Letter Perfect

I love letters. As far back as i can remembers, the arrival of a personal letter addressed to me has been a special event. Part "present" that needed unwrapping, part conversation suspended over the time it took for a letter to travel from writer to reader,

part artifact of a time and a place and a set of feelings, thoughts, observations, questions, answers, news, part treasured document, and yes, part financial boost if it contained money, the letter has held a noble place in world history for as long as it has been a part of it.

This article chronicles the efforts of one family who saved those letters, and reading it put a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye, as I thought of all of the hundreds of personal letters I have lost or misplaced over the years.

And now, of course, emails come and go in nano-seconds, and few of those are saved. Something's being lost. This article explains what.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
January 29, 2006
In 200 Years of Family Letters, a Nation's Story
By KIRK JOHNSON

BOULDER, Colo., Jan. 27 — To most college students, instant messages, or I.M.'s, are about as ephemeral as the topics they typically address. One flicker and gone.

Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his I.M.'s on his computer to read again later. But in his family, that is no surprise.

Mr. Cowan comes from a long line of savers — really, really dedicated savers.

"It's in the genes," said his mother, Linda Cowan.

Beginning more than 200 years ago, Mr. Cowan's family has kept the messages — people called them letters in those days — written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling.

The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years, genealogy experts say. It has been stored in attics, sheds and storage lockers over the years, and most recently in the Cowans' home here in Boulder, where they were interviewed on a recent morning. Its contents cover the scandalous (a relative jailed for embezzlement), the intriguing (a runaway slave seeking refuge in the North) and the historic (the settling of Chicago).

Now the current owner of the collection, Mr. Cowan's grandmother, Mary Leslie Wolff, who is 82, is negotiating to donate the papers — called the Ames Family Historical Collection, for her father's branch of the tree — to a historical society somewhere back East, where the family began. Ms. Wolff declined to say where the collection might go because discussions were continuing.

Historians and librarians say the collection is probably as remarkable for its intellectual vigor as for its age and size. It is essentially a dialogue of history: one well-educated, middle-class family's long conversation, and its interaction with the issues that defined the early nation and its westward tide, including the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, the early rise of feminism and the discoveries of geology that were shaking religious assumptions about the age of the earth. The family's writers talked all of it through, often at length. Letters of 10 to 12 pages were common.

"Whenever anyone finds a record like this that speaks to one family in depth, it's a gold mine," said David S. Ouimette, who manages the genealogy collection for the Family History Library, run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City.

"And it sounds like they weren't just observing the events of the day, they were participants," added Mr. Ouimette, who has not seen the collection. "That's what puts flesh on the bones."

One series of letters, for example, talks about a runaway slave named Mary Walker who took shelter with an abolitionist branch of the family in Philadelphia, the Leslies, during a visit by her master in the 1850's. Ms. Walker, after being hidden for a time, was eventually sent farther north to live with Leslie relatives in Massachusetts.

But the story did not end there. As the Civil War tore the country apart, the letters show an effort to reunite Ms. Walker with her family in North Carolina. A friend who was an officer in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army, then advancing south, was asked to look out for Ms. Walker's children, and he apparently succeeded, because they ultimately made their way north to join her.

Another series of letters offers a vivid early glimpse of the still-raw settlement of Chicago by a family member who had journeyed west from Philadelphia in 1836 to Missouri to see some land he had bought. The land was not much to speak of, wrote the author, Peter Leslie — Ms. Wolff's great-great grandfather — in a letter to his children. But when he arrived at what he called "Chicago on Lake Michigan," Mr. Leslie immediately knew a rising force when he saw it.

"The town has more natural advantages than any place I have yet seen and is destined to be the N. York of the West," he wrote in a letter describing the construction and the bustle of the new city, then a few years old. Hotels were springing up, land fever was in the air and ambition was everywhere.

"The people of the West have a town-making mania," he wrote. "This one must succeed."

Ms. Cowan, Ms. Wolff's daughter, said she had recently been working through the letters of Mr. Leslie's son, J. Peter Leslie, who was a geologist in Philadelphia later in the 19th century. Many of those letters, she said, read like a novel: you start one, and you just have to find out what happens next.

"Right now there's a relative in jail for embezzlement," she said. "He ran off to Canada, then his conscience got the better of him and he came back and gave himself up."

Why this family saved the things that many others threw away or lost remains a mystery, Ms. Wolff said. An early progenitor in Massachusetts apparently got the ball rolling in the 1700's; that branch's attic-size collection was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society many years ago.

Beginning in Massachusetts and Philadelphia, where the first immigrants of the family settled after arriving from Scotland, the letters piled up as the clan, like so many others of the day, gradually moved west — to Minnesota in the 1850's, then Colorado a century later.

"I think a lot of people have the urge, but at some point they just give up and throw it out," Ms. Wolff said.

Ms. Cowan spoke up. "These people didn't — they didn't throw out anything."

In today's era of the instantaneous and disposable, even the paper on which the letters were written can seem alien — so durable, at least through the 1850's vintage, that neither coal dust from furnace-room storage nor glue from an ancestor's zealous scrapbook-making apparently harmed it.

Even some of the subjects that gripped people back then can seem new again with time, like poetry. Family members transcribed poems they loved, or perhaps wrote themselves, into a book that Ms. Cowan said nobody had tried to go through yet.

"We don't even know what's in it," she said.

Mr. Cowan, a junior at Oberlin College in Ohio who said he thought of becoming an author someday, looked up sharply at the mention of unread 19th-century poetry.

"Whoa, can I check that out?" he asked.
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Fog of War ?

The New York Times
January 28, 2006
Hurricane Investigators See 'Fog of War' at White House
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — The White House was beset by the "fog of war" in the crucial days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, leaving it unable to respond properly to the unfolding catastrophe, House investigators said Friday after getting the most detailed briefing yet on how President Bush's staff had handled the events.

The closed-door briefing, attended mostly by House committee aides, was provided by Kenneth Rapuano, who as Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security adviser was the senior official in charge of managing storm events at the White House when the hurricane struck. The meeting was a compromise, a result of White House objections to the investigators' requests for copies of e-mail messages and other correspondence from top presidential aides.

Mr. Rapuano, those present said, acknowledged that he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.

But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.

The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."

"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government's response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information — and that had consequences."

Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, who also attended the briefing, acknowledged that all levels of the government had suffered from a lack of clarity about the events as they developed.

"There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels," Mr. Duffy said in an interview on Friday. "That is one of the biggest lessons everyone in emergency preparedness has learned because of the storm."

With the House not yet in session, only one lawmaker from the investigative committee — its chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia — was present for the briefing. Mr. Rapuano told him and the staff investigators that the White House role had been to monitor the situation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, were operationally in charge, he said.

The investigators expressed frustration that the White House did not seem to have been more actively involved. But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."

The committee staff members also asked why it had taken Mr. Bush until the following Saturday, nearly a week after the storm, to order a large number of federal troops to the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Rapuano said that the Pentagon had already started to send troops and that in fact 5,000 of them had arrived by that point.

Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had asked for many more three days earlier, but Mr. Rapuano said the problem was that she had not provided specifics as to what kind of troops she needed.

If the investigators cannot determine, through either testimony or written correspondence, what various presidential aides knew, and when, it will be hard to pinpoint where failures occurred within the White House, said Mr. Marin, the staff director for the House committee.

"There is a difference between having enough information to find institutional fault, which we have," he said, "and having information to assign individual blame, which in large part we don't."
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Pope-alicious !

Growing up Catholic, we hung on every word from the Pope's mouth. When he issued an encyclical, we know it was no papal bull. We listened as our mother and especially our grandmother held forth on the importance of whatever it was the pope was writing about.

He truly was regarded as infallible by us then. But as we grew older, and certainly by the time we eight siblings each reached highschool (even earlier for the younger ones), the pope had lost his punch. We doubted that any one person could hold so much "truth," and soon the idea of papal infallibility went by the wayside of our thoughts.

Funny, but i recall how much I wanted to (needed to?) believe in the pope. And I still do believe that whoever is pope clearly has had a great deal of spiritual enlightenment and experience. But infallible ? Hardly. Yet I have to smile when I realize that such a notion is exactly what our president wants us to believe about him and his policies.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
January 25, 2006
Pope, in First Encyclical, Provides Meditation on Love
By IAN FISHER

VATICAN CITY, Jan. 25 — Pope Benedict XVI issued today an erudite meditation on love, in a long-awaited first encyclical that presented Catholicism's potential for good rather than imposing firm, potentially divisive, rules for orthodoxy.

The encyclical, called "God Is Love," did not mention issues that divide Catholics, like abortion, homosexuality, contraception and divorce. But in gentle, often poetic language, Benedict nonetheless portrayed a tough-minded church "duty-bound," he wrote, to intervene at times in secular politics for "the attainment for what is just."

He also suggested that terrorism — as an attack on Christ's command to "love your neighbor" — had helped inspire his first major statement.

"In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant," he wrote. "For this reason, I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes on us and which we in turn must share with others."

The encyclical is the highest form of papal teaching, and there had been much anticipation in the Roman Catholic Church for Benedict's first, given his long service as Pope John Paul II's outspoken and conservative defender of the faith.

But in contrast to his public reputation, Benedict, 78, elected last April, began his encyclical with this premise:

Conceding that the church has at times viewed sexuality as something "negative," he placed erotic love between married men and women at the center of God's plan. Sex, he wrote, should mature into unselfish concern for the other — creating a love that ultimately demands charity and justice even to strangers.

"Love is indeed 'ecstasy,' " he wrote in a document that ran 71 pages in the English translation. "Not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God."

Benedict often makes reference to his predecessor and stresses the continuity of his papacy to that of John Paul — and in some measure, this is an encyclical of two popes.

The second half of the document, on charity and the role of the church in society, had begun under John Paul before he died in April. Church officials said, however, the finished document, beginning with a section on love, was very much the work of Benedict, who as Joseph Ratzinger, was a professor, theologian and prolific writer.

"You cannot say that this pope added the first or the second part," said the Rev. Paul Josef Cordes, the pope's top adviser on charity. "You have to see that this pope is always following the steps, the traces, of John Paul II, and in this way it is a continuation, but not much."

The top papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, told reporters here that Benedict began writing the encyclical at the papal summer residence, Castelgandolfo, after he returned from vacation in the Italian Alps in late July. Benedict signed it on Christmas Day.

Before becoming pope, Benedict was often seen as a divisive figure, lauded by more conservative Catholics for his devotion to orthodoxy and criticized by those more liberal for not sharing their vision for a changing, more modern church.

But Benedict's elaboration on love and charity was largely praised on today by people on both sides of the divide, as a document that sought to express what is common to all Catholics.

"He's not wagging his finger about what's wrong with contemporary culture," said Msgr. Kevin Irwin, dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Catholic University of America in Washington.

"He's framing the debate in a very broad-stroke, wide-angle way," he said. "He's saying, this is the big picture, and out of that you get a positive, optimistic ultimate vision of what Catholicism is."

Christian Weisner, spokesman for the German chapter of the liberal group We Are Church, called the encyclical "a sign of hope" that Benedict would prove to be a "human face for Christianity and for the Catholic Church."

He said, however, that he hoped that Benedict's emphasis on love would make him more open to liberal groups like We Are Church, which advocates positions Benedict does not agree with, including women priests and an end to priestly celibacy.

"Loving your neighbors also means loving critical theologians, he said. "He also has to apply these ideas within the church itself."

The Rev. Joseph Fessio, editor of the conservative publishing house, St. Ignatius Press, which publishes Benedict's books in English, said the themes and gentle tone of the encyclical should finally put to rest the stereotype of Benedict as an conservative ideologue.

"I can suggest a subhead for all the major media: 'Is this the Panzer Cardinal?' " Father Fessio said, referring to a nickname bestowed by the news media on the German-born Cardinal Ratzinger.

Nonetheless, Father Fessio said that in the encyclical Benedict was nonetheless true to traditional church teachings: Benedict's definition of love in it applied to men and women, married and monogamous "forever."

"What is he doing there?" Father Fessio asked. "He is saying no divorce. He is saying no promiscuity. He is saying no multiple wives. No homosexuality. He's completely positive but if you accept the teaching, consequences follow."

The subject of love, some church officials said, was not the most obvious one for a first encyclical. Monsignor Cordes joked earlier this week to reporters that some people consider celibate priests talking about love as they would "a blind man talking about colors."

Nonetheless, the Rev. William Levada, the American archbishop who replaced Benedict as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer, told reporters here today that there was no more important subject.

"Love is the fundamental reality," he said.

In the encyclical, Benedict sought to unite the notions of sexual and a broader more altruistic love. He paraphrased Nietzsche as saying that Christianity's moral rules had blown "the whistle" on sexuality, a fundamental part of human nature. Benedict admitted the charge to some degree, but said the church was not alone in distorting sex.

"Nowadays, Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed," he said. "Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is also deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure 'sex,' has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought or sold."

He said that through monogamous relationships between married men and women, love grows and is "less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other." This love, he wrote, mirrors God's love for humankind, reflects Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and leads to a larger love for neighbors, then for mankind.

This leads to the second part of the encyclical, on charity, which he said represented love as an "ordered service to the community." Individual Catholics, he said, had an obligation to charity, which is also he said a fundamental facet of the church.

In the end, the second part on charity may ultimately be read more closely than the first for more concrete clues to Benedict's papacy. Since his election, there has been criticism here in Italy that the Vatican has been more outspoken on political issues, weighing in on issues like abortion, assisted fertility and civil marriages.

The new document carefully outlines the church's rationale for weighing in on political issues.

"The church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible," Benedict wrote. "She cannot and must not replace the state.

"Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice," he added.

He also wrote that the church, emphasizing the spirit, has a distinct role to play in charity that can never be met by the state, which is concerned more with delivering help in itself.

"Love — caritas — will always prove necessary, even in the most just society," he wrote. "There is no ordering of the state so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such."

Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting for this article from New York.
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The Mouth That Roared

Word-of-Mouth advertising. Is there any other kind, really ? Even the millions (Billions? Trillions?) spent on o ther kinds of advertising ultimately depend upon some form of WOM to bring the message to its final destination : those who will buy.

"Did you see that new commercial for blodgets?" we hear friends say. And so the advertising industry is finally coming around to the most ancient form of that practiced art of influencing our spending habits.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
January 23, 2006
Advertising
Advertising Is Obsolete. Everyone Says So.
By JULIE BOSMAN

ORLANDO, Fla.

AS advertising conferences go, the take-home message at the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association meeting was a little unusual: Don't advertise.

But at the conference, held here last Thursday and Friday, more than 450 advertising and marketing professionals listened to speakers tell them how to reach customers using some alternatives to traditional advertising, like viral and buzz marketing, that are becoming increasingly popular within the industry.

The conference was called "Word-of-Mouth Basic Training," and it was aimed at teaching attendees how to tap into the power of word of mouth, an ancient form of communication that many marketers have updated by using new technology like blogs, podcasting and online message boards.

At times, the conference could have been mistaken for a religious convention. Among Friday's offerings were sessions titled "Turning Customers Into Evangelists," "Word of Mouth in Faith-Based Markets" and "How to Create Brand Converts." (Later that afternoon, two speakers explained how to "Bring Brands Back from the Dead.")

Speakers with titles like "marketing medic" or "manager of influencer marketing" extolled the effectiveness of nontraditional tactics in an industry that has all but declared the 30-second TV commercial obsolete.

There were many cautionary lessons in what not to do. Years ago, marketers began randomly pitching products to teenagers who appeared to be popular, in the hope that the trendsetters would pass the information to others and create excitement about the product.

That practice has become much more sophisticated, said Jamie Tedford, the senior vice president for marketing and media innovation at Arnold Worldwide in Boston, part of the Arnold Worldwide Partners unit of Havas.

"The search for the cool kids, the kind of cool hunting that we all used to be a part of - it's just not that cool anymore," Mr. Tedford said.

Marketers are now reaching out to "evangelists," who are already die-hard fans of a brand, and persuading them to spread the word through their existing social networks.

"A lot of our evangelists are evangelists because they simply love the product," said Laurie Weisberg, a senior vice president of Informative, a word-of-mouth marketing firm. "They don't need to be rewarded with discounts or anything like that."

Loosely borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book "The Tipping Point," Ms. Weisberg lectured on the importance of using "influencers," or people who have large social networks and are good communicators, and "promoters," people who talk positively about a brand.

Word-of-mouth marketing makes it easier for people to do something they already do: share knowledge about new products so they can feel more important, said George Silverman, the author of "The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing."

"People engage in word of mouth because they want to look good," Mr. Silverman said. "Word of mouth is the most honest advertising medium there is. People don't want to hurt their friends and family and colleagues with bad information."

The importance of ethics and full disclosure was also a recurrent theme at the conference, as speakers repeatedly warned attendees not to misrepresent themselves when, for instance, pitching a product on an online message board. In other words, do not try to be stealthy, said Robert Ricci, the director of Web relations for Weber Shandwick, a public relations firm that is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

"If you're working on a video game, and you go onto a video gamer's blog, let your contacts know that you are an employee of said company," Mr. Ricci said while leading a session titled "How to Work with Bloggers and Communities, the Ethical Way." "Always let them know what your intentions are up front."

But replacing traditional advertising with word-of-mouth and viral marketing is an outlandish notion for most companies. A session devoted to integrating word-of-mouth marketing with traditional advertising drew a crowd, but the main lesson seemed to be how to persuade a C-list celebrity to market your product free. (In this case, the agency for Downy, the fabric softener from Procter & Gamble, enlisted Delilah Luke, a radio D.J., to rave about new Downy Wrinkle Releaser on the air.)

Some word-of-mouth firms are hired as a small part of a company's complete publicity campaign, which includes traditional print and television advertising. Bob Hutchins, the owner of BuzzPlant, a marketing firm in Franklin, Tenn., was hired to help promote "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to Christian markets.

"Marketing to a Christian audience is no different than any other audience - just that they exercise choice based on a value system," Mr. Hutchins said, adding: "Once the faith-based community can get behind something and they believe in it, they will pass it along. The key to success to both of those movies was going to the gatekeepers."

The gatekeepers, in this case, were volunteers and other "field agents" who distributed promotions for the movies at church events, Bible study groups and youth organizations. (He said their compensation was often as minor as free movie passes.)

As the conference concluded, some attendees sounded almost awestruck about the possibilities of word-of-mouth marketing. "When you do word of mouth, you're finding out exactly what your customers are saying," said Parrish Johnson, the chief executive of Grapevine Marketing, a marketing and promotions firm in Atlanta. "That's what's scary."
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The Yellow Submarine / Beatle Hour

Today I cut an audition "tape" (actually its all digital) for a proposed new show on our local public radio station: KRVS-FM 88.7 (www.krvs.org - you will be able to listen to it live on the internet no matter where you are!).

The show's working title is "The Yellow Submarine" - though i may end up calling it simply "The Beatle Hour" or even better: having listeners name it through a contest.

The show is still in the process of being approved, but should it pass all hurdles, it would be 60 minutes long, once a week (with perhaps a few replay times sprinkled throughout the week at varying times), and lots of fun ( i learned that today) .

The audition required me to produce a 20-minute show, and I only played the songs chosen for this audition for a minute or less in order to showcase more information and my "style" (low key and informational rather than typical "DJ" style).

I chose the cd "1" to be my theme: the 27 number one hits the Beatles recorded between 1962 and 1970. I printed out extra information about each song that I researched online and intended to use that and some of my natural store of info to fill in between songs.

Doing this audition reminded me of how much I love their music, and old memories kept popping into my head as I spoke between music snippets - most of what I ended up saying was unplanned - though I had plenty of researched stuff at my fingertips - and used some of it.

But in the end, it wasn't the information ended up conveying anyway - it was the feelings that the Beatles' music evoked from me as I listened to those early hits. The emotion rushed back in a wave of nostalgia and a recognition that their music still hits home.

With the podcasting revolution now filling up the internet with recordings of all kinds - I could produce and place "The Yellow Submarine" online for everyone to enjoy anyway - but it sure would be sweet to get it on public radio!

Wish me luck.

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."
###

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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