting, receive no treatment for it.
A major reason for the huge gap between the numbers of people in need of treatment and the numbers receiving it is the difficulty in diagnosing depression when symptoms are not typical or are easily confused with a physical ailment.
Classic signs include persistent sadness, withdrawal from activities once enjoyed, difficulty sleeping and concentrating, and poor appetite.
Although some or all of these conditions may also be present in depressed older people, their symptoms may also include signs of dementia like memory problems and confusion, neglect of personal appearance, feelings of irritability or anxiety, pacing and fidgeting, lack of energy and even delusions and hallucinations. And people can be depressed without feeling sad. Rather, their emotional disorder is expressed more in physical terms, like vague complaints of aches and pains or gastrointestinal upset.
Many common stressful events can be seen as an explanation for depression: the death of a spouse or close friend; retirement with nothing satisfying to do; having to move from a family home or familiar neighborhood; losses in vision, hearing or mobility; or the developing a chronic or life-threatening illness.
Although any of these factors can result in temporary feelings of grief, loss and sadness, when such feelings persist for more than, say, six months, clinical depression is the more likely diagnosis. Clinical depression rarely, if ever, cures itself. It needs to be treated professionally.
Clinical depression is all the more likely if the person had previous depressive episodes or if the person's parents, siblings or children experienced depression. Among those with a genetic vulnerability, any major life change can bring on clinical depression.
People lacking such vulnerability typically bounce back within weeks or months of an emotionally challenging event and may remain cheerful even when death is imminent.
Certain disorders, particularly strokes and ministrokes, can cause depression by injuring the brain. Many medications commonly taken by older people can make the depression worse, among them steroids, anticancer drugs, tranquilizers, anti-anxiety agents and drugs for Parkinson's disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and pain.
But it is also important to realize that depression can take hold of a person without any apparent reason. Clinical depression involves a disruption in brain chemicals that can occur with or without a precipitating event.
Older women are nearly twice as likely as older men to become seriously depressed, a fact that some attribute to hormonal or other biological factors. A vitamin B12 deficiency has also been linked to severe depression in older women. People who live alone without supportive social networks also have higher rates of depression.
Value of Treatment
Untreated depression can shorten life and make what time remains not worth living. It is also hard to live with or be around a depressed person, leading to a withdrawal of family and social support, in turn feeding the depression.
Depression has been shown to worsen the symptoms of dementia and to make existing physical ailments like heart disease worse, possibly because depressed people are less conscientious about following prescribed remedies.
By suppressing the immune system, depression may render people more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Depressed older people may be so despondent that they become incontinent, unable to walk or unable to care for themselves.
Remedies Are Abundant
Depression should be regarded as a chronic disease, no less in need of therapy than heart disease or diabetes. The therapeutic possibilities in the modern medical armamentarium are large, and if one remedy fails, others are available. Experts say that more than 80 percent of older depressed people respond well or completely to one or another therapeutic approach.
A recent study indicated that many of them would prefer talk therapy first, resorting to medication only if that is not helpful enough. Most psychiatrists today, however, consider antidepressant medication to be a necessary first step that can make talk therapy more effective.
Compared with older antidepressants, the modern S.S.R.I.'s (for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and the N.S.R.I.'s (for norepinephrine and serotonin reuptake inhibitors) have fewer side effects and do not interact with as many other medications.
Each drug works a little differently from others in its class. If one does not bring noticeable relief in 6 to 12 weeks, another can be tried. If none of the newer drugs help, older ones — MAO (monoamine oxidase) inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants — can be tried. Sometimes combining two drugs works.
Medication can be used with psychotherapy or by itself. Psychotherapy can also be used alone, although studies indicate that it is rarely enough to counter severe depression. Psychopharmacologists warn that, to reduce the risk of a relapse, antidepressants should be taken for six months to a year after depression lifts. In some cases, the drugs may needed for life.
If both these approaches fail — and especially if a person is at risk of suicide — electroconvulsive therapy is often useful, especially when depression is accompanied by psychosis or delusions. Its beneficial effect is immediate.
Also, it uses far less electricity than it once did. Its only known side effect is temporary memory loss, but for some the loss is prolonged.
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The anthology is at once the most natural and also the most exciting form a book (or a sotorytelling circle) can take - because no where in nature does ONE element dominate - it's all a mix and blend of several. In fact, I am looking now for others with whom I have worked to join me in several anthology projects I feel would be fun. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 28, 2006
I Confess: One Theme, 30 Writers, a Trend
By CHARLES McGRATH
CHICK lit. True crime. Diet books. Recovery memoirs. Books about Britney. The publishing industry is a staunch believer in the principle that too much is never enough. The latest genre to flood the shelves in possibly excessive numbers, you may have noticed, is the anthology, but not the sort we used to lug to class.
This new kind of anthology assembles first-person confessional essays, rather than, say, discussions of sanitation and personal hygiene in the Middle Ages, and is readily distinguished by an annoyingly cute title and a numeral specifying the number of writers who bare their souls on a range of intimate topics: "Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives"; "Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick: 28 Women Writers on Life, Sex and Survival"; "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves."
"If memoir is the new fiction, then maybe anthologies are the new memoir," said Elizabeth Kaplan, the agent who helped create the trend in 2002 when she sold "The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage." "They've tapped into something in the air."
Men have occasionally been known to write this kind of confessional lit. In response to "The Bitch in the House," for example, there was "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom." And men may even read these first-person anthologies, though not in great numbers, apparently, and seldom on the subway or in other public places. "Most of the ones aimed at men pretty much fail miserably," said Sally Wofford-Girand, an agent who has handled a number of the books.
The phenomenon is largely a female one, in other words, with most of the essays by women and for women presumably in the same boat — trying to "have it all" while also achieving "balance" in their lives — only without access to a word processor. Certain writers, like Anne Lamott and Pam Houston, turn up all the time and on a variety of subjects, but it's hard to think of a female writer with a byline who hasn't succumbed at least once.
There are anthologies about dieting, Jewish guilt, divorce and breaking up with your friends, and forthcoming ones about money, aging and women behaving badly. But the books that give off the most heat (and generate the most sales) tend in one way or another to be about motherhood and child-rearing — about whether to have children in the first place and about who then takes care of them.
"The Bitch in the House," edited by Cathi Hanauer, was briefly a best seller, landing some of its contributors on the "Today" show, and it remains the role model for the rest, none of which have attained the same degree of success. The theme of "Bitch in the House" is pretty much summed up by the title: the 26 women telling the truth about sex, solitude and work, for the most part, were mad as hornets.
"Bitch in the House" struck a nerve, as people in the book business like to say, and more to the point, it created a repeatable publishing formula and spawned a mini-industry. It was quickly followed by "The Bastard on the Couch," edited by Daniel Jones, who, not coincidentally, happened to be Ms. Hanauer's husband and (the world of confessional lit is a small one) was later hired by The New York Times to edit the Modern Love column in Sunday Styles, which has excerpted a number of articles from the first-person anthologies.
What were these women so steamed up about? Men, in a word. Men who don't do their share of housework and child care, or men — in the case of a showoff married to one of the essayists — who venture to do more than their share. Men who, the essayist Karen Karbo says, operate only in binary mode: you can ask them to do something or tell them how to do it, but not both.
A man reading this book could hardly be faulted for concluding, as men always have, that when one's wife or companion is angry the best strategy is to slink out of the house as quickly and as quietly as possible. Not that men are blameless. Some of the male essayists in "The Bastard on the Couch" manage a sort of whiny self-defense, but most of the 17 contributors to "Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment and Marriage," with a preface by Jay McInerney, the well-known serial committer, come across as sublimely clueless.
The essays in this book present a fairly consistent narrative: the writer, a self-proclaimed idiot (the term of choice is actually a more anatomical one), after floundering around for years (though enjoying, as he modestly admits, a healthy amount of hot action on the futon), suddenly finds himself blown away by a "stone babe" who is "willowy" or else "gleamy eyed" and "leggy" and instantly commits, without a moment's thought or regret.
As David Owen writes, explaining his decision to marry quite young: "If you don't know what you're doing, simply gathering more facts is unlikely to improve the outcome."
An oddly similar kind of innocence pervades "The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling It All Together in Your 30's," a new anthology in which most of the essayists, after some mildly inappropriate choices, wind up with Mr. Right. (For really inappropriate choices you need to consult "Roar Softly": junkies, married men, guys who douse themselves with patchouli.)
As often as not, Mr. Right has a deeply spiritual side. (Hint to guys: "Let me bring you peace" is an excellent pickup line.) And unlike the writers in most of the other anthologies, these women really do seem able to have it all, or to think they can. A surprising number manage to give birth just when they are publishing their first novel or collection, and the two processes — writing and gestating — seem almost indistinguishable.
The difference between a bitch in the house and the May queens, one is tempted to say, is age. The younger writers haven't yet entered the anger years, nor have they figured out that painful narratives sell better than cheery ones.
There is a ghost in many of these books — the mother of the essayist, who is variously memorialized or blamed for being too perfect, an impossible role model, or for not sufficiently preparing her daughter for the world of work. And there is sometimes a surprising amount of animosity toward other women.
Some of the most thoughtful and most deeply felt essays in "Maybe Baby" are those in which the author argues for her decision not to have children and tells the celebrators of motherhood to get off her back. Another anthology, "Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families," is full of accounts of what really do sound like battlefield skirmishes — on the playground and at PTA meetings. "Why are children such a divisive force?" Susan Cheever writes. "What happened to the good old days when women used to fight with men?"
Some of this material is so raw, so personal, so badly written that readers may find themselves wondering: Why do people publish this stuff? Not for the money. Essayists are typically paid a flat fee of $1,000 to $1,500, which in most cases works out to much less than a dollar a word (though writers can sometimes pick up extra cash by placing their pieces in magazines or newspapers if the publisher hasn't greedily clung to the serial rights.)
They do it because they have something to get off their chest or because they have some unpublished piece gathering dust in a drawer. Or they do it, as I have (twice: for an anthology about coaches and for a forthcoming book about empty nesters), because some persistent editor twisted their arm. Vanity also works. A smart editor will first line up a couple of name writers, and lesser ones will come quickly flocking, flattered to be in such company.
For this arm-twisting and cajoling, and for polishing the prose of the recruits, the editor gets to keep the rest of the advance, which for an anthology these days tends to be in the high five figures or low six, to use the professional lingo — not a bad payday as editorial work goes but also a profitable and efficient arrangement for the publisher, who doesn't have to do a whole lot and can ride the coattails of all the other anthologies.
Of course the editor also has to come up with a saleable idea. In terms of literary quality, by far the best of the anthologies is "Because I Said So," edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, whose guideline is sufficiently vague as to include just about anything written by a woman, from Margaret Talbot's essay about the American Girl dolls to Katherine Whitney's account of meeting her Iranian in-laws.
But the anthologies that sell best tend to push one or two hot buttons, and Susanna Porter, the Random House editor who bought "Mommy Wars," is worried that most of the good ideas have already been used. "There's still a lot of anthologies being submitted," she said. "But publishers are nervous that the fad is on the wane. We're definitely in cautious mode. You can't generalize, but it feels as if the subject pool is getting diluted."
Ms. Wofford-Girand, an agent who has two new anthologies in the works and has a notion percolating for yet another, is more hopeful.
"It's got to be a great idea," she said, "and you have to put it into the hands of great writers, but I still think this form can work. There's always that voyeuristic element. I would not be interested in reading 300 pages about someone's miscarriage or someone's divorce, but I'll gladly read an essay about it."
###
From left, Ain Gordon, Hazelle Goodman, Bob Holman and James Urbaniak are some of the actors in "Leftover Stories to Tell."
Then he suddenly stopped, writing me one final curt letter, tersely stating that he saw no use in corresponding further. I was devastated. I met him once more, in Seattle, in 2002, when he appeared onstage during the Bumbershoot Festival that occurs every Labor Day weekend.
He was suffering from injuries receivec from an earlier auto accident, and agreed to meet with me briefly backstage. We went to dinner. He encouraged my foray into onologues as a performer, and explained that once i began performing monologues, all the questions I had of him 7 years earlier would be answered. He was right.
Rest in peace, Spalding. Rest in peace.Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 28, 2006
For Spalding Gray, One Last Tale
By NELL CASEY
WHEN Spalding Gray committed suicide, most likely by throwing himself off a Staten Island ferry on a cold January day nearly two and half years ago, he left behind an array of grievers: fans, colleagues, friends and family. People were stunned by the loss of this unusual performer, a man who had been artfully befriending audiences through his confessional monologues since 1977. But Mr. Gray's family — his wife, Kathie Russo; his stepdaughter, Marissa, now 19; and his 9- and 12-year-old sons, Theo and Forrest — had to face a different tragedy: the disappearance of a husband and father. Ms. Russo was suddenly left to keep their family together as well as to shape her own unexpected legacy as Spalding Gray's widow.
"I wanted to do something around Spalding's 65th birthday, which is on June 5," Ms. Russo, 45, recently explained at a Greek restaurant in the West Village. "So I thought, 'Let's do a reading of his work for one night at P.S. 122' — that's where he started all his monologues — 'and I'll put it together.' "
Ms. Russo discussed the idea with Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122, and he agreed. Soon after, she mentioned it to David Sefton, the artistic director of U.C.L.A. Live, and he signed on to do the show too. "Then suddenly David sent me a contract for five nights," Ms. Russo exclaimed, "and I was, like, 'I don't know how to do that.' "
She contacted Lucy Sexton, a performance artist and fund-raising consultant for Performance Space 122, and asked if she would help shape the piece. They began to compile a script, culled from Mr. Gray's published work as well as from more personal material: diaries, unperformed stories, poems from his youth (including one called "I Loved a Midget Once"). They even borrowed from a recording Mr. Gray left for Ms. Russo just before his death, in which he announces his plans to commit suicide.
"The first thing that occurred to me was 'Boy, this could really be much more than just a couple of excerpts read by different people,' " Ms. Sexton said, seated across from Ms. Russo at lunch. "Especially when Kathie talked about wanting to use unpublished material, then you're really talking about a fantastic treasure trove."
The product of their collaboration, "Leftover Stories to Tell," will play at Performance Space 122 from May 31 to June 4 and at the Freud Playhouse at the University of California, Los Angeles, from June 14 to June 18. In New York the cast will feature Jonathan Ames, James Urbaniak, Hazelle Goodman, Bob Holman and Ain Gordon. There will also be a different guest performer each evening; Debra Winger, David Strathairn, Steve Buscemi and Olympia Dukakis are among those who have signed on.
In Los Angeles the readers will include Teri Garr, Roger Guenveur Smith, Tommy Tiernan, Mr. Holman and Mr. Gordon, in addition to two surprise participants nightly.
The actors will read selections from Mr. Gray's work that ultimately serve as theater-as-séance. At a reading, the piece so intensely called up the presence of the charmingly neurotic actor that you half-expected him to come loping out on stage to interrupt with a worried joke. It also offers the rich story of his life. (Though with a bit of editing. Renée Shafransky, Mr. Gray's ex-wife and frequent character in his stories, hardly appears in this version.)
The piece mainly moves chronologically, with stories ranging from boyhood swimming dates with his mother, who also took her own life, to a raucous experience at a sweat lodge in Minnesota to his delighted worship of his children.
The show also captures what brought so many fans to Mr. Gray in the first place: a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of a wayward WASP, someone willing to unstintingly report on his own weaknesses and neuroses while using them to create an incisive portrait of relationships, sex, therapy, politics, ambition and family. And he was reliable: always seated at his desk with a shimmering glass of water, always ready to tell a captivating story.
The two women have been presenting the material in workshops since last November, setting up readings and inviting critiques from guests. What has emerged is a seamless fusion of Mr. Gray's private and public lives (the two collide less often than it seems in his monologues) to create a piece of storytelling that might intrigue Mr. Gray himself.
"I feel like he was there," Ms. Russo said. "At our very first reading, we were playing around with a recording of Spalding's voice and the CD got stuck, and so he kept saying, 'I am talking about myself, I am talking about myself,' over and over again. I just threw my arms in the air and said, 'It's Spalding!' "
Mr. Gray is being resurrected elsewhere too. The actor Michael Brandt has just wrapped the New York run of his one-man play "A Spalding Gray Matter," produced by the New Group (naked). The director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed Mr. Gray in "King of the Hill" and in "Gray's Anatomy," is making a documentary about him to be released in 2007 by HDNet Films Production along with Ms. Russo's company, Washington Square Films. And, at Ms. Russo's request, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg officially named June 5 Spalding Gray Day.
"It feels like the first time we're opening the book again and going, 'It's O.K. to talk about Spalding,' " Ms. Sexton explained. "It was such a harsh end. But all those beautiful, graceful moments that he recognized in his work, they still stand. They don't get negated by that last moment."
That last moment is also a crucial part of the performance. The excerpts from his diaries chronicling his mounting agony — sadness steadily runs throughout his work but never as starkly as in his last months — are the most emotional parts of the piece.
Immersing herself in her husband's words, including notes he kept toward the end of his life throughout his depression after a car accident left him seriously injured and disfigured in 2001, also allowed Ms. Russo to shape her own perspective.
"Doing this kind of work has given me time to reflect on who he was to me, to the children, to his audience," said Ms. Russo, who hopes to one day open a center for family survivors of suicide victims. "He was a very important artist to the world, and I don't want him to be forgotten."
On May 4 a preview excerpt of "Leftover Stories to Tell" was performed as a tribute to Mr. Gray and to benefit Performance Space 122. Ms. Russo and Ms. Sexton were there, and so were Mr. Gray's children. The performers — including Rosie O'Donnell, Jay McInerney, Judith Ivey and Eric Bogosian — gave a bold reading of the material. The piece offered a poignant combination of hilarity and despair, finally leaving the audience on its feet in a rousing ovation. It was almost what Mr. Gray was always searching for: "a perfect moment." The only thing missing was Mr. Gray himself.
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LEFT: Julia Child with her collaborator Simone Beck.Julia Child has had an enormous influence on my life. She made me proud to be from France. She made me proud to be a man who loves to cook. She made me proud to share my cooking with others, and extol the virtues of French cuisine. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 28, 2006
'My Life in France,' by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
Becoming Julia Child
Review by ALAN RIDING
READ no further if you dislike France, consider the French irritating, find French cooking pretentious and the French art de vivre overrated — because Julia Child liked everything about France. And her memoir, "My Life in France," is an affectionate merci for all that France gave her.
True, Child also did a lot for France — and the American palate — by introducing French cuisine to American homes. But this book, written with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, before Child's death at 91 in August 2004, is really a love story: she loved Paul Child, 10 years her senior; she loved France; she loved French cooking; and she loved life. Listen to her: "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly." And a few pages later: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness and freedom of spirit." Yes, mes amis, that's love!
In a foreword, Prud'homme explains that the book had been gestating since 1969, when Julia and Paul organized the records of their life in France between 1948 and 1954: hundreds of letters home, piles of black-and-white photographs (79 are in this book, many taken by Paul) and Julia's notes as she prepared her influential cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," published in 1961. But while she often talked about writing "the France book," Prud'homme recalls, it was only in December 2003, nine years after Paul's death, that she turned to him and said: "All right, dearie, maybe we should work on it together."
The result is a delight. On one level, it's the story of how a "6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" — her words — discovered the fullness of life in France. On another, it recounts the making of "Julia Child," America's grande dame of French cooking. Inevitably, the stories overlap.
Julia and Paul met in wartime Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were working for the Office of Strategic Services. They married in 1946 and moved to Washington. In the winter of 1948, Paul, an amateur painter and photographer, was assigned to run the exhibits office of the United States Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, and Julia naturally accompanied him. Unlike Paul, she had never been to Europe, spoke no French and had no experience of French cuisine. But on their first day in France, in November 1948, as they drove their imported sky-blue Buick station wagon from Le Havre to Paris, they lunched at a restaurant in Rouen and there Julia's life changed. She recalls the "epiphany" in mouth-watering detail — oysters, sole meunière, salad, cheese and coffee — and concludes: "It was the most exciting meal of my life."
Of course, with Paul as her experienced guide, Paris meant many more exciting meals. Soon, inspired by visits to grocers, butchers and markets and aided by a couple of weighty cookbooks, Julia began probing the mysteries of French cooking in her unheated Left Bank apartment. Then, in October 1949, she signed up to learn the real thing at the École du Cordon Bleu.
The making of "Julia Child" began here, but the road would still be long. For a start, in the school's "short, thin, rather disagreeable owner," Julia at last met someone in France she didn't like. Then, 18 months later, she failed her final examination. But she had a mentor in the chef Max Bugnard, a jolly soul in his late 70's, who never ceased to teach and encourage her. Julia retook the exam and graduated.
Soon afterward, she met two elegant French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both experienced cooks, who joined her in forming L'École des Gourmettes, which offered cooking classes from their homes. Beck and Bertholle were also working on a cookbook; in September 1952, they invited Julia to help prepare it for the American market. "And so," Julia recalls, "our collaboration began."
In the decade that followed, the Childs moved from Paris to Marseille, then to Bonn, back to Washington, then finally to Oslo, before Paul retired and they settled in Cambridge, Mass. Julia describes their peripatetic lives in a bubbly style, offering asides on everything from the horrors of McCarthyism back home to the exhilaration of her first mistral in Marseille. But her main energy went into the cookbook, organizing the existing recipes and gathering new ones for, say, bouillabaisse and aïgo bouïdo, or garlic soup, then testing them with American ingredients in American kitchens. The book, meanwhile, had grown to 700 pages, and in 1958 Houghton Mifflin rejected it as too long. After it was rewritten, it was again turned down, this time as too expensive to produce.
Then, in 1960, Judith Jones at Knopf offered to publish it, requesting only that its working title, "French Recipes for American Cooks," be replaced. The following year, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" came out and fame beckoned for Julia. The book's success led to her popular television cooking classes and, eventually, to Vol. II of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and many more cookbooks.
Meanwhile, the Childs built a stone house next to Beck's in Provence and prolonged their love affair with France. But by 1992, with Paul in a nursing home, Beck dead and Provence no longer a "quiet refuge," Julia finally said goodbye to the home she called La Pitchoune, or "The Little Thing."
"I tried to hold on to my impressions," she writes, "but it was hopeless, as if I were trying to hold on to a dream. No matter. France was my spiritual homeland: it had become part of me, and I a part of it, and so it has remained ever since." But one memory stayed firm, that of her first meal in France. "And thinking back on it now," she concludes, "reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite — toujours bon appétit!"
Alan Riding is the European cultural correspondent of The Times and a co-author of "The Essential Shakespeare Handbook."
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Juliet Binoche, right, sans make-up. My sisters are even more beautiful - also without make-up. And so were my mother and her mother. Photos to be posted soon. You decide.
I was blessed, being raised in a home with four of the loveliest sisters, mother and grandmother in the world. None of them ever needed any make up at all to look beautiful. Now, the rest of the world is catching on. Enjoy.
May 25, 2006
Skin Deep
Sans Makeup, S'il Vous Plaît
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS
CHIC French women don't wear makeup. At least they pretend not to.
Their goal is to glow, with invisible pores and highly polished skin. Too much makeup, French women say, makes a woman seem older, or even worse, as if she makes a living walking the streets.
"It really astonishes me the way American women wear so much makeup," said Laura Mercier, the French creator of a line of cosmetics and skin care who lives in New York. "In America, even teenage girls are overly made-up. And when you are overly made-up, you send out the message that you are overly sexual, that you want to be visible to attract men."
By contrast, Ms. Mercier said: "French women are not flashy. They must be subtle. The message must not be, 'I'm spending hours on my face to look beautiful.' "
Michèle Fitoussi, one of France's leading social commentators and a columnist at French Elle magazine, described the painted-doll look preferred by many American women with one word: "vulgaire."
Certainly, the French delight in defining themselves in opposition to America, no matter what the topic — food, wine, diplomacy, even beauty. But this attitude is complicated — a blend of chauvinism and fascination, perhaps with a touch of envy. The French admire the Americans, even as they criticize and dismiss them.
A recent issue of French Elle poked fun at what it called the "too much" look of the "California Beauty," illustrated by a model in a shocking pink shirt, bicycle shorts, an orange print scarf, mirrored sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton handbag and gaudy gold high-heeled sandals, earrings, necklaces, chain belt, bangles and rings.
Nicole Richie and Britney Spears have that overdone look, the French say. Madonna is forgiven since she is seen as a hard-nosed businesswoman and free spirit. Jennifer Lopez doesn't count because she is Hispanic and therefore culturally more exotic.
But this disdain is aimed less at specific women than at the overall overdone look.
This season, the unadorned look is more in vogue than ever in France. The weekly magazine L'Express calls it "Le no makeup" look. French Elle described it this month as "Le bare face," defined as "nude skin, shimmering slightly."
To women in France, the too-made-up look represents something more profound than simply one's taste in skin care. It is also the mark of the desperate housewife type who tries too hard.
"The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion" is the famous quotation of the designer Yves Saint Laurent. "But cosmetics are easier to buy."
Indeed, at the first "beauty cafe" in Paris, the talk is about respect, not transformation. For two hours on four recent evenings, the Columbus Café — a rival of Starbucks — transformed the second floor of its outlet near the Bastille into a place where women came for free lessons about skin care.
"Today beauty is not something only on the surface," Sandra Renzi, a cosmetologist with the Darphin skin care line, lectured to women over coffee and Perrier one evening. "It also comes from inside. Essential oils that contain tiny molecules that penetrate your skin must come first."
At another session, Sylvie Dutour, a cosmetologist with the Bourjois line, revealed how to respect the eyebrow line and the importance of a lipstick-free mouth if the eyes are shadowed and lined with color.
Even for Olivia Hollert, a 22-year-old nurse who considers herself a makeup fanatic, Americans overdo it.
"American girls worship the cult of the 'ideal woman,' " she said. "No part of the face seems to be forgotten. And when you use too much makeup, it means you are hiding from yourself."
In a 2004 poll by the market research group Mintel, 64 percent of American women said they sometimes use foundation, compared with 47 percent of French women; 81 percent of Americans use lipstick compared with 70 percent of French women and 59 percent of Americans use blusher, compared with 43 percent.
The image du jour of "le no makeup" look is Audrey Tautou. One cover of French Elle this month featured Ms. Tautou, 29, the star of "The Da Vinci Code," without jewelry or any visible makeup except for a slight tint on her lips. Even her beauty marks have not been airbrushed away.
Inside the magazine, a full-page photo of her in a frizzy black wig with blackened eyes and red satin cocktail dress bears the caption, "The Fiancée of Frankenstein."
The French actresses Juliette Binoche and Nathalie Baye are regularly featured in magazines for embracing the natural look.
In politics, the Socialist lawmaker Ségolène Royal is busily seducing the country in part because of her grass-roots style, broad smile and fresh-faced look. In some polls on next year's presidential election, she leads the competition.
Ms. Royal, 52, who is portrayed as a young politician, wears almost no makeup and brushes her shoulder-length hair often.
When she had an upper tooth straightened last year, the daily newspaper Libération labeled it an un-French act. "The French people's favorite Socialist is now endowed with an American smile," Libération wrote.
That may be because French women still lag far behind Americans in cosmetic surgery and sundry injections to make them appear less flawed (although they are catching up).
Catherine Deneuve, for example, with her apparent facial interventions and painted face, is sometimes seen as an object of pity. Ms. Deneuve, 62, the icily beautiful star of "Belle de Jour," was once considered so perfect that she was named France's "Marianne," the idealized embodiment of the French Republic. The face of Chanel in the 1970's, she recently was named the face of MAC's Icon cosmetics line. She admits to wearing makeup even when gardening.
"Poor Catherine," said Terry de Gunzburg, creator of the By Terry makeup line. "She let herself get hooked by the syndrome of Dorian Gray, of eternal youth. It's sad."
On the whole, French women like to portray themselves as more balanced, more inclined to pamper themselves and take pleasure in daily rituals than Americans. In its most extreme, America is seen as a youth-obsessed, throwaway, quick-fix culture where women are more likely to look artificially young and totally "done."
According to this view, sexuality has to be subtle. "There's always a rapport with the erotic but it's hidden," Ms. Fitoussi said. "The French love mystery, the game of seduction. That's why we respect perfume, why lingerie is so important."
(A poll in 2003 concluded that 87 percent of French men and women believe that lingerie is an important part of life.)
For Ms. Fitoussi, who wears glasses and little makeup, it's all about choosing. Made-up eyes means wearing neutral lipstick. Red lipstick means dressing in black. "Makeup dates you," she said. "Like a tree."
Instead, French women invest more time aiming for perfect, blemish-free skin. If there is an obsession, it is tight pores. Even French women of modest means are much more likely than American women to get treatments in spas or clinics that scrub, polish, buff, massage and cream their skins.
The French government is complicit. Any woman who can claim to have a medically diagnosed skin condition, from eczema to acne, can receive a regimented "thermal cure" at spas in France once a year. The French taxpayer covers as much as 65 percent of the cost.
Not everyone agrees that the French emphasis on restraint translates into chic and beautiful women.
"In France, women think they know better than others," Ms. de Gunzburg said. "There is a self-sufficiency, an attitude of 'I don't give a damn what you're telling me.'
"Tell me who's chic here in France? Give me one example. Women don't make any effort here."
Frenchmen, meanwhile, (who are getting their faces creamed and polished more often) are quick to say they don't like women whose skin color rubs off on their clothes or who look as if they have smeared their lips with tinted Vaseline.
That sentiment is not new. The narrator of Marcel Proust's 1927 novel, "Finding Time Again," makes the obviously painted and powdered Gilberte a bit pathetic.
"I sensed that, despite myself, I was staring at her in my curiosity to discover what it was about her that was so changed," the narrator says. "This curiosity was, however, soon satisfied when she wiped her nose, despite all the precautions she employed. From all the colors which remained on the handkerchief, turning it into a rich palette, I saw that she was entirely made-up."
Maïa de La Baume contributed reporting for this article.
###
Any plan to increase wildlife habitat is ok by me. No apologies. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 23, 2006
Home on the Range: A Corridor for Wildlife
By CORNELIA DEAN
LAKE LOUISE, Alberta — One day in April, a zoologist named Paul Paquet found himself at the tiny railroad station here, in the middle of Banff National Park. Above him loomed the snow-covered crags of the Canadian Rockies, fringed with Douglas fir and lodgepole pine. A few dozen yards away, the Bow River glimmered in the sun.
He surveyed his surroundings and grimaced. "This park," he said. "It's a national disgrace."
Sure it's beautiful, he said, and, yes, it is one of the last places where grizzly bears can roam and wolves can hunt the elk and bighorn sheep that are their prey. "But there is a highway through the middle of the park, and development associated with it," he said. As a natural environment, "it's a disaster."
Dr. Paquet, who works for the World Wildlife Fund and has faculty appointments at several Canadian universities, is part of a collaborative group of researchers, conservationists, government officials and others hoping to improve things — not by removing roads or railways but by mitigating their effects.
They want to create a sustainable environment for wildlife from the Yukon to Yellowstone, even as people move ever deeper into the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada.
Participants in the collaboration, called Y2Y, have designed and monitored overpasses and underpasses to help animals cross highways safely. They have negotiated limits on access to golf courses and ski slopes so animals can traverse them. They have encouraged the creation of wildlife corridors around or even across towns.
Their goal is not just a wolf pack surviving here and there, or a few scattered grizzly bears or elk or bighorn sheep, but a landscape in which animals can thrive, roaming and reproducing widely and avoiding the genetic perils of small populations trapped in shrinking habitats.
When the researchers write up their findings for scientific journals, they call this goal "functional connectivity," said Michael Proctor, a zoologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta. He calls it "sex across the highway."
Around the world, conservationists are embarking on similar efforts. In India, wildlife experts are trying to establish corridors linking fragments of tiger habitat, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Similar projects are under way in Costa Rica and Australia.
Researchers at the University of Florida, working in an experimental landscape in South Carolina, reported last year that corridors established for wildlife can also help the survival of plants.
But Y2Y is perhaps the largest effort.
Dr. Proctor, Dr. Paquet and other scientists were at the Lake Louise station because the Canadian Pacific rail line that carries grain to ports on the west coast is a major killing ground for elk, bears and other animals drawn to the tracks by grain that spills from the hoppers
There are arguments over who is responsible for the problem, said Mike Gibeau, as he bent to gather lentils, barley and other grain lying in small piles between the tracks. Dr. Gibeau, who works for Parks Canada, the agency that runs the national parks, is working with other researchers for ways to reduce the carnage.
Here in Lake Louise, the tracks have been fenced off with metal mesh. Where the fence opens at the station, the rail bed has been fitted with a mat of six-inch metal spikes. Trains can pass over the spikes but, in theory, animals cannot.
"We're going to see if it works," Dr. Gibeau said, and if it does it will be adopted elsewhere.
Mesh fencing has also been installed along stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway as it slices across the park, and as the road is widened additional fencing will be added. The effort is motivated not so much by concern for animals, the researchers note, but to avoid injury to the drivers of cars and trucks that would otherwise hit them. In fenced areas, hardly any animals die on the road, but they are trapped on one side or the other.
A project a few miles south of Banff aims to correct that. There, an overpass about 50 yards wide over four lanes of traffic was built a few years ago. Researchers supported by Y2Y are studying what animals are using it and when, in hopes of installing similar crossovers elsewhere.
Approached from the woods, the crossover resembles any other sloping hill, covered with brushy grass, shrubs, saplings and even a clump or two of pussy willow.
Earthen berms on either side hide the road and mute the noise of the tens of thousands of cars that pass by daily, winter and summer.
Animals have worn a trail along one edge and, at the top, leave prints on a cleared stretch of dirt, a so-called track pad, monitored by motion-sensitive cameras with night-vision lenses.
Wayne Hallstrom, a research associate with Parks Canada, said he and his colleagues checked the pad twice a week for signs of animal crossings. In the last few years, he said, they have counted tens of thousands of crossings by wolves, bears, cougars, elk, deer and other animals. Each year the numbers rise, presumably because more animals are learning where the crossings are.
He said researchers planned next to install a bit of barbed wire in hopes of snagging bits of fur with hair follicles that will yield DNA for testing. They want to know not just how many times bears cross the road, say, but whether there are many bears or just a few bears making multiple trips.
"I think it's changed the movement of the elk," Mr. Hallstrom offered, "but it's unstudied so far."
The overpass project is run by Anthony P. Clevenger, a scientist supported by Y2Y who works with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University at Bozeman. Dr. Clevenger is working on installing dozens of wildlife crossings on Route 93 in Montana, south of Flathead Lake.
"We know that some species — grizzly bears, wolves, elk and deer, also moose, prefer large structures," Dr. Clevenger said. "Cougars and black bears prefer the opposite — very constricted structures with lots of cover." Sometimes a pack of wolves will approach a crossing, but if only some are willing to chance it the pack as a whole may not cross. The scientists are trying to figure out a crossing design that will encourage packs to move en masse.
Dr. Proctor said there was also talk of modifying avalanche sheds that carry cascading snow across mountain highways so animals can use them as crossovers. Y2Y began in the mid-1990's when some Canadian parks officials and conservationists approached the Kendall Foundation, an environmental grant-maker based in Boston. "They said they had this idea of protecting the wild heart of North America from Yellowstone to Yukon," said Gary Tabor, who was at the foundation at the time and later became the first director of Y2Y.
The protection offered by national, state and provincial parks was not enough to protect their bears and elk and wolves, Dr. Tabor said they told him. "They said, 'You have to protect larger landscapes to protect such species.' "
Eventually, Dr. Tabor said, the foundation convened meetings with academic researchers, conservation groups, government agencies and "key stakeholders," like business leaders and American Indian representatives. They discussed what the Y2Y boundaries should be, settling on a region of about 465,000 square miles, most at elevations of 3,500 feet or higher, encircled at lower elevations by prairie grasslands.
They also talked about what kind of scientific work the organization should finance. Today, Y2Y receives grants from foundations and itself supports the work of established scientists, graduate students and others with an annual budget of about $2 million. (An exhibition on the initiative will open July 15 at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, where it will run until January.)
Initially, Dr. Tabor said, property rights organizations and other groups accused Y2Y participants of seeking to drive people out of the Rockies. "That was never the intention," said Dr. Tabor, who left Y2Y in April to head the North America program for the Wildlife Conservation Society. "The intention was, We have to have a regime where people and wildlife can live compatibly." Although parks and other protected areas form the core of Y2Y, "we work community by community," he said.
"It's not just public lands; it's about private lands in between," he added.
When people objected that restrictions would harm the region's economy, Y2Y pointed to a study showing that a pristine environment could draw people who come to the area because of its ecological integrity, the so-called amenity migrants, said Rob Buffler, who replaced Dr. Tabor as Y2Y's chief.
One of the towns drawing them is Canmore, not only because of its beautiful location in the Bow River Valley, but also because it is within commuting distance of Calgary, thriving in Alberta's oil and gas boom, and Banff.
The growing town, which the researchers call "the Canmore plug," has forced animals that once traveled along the river up the mountain slopes, Dr. Gibeau said.
To accommodate them, he said, some ski resorts and golf courses are limiting access to people.
"Grizzly bears come down here to walk down the road in the middle of the night," he said. In April, Parks Canada appealed to drivers to use one major road, the Bow Valley Parkway, only from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. until June 25, to create traffic-free periods for wildlife on the move in spring.
But the human species does not always embrace all of Y2Y's goals. Hikers camp in wildlife underpasses. Mountain bikers drive animals away from an overpass built over a hydroelectric plant canal, Dr. Gibeau said, and they ruin hillside vegetation by riding their brakes too hard on the way down.
Such problems sometimes leave the researchers wondering whether their efforts do any good. Dr. Paquet said it was troubling to think that he might simply be "monitoring the slow demise" of the ecosystem.
Dr. Gibeau carries in his wallet a much-folded piece of paper with words the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote more than 30 years ago: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds," Leopold wrote. "Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well — and does not want to be told otherwise."
Dr. Gibeau has this "ecological education," and he knows Leopold was right.
"People who come here are just so awestruck by the scenery that they cannot understand its ecological problems" he said. "They say, 'How can there be trouble here?' But once you peel back the veneer, this place is like most other places, a human-dominated system."
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When I was in elementary school, I read, as a class assignment, words written by Thomas Jefferson. He instantly became my hero. He still is, and has been, all through my life since that moment in 5th grade. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 21, 2006
Expanding on Jefferson
By ADAM GOODHEART
In the midsummer of 1817, the old man rode down from his mountaintop to the outskirts of the nearby village and worked at dreaming up colonnades and pavilions where none existed. Thomas Jefferson left no detailed description of his own labors in designing the University of Virginia, but he did leave a thin paperbound memorandum book, its pages crowded with rows of figures penned in a minute, almost delicate hand — calculating the exact slope of a terrace, the mathematical relationship between a cornice and an architrave and how many bricks it would take to build 16 dormitory rooms (precisely 298,978). That notebook is preserved today in the university's archives, and as you gingerly turn its pages, it is easy to imagine the founder and former president, tall and slightly stooped, striding purposefully around the fallow cornfield with his compass and theodolite — assisted by the 10 slaves he had brought down with him from Monticello.
Nearly two centuries later, I sat in a room at one end of that former cornfield in Charlottesville, Va., as another group of men (and, this time, a few women) tried to design another group of buildings. It was a task they were approaching with rather more diffidence — some might call it reverence — than their institution's founder had done. "This is consecrated ground," said one distinguished gray-haired man. "What we're doing is sort of like putting a wing on the Taj Mahal."
The university's board of visitors — what most schools would call their trustees, but for this, as for many other things, Virginia has its own quaint nomenclature — was gathered around an immense oval conference table, beneath an 1816 portrait of Jefferson in his study at Monticello. Blue suits and salmon pink ties were very much in evidence among this group, as were the lanky builds and equine features that were already recognized 200 years ago as hallmarks of a particularly Virginian physique. The matter at hand was the construction of a 110,000-square-foot $105 million annex, just south of the original Jeffersonian campus. The planned new complex, known as the South Lawn, was intended to house most classrooms and faculty offices for the university's traditional core: its College of Arts and Sciences. The project had been under discussion for the better part of a decade, the original architect had recently thrown up his hands and quit and the university's trustees were now about to evaluate yet another new set of renderings (perhaps the fourth; everyone had lost count).
Moreover, in the view of some of the people in the room, the original artistic vision of Jefferson — or rather, "Mr. Jefferson," as he is still often called in Charlottesville — had lately come under attack.
The initial spark was struck last summer, after the university announced unexpectedly that it had ended its four-year relationship with the acclaimed architect James Polshek, whose New York-based firm had been hired, amid much fanfare, to design the South Lawn. Word in Charlottesville had it that Polshek's office — which had won national renown for such widely praised modernist projects as the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock and the Rose planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History — had become frustrated by the school's refusal to approve any design that did not hew to a strict Classical palette of arches and columns.
A group of malcontents at the university's School of Architecture had published an open letter assailing the administration's effort to turn the campus into a "theme park of nostalgia": an assemblage of mediocre, slavishly neo-Classical buildings. On the other side, certain members of the board had nightmares of something big and boxy and glassy — something that looked, as one of them put it at the meeting, "industrial" — looming alongside Jefferson's sacred precinct. The debate had spilled over to the rest of the faculty — and, via Internet newsgroups and blogs, had even drawn in architects around the world.
Now the board was under pressure to make up its mind so that construction could begin in the autumn. "There are some very strong opinions on both sides of the aisle, but I have heard you all and heard you clearly," said the university's architectural coordinator, David Neuman, with just a hint of weariness in his voice. "Rest assured, we are going to make sure that what we're building is something we're all proud of."
Around the conference table, more than one of the handsome equine faces betrayed a flicker of doubt. On the wall above them, Mr. Jefferson's painted countenance held its peace.
For an architect, designing any new building at the University of Virginia is like stepping onstage at the Metropolitan Opera moments after Pavarotti has brought the house down with a heart-stopping aria. A certain degree of performance anxiety is liable to set in.
The university's original grounds — a real Virginian never, ever, says "campus" — which Jefferson designed, are an icon of American architecture. Together with Monticello, they form one of a handful of places in this country that the United Nations has recognized as World Heritage sites — on par with the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.
What Jefferson did with the slanting, muddy cornfield was, even to a layperson's eye, astonishing. First, he terraced the ground so that it fell away in a series of gently sloping ledges. At the top end, he placed the Rotunda, a majestically domed and columned building modeled after the Pantheon in Rome — and meant to serve as a library, to signal the pre-eminence of reason instead of religion at the new university. Stretching down from the Rotunda on each side, hemming the stepped terraces on the east and west, Jefferson laid a single-file line of low dormitory rooms and classroom pavilions, fronted by corridors of white Tuscan columns, with more student rooms, gardens and dining halls ranged behind. The south end of this elongated quadrangle (known as the Lawn, always capitalized) was left open.
The resulting ensemble, like much great architecture, appears simple at first glance — red brick and white columns on three sides of a grassy field — but turns out, as you explore it further, to offer inexhaustible complexities. Critics have seen in its design an embodiment of the Old World and New World in harmony — with the Lawn's open south end, and its view along the distant valleys of the Virginia Piedmont, symbolizing the unbounded possibilities of the American continent (or, if you prefer, the unending quest for knowledge, or the romantic embrace of nature, or perhaps the imperfect state of all mortal architecture). If the Declaration of Independence was the great philosophical statement of Jefferson's youth, the Lawn and its surroundings were the masterful peroration of his final years.
Although the university has hired many prominent architects over the succeeding years — from Stanford White to Michael Graves — none have built nearly so well as Jefferson did. Many critics say the administration's long string of unfortunate choices began in 1896, when it engaged White to seal up the Lawn's open southern end, blocking Jefferson's boundless view with a middlebrow building, designed in a Gilded Age version of Georgian taste. (According to some historians, it was also meant to block the sight of a working-class African-American neighborhood that had encroached upon the no-longer-quite-so-boundless view.) Worse was to come: in 1952, just behind White's structure, the university erected New Cabell Hall — neither fish nor fowl, modernist nor neo-Classical, but simply a redbrick hulk that looks like nothing so much as a postwar suburban middle school.
So, when driven by a pressing need for classroom and office space, administrators of the school's undergraduate program began talking several years ago about building a new, larger and far more ambitious addition to the Lawn — one that would, moreover, strive to extend and reinterpret Jefferson's original plan — there was reason for worry.
The one thing everyone in Charlottesville seems to agree on is that the South Lawn's design needs to be "Jeffersonian." The problem is that everyone has a different definition of what this means — and it doesn't always involve red bricks and white columns.
"Thomas Jefferson was constantly inventing new building technologies," Karen Van Lengen, dean of the university's School of Architecture, told me recently. "He laid glass panes over one another like shingles to make skylights. As materials change, you can create things that you couldn't create before — Jefferson would've understood that."
A former associate of I.M. Pei — and a friend of James Polshek — Van Lengen took over the highly ranked architecture school in 1999, moving to Charlottesville from New York. She and her family gave up a loft on Broome Street for one of the Lawn's 10 original "pavilions": the magnificent colonnaded structures that Jefferson designed as faculty residences and classrooms. The one she rents, Pavilion IX, is particularly elegant in its architecture, and Van Lengen has filled it with a combination of furniture lent by the university (a Hepplewhite sideboard; a mahogany dining table) and artwork brought from New York (a Frank Stella print; a Saul Steinberg tabletop construction; and organic-looking abstractions in beaten copper by her husband, the sculptor James Welty). The effect is unexpected but pleasing — and it feels more authentically Jeffersonian in spirit, closer to Monticello and its walls bedecked with Indian artifacts and buffalo hides, than does, say, the board's conference room with its repro-Federal-style décor.
Under Van Lengen, the architecture school — known in the 1980's as a haven for neotraditionalists — has stood decisively in the modernist camp. Predictably, this has set it somewhat at odds with the prevailing currents of taste in Charlottesville. "The university's idea of a good building is more or less the opposite of what we teach," says one faculty member, W.G. Clark. "What they've been putting up year after year are mediocre buildings decked out in pseudo-Jeffersonian cladding. We try to attract graduate students and faculty to come here, and they look around and say, 'What era are you people living in?"'
Clark himself recently collaborated on a design to add new space to the architecture school, and Van Lengen pointed to it as an example of what the university ought to be building elsewhere. "He created panels on the facade that can flip down to serve as seminar tables — that's a Jeffersonian idea, and if you've been to Monticello, you know he'd love it," she said. The new additions also include faculty offices clustered around open porches and seminar rooms, an idea that Van Lengen said was inspired by Jefferson's campus design, what he famously called the "academical village," with its integration of student and faculty buildings. "We all love the Lawn here," she said. "We just love it in different ways."
"It's like the Pantheon, or Amiens cathedral, or the Kimbell museum — it's not something you can replicate," another faculty member, Ed Ford, told me. "If you build a copy of it next door, that will diminish the experience of the Lawn, not enhance it."
I thought back to the board meeting I'd attended, at which one member — Don Pippin, a retired lawyer from southwestern Virginia — summed up his side of the case in a few simple words. "Whenever we represent the university on a postcard, we show the Lawn," he said. "That's us — and that's Classical."
For all its tradition, the University of Virginia, more than most other institutions, suffers from a generation gap between its past and present selves. This is actually a result of its phenomenally successful transformation in the past few decades from a small, regionally-bound institution (where the first black undergraduate was admitted in 1955 and full coeducation arrived only in 1970) to a major research university with a $3 billion endowment and an increasingly diverse student body. Many of its older and wealthier alumni, then, are nostalgic for a jacket-and-tie Southern school that no longer quite exists. This is an especially salient point because Virginia draws only about 8 percent of its revenues from government subsidies far less than most other state schools. New building projects, particularly, need to be embraced by wealthy donors if they are ever to get off the drawing board.
When the idea of a major new addition to Jefferson's college was first proposed, in the late 1990's, it was referred to as "the Digital Academical Village," an awkward name that, in retrospect, may have heralded the difficulties to come. Then, after the tech bubble burst, the project was rebaptized the South Lawn — which harked back to the school's Jeffersonian roots (as well as to its traditional cultural orientation) without any embarrassing Al Gore-ish overtones.
The site chosen for this bucolic new campus looked, and still looks, nothing like a lawn. It begins on a steep hillside behind New Cabell Hall (slated for eventual demolition), continues across a busy road in Charlottesville and ends in a large parking lot — which sits some 40 vertical feet below the level of New Cabell. The topography was rendered yet more complicated by the presence of an underground stream and by the discovery of an unmarked African-American cemetery from the 19th century, which the university wants to preserve and commemorate as part of the new construction. Add the fact that all this is a stone's throw from a World Heritage site, and it was clear that the architects faced a formidable challenge.
James Polshek's solution, as at the Clinton library, was a bridge. Those in Charlottesville familiar with the design said that over successive drafts, the connector grew wider and wider until it became a football-field-size terrace spanning the road, which would pass beneath it. (Citing a confidentiality agreement signed with the university when their contract was terminated, Polshek and his staff declined to comment for this article, or to provide copies of their plans.) As for the buildings themselves, the designs remained sketchy in their details but included several boxy structures arranged asymmetrically around a grassy space. Although the new complex wouldn't be directly visible from the Lawn, it would nearly match it in scale — leading some to worry that it would detract from the dignity and centrality of Jefferson's structures.
Almost from the beginning, Polshek's plans came under fire for not being "traditional" enough. "There were a couple of strong-willed people on the board who really made that an issue, relentlessly," says Samuel A. Anderson III, the university's former architectural coordinator.
After years of quibbles and false starts — complicated further by what the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences called "our largest budget crisis since the Civil War" — Polshek resigned from the project last spring. This came as a surprise to his admirers, particularly given Polshek's reputation as easygoing and his record of building successfully in historically sensitive contexts. But a "strong sense of mutual fatigue" had set in, according to one college administrator, Adam Daniel, who had worked closely with the architect.
At the School of Architecture, Polshek's partisans saw his resignation (some rumors portrayed it as a dismissal) as a last straw. After rounds of angry e-mail messages, a group of them met in a lecture hall on campus to draft a manifesto, which they released to the press with 24 signatures. "What Are the Jeffersonian Architectural Ideals?" it was headlined, and went on to ask:
"Is the university committed to architectural excellence? . . .
"Is there not a difference between buildings that merely look Jeffersonian as opposed to the infinitely more difficult task of being Jeffersonian?. . .
"Is it desirable that a building built [today] be mistaken for one built in 1830? Is U.Va. to become a theme park of nostalgia at the service of the university's branding?. . ."
The administration offered no answers to these questions. But more and more faculty members, not all of them from the architecture school, added their names to the open letter, and their grievances spread far beyond the South Lawn. Many ridiculed the university's new $128 million basketball arena, decked out with a bombastic pergola of bloated Tuscan columns. Others focused their ire on the campus of the Darden School of Business, which Robert A.M. Stern designed in the 1990's as a rather literal copy of Jefferson's buildings on the Lawn — "a corporate office park version," as one professor called it. They pointed out that red brick and white pillars had not altogether happy historical connotations for the black students that the modern-day University of Virginia was competing hard to recruit.
One of the letter's authors created a Web site about the controversy, which soon filled up with comments from far beyond Charlottesville, many of them by self-appointed defenders of Jeffersonian neo-Classicism. Several dozen — including the New Urbanist pioneer Andres Duany and even a representative of Prince Charles's architecture foundation in London — took out a full-page ad in the campus newspaper for their own manifesto, which excoriated "the architecture school's modernists" and exhorted the administration to rededicate itself to "beauty, tradition and common sense."
All this, to be sure, was a reprise of a debate that had been going on for a long time. "The shade of Jefferson broods over Charlottesville," wrote one critic in the magazine Architectural Forum. "Misunderstood, embalmed by little minds in static thought, the revolutionist must turn forever in an angry grave. The grandeur of his University looks down at sycophants who ape his cornices at puny scale, forget his sense of space, and strive forever to repeat the form without the soul." That article appeared in 1934.
And as of 2006, after almost four years of work — as long as it took Jefferson to build nearly his entire academical village — the hypothetical South Lawn was still a hillside, a road and a parking lot.
"I find the argument juvenile," Robert A.M. Stern told me. If the critics on the architecture-school faculty, he added, "would spend their time actually studying Jefferson, the world would be a better place." And yet, he admitted, this hasn't kept him from following the whole thing closely — from the safe remove of his offices in New York and New Haven, where he is dean of the architecture school at Yale — via architects' listservs and the U.Va. student press. The godfather of postmodern architecture has been building at Virginia (among dozens of other colleges and universities) since the early 80's and currently has a project on the drawing board for the university's school of education.
Although the debate in Charlottesville might seem like a merely academic dust-up, Stern said that the questions it raises have a far larger significance. "One of the problems with modernism is that it is based on a kind of global solution to everything," he said. "And even though it's true that we live in an increasingly globalized society, we can't just go in and slam down the same buildings in Charlottesville that you would slam down in Istanbul. This isn't just about the University of Virginia — it's about the local and the global."
In designing the Darden School's campus a decade ago, Stern said, he tried to create a place where, "although nobody standing there thinks he's on the Lawn, anybody standing there knows he's at the University of Virginia."
Yet to some, including admirers of the Classical tradition, the Darden School is one of the worst abominations of recent campus architecture. "I find it deeply un-Jeffersonian," says Malcolm Bell III, a respected scholar of ancient Greek art and archaeology at the university. "It's really quite dreadful."
Indeed, even on a sunny spring day, there's something a little creepy about Darden. First, there's the sense of déjà vu. The "academical village" has been mimicked not just once, but on two sides of the building: in the front, where a Rotunda-like facade gazes out over rows of parked cars, and off one side, where an abbreviated version of the Lawn, flanked by monotonously identical pavilions instead of playfully varying ones, dead-ends in a bulldozed berm. The facades may look Classical, but they lack Jefferson's saving eccentricities; it is as if someone had run them off on an enormous photocopier. And whereas stepping onto Jefferson's Lawn feels, even for a visitor, somehow both ennobling and joyous all at once, Darden — its cyborg twin — intimidates.
What's the alternative? Many of the university's modernists point admiringly to Hereford College, a complex of undergraduate dorms designed in the 90's by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. "There's an engagement with the landscape and a compositional playfulness," says Daniel Bluestone, a professor of architectural history at the university. But I found Hereford, which is home to some 500 students, as depressing as Darden: an off-kilter arrangement of towering brick slabs, their slitlike windows resembling gun ports in World War II pillboxes. Unlike the Lawn, which on that same morning was full of students sunbathing and tossing Frisbees, the quad at Hereford was devoid of any life.
In fact, the more time I spent touring Virginia's campus beyond its Jeffersonian core, the more I found myself wishing impossibly that most of it would simply go away, leaving the Lawn in its pristine glory amid antebellum cornfields. Stern himself expressed almost the same thought when he told me that new buildings in a place like Charlottesville should meld seamlessly into what's already there: "It takes a great architect to wield an invisible hand. It's the third-rate clod who leaves his filthy fingerprints all over everything."
But is invisibility a desirable — let alone attainable — goal in architecture, especially for an institution that has grown from serving a couple of hundred students in the 1820's to more than 20,000 today? Jefferson's great gift to his university was starting to seem, in at least one sense, more like a curse.
Among the few places on the central grounds where I saw no effigy of the university's patron saint — no plaster bust, oil painting or handsomely framed print — was the high-ceilinged office of the school's president, John T. Casteen III. One of the few visible reminders of Jefferson is a modern edition of his papers on the bookshelf — a multivolume set, bound in dingy cloth and obviously well thumbed.
A solemn, doughfaced man — nothing equine about him — Casteen ducked the subject of Jefferson when we got to discussing architecture. Instead, he talked about vernacular Southern houses and the Pompidou Center, Jerusalem and Singapore. Finally, I cornered him: didn't he have any opinion on what kind of architecture his institution's founder would support if he were alive now?
"The truth is, I know Jefferson pretty well — probably better than most people here," he told me. As an undergraduate, Casteen worked as a clerk in the rare-book room of the university library, assisting scholars who were editing the great man's papers; he ended up reading more than 5,000 of Jefferson's letters straight from the original manuscripts. "If I learned one thing about his character, it's that he was unpredictable; he didn't play by normal rules. And he continually challenged the assumptions of his age."
The most remarkable thing about Jefferson's "academical village," his admirers like to point out, is how durable it has proved. Unlike most 200-year-old structures, it still serves its architect's original intent, as a community where students and professors live at close quarters, in the university's heart.
Unlike in the 19th century, however, when the Lawn sheltered the entire student body, today it is home to just a few dozen handpicked members of the senior class, who gamely put up with the lack of convenient indoor plumbing and the constant intrusions of visitors: tourists, alumni, prospective freshmen. A cynic might even say that the Jeffersonian core has become a kind of false shop window for the university; Charlottesville suffers from a shortage of student housing, and many more undergraduates end up in cramped off-campus apartments far from their classrooms. The community that Jefferson constructed has changed in other ways too: high-speed data cables run through the dirt-floored basements where slaves once lived.
In some ways, a more honest reflection of the present day is the newly opened undergraduate dining hall atop Observatory Hill, about half a mile away. Inside, a curvy staircase leads up to a tiled food court, surrounded by deluxe cafeteria stations, grills and sushi bars, each advertising itself on a brightly colored marquee: Old World. Upper Crust. Center Stage. Traditions. Innovations. Cravings.
Here in this found poetry, I think, is the heart and soul of the modern university. Its contradictions are the contradictions inherent in architecture as well. Our society expects its colleges (and its architects) to be both guardians of tradition and incubators of originality. We expect them to exalt individual genius but not offend the ordinary herd. We expect them to stand for both the old and the new. We expect them to be bravely independent yet obedient to our demands. And somehow, amid all these countervailing currents, we expect them to remain financially stable. No wonder it's so hard to build a halfway decent campus building anymore.
The college campus that I myself know best — Harvard's — is in some ways the opposite of Virginia's. Unlike the Lawn, its ancient Yard has developed through the years by a process of slow accretion: a stalwart Georgian relic here, a bit of Romanesque Revival there, a modernist folly by Le Corbusier sidling up along one edge. When I was an undergraduate there, I loved the sense of living amid a museum of three centuries of American architecture. Some buildings were closer to my heart than others, but I never thought of the new as detracting from the old. All, it seemed, were part of a continuing intellectual project; their variety was proof of its vitality.
When I spoke with Samuel Anderson, the University of Virginia's retired architectural coordinator, he spun this idea into an elegant simile. "I think of the buildings at a university as being like books in a well-loved family library," he said. "You can pull some novels down and say, 'I bought these in the 50's, when Cheever was big,' and then point to some travel books that your great-grandfather collected in the 1840's. I've been in houses where the people were newly wealthy and had libraries that had been assembled for them by someone else: all those perfect, new leather bindings. That's what I fear if a university builds new buildings that try to look old."
Early last month, I returned to Charlottesville to see the board vote on the latest version of the South Lawn plans. The project had been assigned to new architects from the California firm Moore Ruble Yudell, who had been working on it intensively for months — including long hours spent poring over copies of Jefferson's original architectural drawings.
This time, the meeting was held at the Darden School, in a room that resembled the banquet area of an airport hotel. Almost as soon as I arrived, it was clear that the new proposal was expected to win approval hands-down. Outside the conference room, Edward Ayers, the boyish dean of the college, was almost hopping with excitement as he anticipated taking the architect's model on the road to show prospective donors.
When the meeting of the board's buildings-and-grounds committee convened, the model sat in the center of the room. The new team of architects — led by John Ruble, himself a Virginia alumnus — kept Polshek's land bridge but reoriented its structures around a familiar scheme: two parallel rows of redbrick pavilions joined by colonnades, facing inward around a grassy quadrangle. At the head of the quad, just where the Rotunda would be, was a circular terrace with a granite fountain.
"We worked hard to give this building its own unique quality — while resonating with Jefferson," Ruble told me later. (Meanwhile, a professor at the architecture school who had seen the plans sent me a late-night e-mail message headed "The Newest South Lawn Debacle.")
Personally, I liked the way Ruble's design created an outdoor but intimate space for students and faculty while opening onto the fabled vista of the Piedmont. On the other hand, I also thought its white-column and redbrick details looked like a Marriott hotel version of neo-Classical architecture. They reminded me of a lot of the mediocre buildings constructed on many campuses, not just Virginia's, in recent years: "postmodern" pastiches of old and new, whose highest aspiration is to offend no one. I found myself thinking wistfully of missed opportunities a few weeks later, when I visited the newly reopened Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where Renzo Piano's glass-and-steel pavilion had enriched the historic brownstone and Beaux-Arts landmarks that flanked it — old jewels gleaming in a new setting.
In any case, Ruble's South Lawn design passed the board by a unanimous voice vote. As the meeting broke up, I approached John Casteen, who was lingering by the model. He liked it, he said. The fountain reminded him of something at the Pompidou Center. The buildings would admirably serve the needs of students, faculty and staff. The donors, too, would be satisfied. Then I asked Casteen if he thought the new design was suitably Jeffersonian.
"The only person I know who does Jeffersonian architecture," he said, "is Thomas Jefferson."
Adam Goodheart, the C.V. Starr scholar at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., writes frequently about American history.
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Sneakers Delight, a feast for the feet, on Rua do Norte in Lisbon's hip Bairro Alto neighborhood.
The New York Times
May 17, 2006
Frugal Traveler
My Goal Is to Go Around the World in 90 Days on the Cheap
By MATT GROSS
Back in 1872, it was easy to go around the world. When Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days," wanted to do it, he simply left his London club, went home to collect a few shirts and his servant, and caught the 8:45 p.m. express train to Dover. He was on his way.
Over the last month, as I prepared for my own summer trip around the word in 90 days — a journey I'll write about here every Wednesday until the deed is done — I often wished it were still the late 19th century, when gleaming new railroads and steamers carried one across the plains and oceans of a world that had, almost overnight, grown smaller.
Today, we have the advent of long-haul flights, airlines that'll fly you across Europe for a nickel, and Web sites that bring up limitless destinations in an instant. But Fogg needed none of that. His simple travel tools consisted of "Bradshaw's Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide" and an unshakable faith that "the unforeseen does not exist." Well, he also had £20,000 stuffed into a bag (the equivalent today, according to an Internet inflation calculator, of £1,190,053.40 or just under $2.3 million).
I did not have vast riches. I did not have a devoted French servant. And I did not have faith in airline timetables and the easy availability of hotel rooms and economy-class seats. What I did have were three months with no pressing engagements. So I jumped at the opportunity to write about the traveler's holy grail: the round-the-world voyage.
Every week, as I make my way eastward, I will be sharing travel tips, discussing the limits of ultra-discount airlines, exploring the concept of Slow Travel and, if I'm lucky, discovering a microscopic town or burgeoning metropolis with untapped vacation potential. I'll seek stylish shoes in Barcelona and fine wines in Georgia, and delve into the logistics of yurt camping in Mongolia. Whether I succeed will depend in part on your feedback: so post your tips, comments and theories, and I'll test them out there in the real world.
Some guidelines first. Circling the globe presents an seemingly infinite number of travel options, and narrowing them down requires one to be patient, open-minded and occasionally arbitrary. I am beginning in the Mediterranean because it's summer and I want to go to the beach. Odessa is also on my list, precisely because I had heard little about it except that it's a hot party zone. And while I went to Shanghai last year, that city struck me as so fast-moving that I couldn't wait to see how it's changed in the intervening months.
But the real challenge is not in choosing the route but in accomplishing the journey as the Frugal Traveler. Though my travels might take me to some of the wealthiest corners of the globe like Monaco, my budget is limited: for lodging, free if possible, with a $100 cap per night; and for meals, $40. Like Phileas Fogg, who embarked on the voyage to show it could be done (and to win a £20,000 bet), I too had something to prove: that it doesn't take a sack full of cash to live the high life.
Unfortunately, as I shopped for around-the-word fares, I began to get discouraged. The cheapest circuits, like the $1,379 fare from Around-the-World.com, weaved through cities like London, Paris and Bangkok — well-worn destinations that offered little in the way of real adventure.
Next, I tried at Airtreks.com, which specializes in round-the-world trips. Its online trip planner lets you plot every point on your journey, including obscure places like Thessaloniki, Greece, and Peshawar, Pakistan, as well as segments you want to make overland. But the price was too high: my proposed itinerary would have cost about $5,800.
Then I turned to my favorite hobby: entering unusual airport codes on Kayak.com, whose stripped-down design and inclusion of lesser-known carriers (Uzbekistan Yullary, anyone?) never fail to impress me. I put together a quick itinerary that started from Newark, with eastward stops in Lisbon, Istanbul, Tashkent, Beijing, Shanghai, Ulaan Baatar and San Francisco. The price wasn't bad — $3,370 — but I knew it wouldn't hold up to the vagaries of online booking.
And yet ....
What if I heard about an amazing spot that didn't fit into my pre-set itinerary? What if the Uzbek consulate rejected my tourist visa application? What if the beaches of Croatia are nicer than I had imagined, and I wanted to spend an extra day?
In the end, I decided to buy only the first and last segments of the trip — Newark-Lisbon on May 11, which I purchased for $547 through TAP Portugal's Web site, and Beijing-San Francisco on Aug. 11, for $898.67. To get from Point A to Point A, I would hopscotch the globe using low-cost carriers, buses, trains, ferries and serendipity. Or at least that's the plan. Like Phileas Fogg, I set off without a second thought last Thursday.
Which is how I came to find myself in Lisbon last weekend, in the hip Bairro Alto neighborhood with my friend Michele, an American who's lived there a decade, and his friend Margarita. Despite my jetlag, we were drinking outdoors on Rua da Bica Duarte Belo. Lisbon's coolest were out in full force.
"Look at this guy," Michele said, nodding at a Lisboete in his mid-20's, with dark hair, dark eyes and a week's growth of beard. "He's so Portuguese. They're all so Portuguese! They all look like they could've been 16th-century explorers."
Indeed, Lisbon seems to have been designed for and by explorers. A discovery lurks around every corner, whether it's a peaceful pocket park, a glittering view of the Tagus or just the irresistible scent of roasted chicken from a takeout joint. I would spend the next two days wandering those back alleys, getting lost in the way that one only can in old European cities.
Besides, I was running low on money. I wanted to splurge on my first night, so we ended up at Farta Brutos, an old-school restaurant where the dorado comes perfectly grilled and the motherly waitress shoots you disapproving looks if you don't finish everything on your plate. Dinner set me back 25 euros. Sticking to my daily meal allowance of about 30 euros will be tough. The next day, I settled for a cafeteria lunch of salad and quiche for 7.50 euros. Luckily, a friend recommended the Hotel Lisboa in the city's center. The room was small, but it was only 55 euros a night.
Before I departed Lisbon, I paid homage to Portugal's adventurers by visiting the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a 500-year-old monastery where seamen would make their last confessions before sailing off — unforeseen be damned! — to the edge of the world. The sun was out, and the monastery's pale Manueline spires stood out against the clear sky. Better yet, because it was Sunday, entrance was free (at least till 2 p.m.).
I walked into the chapel, where a choir was singing and parishioners were shushing tourists. Just to the left was the tomb of Vasco da Gama, who had sailed from Lisbon to India at the dawn of the 16th century. Above the tomb lay his statue, hands clasped, a garland of fresh flowers below his heavily bearded chin. He looked, I thought, like someone I'd want to have a drink with.
Next week: Galicia.
Have you been to Galicia? Share your tips with the Frugal Traveler. | Read comments.
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Gotta love this stuff. If physics were made this interesting in school, we'd be a nation of scientists. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 16, 2006
Impressive New Tricks of Light, All Within the Laws of Physics
By KENNETH CHANG
To make light go backward, hold up a mirror. Light bounces off the mirror and goes back.
Robert W. Boyd, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, however, did not choose this easy, straightforward technique.
Instead, in the latest example of logic-defying tricks that physicists can now perform with light, Dr. Boyd and his colleagues demonstrated an optical fiber — a glass strand that transmits pulses of light — with a couple of odd characteristics:
¶A pulse of light shot into the fiber departs before it enters.
¶Within the fiber, the pulse travels backward — and faster than the speed of light.
Perhaps most amazingly, Dr. Boyd's results do not violate any law of physics. The effect is indeed predicted by the equations describing the propagation of waves.
"This is a good example of something which is very counterintuitive that the laws of nature permit," Dr. Boyd said.
An article describing the experiment appears in the current issue of the journal Science.
In the vacuum of space, light travels at a constant 186,282 miles per second. When it passes through a transparent material like glass or water, it slows slightly, in effect bouncing off atoms as it moves.
In 1999, physicists led by Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard slowed the speed of light to a leisurely 38 miles per hour by shining it into an exotic ultracooled material known as Bose-Einstein condensate.
Two years later, Dr. Hau's group, as well as a second team of scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, were able to bring light to a standstill — and then release it with its original properties intact.
In other experiments, scientists have shown that it is possible to make light at least appear as if it is traveling faster than the speed of light. Physicists hope to harness such manipulations of light to speed up optical communications.
For Dr. Boyd's trick, the scientists used an optical fiber of glass with small amounts of the metal erbium, which acts as an amplifier. In the experiment, a pulse of laser light was fired into the fiber. Even before the peak of the pulse entered the fiber, another pulse appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at the far end of the fiber.
This new pulse then split in two. One, a twin of the original pulse, moved forward, while the other moved backward through the fiber.
The backward pulse, which traveled faster than the speed of light, and the original pulse met at the front end of the fiber, where they canceled each other.
Even though one pulse momentarily became three, the experiment did not violate the law mandating conservation of energy because the amplifying effect of the erbium added a temporary surge of energy.
At first glance, the experiment appears to flout the usual speed limit on the transmission of signals as the original pulse jumped to the forward-moving pulse on the other side of the fiber.
However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that wide.
Thus, the outgoing pulse was actually just part of the original pulse that was reshaped by the fiber's unusual properties.
"It's really kind of showing the kind of manipulation of light we can do these days," Dr. Hau said of Dr. Boyd's experiment.
Dr. Boyd said this effect might find some application in speeding up optical communications, but it is, for now, mostly just an impressive trick of physics. "I find it neat," he said. "I find it nifty."
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