Weighty Concerns

Research is continuing to show that carrying extra weight also carries lots of extra problems for most folks. Here are two approaches about to get their day in the spotlight. Enjoy.


The New York Times
January 17, 2006
2 Approaches to the Nation's Obesity Epidemic Coming Up for Review
By STEPHANIE SAUL

Two new approaches to weight loss are up for review by federal regulators. And they represent vastly different solutions to the nation's obesity epidemic - for consumers and for the companies behind the drugs.

One, called Acomplia, would be a prescription pill to control appetite by blocking the same brain receptors that stimulate the "munchies" in marijuana smokers. Some financial analysts see Acomplia as the most promising new drug of the year, and they predict multibillion-dollar sales eventually for its maker, the French company Sanofi-Aventis.

The other, with the proposed name Alli, is a weight-loss drug that works by blocking the body's absorption of fat. Since 1999 it has been sold in the United States as the prescription medication Xenical. GlaxoSmithKline is proposing an over-the-counter version, a prescription-quality alternative to the diet remedies available in drugstore aisles and over the Internet.

Glaxo plans to draw on some of the same marketing techniques it used in 1996, when it successfully commercialized Nicorette chewing gum and Nicoderm skin patches, which had formerly been sold only by prescription. But the history of Xenical, which was introduced by Roche in the United States seven years ago to rosy Wall Street forecasts that never fully materialized, may be a cautionary tale for Sanofi and its Acomplia cheerleaders.

If approved, Acomplia and Alli would be the first new developments in weight-loss medicine since the late 1990's. An estimated 200 other possibilities are in the research pipeline as companies seek an elusive cure for obesity. None of the others, however, is close to regulatory review.

Advocates for the obese and overweight, a group that now includes two-thirds of the American population, hope that the over-the-counter availability of Alli and the approval of Acomplia will provide new options, and suggest that the drugs might even be used together by patients who want help losing weight.

"I think if we could get obesity treatments to a situation like cholesterol where there are several different products, where one or two in combination might be successful, at least that would arm physicians with more than they have now," said Morgan Downey, executive director of the American Obesity Association, a patients' advocacy group in Washington.

The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled an advisory panel hearing for Jan. 23 to review Alli. And the F.D.A. could make its decision on Acomplia as soon as next month.

Both drug companies are seeking approval in a difficult regulatory environment, as the F.D.A. is moving cautiously in the wake of the Vioxx debacle. Any diet drug is up against a backdrop of safety issues from the past - most notably problems with the diet drug combination fen-phen. Fenfluramine, the "fen" half of the combination, was withdrawn from the market in 1997 after it was found to cause heart damage.

Xenical has shown itself to be moderately effective and has a long safety record. But Alli - a name the company has proposed because the drug must be allied with a weight-loss program - faces the higher hurdle required when prescription drugs are proposed for sale without a doctor's oversight. "You have to not only provide data that shows it's safe, you have to show that it's safe when it's misused," said Gerald Meyer, a former F.D.A. associate commissioner.

As the F.D.A. weighs Glaxo's proposal, the company is proposing that its sales be restricted to adults 18 and over to prevent misuse by teenagers. And yet, a factor that limits Alli's potential for overuse is its tendency to cause flatulence, diarrhea or even sudden loss of bowel control.

Those side effects are among the reasons Xenical has never lived up to analysts' original forecasts.

Worldwide sales quickly rose to nearly $750 million in 1999, the first year Xenical was available in the United States. As patients realized it was not an obesity cure-all, though, sales fell off and now hover at about $500 million a year worldwide, mainly outside the United States.

As regulators assess Acomplia from Sanofi, analysts see a positive sign in the fact that, as the February date for F.D.A. action on the drug approaches, the agency has not yet announced a hearing by an advisory panel of experts. That could mean regulators have no serious reservations about the drug. In medical conferences, Sanofi has presented data that shows that Acomplia is not just a weight-loss drug but also a way to control a constellation of disorders - high cholesterol, high blood pressure and elevated blood sugar - that frequently accompany obesity.

The only other weight-loss drug approved for long-tem use is Meridia, introduced by Abbott Laboratories in 1997. Some doctors have avoided using it because of its link to increased blood pressure, one of the reasons for its tepid sales. According to IMS Health, Meridia had total United States sales in 2004 of $72 million. Xenical's United States sales in the same year were $102 million, IMS said. Worldwide sales of Xenical were about $500 million, according to Roche, which licensed the drug to Glaxo for over-the-counter marketing.

Glaxo means to promote Alli as not just a pill, but a plan. Consumers who purchase the drug will also get a guide offering weight-loss and exercise tips - including a fat and calories gram counter and a healthy eating guide with menus and shopping lists. They will also be able to log into a free online behavioral support program.

Studies have shown that in combination with a weight-loss program, prescription Xenical led to an average of 12.4 pounds of weight loss in six months, about double the amount lost by patients on the same weight-loss program who were taking a placebo. Those patients took 120 milligrams six times a day.

Steven L. Burton, vice president of weight control products for Glaxo's consumer health division, said studies showed that the over-the-counter dose of 60 milligrams, three times a day, achieves about 80 to 85 percent of the weight lost by those taking the 120-milligram dose.

The prescription version costs about $100 a month, and is generally not reimbursed by health plans. Alli would cost significantly less, although Mr. Burton would not reveal the exact price.

One obesity expert, Dr. Louis J. Aronne of Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York, said that an over-the-counter version of Xenical would be a welcome substitute for the unproven and, in some cases, dangerous weight-loss remedies currently sold without prescription. Many of those are classified as nutritionals and do not require F.D.A. approval.

"If you look at the products out there right now, it's really a sad state of affairs," Dr. Aronne said. "The way the rules are, there's very little oversight of these products. So given that, I think the entry of something like Xenical would clearly make it the first safe, proven and effective therapy."

Xenical blocks the body's absorption of fat by preventing the gastrointestinal tract from breaking down fats into smaller molecules. The fat that is not absorbed gets flushed down the toilet, the reason for the drug's gastrointestinal side effects. People who eat too much fat risk extreme cases of those effects, one way the drug can alter behavior.

Aside from potential embarrassment, the drug's only known potentially serious side effect is that it also reduces the absorption of some vitamins. But problems can be prevented by taking a multivitamin.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who leads the Public Citizen Health Research Group, warns generally against using weight-loss medications. Dr. Wolfe, who is among those expected to testify at the Alli hearing, says that diet and exercise remain the preferable way to lose weight.

But Mr. Downey, of the American Obesity Association, said his group would speak in support of the over-the-counter version.

"I think our point is going to be it's had this track record for some time," Mr. Downey said. "There's been no major safety problems or abuse of it. Converting it to O.T.C. is a different market and it's going to bring a product that's more affordable to more people."

Gbola Amusa, a medical doctor and financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said his company was not forecasting sales of Alli because of uncertainties and the fact that the revenue would be split by Glaxo and Roche.

Mr. Amusa said he viewed Acomplia as a far more exciting product, and he has predicted that sales could exceed $5 billion by the end of the decade. A number of other analysts have similarly optimistic projections of $2 billion to $5 billion.

Acomplia is a selective cannabinoid blocker, a new class of drug that several companies are researching in the race to manage obesity. Studies have shown that Acomplia, when combined with a weight-loss regimen, resulted in average losses of 19 pounds and 3.5 inches around the waist in patients who took it for one year. Those taking a placebo lost an average of five pounds. A study also found that risk factors for heart disease and diabetes improved, and that Acomplia had fewer serious side effects than Xenical or Meridia, with mild gastrointestinal upset and dizziness in some patients.

Sanofi has not yet indicated its pricing plan for Acomplia. But as a prescription drug, it would presumably cost more than over-the-counter Alli. If Acomplia proves significantly more effective than Alli, price may not be an issue for many of the dieting masses. But researchers have cautioned that Acomplia falls far short of being a magic bullet for losing weight.

"I think over all," Mr. Downey said, "the kind of modest weight loss with Acomplia is less than people thought they might see."
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A Living Wage

Well, I could not keep my socially liberal side hidden forever. This well-researched article describes just how important a living wage is to people everywhere. I agree. Enjoy.


The New York Times
January 15, 2006
What Is a Living Wage?
By JON GERTNER

If It Happened in Baltimore, Maybe It Can Happen Anywhere

For a few weeks in the summer of 1995, Jen Kern spent her days at a table in the Library of Congress in Washington, poring over the fine print of state constitutions from around the country. This was, at the time, a somewhat-eccentric strategy to fight poverty in America. Kern was not a high-powered lawyer or politician; she was 25 and held a low-paying, policy-related job at Acorn, the national community organization. Yet to understand why living-wage campaigns matter - where they began, what they mean, and why they inspire such passion and hope - it helps to consider what Kern was doing years ago in the library, reading obscure legislation from states like Missouri and New Mexico.

A few months earlier, she and her colleagues at Acorn witnessed an energetic grass-roots campaign in Baltimore, led by a coalition of church groups and labor unions. Workers in some of Baltimore's homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs. In response, local religious leaders successfully persuaded the City Council to raise the base pay for city contract workers to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The Baltimore campaign was ostensibly about money. But to those who thought about it more deeply, it was about the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty.

So Kern and another colleague were dispatched to find out if what happened in Baltimore could be tried - and expanded - elsewhere. As she plowed through documents, Kern was unsure whether to look for a particular law or the absence of one. Really, what she was trying to do was compile a list of places in the U.S. where citizens or officials could legally mount campaigns to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard. In other words, she needed to know if anything stood in the way, like a state regulation or court decision. What she discovered was that in many states a law more ambitious than Baltimore's - one that didn't apply to only city contractors but to all local businesses - seemed permissible.

Whether a wage campaign was winnable turned out to be a more complicated matter. In the late 1990's, Kern helped Acorn in a series of attempts to raise the minimum wage in Denver, Houston and Missouri. They all failed. "It wasn't even close," she says. In the past few years, though, as the federal minimum wage has remained fixed at $5.15 and the cost of living (specifically housing) has risen drastically in many regions, similar campaigns have produced so many victories (currently, 134) that Kern speaks collectively of "a widespread living-wage movement."

Santa Fe has been one of the movement's crowning achievements. This month the city's minimum wage rose to $9.50 an hour, the highest rate in the United States. But other recent victories include San Francisco in 2003 and Nevada in 2004. And if a ending bill in Chicago is any indication, the battles over wage laws will soon evolve into campaigns to force large, private-sector businesses like Wal-Mart to provide not only higher wages but also more money for employee health care.

It is a common sentiment that economic fairness - or economic justice, as living-wage advocates phrase it - should, or must, come in a sweeping and righteous gesture from the top. From Washington, that is. But most wage campaigns arise from the bottom, from residents and low-level officials and from cities and states - from everywhere except the federal government. "I think what the living-wage movement has done in the past 11 years is incredible," David Neumark, a frequent critic of the phenomenon who is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told me recently. "How many other issues are there where progressives have been this successful? I can't think of one."

The immediate goal for living-wage strategists is to put initiatives on the ballots in several swing states this year. If their reckoning is correct, the laws should effect a financial gain for low-income workers and boost turnout for candidates who campaign for higher wages. In Florida, a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage by a dollar, to $6.15, won 71 percent of the vote in 2004, a blowout that surprised even people like Kern, who spent several weeks in Miami working on the measure. "We would like it to become a fact of political life," Kern says, "where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state." Though victories like the one in Florida may have done little to help the Kerry-Edwards ticket - George Bush won 52 percent of the state's vote - Kern and some in the Democratic establishment have come to believe that the left, after years of electoral frustration, has finally found its ultimate moral-values issue. "This is what moves people to the polls now," Kern insists. "This is our gay marriage." Already, during the past few months, a coalition of grass-roots and labor organizations have begun gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to ensure that proposed laws to increase wages are voted on in November. The first targets, Kern told me, will be Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Ohio. Next in line, either this year or soon after, are Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, the home of Wal-Mart.

Does America Care About the Gap Between Rich and Poor?

I first met Kern on a sunny morning in late September in Albuquerque, a city of 4770,000 that made her list when she was working in the Library of Congress 10 years ago. She was now, at age 35, campaigning for a ballot initiative that would raise the minimum wage in the city to $7.50 an hour from $5.15. There was no face for the placards, no charismatic presence to rally the troops at midnight or shake hands at dawn outside 7-Eleven. Instead, there was a number, $7.50, a troop of campaign workers to canvass the neighborhoods and an argument: that many low-wage workers were being paid poverty wages. That a full-time job at the federal minimum rate added up to $10,712 a year. That local businesses could afford the pay raise. And that it was up to the voters to restore balance.

One of the more intriguing questions about campaigns like the one in Albuquerque, and those planned for swing states next fall, is whether they reflect a profound sense of public alarm about the divergence between rich and poor in this country. Certainly most Americans do not support higher wages out of immediate self-interest. Probably only around 3 percent of those in the work force are actually paid $5.15 or less an hour; most low-wage workers, including Wal-Mart employees, who generally start at between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour, earn more. Increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would directly affect the wages of only about 7 percent of the work force. Nevertheless, pollsters have discovered that a hypothetical state ballot measure typically generates support of around 70 percent. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center actually put the support for raising the national minimum wage to $6.45 at 86 percent. Rick Berman, a lobbyist who started the Employment Policies Institute and who is a longtime foe of living-wage laws, agrees that "the natural tendency is for people to support these things. They believe it's a free lunch." On the other hand, the electorate's reasons for crossing party lines to endorse the measures may be due to the simple fact that at least 60 percent of Americans have at one time or another been paid the minimum wage. Voters may just know precisely what they're voting for and why.

In the mid-1990's, the last time Congress raised the minimum wage, the Clinton White House was reluctant to start a war over the federal rate, according to Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. For an administration bent on policy innovation, that would have seemed "old" Democrat. "Then we did some polling and discovered that the public is overwhelmingly in favor," Reich told me recently. "At which point the White House gave the green light to Democrats in Congress." Reich, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, happens to view the minimum wage as a somewhat inefficient tool for alleviating poverty (compared with earned income tax credits, say). But he acknowledges that it has a powerful moral and political impact, in states red as well as blue, and especially now, in an era when workers see the social contract with their employers vanishing. "They see neighbors and friends being fired for no reason by profitable companies, executives making off like bandits while thousands of their own workers are being laid off," Reich says. "They see health insurance drying up, employer pensions shrinking. Promises to retirees of health benefits are simply thrown overboard. The whole system has aspects that seem grossly immoral to average working people." As Reich points out, whatever the minimum wage's limitations may be as a policy instrument, as an idea "it demarcates our concept of decency with regard to work."

The idea, Reich points out, isn't new, even if the recent fervor for it is. Massachusetts enacted a state minimum wage in 1912, several decades before the federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour was adopted in 1938. And most of the wage ordinances of the past decade specifically trace their origins back to Baltimore, in 1995. After that moment, in fact, the phrase "living wage" soon caught on - or, you might say, returned. It was a popular workers' refrain in the late 19th century and was the title of a 1906 book by John Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest. In the late 1990's, a loose national network of advocates sprang up, incorporating organized labor, grass-roots groups like Acorn and the Industrial Areas Foundation and, more recently, the National Council of Churches. Legal advice often came out of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, where a lawyer named Paul Sonn helped write wage ordinances and ballot measures for various states and cities.

By dint of its piecemeal, localized progress, the modern living-wage movement has grown without fanfare; one reason is that until recently, most of the past decade's wage laws, like Baltimore's, have been narrow in scope and modest in effect. Strictly speaking, a "living wage" law has typically required that any company receiving city contracts, and thus taxpayers' money, must pay its workers a wage far above the federal minimum, usually between $9 and $11 an hour. These regulations often apply to employees at companies to which municipalities have outsourced tasks like garbage collection, security services and home health care. Low-wage workers in the private sector - in restaurants, hotels, retail stores or the like - have been unaffected. Their pay stays the same.

In Santa Fe, the City Council passed a similar kind of wage law in 2002, raising the hourly pay for city employees and contractors. Some officials in Santa Fe, however, had decided from the start that its wage rules should ultimately be different - that the small city (population 666,000) could even serve as a test example for the rest of the U.S. Early on, several city councilors told me, they anticipated that Santa Fe - with a high cost of living, a large community of low-paid immigrants and a liberal City Council - would eventually extend its wage floor to all local businesses, private as well as public, so that every worker in the city, no matter the industry, would make more than $5.15. The initial numbers the councilors considered as they began to strategize seemed stratospheric: a living wage that began at $10 or $12 or even $14.50 an hour. For some laborers, that would constitute a raise of 200 percent or more. Nothing remotely like it existed in any other city in the country.

The Economists Are Surprised

In the years before the enactment of the federal minimum wage in the late 1930's, the country's post-Depression economy was so weak that the notion that government should leave private business to its own devices was effectively marginalized. During the past few decades, though, in the wake of a fairly robust economy, debates on raising the minimum wage have consistently resulted in a rhetorical caterwaul. While the arguments have usually been between those on the labor side, who think the minimum wage should be raised substantially, and those on the employer side, who oppose any increase, a smaller but vocal contingent has claimed, more broadly and more philosophically, that it is in the best interest of both business and labor to let the market set wages, not the politicians. And certainly not the voters.

This last position was long underpinned by the academic consensus that a rise in the minimum wage hurts employment by interfering with the flow of supply and demand. In simplest terms, most economists accepted that when government forces businesses to pay higher wages, businesses, in turn ,hire fewer employees. It is a powerful argument against the minimum wage, since it suggests that private businesses as a group, along with teenagers and low-wage employees, will be penalized by a mandatory raise.

The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990's following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California at Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger. In 1992, New Jersey increased the state minimum wage to $5.05 an hour (applicable to both the public and private sectors), which gave the two young professors an opportunity to study the comparative effects of that raise on fast-food restaurants and low-wage employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained at the federal level of $4.25 an hour. Card and Krueger agreed that the hypothesis that a rise in wages would destroy jobs was "one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics." Both told me they believed, at the start, that their work would reinforce that hypothesis. But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment.

Card and Krueger's conclusions have not necessarily made philosophical converts of Congress or the current administration. Attempts to raise the federal minimum wage - led by Senators Edward M. Kennedy on the left and Rick Santorum on the right - have made little headway over the past few years. And the White House went so far as to temporarily suspend the obligation of businesses with U.S. government construction contracts to pay so-called prevailing wages (that is, whatever is paid to a majority of workers in an industry in a particular area) during the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. David Card, who seems nothing short of disgusted by the ideological nature of the debates over the wage issue, says he feels that opinions on the minimum wage are so politically entrenched that even the most scientific studies can't change anyone's mind. "People think we're biased, partisan," he says. And he's probably right. While Card has never advocated for or against raising the minimum wage, many who oppose wage laws have made exactly those assertions about his research. Nonetheless, in Krueger's view, he and Card changed the debate. "I'm willing to declare a partial victory," Krueger told me. Some recent surveys of top academics show a significant majority now agree that a modest raise in the minimum wage does little to harm employment, he points out.

If nothing else, Card and Krueger's findings have provided persuasive data, and a degree of legitimacy, to those who maintain that raising the minimum wage, whether at the city, state or federal level, need not be toxic. The Economic Policy Institute, which endorses wage regulations, has succeeded recently in getting hundreds of respected economists - excluding Card and Krueger, however, who choose to remain outside the debate - to support raising the federal minimum to $7 an hour. That would have been impossible as recently as five years ago, says Jeff Chapman, an economist at the E.P.I. Even Wal-Mart's president and C.E.O., Lee Scott, recently spoke out in favor of raising the minimum wage. It wasn't altruism or economic theory or even public relations that motivated him, but a matter of bottom-line practicality. "Our current average hourly wage for workers is $9.68," Lee Culpepper, a Wal-Mart spokesman, told me. "So I would think raising the wage would have minimal impact on our workers. But we think it would have a beneficial effect on our customers."

What a Higher Minimum Wage Can Mean to Those Making It

One evening in Santa Fe, I sat down with some of the people Wal-Mart is worried about. Like Louis Alvarez, a 58-year-old cafeteria worker in the Santa Fe schools who for many years helped prepare daily meals for 700 children. For that he was paid $6.85 an hour and brought home $203 every two weeks. He had no disposable income - indeed, he wasn't sure what I meant by disposable income; he barely had money for rent. Statistically speaking, he was far below the poverty line, which for a family of two is about $12,800 a year. For Alvarez, an increase in the minimum wage meant he would be able to afford to go to flea markets, he said.

I also met with Ashley Gutierrez, 20, and Adelina Reyes, 19, who have low-paying customer-service and restaurant jobs. By most estimates, 35 percent of those who make $7 an hour or less in the U.S. are teenagers. A few months ago, Reyes told me, she was spending 86 hours every two weeks at two minimum-wage jobs to pay for her car and to pay for college. Gutierrez, also in school, was working 20 hours a week at Blockbuster video for the minimum wage. People like Alvarez and Gutierrez and Reyes were the ones who spurred two city councilors in Santa Fe, Frank Montaño and Jimmie Martinez, to introduce the living-wage ordinance. "Our schools here don't do so well," Montaño told me, explaining that he believed higher-wage jobs would let parents, who might otherwise have to work a second job, spend more time with their children. (At the same time working teenagers like Gutierrez would have more time with their parents.) For Santa Fe residents who were living five or six to a room in two-bedroom adobes, Montaño said he hoped a higher minimum wage might put having their own places to live at least within the realm of possibility.

Montaño was confident - perhaps too confident, as it would turn out - that businesses would become acclimated to higher payroll costs. He has run a restaurant and a tour-bus company himself, and he knew that the tight labor market in Santa Fe had pushed up wages so that many entry-level workers were already earning more than $8 an hour. "The business owners believe that government, especially at the local level, should not dictate to business, so to them it was a matter of principle," Montaño says. It was to him too. "We knew that other communities were watching what we were doing," he explains. He and his colleagues on the council were already receiving help from Paul Sonn at the Brennan Center in New York. "I knew that their involvement meant that they saw this as something that was important nationally," Montaño says. "As we got our foot in the door in terms of this ordinance being applied to the private sector," he surmised, that would give the living-wage network the ammunition to help other communities across the country do likewise. "I always knew, early on," Montaño says, "that if Santa Fe enacted such an ordinance, that it likely would go to court, and that if it passed the legal test, it would be the kind of ordinance that other communities would copy." The problem, at least from Montaño's perspective, was getting it enacted in the first place.

The Moral Argument Carries the Day in Santa Fe

Santa Fe's City Council asked nine residents, representing the interests of labor and management, to join a round table that would settle the specifics of the proposed living-wage law - how high the wage would be, for instance, and how soon it would be phased in. Some members of the round table, like Al Lucero, who owns a popular local restaurant, Maria's New Mexican Kitchen, found the entire premise of a city wage law objectionable. "I think the minimum wage at $5.15 is ridiculous," Lucero told me. "If the state were to raise it overall, to $7 an hour or $7.50 an hour, I think that would be wonderful. I think we need to do it." But $9 or $10 or $11 was too high, in his view - and it would put Santa Fe at a disadvantage to other cities in the state or region that could pay workers less. Also, there were the free-market principles that Frank Montaño had anticipated: "They were trying to push and tell us how to live our lives and how to conduct our business," says Lucero, who employs about 60 people.

Not surprisingly, Lucero's opponents on the round table saw things in a different light. For example, Carol Oppenheimer, a labor attorney, viewed the proposed law as a practical and immediate solution. "I got involved with the living-wage network because unions are having a very hard time," she told me. She assumed that local businesses could manage with a higher payroll. Yet after only a few meetings of the task force, both sides dug in, according to Oppenheimer.

It was then that the living-wage proponents hit on a scorched-earth, tactical approach. "What really got the other side was when we said, 'It's just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can't live on that,' " Oppenheimer recalls. "It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy. And we knew that was our issue."

The moral argument soon trumped all others. The possibility that a rise in the minimum wage, even a very substantial one, would create unemployment or compromise the health of the city's small businesses was not necessarily irrelevant. Yet for many in Santa Fe, that came to be seen as an ancillary issue, one that inevitably led to fruitless discussions in which opposing sides cited conflicting studies or anecdotal evidence. Maybe all of that was beside the point, anyway. Does it - or should it - even matter what a wage increase does to a local economy, barring some kind of catastrophic change? Should an employer be allowed to pay a full-time employee $5.15 an hour, this argument went, if that's no longer enough to live on? Is it just under our system of government? Or in the eyes of God?

The Rev. Jerome Martinez, the city's influential monsignor, began to throw his support behind the living-wage ordinance. When I met with him in his parish, in a tidy, paneled office near the imposing 18th-century church that looks over the city plaza, Martinez traced for me the moral justification for a living wage back to the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI and John Paul II, in which the pontiffs warned against the excesses of capitalism. "The church's position on social justice is long established," Father Jerome said. "I think unfortunately it's one of our best-kept secrets."

I asked if it had been a difficult decision to support the wage law. He smiled slightly. "It was a no-brainer," he said. "You know, I am not by nature a political person. I have gotten a lot of grief from some people, business owners, who say, 'Father, why don't you stick to religion?' Well, pardon me - this is religion. The scripture is full of matters of justice. How can you worship a God that you do not see and then oppress the workers that you do see?"

I heard refrains of the moral argument all over Santa Fe. One afternoon I walked around the city with Morty Simon, a labor lawyer and a staunch supporter of the living wage whose wife is Carol Oppenheimer. "This used to be the Sears," Simon told me as we walked, pointing to boutiques and high-end chain stores. "And we had a supermarket over here, and there was a hardware store too." Simon came to Santa Fe 34 years ago as a refugee from New York, he said, and for him the unpretentious city he once knew was gone. The wealthy retirees and second-home buyers had come in droves, and so had the movie stars. Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer had settled here; Simon had recently found out that someone had plans for a 26,000-square-foot house, a new local record. For him, the moral component of the law, the possibility of regaining some kind of balance, was what mattered. "It was really a question of, what kind of world do you want to live in?" he said.

Several Santa Fe councilors had, over the course of the previous year, come to Morty Simon's view that the wage ordinance presented an opportunity to stop the drift between haves and have-nots. Carol Robertson Lopez, for example, had initially opposed the living-wage law but changed her mind after 30 hours of debate. "We take risks, oftentimes, to benefit businesses," she told me, "and we take risks to benefit different sectors. I felt like this was an economic risk that we were taking on behalf of the worker." She acknowledged that some residents thought the city had started down a slippery slope toward socialism; jokes about the People's Republic of Santa Fe were rampant. But Robertson Lopez says that by the night of the vote she had few reservations. "I think the living wage is an indicator of when we've given up on the federal government to solve our problems," she says. "So local people have to take it on their own."

The living-wage ordinance had its final hearing on Feb. 26, 2003, in a rancorous debate that drew 600 people and lasted until 3 a.m. The proposal set a wage floor at $8.50 an hour, which would increase to $9.50 in January 2006 and $10.50 in 2008. It would also regulate only businesses with 25 or more employees.

It passed the City Council easily, by a vote of 7 to 1. A few weeks later, a group of restaurant and hotel owners filed suit in state court on the grounds that the living-wage ordinance exceeded the city's powers and was a violation of their rights under New Mexico's constitution. A judge suspended the wage law until a trial could resolve the issues.

Businesses Fight Back

To business owners in Santa Fe, the most worrisome aspect of the living-wage law is that the city has sailed into uncharted territory. Most of the minimum-wage campaigns in the U.S. have been modest increases of a dollar or a dollar and a half. The numerous state campaigns for 2006 will probably propose raises to between $6.15 and $7 and hour. (When San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $8.50 an hour in 2004 - indexed to inflation, it is now $8.82 - California's state minimum wage was $6.75, so the increase was 26 percent.) And even staunch supporters of a higher minimum wage accept that there is a point at which a wage is set so high as to do more harm than good. "There is no other municipality in the country that believes that $9.50 should be the living wage," says Rob Day, the owner of the Santa Fe Bar and Grill and one of the plaintiffs who sued the city. In fact, the most apt comparison would be Great Britain, which now has a minimum wage equivalent to about $8.80 an hour. "They have minimum wages that are Santa Fe level," says Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist. And at least for the moment, he says, "they have lower unemployment than we do."

As the lawsuit against the city progressed, though, Europe wasn't even a distant consideration. The focus was on the people of Santa Fe. I read through a transcript of New Mexicans for Free Enterprise v. City of Santa Fe one day this fall in a conference room at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the white-shoe law firm in Midtown Manhattan that defended, pro bono, Santa Fe's right to enact the living-wage ordinance. In many respects, the trial, which took place over the course of a week in April 2004, was an unusual public exchange on profits, poverty and class in America. Paul Sonn, the lawyer at the Brennan Center at New York University who wrote the Santa Fe ordinance, had enlisted Sidney Rosdeitcher, a partner at Paul, Weiss, to be lead counsel for Santa Fe's defense. Rosdeitcher told me that before the trial began he wasn't convinced that there were many factual issues in dispute; as he saw it, the living-wage controversy was about the law and, in particular, whether Santa Fe had a legal "home rule" authority, under the provisions of the New Mexico constitution, to set wages, even for private industry. Nevertheless, several low-wage workers took the stand to relate the facts, as they saw them, of what the wage increase would do to improve their quality of life. The Rev.

Jerome Martinez took the stand as an employer of 65 people in his parish and Catholic school. And a number of restaurant owners, in turn, explained how the new law could ultimately force them out of business.

The plaintiffs - the New Mexicans for free enterprise - were not unsympathetic: the restaurateurs who took the stand, like Rob Day or Elizabeth Draiscol, who runs the popular Zia Diner in town, opened their books to show that their margins were thin, their costs high, their payrolls large. They cared about their employees (providing health care and benefits), trained unskilled workers who spoke little or no English, gave regular raises and paid starting salaries well above $5.15. They had built up their businesses through an extraordinary amount of hard work. Draiscol testified that her restaurant, for instance, had $2.17 million in annual revenue in the fiscal year of 2003. Though her assets were substantial - a restaurant can be valued at anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of its annual revenues, and Draiscol said Zia had been appraised at 66 percent of revenues, or about $1.4 million - she earned a salary of $49,000 a year. Draiscol testified that the living wage would raise her payroll, which accounted for 55 to 65 employees (depending on the season), by about $43,192 a year. Rob Day put the expenses of a living-wage increase even higher. In addition to labor costs, he estimated that the price of goods would go up as his local suppliers, forced to pay employees higher wages themselves, passed along their expenses to the Santa Fe Bar and Grill.

Rosdeitcher showed that the restaurants had made serious errors overestimating their costs. Still, the increase in expenditures was not negligible. Over the past few years, a variety of experts have tried to perfect the science of predicting what will happen to a community in the wake of a minimum-wage change, and one of those experts, Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, served as the expert witness on behalf of Santa Fe. Pollin projected that the living wage would affect the wages of about 17,000 workers. About 9,000 of those workers would receive raises because of the ordinance, he said; the rest would receive what he called "ripple effect" increases - which meant that those making, say, $8.50 or more before the raise would most likely receive an additional raise from their employers to reflect their job seniority. Pollin calculated that wage increases would cost businesses a total of $33 million. And to pay for those amounts, restaurants and hotels and stores would probably need to raise prices by between 1 and 3 percent. The question, therefore, was whether business owners were willing to raise prices or make less in profits. In the trial, Pollin cited an obscure 1994 academic experiment in which several economists had set a different price within the same restaurant for a fried-haddock dinner. In varying the price of the haddock between $8.95 and $10.95, the researchers' goal was to find out whether variations in cost affected demand in a controlled environment. As it turned out, they didn't. Customers ordered the haddock at both $8.95 and $10.95.

Results From the Santa Fe Experiment

That the city of Santa Fe has effectively become a very large fried-haddock-dinner experiment is difficult to deny. A state court judge ruled in favor of the city soon after the trial, allowing the living-wage ordinance to take effect in June 2004; recently, the judge's decision was affirmed by a state appellate court, giving the city, and its living-wage advocates, a sweeping victory. Many business owners have found these legal losses discouraging. This fall, not long after I visited the city, the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce sent a note to its members to gauge their opinion on the $8.50 living wage and the hike on Jan. 1 to $9.50. Some members reported that they had no trouble adjusting to the first raise and supported a further increase. (Some of these owners, whose high-end businesses employ skilled workers, paid more than the $8.50 to begin with.) Others insisted that they were not averse to a state or federal raise in the minimum but that Santa Fe's citywide experiment had put local businesses at a competitive disadvantage: companies could move outside the city limits or could outsource their work to cheaper places in the state. But most respondents opposed the law. The living wage had forced them to raise prices on their products and services, which they feared would cut into business.

To look at the data that have accumulated since the wage went into effect is to get a more positive impression of the law. Last month, the University of New Mexico's Bureau of Business and Economic Research issued some preliminary findings on what had happened to the city over the past year and a half. The report listed some potential unintended consequences of the wage raise: the exemption in the living-wage law for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, for instance, created "perverse incentives" for owners to keep their payrolls below 25 workers. There was some concern that the high living wage might encourage more high-school students to drop out; in addition, some employers reported that workers had begun commuting in to Santa Fe to earn more for a job there than they could make outside the city.

Yet the city's employment picture stayed healthy - overall employment had increased in each quarter after the living wage went into effect and had been especially strong for hotels and restaurants, which have the most low-wage jobs. Most encouraging to supporters: the number of families in need of temporary assistance - a reasonably good indicator of the squeeze on the working poor - have declined significantly. On the other hand, the city's gross receipts totals, a reflection of consumer spending and tourism, have been disappointing since the wage went into effect. That could suggest that prices are driving people away. Or it could merely mean that high gas and housing prices are hitting hard. The report calculates that the cost of living in Santa Fe rose by 9 percent a year over the past two and a half years.

Rob Day of the Santa Fe Bar and Grill sees this as the crux of the matter. In his view, the problem with Santa Fe is the cost of housing, and there are better ways than wage regulations - housing subsidies, for example - to make homes more affordable. In the wake of the wage raise, Day told me, he eventually tweaked his prices, but not enough to offset the payroll increases. He let go of his executive chef and was himself working longer hours. "Now in the matter of a year and a half, I think there is a whole group of us who thought, if we were going to start over, this isn't the business we would have gone into," he says.

Al Lucero, the owner of Maria's New Mexican Kitchen, says that the living-wage battle has risked turning him into a caricature. Opponents backing the living wage "paint us as people who take advantage of workers," he told me. By contrast, Lucero sees himself as an upstanding member of the community who provides jobs (he has 60 employees) and had always paid well above the federal minimum. Other business owners said similar things but would not speak out publicly. They feared alienating customers. As some told it, they had started businesses with a desire to create wealth and jobs in a picturesque small city. Then they had awakened in a mad laboratory for urban liberalism.

The Issue in Albuquerque

Long after he did his influential research with David Card on the effect of minimum-wage raises, Alan Krueger says, he came to see that ultimately the minimum wage is less about broad economic outcomes than about values. Which is not to say that workers' values should trump those of owners'. Rather, that when wealth is being redistributed from one party to another - and not, in the case of Santa Fe, from overpaid C.E.O.'s and hedge-fund managers but from everyday entrepreneurs who have worked long hours to succeed in their businesses - things can get complicated. Indeed, while it is tempting to see the wage disputes in Santa Fe and elsewhere as a reflection of whether one side is right or wrong, on either economic or moral grounds, they are, more confusingly, small battles in a larger war (and, in America, a very old war) over where to draw the line on free-market capitalism. On one side there is Al Lucero, on the other someone like Morty Simon, or the economist Robert Pollin, who says: "The principled position is, 'Why should anyone tell anyone what to do? Why should the government?' I just happen to disagree with that. A minimally decent employment standard, to me, overrides the case for a free market."

And yet, the fact that voters or elected politicians should decide who wins these battles, rather than economists or policy makers, seems fitting. During Albuquerque's living-wage campaign this past fall, Santa Fe - the smaller, wealthier, northern neighbor - served as a rallying point. But it was also a question mark: Was Santa Fe's experience repeatable? Was it even worth pointing to as an exemplar? In the final days of the Albuquerque effort, Jen Kern of Acorn told me she had little doubt that the wage victory in Santa Fe, like the one in San Francisco, was an indication that a battle for creating high base wages in America's cities, in addition to the states, could be won. But these were also rich cities, liberal cities - "la-la lands," as she put it. "I think with citywide minimums, if this is going to be the next era in the living-wage movement, it's got to look like it's winnable," Kern says. "The danger or the limitations of just having San Francisco and Santa Fe having passed this is that people in other parts of the country are going to say, 'Well, I'm not Santa Fe, I'm not San Francisco."' In Kern's view, a win "in a city like Albuquerque, which I think everyone thinks of as sort of a normal city," was a truer test.

And it didn't pass that test. When the $7.50 ballot initiative lost by 51 percent to 49 percent on Oct. 4, it made many in the living-wage movement wonder how these battles will play out over the next year or two. One political consultant involved in the movement questioned whether the Albuquerque wage itself, at $7.50 an hour, had been set too high by Acorn to win broad support. Matthew Henderson of Acorn, who ran the day-to-day campaign, said he thought they were outspent by their opponents. Most likely, though, the outcome was determined by the actual grounds on which the battle was fought. The businesses that opposed the $7.50 wage, represented mainly by the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, challenged a small provision in the proposed living-wage law that would allow those enforcing a living wage to have wide "access" to a workplace. The campaigns soon began trading allegations through television ads and direct mailings about how far such access might go. And so the living-wage campaign had become a surreal fight over privacy (it would allow "complete strangers to enter your child's school," one mailing against the measure alleged) rather than wages. When I met with Terri Cole, the president and C.E.O. of Albuquerque's Chamber of Commerce, a few days before the vote, she acknowledged that the chamber opposed the living-wage law on philosophical grounds. But she said she saw the access clause as a legitimate grounds for a fight.

Will It Play Nationally?

In the aftermath of Albuquerque, Jen Kern took solace in the fact that 10 years after she visited the Library of Congress, and 10 years after she began working on living-wage campaigns, the opposition fought not on the economic merits or risks of a higher wage, but on a side issue like privacy. Still, a loss is a loss. It is possible that the Albuquerque wage campaign may still prevail, in effect: New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, has said he would consider a statewide raise this spring, presumably to $7 or $7.50, from $5.15, that would affect all New Mexicans. (It would, in all likelihood, leave Santa Fe's higher wage unaffected.) Yet such an act does little to clarify whether progressives can actually transform strong levels of voter support for higher wages into wins at the polls. Kristina Wilfore, the head of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive advocacy group, says that over the years there has been anywhere from a 2 to 5 percent increase in voter turnout specifically correlated with wage measures. "But people think it's some big panacea, and it's not," says Wilfore, who regards success as dependent on how well a local wage coalition (organized labor, grass-roots groups, church-based organizations) can work together at raising money and mobilizing voters.

For specific candidates in a state or city where a wage measure is on the ballot, it can be similarly complicated. Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me that the local battles over living wages reflect the broader debate in the U.S. over health care, retirement security and an advancing global economy. "Every district is different," Emanuel says of the slate of Congressional races for 2006, "But there is not one where the living wage, competitive wages or health care doesn't play out. The minimum-wage issue, if it's on the ballot, is part of the economic argument."

David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, who frequently conducts polls on minimum-wage issues, told me that the dollar level of a wage proposal is important, though it can vary from place to place. ("People have different feelings about what's a lot of money," he says.) But he has found that quirks can emerge. An increase to $6.15 sometimes doesn't poll as well as an increase to $6.75, which can generate more intensity and broader support from voters. Mermin also says that wage measures have had success in recent years, Albuquerque notwithstanding, not because Americans feel differently but because campaigners are getting smarter about stressing morals over economics. And when handled adroitly, a wage platform can motivate the kind of voters who are difficult to engage in other ways: younger voters, infrequent voters, low-income urban voters. His research, Mermin adds, shows that most people who vote for the minimum wage know it's not going to affect their lives tomorrow: "It's not like fixing the health-care system, or repairing the retirement system," he says. "It doesn't rise to that level directly. And if you list it in 10 issues, it doesn't pop out in priority. But when it is on the ballot, it crystallizes a lot of things people feel about the economy and about people who are struggling." In his experience, voters seem to process these measures as an opportunity to take things into their own hands and change their world, just as Morty Simon did.

Still, as an endgame, many in the living-wage movement see the prize not in a series of local victories in 2006 but in Congressional action that results in a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage - and even better - one that is indexed to inflation, so that such battles about raising the wage don't need to be fought every few years. The long-run trajectory, Paul Sonn told me, is for cities and states to create enough pressure to ultimately force a raise on the federal level. Or to put it another way, the hope is that raising wages across the U.S. will ultimately demonstrate to voters and to Washington lawmakers both the feasibility and the necessity of a significantly higher minimum wage. In the meantime, Sonn says, cities like Santa Fe play an important role in policy innovation, "really as sort of laboratories of economic democracy." Richard Freeman of Harvard echoes this point. "If you go back, a lot of the New Deal legislation, good or bad, came about because there was a lot of state legislation," Freeman says. Policies from New York or Wisconsin were adapted into the federal system of laws. "A lot of it came from state variations in the past, and I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next few years. The things that work the best might be adopted nationally."

Of course, it also seems plausible that any kind of national coherence on economic - or moral - matters may have ended long ago. Just as the voters of states and cities have sorted themselves politically into red and blue, and into pro- and anti-gay marriage, in other words, they are increasingly sorting their wage floors and (perhaps soon) their health-care coverage. This trend may produce not progressive national policies but instead a level of local self-determination as yet unseen. Or as Freeman puts it, "Let Santa Fe do what it wants, but let's not impose that on Gadsden, Ala." That wouldn't make a federal increase in the minimum wage insignificant, but it would make it something of a backdrop for major population centers. As Robert Reich says, "The reality is, even if the wage were raised to $6.15, it would not be enough to lift a family out of poverty." And as Jen Kern points out, even a federal minimum wage that goes up to $7.25, which is the proposal from the Senate Democrats and which probably isn't going anywhere until 2008, doesn't approach what it now costs to live in some cities.

This was why, in December, Kern and Acorn were considering the prospects for laying the groundwork for living-wage ordinances in other cities. And it's why, also in December, Paul Sonn was helping to write an ordinance for Lawrence Township, N.J., aimed at forcing the city's big-box retailers like Wal-Mart to pay a higher wage (more than $10 an hour) and to contribute a larger share of employee benefits. Last month, Sonn also pointed out to me that Santa Cruz, Calif., was considering plans to introduce a measure that would establish a minimum wage of $9.25 an hour.

It wasn't quite Santa Fe's level, but close. And that suggested that the small New Mexican city, to the delight of its living-wage advocates and the chagrin of many business owners, was no longer just an experiment. Rather, it had already become something best described, for better or for worse, as a model.

Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for the New York TImes Magazine.
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Indigo Children

This phenomenon has intrigued me for years. Now, I think I have a nephew in Australia who has this quality they describe. Enjoy.

The New York Times
January 12, 2006
Are They Here to Save the World?
By JOHN LELAND

AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.

"Tell him I'm strong," he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.

"I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn't raining," he said.

"I'm getting bored," he said.

At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child.

"He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."

If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.

Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).

Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.

Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.

"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."

To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."

Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.

Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.

To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.

Annette Piper, a mother of two in Memphis, said that she had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them. Like a lot of others who describe themselves as indigos, she was also sensitive to chemicals and fluorescent lights. Instead of going to medical school, she became an intuitive healer, directing the energy fields around people, and opened a New Age store called Spiritual Freedom.

Her daughter Alexandra, 10, is also an indigo, she said. They play games to cultivate their telepathic powers, but at school Alexandra struggles, Ms. Piper said. "She has trouble finishing work in school and wants to argue with the teacher if she thinks she's right," Ms. Piper said. "I don't think she's found out what her gifts are. From the influence in school and friends she lays off these abilities. She's a little afraid of them."

Problems in school are common for indigos, said Alex Perkel, who runs the ReBirth Esoteric Science Center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a bilingual (Russian-English) center dedicated to "the knowledge of ancient esoteric schools and Eastern science," according to its Web site (www.esotericinfo.com).

Last year the center organized a class for indigo children but canceled it when families dropped out for economic reasons.

"A lot of people don't understand the children because the children are very smart," Mr. Perkel said. "They have knowledge like our teachers. They don't want to go to school, No. 1, because they don't need the knowledge they can get from school. So parents bring them to psychologists, and psychologists start giving them pills to take out their will and memory. We developed a special program to help them understand that they came to this planet to change the consciousness because they have guides from a higher world."

Stephen Hinshaw, a professor and the chairman of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that "there is a legitimate concern that we are overmedicalizing normal childhood, particularly with A.D.H.D." But, he said, research shows that even gifted children with attention-deficit problems do better with more structure in the classroom, not less.

"If you conduct a very open classroom, kids with A.D.H.D. may fit in better, because everyone's running around, but there's no evidence that it helps children with A.D.H.D. learn. On the other hand if you have a more traditional classroom, with consistent tasks and expectations and rewards, kids with A.D.H.D. may have a harder time fitting in at first, but in the long run there's evidence that it helps their learning."

Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in Manhattan, who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.

"I'm very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors," she said. "I'm not against medication at all. I just think it's overused." When parents take children to her for treatment - she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person's electromagnetic field - she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.

"Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, 'I'm talking to an angel,' or 'I'm talking to someone who's deceased'?" Ms. Tuchman asked. "A lot of them have no one to talk to." She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.

Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.

"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."

She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in "fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode."

Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."

In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.

Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.

For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.

"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."
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Slipping Around

Reese Witherspoon as June Carter in "Walk the Line"




Only certain women can "work a slip like nobody's business." Sis was one of them ,as those of us who grew up at 565 know to be true. Luckily for them, my four sisters inherited this "it" quality from Sis.

What's Sexy Now?
The Slip
By RUTH LA FERLA

NAOMI WATTS can work a slip like nobody's business, a gift she flaunts in the Peter Jackson remake of "King Kong." As Ann Darrow, the movie's spirited heroine, Ms. Watts whirls and shimmies like an overheated windup toy before the mighty Kong, sheathed all the while in a sliver of silk and lace.

She is but the latest in a long procession of big-screen temptresses - think of Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway - to have brought out the beast in their leading men while slinking around in a slip.

But despite its glamorous provenance, the slip's appeal in recent decades has remained primarily on film. Off screen it languished, so scarce as to border on extinct, worn mostly, if at all, by women of Ms. Taylor's vintage. "Two years ago you wouldn't have been able to find a slip in most stores," said Susan Hughes, a fashion director at Bloomingdale's.

Today retailers tell a different tale, as slips, long consigned to fashion's scrapheap, are being resurrected on store racks, their aura of candied sexiness coinciding with the pervasive romanticism of the spring collections.

At Bloomingdale's, which carries versions by Betsey Johnson, DKNY and Far West, sales have been strong enough to warrant adding new styles and labels for spring, Ms. Hughes said. Monica Mitro, the spokeswoman for Victoria's Secret, said her company has expanded its slip offerings in anticipation of a boomlet.

"We believe that slips are emerging as a major trend for summer and even into fall," she said. And at luxury stores like Bergdorf Goodman and popular lingerie Web sites like Figleaves, new incarnations proliferate, with most of their old-fashioned charms intact.

"We're beginning to see a new generation discover the slip," said Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm. "For now slips are an undercultural movement by women shopping in more affluent stores."

Most, he added, are under 40, women who as recently as a year ago would no more have thought of buying a slip than of wearing a hoop skirt. Because the trend is only now emerging, sales figures are not available, but Mr. Cohen predicted a measurable spike in slip sales by spring.

Not to be confused with the ubiquitous slip dress still enjoying a healthy retail run, the slip is distinctly of the old school, intended mainly as an underthing or for the bedroom, not for a night on the town. Its appeal is one part practical - it provides cover and a smoothing base under the filmy, sometimes clingy tops and dresses coming into stores for spring - and two parts sensual, as is evident in the sinuously contoured, lace-trimmed retro interpretations from design houses like Janet Reger, La Perla, Natori and Jonquil.

Like white lace dresses and crocheted tops, "slips are the virginal counterpoint to things that were a little bit sinister for fall," Ed Burstell, the senior vice president and general merchandise manager at Bergdorf, suggested.

The latest slips are indeed pretty and innocent, yet paradoxically steamy enough to supplement, if not supplant, staples like the camisole or the thigh-grazing chemise. "All those midriff-baring pieces have taken on a tacky nature," said Susan Rolontz, the executive vice president of the Tobé Report, a retail newsletter.

"A slip is the new pristine version of sexiness." She might have been describing one of the modestly trimmed cotton batiste slips from Vera Wang's new lingerie line, to be introduced for spring. With its slender straps and refined sheer border, it is as decorously girlie as a debutante.

Some merchants say that these sleekly elongated underthings speak to privately cherished fantasies. "They give some women back a feeling of femininity and glamour," said Lauren Borish, a senior buyer for Figleaves. Last fall the company added several coquettish new styles to its stock of functional elasticized slips from Maidenform and Spanx.

"Slips have a kind of sophistication, a sexiness that makes you feel more womanly," said Lauren Martin, a psychoanalyst in New York. She shows off her wardrobe of traditional slips under sheer blouses and skirts with slits. Rebecca Apsan, who carries a rainbow assortment of slips at La Petite Coquette, her lingerie boutique in downtown Manhattan, puts one on the instant she comes home from work.

"It makes me feel like Liz Taylor in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' " Ms. Apsan said. "Yeah, I'm very much Maggie the Cat." Historically Hollywood has served up slips as a contradictory symbol of girlishness and womanly predation, one that glides between the poles of trashiness and class.

A subtle invitation to misbehave, slips were impressed on the popular consciousness by stars like Ms. Taylor, not only dangerously feline in "Cat," but elegantly debauched as she nursed a Scotch wearing satin and lace in "Butterfield 8."

Faye Dunaway looked glamorously undone in a slip and pencil skirt in "Bonnie and Clyde." More recently Reese Witherspoon was steamy yet sensible in a nylon slip in "Walk the Line," her rumpled lingerie attesting to a predawn romp between the sheets.

Off screen the slip's slide into oblivion was hastened by the upheavals of the 60's. Women seemed to view it as yet another encumbrance, discarding it along with their wired bras and harnesslike girdles as a gesture of protest - or ennui. Scholars argue that the slip actually began its protracted decline as early as the 50's, edged out as the public fixated increasingly on breasts, by the more revealing push-up or demibra.

"The very coyness" of the slip, "this little sister to the dress no longer had charms for men now serenaded by seminaked sirens," writes Farid Chenoune, the author of "Hidden Underneath: A History of Lingerie" (Assouline, 2005).

Several years ago slips were rediscovered, sought out at vintage stores by young women with a penchant for granny-style lingerie. Some wore them as dresses, and an enterprising handful even had them monogrammed. Others pulled them, rents and frays intact, over jeans and under cardigans. Late last year eagle-eyed style editors began spotlighting the trend in magazines.

Impressed by the image of Ms. Dunaway in a slip in "Bonnie and Clyde," Andrea Linett, the creative director of Lucky, recreated the look in the December issue. She followed up in the magazine's current issue with a feature showcasing whimsical slips sprinkled with flowers and lace: a fetching alternative, Ms. Linett said, to the overhyped push-up bra and thong.

"Slips are totally demure," she said. "At a time when nothing is shocking anymore, that's what makes them sexy."###

Science at the Cellular Level

It just doesn't get any better than this - a readable explanation of one of life's little mysteries. This is why I love science so much.

The New York Times
January 10, 2006
Cells That Read Minds
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements.

Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.

A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth.

The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.

Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.

"It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own.

But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.

The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.

"We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."

He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."

The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.

Everyday experiences are also being viewed in a new light. Mirror neurons reveal how children learn, why people respond to certain types of sports, dance, music and art, why watching media violence may be harmful and why many men like pornography.

How can a single mirror neuron or system of mirror neurons be so incredibly smart?

Most nerve cells in the brain are comparatively pedestrian. Many specialize in detecting ordinary features of the outside world. Some fire when they encounter a horizontal line while others are dedicated to vertical lines. Others detect a single frequency of sound or a direction of movement.

Moving to higher levels of the brain, scientists find groups of neurons that detect far more complex features like faces, hands or expressive body language. Still other neurons help the body plan movements and assume complex postures.

Mirror neurons make these complex cells look like numbskulls. Found in several areas of the brain - including the premotor cortex, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus and the insula - they fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions.

Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."

"When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. "Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate," he said. "But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements.

"When you see me pull my arm back, as if to throw the ball, you also have in your brain a copy of what I am doing and it helps you understand my goal. Because of mirror neurons, you can read my intentions. You know what I am going to do next."

He continued: "And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate, mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling."

Mirror neurons seem to analyzed scenes and to read minds. If you see someone reach toward a bookshelf and his hand is out of sight, you have little doubt that he is going to pick up a book because your mirror neurons tell you so.

In a study published in March 2005 in Public Library of Science, Dr. Iacoboni and his colleagues reported that mirror neurons could discern if another person who was picking up a cup of tea planned to drink from it or clear it from the table. "Mirror neurons provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture," said Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the U.C.L.A. who studies human development.

Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she said. "But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation."

Other animals - monkeys, probably apes and possibly elephants, dolphins and dogs - have rudimentary mirror neurons, several mirror neuron experts said. But humans, with their huge working memory, carry out far more sophisticated imitations.

Language is based on mirror neurons, according to Michael Arbib, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. One such system, found in the front of the brain, contains overlapping circuitry for spoken language and sign language.

In an article published in Trends in Neuroscience in March 1998, Dr. Arbib described how complex hand gestures and the complex tongue and lip movements used in making sentences use the same machinery. Autism, some researchers believe, may involve broken mirror neurons. A study published in the Jan. 6 issue of Nature Neuroscience by Mirella Dapretto, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., found that while many people with autism can identify an emotional expression, like sadness, on another person's face, or imitate sad looks with their own faces, they do not feel the emotional significance of the imitated emotion. From observing other people, they do not know what it feels like to be sad, angry, disgusted or surprised.

Mirror neurons provide clues to how children learn: they kick in at birth. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has published studies showing that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing. More than other primates, human children are hard-wired for imitation, he said, their mirror neurons involved in observing what others do and practicing doing the same things.

Still, there is one caveat, Dr. Iacoboni said. Mirror neurons work best in real life, when people are face to face. Virtual reality and videos are shadowy substitutes.

Nevertheless, a study in the January 2006 issue of Media Psychology found that when children watched violent television programs, mirror neurons, as well as several brain regions involved in aggression were activated, increasing the probability that the children would behave violently.

The ability to share the emotions of others appears to be intimately linked to the functioning of mirror neurons, said Dr. Christian Keysers, who studies the neural basis of empathy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and who has published several recent articles on the topic in Neuron.

When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.

People who rank high on a scale measuring empathy have particularly active mirror neurons systems, Dr. Keysers said.

Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of the brain called the insula, Dr. Keysers said. In a study not yet published, he found that when people watched a hand go forward to caress someone and then saw another hand push it away rudely, the insula registered the social pain of rejection. Humiliation appears to be mapped in the brain by the same mechanisms that encode real physical pain, he said.

Psychotherapists are understandably enthralled by the discovery of mirror neurons, said Dr. Daniel Siegel, the director of the Center for Human Development in Los Angeles and the author of "Parenting From the Inside Out," because they provide a possible neurobiological basis for the psychological mechanisms known as transference and countertransference.

In transference, clients "transfer" feelings about important figures in their lives onto a therapist. Similarly, in countertransference, a therapist's reactions to a client are shaped by the therapist's own earlier relationships.

Therapists can use their own mirror system to understand a client's problems and to generate empathy, he said. And they can help clients understand that many of their experiences stem from what other people have said or done to them in the past.

Art exploits mirror neurons, said Dr. Vittorio Gallese, a neuroscientist at Parma University. When you see the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini's hand of divinity grasping marble, you see the hand as if it were grasping flesh, he said. Experiments show that when you read a novel, you memorize positions of objects from the narrator's point of view.

Professional athletes and coaches, who often use mental practice and imagery, have long exploited the brain's mirror properties perhaps without knowing their biological basis, Dr. Iacoboni said. Observation directly improves muscle performance via mirror neurons.

Similarly, millions of fans who watch their favorite sports on television are hooked by mirror neuron activation. In someone who has never played a sport - say tennis - the mirror neurons involved in running, swaying and swinging the arms will be activated, Dr. Iacoboni said.

But in someone who plays tennis, the mirror systems will be highly activated when an overhead smash is observed. Watching a game, that person will be better able to predict what will happen next, he said.

In yet another realm, mirror neurons are powerfully activated by pornography, several scientists said. For example, when a man watches another man have sexual intercourse with a woman, the observer's mirror neurons spring into action. The vicarious thrill of watching sex, it turns out, is not so vicarious after all.###

Baseball's Hall of Fame

"Baseball been berry, berry good to me," was a trademark line delivered by Garrett Morris, who played an Hispanic ballplayer in skits on the early days of Saturday Night Live. Well, ditteaux here. Baseball has been very, very good to me as well. In fact, I would not be at all (at least in my present form) had it not been for the game.

My father was a pro ballplayer in the summer of 1950 when he met my mother, a local beauty in the full bloom of her youth as a recent high school graduate. By the time that season ended in September, they were only 90 days away from marriage and I was just a year away from birth.

The New York Times
January 8, 2006
Keeping Score
The Great State of Baseball Casts Its Ballot for (Your Name Here)
By ALAN SCHWARZ

Tony Perez does not understand it either. For most of the 1990's, he was told that his title immemorial had not quite ripened to Hall of Famer. He spent eight years on the Cooperstown ballot before finally being knighted in 2000.

"One year you're up, the next year you're down," Perez said recently. "I never know. One year no, then yes. I don't know how they do it."

Although a Hall of Famer is known as such forever, many take what seems like forever to have the appellation bestowed. Dozens have spent 5 or 10 years hovering around 50 percent of the annual vote by the Baseball Writers' Association of America - far short of the required 75 percent - with the unmistakable message that half the voters consider them unworthy of the Hall of Fame. But without hitting a home run or throwing a shutout for a decade or more, most of these bridesmaids eventually become impressive enough to reach the altar.

The voting for this year's class, to be announced Tuesday, could easily become another example of this. Last year's near misses - like Bruce Sutter (67 percent), Jim Rice (60 percent) and Rich Gossage (55 percent) - will be happy to learn that history has treated their predecessors extraordinarily well.

Sutter is in great company because in this arena, no one forgets who finishes second. Since 1968, of the 28 other players who finished with the highest percentage of the vote without being elected, 21 have been elected eventually, most the next year, and 4 who were in their last year on the ballot were later chosen by the veterans committee. Nowhere else can "Wait till next year!" brim with such confidence.

Many players further down the ladder climb to the top. Don Drysdale, Eddie Mathews and Duke Snider are recognized today as Hall of Famers, but they spent an average of eight years outside the gates, often finishing with 40 percent to 50 percent of the vote while nays slowly became yeas.

Snider was favored by only 17 percent of voters his first year on the ballot, 1970. Luis Aparicio, who got the nod from 2 percent in 1981, must have mounted one heck of a public relations campaign; he received 84 percent and a plaque only three years later.

Over all, a quarter of the players who got 40 percent to 49 percent of the vote eventually rose above the required 75 percent. Getting 50 percent to 59 percent meant subsequent good news two-thirds of the time, and getting 60 percent to 74 percent once meant eventual election 75 percent of the time.

Clearly, a decade after retirement, a player's performance on the field can mean less than his performance in the voting; like high schoolers conferring beside their lockers, voters often wait for others' approval before joining in.

Jayson Stark, an ESPN.com reporter who has voted in the last 15 elections, said: "I feel as if my job is to look at a player and decide whether he's a Hall of Famer or not, and vote that way every year unless something significant comes along to change my mind. But some people don't look at it that way. They say, 'I want Ozzie Smith to go in alone this year,' or 'This guy doesn't feel like he should get in yet.' Those are the biggest reasons for the zigzagging."

As capricious as this appears - given how enshrinement in Cooperstown is probably the most hallowed individual honor in team sports - the early history of Hall of Fame voting makes it look downright rational. Back in the 1940's and 50's, when dozens were deserving but writers still preferred choosing only two or three, it became almost impossible to gain the 75 percent consensus. Even Joe DiMaggio got less than half the vote his first year, 1953, and failed again the next year before getting in.

Although most worthy candidates - and many unworthy ones - have been elected, this wait-your-turn dynamic still exists in lesser form. For example, Carlton Fisk had the misfortune of making his debut on the ballot in 1999, the year for the shoo-ins George Brett, Nolan Ryan and Robin Yount. So he had to wait until 2000, when the crowd had thinned, and he and Perez were invited.

Three years later, Ryne Sandberg, the great Cubs second baseman for most of the 1980's and early 1990's, got 49 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot. He rose to 61 percent on his next try, then to 76 percent last year, earning a plaque that hangs with those of all the other Hall of Famers - among the Seavers and Robinsons, who did not have to wait, as well as the Drysdales and Perezes, who did for years.

"I don't think that's it's ever too late, and I don't think it diminishes the honor at all," Sandberg said last January. "You're either in the Hall of Fame or you're not."

Eventually.

E-mail: keepingscore@nytimes.com

Elements of the perfect Saturday morning

A burst of sunlight rocketing over the morning landscape.

A chill to the air (47*F) blended with the warmth of the sun.

A breeze to unfurl flags and toussle hair.

A brisk walk to stir the blood.

A bakery visit that yields a fig bar, a chocolate drop, a brownie, and a strawberry bar.

A teapot full of rich Chai tea.

A rambling conversation with a favorite companion.

Hearing music (and if you are lucky, dancing to it), that lifts the soul.

A bit of reading followed by a touch of writing.

A walk through the garden, snipping off tips of sweet, ripened broccoli.

And planting 72 "starter pods" with favorite flower and vegetable seeds (to be kept indoors 'til March).


"How do you know when you are rich?" I once asked my Uncle Mose, when I was still in single digits. "When you have your mornings to yourself," he quipped. ###

Check Them Out

About once a week, I will remind regular readers of what's been posted on not only my other blogs, but also other blogs of interest. And, I encourage you to take a few minutes of exploring the world of blogs on your own as well. There's lots of good stuff out there, and some of it will find a home in your heart.

My other blogs: (click on title of blog to go there)

Living Well is the Best Revenge = Ways we can elevate our quality of life, either by doing or NOT doing something in certain ways. Isn't this what it mostly boils down to : Living Well ?

...A Few of My Favorite Things . . . = People, places, events, and ideas that have been favorites of mine over a long period of time.

New Orleans Pentimento = The rebuilding of New Orleans. Visit New Orleans soon if you can and help in the rebuilding process.

Maxymilian Moments = Moments, as lived by Maximilian Dove, a longtime friend of mine, and passed on to you to enjoy. All we have is moments, really.

We Constant Gardeners = A blog about the world of growing things, from flowers to vegetables to ideas about how we treat the earth. This is definitely a Green Space. Inspired by the Louisiana Master Gardener's Course of study that I completed in the fall of 2005. My classmates are co-contributors.

Chaillot Family Blog = A blog about the Chaillot clan. We are all descended from the married couple Ernest Chaillot ( shy YO ) and Louise Jordy ( jar DAY ), who lived in New Orleans when the 19th Century turned into the 20th.

Poor Clio = New Iberian James Edmunds is Acadiana's best-read blogger. He invented the tabloid newspaper business in Acadiana with The Spectator back in the late 1970s. Both The Times of Acadiana and The Independent are direct descendents of his vision. This site is one of the most heuristic I have ever seen. Check out his list of blogs and sites. Awesome.

There you go - now, off and do some fun reading.