Wow. The search for "the right one" used to mean a choice of mates with whom you lived on a day-to-day basis. Now it could mean what this article explains. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Wanted: A Few Good Sperm
By JENNIFER EGAN
One day last October, Karyn, a 39-year-old executive, pulled her online dating profile off JDate and Match.com, two sites she had been using, along with an endless series of leads, tips and blind dates arranged by friends and colleagues, to search for a man she wanted to marry and raise a family with. At long last, after something like 100 dates in the past 10 years and several serious relationships, she had found the man she refers to, tongue only slightly in cheek, as "the one." It all began last summer, when she broke off a relationship with a younger man who wasn't ready for children and got serious about the idea of conceiving on her own. She gathered information about fertility doctors and sperm banks. "Then a childhood friend of mine was over," she told me. "I pulled up the Web site of the only sperm bank that I know of that has adult photos. There happened to be one Jewish person. I pulled up the photo, and I looked at my friend, and I looked at his picture, and I said, 'Oh, my God.' I can't say love at first sight, because, you know. But he was the one."
Sperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor's profile and liked what she saw. "You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated," she said. He had worked as a chef. He had "proven fertility," meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. "People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus," Karyn said. "I'd be a lot more concerned about my date next week." But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an "open donor" or a "yes donor") — a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.
The next morning, Karyn called the bank and spoke with a woman who worked there. "She said: 'I have to be honest. He's very popular, and I only have eight units in store right now. I'm not sure how much longer he might be in the program,"' Karyn told me. "Most women in New York impulse-buy Manolo Blahniks, and I said, 'I'll take the eight units.' It was $3,100." The price included six months of storage.
That hefty purchase, and the strong sense of connection she felt to the donor, galvanized Karyn: she made an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist and gave up alcohol and caffeine. At work, she took on a position of greater responsibility and longer hours — with a higher salary — to save money. She went on a wait list to buy more of the donor's sperm when it became available. (All donor sperm must be quarantined for six months — the maximum incubation period for H.I.V. — so that the donor can be retested for the disease before it is released.) She told her parents and married sister what was going on, e-mailing the donor's picture to her father with an invitation that he meet his son-in-law. She also printed the donor's picture and kept it on the coffee table of her Manhattan studio apartment, where she sleeps in a Murphy bed. "I kind of glance at it as I pass," she said of the picture. "It's almost like when you date someone, and you keep looking at them, and you're, like, Are they cute? But every time I pass, I'm, like, Oh, he's really cute. It's a comforting feeling."
When I suggested that she must be a type who is prone to love at first sight, she just laughed. "With online dating, friends used to say: 'What about him? What about him?' I'd say: 'Don't like the nose. Ah, the eyes are a little buggy. He really likes to golf, and you know I don't like golfing.' There was always something. If I said this about everyone," she concluded, "I would have married someone about 75 dates ago."
Karyn said she hoped to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Human Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination.
As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that — especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35. The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years — adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.
In the 25 years since she founded Single Mothers by Choice after becoming pregnant by accident, Jane Mattes, now 62, has seen her group's membership conceiving at younger ages (the median age among members is 36) and more often having second children. But the biggest change, Mattes says, is that the stigma attached to this form of single motherhood has largely faded. "People used to come into our meetings literally afraid to walk in," she told me. "We don't see that as much anymore. Everyone seems to know somebody who did it, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago."
Karyn, who asked that I use only her middle name, never imagined her life unfolding in this way, she told me over dinner at Caliente Cab, where we sat outdoors on an unseasonably warm November night. She has big blue-green eyes, shiny brown hair past her shoulders and an ironic appreciation of certain parallels between her life and Carrie Bradshaw's. She has always known she wanted to marry and have kids. "I certainly never thought I would be the last one standing," she said. "You feel a little bit resentful, like, Gosh, how did I get here? Blind date after blind date — why can't it be easy for me like it was for other people? Right up until I ordered the sperm and made the doctor's appointment, I was filled with anxiety. I felt sad, overwhelmed. Now I'm completely at peace with it."
In the month since we had first talked, she had seen the reproductive endocrinologist and received a clean bill of health. Her hormone levels looked excellent. She planned to have her first insemination in December. Her decision had meshed seamlessly with what had been, until now, a conventional life; her parents were driving in from Long Island the next morning to take her for a medical test to check that her fallopian tubes were clear. Of her mother, Karyn said: "She used to call me once a week with a blind date. Now she'll call once a week with a friend of a friend of a friend who has a daughter who became a single mother by choice."
Karyn carried a wallet-size copy of the donor's photo between her MetroCard and her work ID: a fair, sharp-featured young man in a crisp white shirt, his arms crossed. In the past month, she had had a couple of residual online dates, but now she seemed relieved to let that go. "People would say, 'Oh, it's just a date — don't expect anything,"' she said, sipping her ice water. "'Just go out and have a good time.' But then you'd get four calls that night: How was it? What did you think? Did you like him? Why wouldn't you go out with him again? There was so much pressure. It became a job." Online dating has, if anything, made the search for a partner more callous and mystifying than ever; disappearing has become so easy. "I imagine one day when I get to heaven there will be a whole room full of missing socks and men :)," Karyn once wrote to me in an e-mail message. "I hope the men will be wearing the socks."
Now, as we sat outside, she said: "There's nothing I'd like more in life than to have the whole picture and to share it all. To have the baby, to have the miniwagon, to have the husband, morning soccer games and P.T.A. — he's out manning the grill, and I'm mixing the margaritas. But I think if I had to choose today between becoming a mom or finding the perfect man and I could only have one today, I would choose becoming a mom. And hope that I have my lifetime to find the other."
Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic — more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own.
Last October, when I visited the Manhattan apartment of Daniela, a 38-year-old German advertising executive who had recently been inseminated with the sperm of a male friend, her guest room was peppered with toys belonging to the young son of a visiting friend who had broken up with the boy's father by the time he was born. "They got a child out of love, and the parents couldn't deal with one another," Daniela, who asked that I use only her first name, told me. "And now she lives in Germany; he lives here. He doesn't pay any money if he doesn't see the child. So there's a constant battle over it. The child is torn in between. She has to deal with the father. I won't have to deal with the father."
Daniela's apartment is neat and spare, with hardwood floors, a basket of colorful slippers by the front door for guests and an entire wall devoted to pictures of her family in Germany. (She also has a married sister with three children who lives in New Jersey.) A 6-foot-1 blonde who speaks with disarming frankness, she came to America 10 years ago with the man she would later marry, only to find that he didn't want children. After their divorce, she was engaged to another man who kept postponing their wedding — she still has a set of "Save the Date" cards in her closet. Having always wanted passionately to be a mother, she decided to use a "known donor," a close gay friend, also German, to help her conceive. Known donors have some big advantages over anonymous ones: they can contribute fresh sperm, which is more motile and long-lived than frozen. (As much as half of a man's sperm dies during freezing, which is why sperm-bank donors need to have extremely high sperm counts.) With a known donor, there is a theoretically endless supply, and it's free, whereas "washed" sperm, cleared of debris for an intrauterine insemination, or IUI (recommended for women using frozen sperm because the sperm is placed directly into the uterus and doesn't have to swim past the cervix), generally costs between $200 and $400 a vial, plus $100 for shipping, not to mention another $100 if the donor is "open."
The big disadvantage to using a known donor, as Daniela learned when she posted a query on a Listserv of Single Mothers by Choice (she had been avoiding the meetings, finding them too full of "personalities"), is that in most states the donor will always have full parental rights, regardless of whatever deal he and the mother might have worked out in advance. This didn't worry Daniela; she wanted her child to have a father, even a partial one. "His parents are ecstatic about it," she said of her donor friend as we sat drinking tea at her dining table. "He's smart; he has a great character; he's a friendly person. I said, You don't have to pay for the child, but if you want to have it with you or you want to participate, you're more than welcome."
An unforeseen hitch emerged at the reproductive endocrinologist's office, where Daniela and her friend were posing as an engaged couple to avoid having to quarantine his sperm, as required by federal and New York State regulations before a woman can be inseminated by a man who isn't already her sexual partner: he had an extremely low sperm count. The doctor "spun" the sperm to concentrate it before placing it in Daniela's uterus, and she and her friend had already tried three inseminations, the last one a few days before my visit. She was now in the middle of what is known in fertility parlance as the "two-week wait" to find out if she was pregnant. She wasn't optimistic. In vitro fertilization might be more successful, but she has a stressful job and was leery of the intense hormone treatments.
Daniela also found anonymous donors deeply unappealing. "These people don't do that because they want to help the population, let's face it," she said. "They're doing it for the money and because they maybe want to populate the earth. A) you're going to have a lot of siblings out there. B) I question what kind of personality these people can be. You read characteristics like height and ethnicity, what kind of education — it's the information that you don't get that is much more important. I'm thinking about happiness or moods, these kind of things."
Sperm banks do try to address the amorphous question of character; many include psychological studies of donors as well as "staff impressions." Some offer audiotaped interviews in addition to the lengthy written questionnaires, but Daniela said she felt that these materials would only confuse her. She did have a few ideas of what she might look for: she wanted a man of her same blood type, O positive. Because she herself is so tall, she preferred a medium height. (Short donors don't exist; because most women seek out tall ones, most banks don't accept men under 5-foot-9.) She was also attracted by the idea of a donor of another race. "I believe in multiculturalism," she said. "I would probably choose somebody with a darker skin color so I don't have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. I want it to be a healthy mix. You know how mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don't bark and have a good character. I want a mutt." Her African-American friends questioned this strategy, suggesting that her child's life would be harder if he or she was perceived as nonwhite, but Daniela said: "If that's what I believe, I have to go by that. And it might help the world also if more people are doing it that way."
While many single mothers look for donors whose features and coloring resemble their own, Daniela's attraction to a diverse gene pool isn't so unusual. A 40-year-old African-American woman I spoke with wanted a Latino donor so that her child would have lighter skin and nonkinky hair. "I'm the African-American," she told me. "The child will get that from me." Q., a 43-year-old health-care manager who attended a yeshiva from kindergarten through high school (she asked that I use only one of her initials), first sought out a Jewish donor. "Everybody either had glasses, they're balding or their grandmother was diabetic and had heart disease — typical Jewish population," she told me. Her solution: a 6-foot-2 Catholic, German stock on both sides, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. "He really was the typical Aryan perfect human being," she said, laughing. "He was a bodybuilder. He played the guitar and the drums, and he sang. He was captain of the rugby team in college. When I had the in vitro process done, the embryologist said: 'This is some of the best sperm I've ever seen. It just about jumped out of the test tubes."' Q.'s golden-curled, blue-eyed daughter has just turned 2.
For the moment, though, Daniela was still hoping that this recent insemination with her friend's sperm would take. She dreamed of a little girl. And like virtually all of the prospective single mothers I spoke with, she had every intention of finding a mate after the child was born. "Taking this whole 'I have to find the father of my child' out of the equation might make it a lot more relaxed and easier," she said. "The guys are smelling it, and they run." And even if the guy held still, he might not be the one you'd pick — or even consider — if you weren't desperate for kids. "I see so many women who are in unhealthy relationships, where they really just try to get married and then have a child and break it off," Daniela said. "If they would consider this as an option, I think they would be happier, and the children would be happier."
I went to a special meeting of the New York chapter of Single Mothers by Choice a few weeks later, in mid-November. It had been arranged for members willing to have a reporter present. We met on the Upper West Side, in a long rectangular rented room whose high ceiling magnified the yelps and stomping feet of toddlers who had come with their mothers. Women contemplating single motherhood or trying to get pregnant ("thinkers" and "tryers") arrived an hour later, Karyn among them. It was her third meeting.
The mothers' discussion was mostly practical: a pretty blonde in a black T-shirt that read "Sweet and Toxic" had noticed a sign in her health club forbidding children over the age of 3 to change in opposite-sex bathrooms: what would she do in a year when her son was 3? She also wondered about teaching him how to urinate into the toilet bowl; a friend had suggested throwing Cheerios in for him to aim at. (A mother of a 4-year-old boy discouraged this practice; it might tempt him to throw other things into the toilet.) A woman trying to arrange a domestic adoption asked about nannies versus day care.
When the general meeting began, each woman in the largely white group introduced herself. Two were pregnant; another had twins; one had adopted a daughter from Haiti. One had not been able to conceive and planned to become a foster parent. Anyone walking into the room would have assumed that the women with kids had husbands or partners at home, but in three hours of discussion, the only men who were mentioned were donors, anonymous and known. These women's independence of male partners in their family-making often brings a corollary reliance on one another — for sympathy and information, for companionship (Single Mothers by Choice sponsors vacations every year for single mothers and their kids) and the chance to show their children other families like their own. At times, the relationships can become even more enmeshed: one mother I spoke with, whose twin sons were conceived using both donor eggs and donor sperm, gave her leftover frozen embryos to a friend who was having fertility problems. The friend is now pregnant with a child who will be this mother's own sons' full sibling.
While nearly every woman I spoke with had her own history of romantic near misses and crushing disappointments, most also saw advantages to proceeding on their own. "This baby will be my baby, only my baby," Karyn told me that night at Caliente Cab. "The thing I'm afraid of is that after doing this, I might not want to get married. It seems like a lot of hard work, a lot of compromise. Someone ends up short, and usually it's the mom, because by the time you get to the child and your husband and the dog, there's not much left."
After introductions, the group broke into smaller discussion groups, mothers and pregnant women at one end of the room, thinkers and tryers at the other. Among the thinkers, two women were holding off on making a decision while they looked for work — something I heard a lot. Such delays put these women in a bind, though; each month is precious in terms of fertility. "I can't stress enough how much money worries me in this process," I was told by a 35-year-old Canadian woman who will soon begin trying to get pregnant. "I'm alone; there's no safety net. If you picture it like the scales, on the one side there's my money and on the other are the years left to have children."
Karyn had moved from the thinkers group into the tryers since her last meeting. She had brought a bag of pretzels, which she shared with the others, most of whom were slightly older than she — slightly in real terms, but through the telescopic lens of a woman's fertility, the difference was vast. "Trying to get pregnant at age 41 is nothing like trying to get pregnant at age 38," a 41-year-old grimly remarked when Karyn asked if she had begun trying. "My gynecologist wouldn't even do any of the tests. She said because of my age, just go to deal with infertility, don't waste any time."
Because many single women have waited years, hoping the right man would come along, and because the majority use sperm that has been frozen, they are disproportionately at risk for fertility problems when they finally decide to have children. Many report being stunned that their fertility was so fragile. "I thought I could have kids until my period ended, and menopause is 50, right?" said another woman I met at a Single Mothers by Choice meeting in Washington, who began trying to conceive at 44. The sense of not having been informed, of being too late, is so often expressed by would-be single mothers in their 40's that it has doubtless spurred some younger women in the Single Mothers by Choice network to act more precipitously. (I interviewed two women who conceived while still in their 20's.) Still, the near-miraculous success of some older mothers can give hope — often unrealistic — to those still fighting the odds. Most doctors refused to take the 44-year-old Washington woman except as an egg-donor patient, but one did — and she became pregnant with a girl who is now almost 4. Another woman in the D.C. group went through 16 attempts and a miscarriage, using both IUI and I.V.F., before her son was finally born.
At 39, Karyn was still on the right side of this equation, but just barely. "I'm waiting for my next period to start the beginning of December," she told the older woman. "I'm about to start trying, either before or after Christmas Day."
But it didn't work out like that. A few days before Christmas, after receiving a string of e-mail messages from Karyn chronicling her march toward insemination, I found one with the subject line, "Do you believe in signs?" She had written: "Sit down, ready for this one? I arrived home from work again at 11:30 last night to be greeted by my doormen telling me how very sorry they were — a steam pipe explosion blew right through my apartment with a flood.. . .My apartment is destroyed and needs to be gutted.. . .I am taking all of the events as a sign that this is not the right month to get pregnant."
She planned to wait three months, at which point she would be weeks away from her 40th birthday.
In November, I met Daniela in her Midtown office, which has a modern industrial design and faces east into what that afternoon was a bleak gray day. As she had feared, the last insemination with her donor friend hadn't worked, and she had resigned herself to the idea of using an anonymous donor instead. She had even found two that appealed to her, both from a small Manhattan sperm bank where she would save money on shipping by picking up the samples herself and carrying them to her doctor's office. As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors' descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: "He's got black straight hair," she told me, "brown eyes, he's six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that's perfect. You don't have to get in fights about food." The Indian donor's complexion was described as "medium/dark," and he had proven fertility. He had a master's degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good.
The second donor was a mix of Chinese, Peruvian and Italian. He was olive-skinned, 5-foot-9 and weighed 169. "Thick hair, which is also nice," she said, "because if I happen to get a son, I don't like bald guys. He's Catholic, which I would obviously like, because I am. He has a very interesting book collection: he likes Hesse, Henry James, Lorca. Excellent vision. His parents are pretty boring professionally, so I was a little concerned about that. But when they started their businesses, they probably didn't have all that many chances, the father being Peruvian and the mother being Chinese-Italian." She especially liked the fact that he was a full-time student in theater. "He has creative aspirations," she said. "Those things are hereditary."
Mostly from a sense of obligation, she Googled "sperm" and began scanning lists of donors at other banks, using O-positive blood type as her first criterion. "This one is a Hispanic fair," she mused. "But Hispanics can still be very, very fair. Then we have a Dominican-Honduran, black straight hair, olive skin — he is really too heavy, 220, are you kidding me? Now here we have a Caucasian. Research assistant in psychology — no. You don't study that if you haven't touched upon it somewhere."
At the California Cryobank site, the donors numbered in the hundreds. "All those Germans," Daniela murmured, scrolling down. "How am I proving my healthiness if I do the same race again? Black African, they do have three of them. Look how tall they are. And see how heavy the two O-positives are?"
Eventually she happened on a search engine that listed donors from all of the banks without revealing which bank they were from without payment. Visibly weary as she scanned the list, she reflected: "I still like my Chinese-Peruvian-Italian. He seems a little bit more special somehow. From this little bank . . . it's like a little country. There he is. There he is! Chinese-Peruvian-Italian, full-time student!"
The sheer familiarity of the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian made him leap from the haze of anonymous data like an old friend. And that feeling counts for a lot. It's no wonder that a number of single mothers I spoke with used the phrase "I felt a connection" in explaining their choice of donors. Despite the obvious parallels between shopping for sperm and dating online, there is finally no comparing them — a sperm donor is providing half the DNA for your child, and whether or not you choose to think about it, he'll be there forever in the child's tastes and choices and personality. No one wants a decision like that to feel arbitrary.
Daniela had other news: she had met a man she was interested in. It happened during a business trip the week before; he was meeting friends in the bar of her hotel. "He was so good with his friend's kid," she said. "I'm, like, 'Oh, you must have three kids.' He said, 'No, just nieces and nephews."' They struck up a conversation, and she ended up joining his group for dinner. She was honest with him about her plans to get pregnant, but the news may not have sunk in; he had been calling ever since, eager to see her again. He was in his 40's, African-American, and had his own business. "It's nice to know that just because you have these plans, you're not unattractive or undesirable," Daniela said. She felt more at ease with this man than she had with other men in recent years and attributed this to her decision to move ahead with motherhood. "It was a completely different feeling," she said. "It empowers one, because you're not relying on somebody else. You don't have to bring up the big life conversations."
While many women, like Karyn, relish their emancipation from the grind of dating and pursue motherhood with a single mind, others are intrigued by what romance could mean, absent the imperative of finding a father for their children. One woman, a 40-year-old graduate student in biology in the Midwest, told me shortly after her first insemination: "One of the things that was so powerful about deciding to have a baby on my own was saying, I'm taking charge of this piece of it; I'm not going to wait around for a guy to give it to me. And my feelings about what I want from men right now are really changed. I don't actually want a big relationship. Now I want occasional companionship and sex."
On a recent date, between inseminations, this woman noticed the difference. "It was one of these dates where the guy's just telling you his sad story and his complicated relationship with his mother. In my previous dating life, I would have been, like, I'm not going to get seriously involved with a man like this. I'm going to get rid of him. This time I was, like, I think he's hot, so if I just keep listening, maybe eventually we'll have sex. And we had great sex. It was really hot." At one point, she had sex with two different men in the same weekend (both times using condoms) not long after an insemination. Observing her own behavior, she said: "Maybe in six months or a year I'll have more insight about it, but something radical is going on in my brain about my relationships with men. O.K., so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life. I'm waving the white flag. And now I have permission to directly pursue what I want. It's a very curious and ambivalent liberation, because I would rather not be single. It's not my first choice."
Daniela told me that regardless of what happened with the new man, she was certain of one thing: she would go ahead with her plan to inseminate. "I've done the mistake of putting this on hold several times, and I cannot afford it," she said. We looked together at her November calendar on her office computer; sandwiched among coming trips and meetings were her expected days of menstruation and ovulation, noted in German. She planned to inseminate in December, so she would have to pick the donor by the end of the month. Meanwhile, the new man had proposed coming to New York in mid-December, which happened to be the time when she thought she would be ovulating. Daniela said she wouldn't feel comfortable using protection with him while she was going to a doctor's office to be inseminated. "That would be weird," she said. "But leave it up to destiny? That's a possibility, I think."
I was astonished. Had she thought through the implications of having this man's child? I asked. What if the relationship didn't last? What if she turned out not to like him at all? Daniela countered that his parents were happily married, and he had good relationships with his siblings, but what I heard in her voice was confusion. Then I recalled something she had told me in a previous conversation: "I have this big fear in my life that I never will be pregnant. You see these pregnant women on the street, and you're, like, How does it feel? What's going on in your mind, in your heart? I want to feel it!" Remembering this helped me to understand: it is hard to want something so badly and to try to prevent it.
As it turned out, he didn't visit in December. Daniela didn't inseminate, either. Her Indian donor was out of stock, and the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian's sperm was in quarantine until early January. Meanwhile, she had learned that her health insurance had a $2,000 annual cap on fertility treatments that she had already exhausted on the inseminations with her gay friend.
So it was early January when I finally met Daniela at 8 a.m. outside the Empire State Building, where her sperm bank is located, to pick up two vials of sperm from her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian donor. She had hardly slept the night before from excitement, she told me. At the bank, a nondescript lab, Daniela paid $450 and was given an 18-pound white canister with an orange "Biohazard" sticker on it. She had been there once before; her donor friend had had to go out of town and left frozen sperm for her. "You walk out on the street, and you've got the container in your hand," she said, "and then there's all these containers on two legs."
One such two-legged container was in the elevator when we got on: a workman surrounded by tools. "You're unbuttoned, you know that," Daniela said, looking at his fly.
The guy's fair skin turned crimson, and he buttoned up, grinning but avoiding her eyes.
She explained, "I think it's better that I tell you now, so you don't go through the day like that."
"If they notice, they shouldn't be looking there," he said in a strong Irish accent, smiling right at her now.
Daniela smiled back. "Are you Irish?" she asked. "I'm German. That's why I don't understand a word you're saying."
This was flirtation, right? I was still asking myself that question as we left the elevator, but I wasn't sure: what does flirtation even mean in the context of a woman hauling a canister of sperm to a doctor's office so he can inseminate her? Or, to put it another way, what's the point?
"He was a sweet kid," Daniela said briskly as we left the building and stepped onto the dusty, bacon-smelling street.
At the doctor's office, we repaired to an examining room, where Daniela's doctor, an avuncular man in wire-rimmed glasses, took a sonogram of her ovaries and uterus. "The lining looks very good," he said. "It's the proper time to do this. We'll thaw out the specimen."
In a different room, he removed a "straw" of frozen sperm from the canister of nitrogen and placed it into a tub of warm water to thaw. Most sperm banks use plastic vials nowadays, but this particular bank had stuck with an old system. The doctor left the room while the sperm was thawing, and Daniela filled me in on the new man. They hadn't seen each other since that first meeting two months ago; trips had been arranged and fallen through, often because he was short of money. Still, they were in close touch. Three days ago, she told him on the phone about the planned insemination, and his response was wary. "How do you react to dating a person that would be pregnant with somebody else?" Daniela said, paraphrasing his reaction. "Just like I am feeling completely weird carrying that bucket, it must be the same feeling for him when he meets a person like me." Yet she was hopeful that things might still work out. "If we're going to be great together," she said, laughing, "we're going to be great together with that Eurasian child."
The doctor came back and placed the straw of clear, yellowish sperm in a slim glass cylinder and removed a drop to look at under a microscope. "We have very good motility," he said. "This is a good specimen."
Daniela looked, too. "I see lots of them," she said, excited. "Last time I had to look for four."
The doctor left so Daniela could change into a gown and lie down. When he came back, he drew the yellow liquid into an oversize syringe that tapered into a skinny tube. It is hard to say what Daniela's chances of becoming pregnant would be; statistics on the success rates of IUI using frozen sperm suggest that they are between 8 and 15 percent in a given cycle. Daniela would return the next morning for a second insemination; many doctors believe that consecutive inseminations increase the chances.
Wearing a small miner's light around his head, the doctor went to work. He was done in three minutes. Daniela lifted her hand, fingers crossed, as he left the room.
A week into Daniela's two-week wait, I heard from Karyn again. She had been living in a friend's apartment for weeks while the various insurance companies haggled about how much to pay out for the damage to her apartment. Her computer had been destroyed, along with many of her possessions, including her file of medical records and donor materials. "That's one thing that made me cry," she said. "Just to see all the papers with his information and history and his picture. . .seeing it all soaked."
She had resigned from her job — the brutal hours were wearing her down — and said she believed she had other good prospects. Meanwhile, she had decided to go ahead with her insemination plan. The big day came two weeks later, in late January. Her mother went with her, and Karyn called me a few hours after, elated. The next day I received an e-mail message whose subject line read, "I think I already feel a kick :)."
Over thanksgiving vacation, I took the train to Darien, Conn., to meet Shelby Siems and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who had driven down from their home in Marblehead, Mass. Shelby, 44, grew up in Darien and had come to visit cousins and friends over the holiday weekend. She is part of a rising number of single mothers who are having second children; when we met in Connecticut, she was four months pregnant with a second son by the same donor who sired her first. She and Christopher picked me up at the train station, and we drove to a nearby pizza restaurant that was still quiet at that midmorning hour. Shelby is fair, with long blond hair and pale blue eyes that are prone to tears. Christopher is also pale, a watchful, intelligent child with wispy reddish hair. At lunch, he said "please" and "thank you" and rolled a small green train engine over the laminated tabletop while Shelby and I talked. For a 2-year-old he was remarkably patient, but occasionally he cried, "Mama, Mama, I want to hold you."
"I'm right here," Shelby said.
Once a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, Shelby was finishing up an M.F.A. in nonfiction. Her thesis project is a book about her experience as a single mother, an experience that has been more grueling than Daniela's or Karyn's will most likely be because Shelby has no immediate family; she was an only child of older parents who died by the time she reached her early 30's. She inherited money that has allowed her to go back to school and to support Christopher, but she is alone in the world. In Christopher's first weeks of life, there were periods of many days when they saw no one but each other.
Shelby does have a boyfriend: a 52-year-old bachelor who works at a pharmaceutical company, whom she met at a party when Christopher was a month old. "He's been a great person in my life and Christopher's life, but he's not going to marry me," she explained over the phone when we first spoke. "Some people just don't want to do that, and he's one of those people."
The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with — even those with older children — had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful — and expensive — to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date.
Despite her age — Shelby was 42 when Christopher was born — she was determined that her son have a sibling. "He has even less of a family than I do, because he doesn't have his whole father's side of the family," she told me. "The only person he has is me." She wanted to use the same donor again and put the matter to her boyfriend, who made it clear that he wasn't interested in fatherhood. She began stocking up on the donor's sperm (most banks keep a reserve supply of each donor's sperm for women who want second children) when Christopher was still an infant. "I want my son to have a full sibling," she said. "I want to feel like he has one person in the world who is a complete blood relative after I'm gone. I did not want my son to feel deprived, that the other sibling had a father and he didn't." To be sure that there was no chance the child would be his, Shelby and her boyfriend were celibate for the year it took her to conceive, which she finally did at 43, after eight tries, using I.V.F.
The fact that a child born of an anonymous donor knows only half his biological family concerns single mothers with more robust families than Shelby's, too. The Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site where families can register children conceived by donor insemination in hopes of being matched with half-siblings or even the donor himself, has proved a boon for many single mothers. The site's founder, Wendy Kramer, estimates that the majority of the 7,400 registered members are single. Recent publicity has prompted a jump in the registry's membership and matches — more than 1,500 have been made so far, not just among half-siblings but also among sperm (and egg) donors, 320 of whom are registered on the site, and their progeny.
Q., the former yeshiva student who ended up choosing the 6-foot-2 German rugby player as her donor, developed severe hypertension during her pregnancy and had to be hospitalized several times. Her symptoms lingered even after her daughter was born, and she became preoccupied with what would happen to the baby girl if she were to die. Her brother and a sister are selfish, she says, and her mother is elderly. Last fall, she went to the Donor Sibling Registry and got a shock: the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007. "I was elated," Q. told me. "To quote the granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I wanted her to have kin. Now here's kin that look like her; that're in her same age range. I even thought that if I get to know somebody really well from this group, maybe I would pick one of these other mothers, if they would be interested, to be designated as a guardian for my daughter."
Q. is one of several people in the group with a keen desire to meet her donor one day. And they aren't sitting idle; one woman had magnified his baby picture, in which the donor is blowing out candles on his birthday cake, to the point at which a first name may be legible. Another mother has a hunch about the donor's provenance based on the way he pronounced certain words on his audiotape. At the Washington Single Mothers by Choice meeting, I met a woman who had easily identified the donor for her 9-month-old son using Google. "The person left specific enough information for me to just type in those words and click," she told the group. "But what to do with that information? I'm bound to keep him anonymous as per the contract, but what about when my son says: 'What do you know? Tell me anything about my dad."'
When we'd finished our pizza and salad, Shelby drove to a playground. The brightly colored equipment was empty in the frigid cold, but Christopher bounced in his car seat. "Slides!" he cried.
He bounded out of the car, refusing mittens, and commenced to climb, panting plumes of steam. Whenever he was in earshot, Shelby spelled out the word D-A-D; lately Christopher had become fixated on the idea of a daddy. "He goes to a day care, and he's the only child of a single mother in his class. I think they spend a lot of time talking about Daddy," she told me. Christopher had referred to a neighbor as Daddy, as well as Regis Philbin. "Interestingly, he doesn't call my boyfriend Daddy; he's 'mamma's friend.' The other day, I said, 'Someone special's coming to see you today — do you know who it is?' I expected him to say [her boyfriend's name]. But he said, 'Daddy?"' The single mothers by choice I spoke with generally hold that the story of their children's origins should be told to them from the time of birth, long before the child is old enough to understand it. But Shelby feels that at 2, Christopher is too young to hear that he doesn't have a father.
Shelby's son is part of a population of kids that is only now beginning to be studied, though a 1992 survey of teenagers raised by single mothers found that they experienced markedly fewer adolescent problems than children of divorce. A continuing study of a group of children in England, now 2, who were conceived by single women using donor sperm concludes that so far they are healthy and well adjusted. But the long-term questions of how these children will fare or about the different experiences of girls and boys have yet to be answered.
As we watched Christopher tear around the playground, Shelby reflected on her occasional frustration at the distance her boyfriend maintains from her family. Over Christmas, he would be leaving town for two weeks to visit his family, and Shelby and Christopher would spend the holiday alone. They had no plans, and Shelby felt pressure to make Christmas festive for her son. "On the other hand," she said of her boyfriend, "he's still attracted to me physically through all my body changes, and he and Christopher are so fond of each other. They have a very sweet relationship." Her boyfriend usually visits on Sunday mornings. "A huge wave of relief comes over me," Shelby said. She can relax or do dishes or take a nap. "I feel, like, Wow, this must be what it's like to have a husband every day of the year. I can do my own thing, but I love to just stand across the room and watch them together."
When I next spoke to Daniela, in late January at the end of her two-week wait, she was on a business trip. Her voice sounded weak and tired. She had just gotten her period. And the new man had finally made it to New York, but the visit had been a disaster. "I guess it has to do with the fact that I'm going through this," she said. "You kind of protect yourself. He was saying he was one of these what he calls old-fashioned guys: if his wife is going to have a child, he's going to be in the waiting room until the child is delivered and washed. I'm, like, wait a second. Don't you think you should go through this together? He said, 'No, I'm going to faint, and I'm going to throw up."'
His visit to New York was supposedly a business trip, but in the end he didn't have much to do. "He's not cut out to be a provider, to be a protector or to be a patriarch," Daniela said. "He can't be there when the child is born; he can't make the living for the family. Maybe what bothered him is that he couldn't offer what he would like to offer. So he made it, like, taste bad."
I had never heard her so low. "Everything is so hard, and it's so degrading," she said. "You always think that you'd go through this with somebody that would support you. You don't think about having all the problems, let alone doing it on your own."
I was humbled by the grueling ordeals many women had undergone on their paths to single motherhood: years of trying to conceive, hormone treatments, hospitalizations, miscarriages, untold thousands of dollars spent — all without a partner to buffer the strains and disappointments. And being a single parent is no easier: whether it's a matter of trying to get a photo taken of you with your child or finding a way to shower without worrying that you won't hear your baby cry or accommodating a difficult work schedule, being a single parent can require compromises and jury-rigging that might awe a person with a partner. A longtime employee of New Jersey Transit spent a year working the 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift, which meant waking her daughter at 4 and walking her across the street in her pajamas to a neighbor's house. Her daughter slept on the sofa until the neighbor woke her and took her to school with her own children. "It's probably harder than you ever think it's going to be," this mother told me. After a moment, she added, "My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner." It is a measure of how deep the pull toward motherhood can be that thousands of women from many different walks of life are making this choice, using reproductive and communications technology in ways that not only break with tradition but also make it seem obsolete.
Daniela did another insemination in early February, this time mingling the sperm of her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian with another donor from the same bank who had proven fertility. It didn't work. Neither did Karyn's first try. When I spoke with her early this month, she was preparing to move back into her apartment, whose renovation would soon be complete. There was still one last chance to become pregnant before her 40th birthday in April. "In a perfect world, I'll get pregnant this cycle," she told me. "I'll start working the first week of April before I'm officially really pregnant, and we'll live happily ever after."
When I spoke to Daniela a couple of weeks ago, she had recovered from her disappointments and had just been inseminated again with the sperm of a French-English-German-Scandinavian attorney with proven fertility. She had also struck up an e-mail correspondence with another woman on the Single Mothers by Choice Listserv. They had met for a drink and hit it off, and Daniela planned to go with her to a Single Mothers by Choice meeting. She seemed reconciled to the fact that it might take a while to become pregnant, but she was no less determined. Her fellow would-be single mother is 36, Daniela told me, but her situation is complicated by a boyfriend who has children.
"Why don't you tell him you've got some kids, too?" Daniela recalled suggesting to her friend. "They're just not born yet."
Jennifer Egan last wrote for the magazine about online dating. Her new novel, "The Keep," will be published in August.
###
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Shift to the Right
AS good an article as there is about the emergence of the Republican Party in the late 20th Century. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
###
Woman Up
This article had an immediate and profound impact upon me - and i am still pondering it and finding new meaning each time i read it. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Modern Love
I Need to Woman Up and Do This on My Own
By ASHA BANDELE
FIVE months after we were married, my husband, Rashid, and I had a honeymoon of sorts, a 44-hour jaunt in a trailer at the New York State prison where he lived. At 21 he had been convicted of a gang-related murder, which occurred three years before, and on this day he was in the 13th year of a 20-year sentence.
We had met five years earlier, when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners. I believed then, as I do now, that poems can expand a soul. They had done so for me, and I was watching the same thing happen to prisoners, especially Rashid, already a man seeking transformation.
Over the course of a year and many discussions about changing ourselves and our world, we fell in love. With Rashid there was this breadth of dialogue I hadn't experienced before. Our conversations — unspeakably honest — were for me life-saving.
When I met Rashid, a failed marriage already behind me, no college degree yet, no direction for my future, I saw my life as a series of mistakes. He set that lie aside, made me see myself through his eyes until I could love my reflection.
When I could no longer stand not being able to touch this man who had so touched me, we married in the prison visiting room. Five months later we qualified for conjugal visits, and in a small two-bedroom trailer in a yard on the prison grounds we made love, again and again. But more, we had a period of semi-normalcy. We cooked, danced slow, watched television, showered together. For five years this was our life, the life we chose.
I didn't tell Rashid during this time that I would never have a baby with him while he was locked up. I knew many women with incarcerated husbands did so, and while I didn't judge them, it wasn't for me. I didn't want to be a single parent or bring a baby into a prison. But I didn't say this because at the time I didn't think I could get pregnant. I had been married before and never conceived. I made love to my husband and didn't worry.
Three weeks later I found out I was pregnant.I never considered keeping the baby. Even as I wept, listened to Rashid's pleading, I knew I wouldn't keep it. It wasn't just the prison or my unwillingness to be a single parent. It was also financial. Whatever income I generated as a freelance writer and poet covered the rent, lights and food but precious little else. What did I have to offer a child, except instability?
Against the love I felt for the baby who'd barely begun to take shape inside of me, I had an abortion in a Manhattan clinic that seemed less like a medical center than a factory. Despite the doctors, the nurses, all those women waiting just outside for their turn on the table, it was the most alone I've ever felt.
Though having the abortion was the right thing to do, I carried guilt about it for years. Had I been married under "normal" circumstances, I surely would have had the baby. The weight of destroying something that was created from great love was nearly unbearable. There was no way I could ever do it again.
A few years later I was on a book tour, celebrating what I felt was the beginning of my career, when Rashid and I were issued a date for a trailer. I flew home, armed myself with birth control and never thought once about the possibility of pregnancy. I was thinking about what was next for me on the literary horizon.
We made love and talked about our dreams, and when my period was a couple of days overdue, it didn't occur to me that I might be pregnant. But after six or seven days, reluctantly, I bought a test. The stick turned into dark pink double lines that could not be denied. When Rashid called, I told him directly: "We're having a baby."
I never thought not to have this baby.
She created herself in spite of spermicides. Her presence was predetermined. And I was 32. I might not have another chance to be the one thing I always wanted to be: a mother. Still, there were fears.
I worried about finding a stable job and child care. I was terrified of going through labor alone. But mostly I worried whether I would be able to raise a black girl safely in a world that seems to expand in its ability to hate and destroy.
LIVING in a culture where violence is extolled and blacks and women are often stand-ins for the bulls-eye, I worried about whether the life of my girl could be honored by anyone other than me. The rates of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, the violence that's glorified in pop culture, the girls who at 8 are having oral sex in school stairwells and the groundswell of so-called good girls out on the stroll terrified me.
Not because I judged any of these kids, but because I had been my own version of them. Against a Manhattan backdrop, my sister and I were given music, dance, horseback riding, swimming lessons and art classes. I attended private schools, went to the ballet, saw Judith Jamison dance "Cry." But it was also a childhood punctured by violence. All the education and culture were no armor against the excesses and dangers of growing up in an urban environment too unwieldy to notice its children coming undone.
I began high school at 12, graduated at 15, and while I could put on heels and stumble behind the older girls, I couldn't negotiate the social settings — bars and clubs — where I found myself. On more than one occasion, what began for me as a fun night on the town ended as a date rape. There was always racism. When my child reached an age when she would have to negotiate survival, would she know how to speak to me, as I was unable to speak to my parents? Would I know how to listen?
And I had both my parents. My daughter had only me, and she would have to spend the first years of her life passing through metal detectors. Those concerns, more than any others kept me awake through the nights, wondering: Where could I go, where could I raise my child safely? I wanted to run, live off the grid, have my child, tell no one, keep her forever in my womb.
But I had to stay connected to Rashid, even as my trips to the prison became more hellish. The prison guards, normally disdainful of family members, became especially awful once I swelled with life. During one visit I had to request toilet paper four times so that I could please, please go to the bathroom.
The love between Rashid and I no longer disguised the blight, the stench and a terrible question took form in my head. As a mother, would I be able to navigate the prisons and maintain my relationship with Rashid?
But the rounder my tummy became, the more those fears either fell away or shrank to a manageable size. I gave myself over to reason, faith, Dr. Spock. I found work, and child care too. And I made it through labor, quite easily.
My water broke a minute after midnight, and less than 11 hours later my daughter, Nisa, was in my arms. Seven hours later we were home, and I was eating pizza. Fifteen days after that I was placing Nisa's body in her father's arms for the first time. He cried at the sight of her, and I wept too, but from the frustration of not having a place where we could be, at the most basic level, a family.
"You're such a good mother," my sister said once and then added, "How do you do it?" I heard this a lot during the first two years of Nisa's life, when I was writing a novel, working full time and meeting my deadlines. I told her not to believe the facade. It's impossibly hard to be a single mother.
I hate having to be the sole emotional and financial provider for my child. The pressure's too great. If you slip, there's no one to catch you. But worse, there's no one to catch your baby. So somewhere among potty training, play dates, bylines and balancing the household books, I lost pieces of myself I'm only now trying to reclaim.
I started smoking again. I spent too many nights drinking wine and crying. There were times when pain threatened to define the whole of me. And no, no, I couldn't hold my marriage together.
CARING for Rashid and Nisa at the same time was more than I could bear: the weekly treks through metal detectors, the parts of my spirit that always got snagged by the razor wire. I still take Nisa to see her father, but staying romantically entangled with Rashid, when I most feel his absence, was too painful.
Every time I see her change, fall down, stand up again, I'm reminded that the only other person who loves her as I do isn't there to bear witness to her beauty. No one would ever lose an hour, as I still do, just watching her sleep. How could I live with that?
"I can't play at house or marriage anymore" is what I finally said. "I love you. But I need to woman up and do this on my own."
Still, in that breakup I felt like I lost my husband, best friend, father and brother all at once. And I didn't just lose him — I banished him. For that I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again.
Most mornings I'm awakened by Nisa's messy kisses. Her eyes ablaze with mischief and wonder, Nisa's query to me each sunrise is, "What's our big adventure today, Mommy?"
I grin back at my beloved, my child, and my mind begins to work. But before I come up with a plan, this is what I think each time she asks: Yes, Beloved. Our big adventure, indeed. Ours.
Asha Bandele lives in New York City and is the author of the memoir "The Prisoner's Wife." This essay is adapted from the anthology "Maybe Baby," edited by Lori Leibovich, to be published by HarperCollins next month.
###
The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Modern Love
I Need to Woman Up and Do This on My Own
By ASHA BANDELE
FIVE months after we were married, my husband, Rashid, and I had a honeymoon of sorts, a 44-hour jaunt in a trailer at the New York State prison where he lived. At 21 he had been convicted of a gang-related murder, which occurred three years before, and on this day he was in the 13th year of a 20-year sentence.
We had met five years earlier, when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners. I believed then, as I do now, that poems can expand a soul. They had done so for me, and I was watching the same thing happen to prisoners, especially Rashid, already a man seeking transformation.
Over the course of a year and many discussions about changing ourselves and our world, we fell in love. With Rashid there was this breadth of dialogue I hadn't experienced before. Our conversations — unspeakably honest — were for me life-saving.
When I met Rashid, a failed marriage already behind me, no college degree yet, no direction for my future, I saw my life as a series of mistakes. He set that lie aside, made me see myself through his eyes until I could love my reflection.
When I could no longer stand not being able to touch this man who had so touched me, we married in the prison visiting room. Five months later we qualified for conjugal visits, and in a small two-bedroom trailer in a yard on the prison grounds we made love, again and again. But more, we had a period of semi-normalcy. We cooked, danced slow, watched television, showered together. For five years this was our life, the life we chose.
I didn't tell Rashid during this time that I would never have a baby with him while he was locked up. I knew many women with incarcerated husbands did so, and while I didn't judge them, it wasn't for me. I didn't want to be a single parent or bring a baby into a prison. But I didn't say this because at the time I didn't think I could get pregnant. I had been married before and never conceived. I made love to my husband and didn't worry.
Three weeks later I found out I was pregnant.I never considered keeping the baby. Even as I wept, listened to Rashid's pleading, I knew I wouldn't keep it. It wasn't just the prison or my unwillingness to be a single parent. It was also financial. Whatever income I generated as a freelance writer and poet covered the rent, lights and food but precious little else. What did I have to offer a child, except instability?
Against the love I felt for the baby who'd barely begun to take shape inside of me, I had an abortion in a Manhattan clinic that seemed less like a medical center than a factory. Despite the doctors, the nurses, all those women waiting just outside for their turn on the table, it was the most alone I've ever felt.
Though having the abortion was the right thing to do, I carried guilt about it for years. Had I been married under "normal" circumstances, I surely would have had the baby. The weight of destroying something that was created from great love was nearly unbearable. There was no way I could ever do it again.
A few years later I was on a book tour, celebrating what I felt was the beginning of my career, when Rashid and I were issued a date for a trailer. I flew home, armed myself with birth control and never thought once about the possibility of pregnancy. I was thinking about what was next for me on the literary horizon.
We made love and talked about our dreams, and when my period was a couple of days overdue, it didn't occur to me that I might be pregnant. But after six or seven days, reluctantly, I bought a test. The stick turned into dark pink double lines that could not be denied. When Rashid called, I told him directly: "We're having a baby."
I never thought not to have this baby.
She created herself in spite of spermicides. Her presence was predetermined. And I was 32. I might not have another chance to be the one thing I always wanted to be: a mother. Still, there were fears.
I worried about finding a stable job and child care. I was terrified of going through labor alone. But mostly I worried whether I would be able to raise a black girl safely in a world that seems to expand in its ability to hate and destroy.
LIVING in a culture where violence is extolled and blacks and women are often stand-ins for the bulls-eye, I worried about whether the life of my girl could be honored by anyone other than me. The rates of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, the violence that's glorified in pop culture, the girls who at 8 are having oral sex in school stairwells and the groundswell of so-called good girls out on the stroll terrified me.
Not because I judged any of these kids, but because I had been my own version of them. Against a Manhattan backdrop, my sister and I were given music, dance, horseback riding, swimming lessons and art classes. I attended private schools, went to the ballet, saw Judith Jamison dance "Cry." But it was also a childhood punctured by violence. All the education and culture were no armor against the excesses and dangers of growing up in an urban environment too unwieldy to notice its children coming undone.
I began high school at 12, graduated at 15, and while I could put on heels and stumble behind the older girls, I couldn't negotiate the social settings — bars and clubs — where I found myself. On more than one occasion, what began for me as a fun night on the town ended as a date rape. There was always racism. When my child reached an age when she would have to negotiate survival, would she know how to speak to me, as I was unable to speak to my parents? Would I know how to listen?
And I had both my parents. My daughter had only me, and she would have to spend the first years of her life passing through metal detectors. Those concerns, more than any others kept me awake through the nights, wondering: Where could I go, where could I raise my child safely? I wanted to run, live off the grid, have my child, tell no one, keep her forever in my womb.
But I had to stay connected to Rashid, even as my trips to the prison became more hellish. The prison guards, normally disdainful of family members, became especially awful once I swelled with life. During one visit I had to request toilet paper four times so that I could please, please go to the bathroom.
The love between Rashid and I no longer disguised the blight, the stench and a terrible question took form in my head. As a mother, would I be able to navigate the prisons and maintain my relationship with Rashid?
But the rounder my tummy became, the more those fears either fell away or shrank to a manageable size. I gave myself over to reason, faith, Dr. Spock. I found work, and child care too. And I made it through labor, quite easily.
My water broke a minute after midnight, and less than 11 hours later my daughter, Nisa, was in my arms. Seven hours later we were home, and I was eating pizza. Fifteen days after that I was placing Nisa's body in her father's arms for the first time. He cried at the sight of her, and I wept too, but from the frustration of not having a place where we could be, at the most basic level, a family.
"You're such a good mother," my sister said once and then added, "How do you do it?" I heard this a lot during the first two years of Nisa's life, when I was writing a novel, working full time and meeting my deadlines. I told her not to believe the facade. It's impossibly hard to be a single mother.
I hate having to be the sole emotional and financial provider for my child. The pressure's too great. If you slip, there's no one to catch you. But worse, there's no one to catch your baby. So somewhere among potty training, play dates, bylines and balancing the household books, I lost pieces of myself I'm only now trying to reclaim.
I started smoking again. I spent too many nights drinking wine and crying. There were times when pain threatened to define the whole of me. And no, no, I couldn't hold my marriage together.
CARING for Rashid and Nisa at the same time was more than I could bear: the weekly treks through metal detectors, the parts of my spirit that always got snagged by the razor wire. I still take Nisa to see her father, but staying romantically entangled with Rashid, when I most feel his absence, was too painful.
Every time I see her change, fall down, stand up again, I'm reminded that the only other person who loves her as I do isn't there to bear witness to her beauty. No one would ever lose an hour, as I still do, just watching her sleep. How could I live with that?
"I can't play at house or marriage anymore" is what I finally said. "I love you. But I need to woman up and do this on my own."
Still, in that breakup I felt like I lost my husband, best friend, father and brother all at once. And I didn't just lose him — I banished him. For that I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again.
Most mornings I'm awakened by Nisa's messy kisses. Her eyes ablaze with mischief and wonder, Nisa's query to me each sunrise is, "What's our big adventure today, Mommy?"
I grin back at my beloved, my child, and my mind begins to work. But before I come up with a plan, this is what I think each time she asks: Yes, Beloved. Our big adventure, indeed. Ours.
Asha Bandele lives in New York City and is the author of the memoir "The Prisoner's Wife." This essay is adapted from the anthology "Maybe Baby," edited by Lori Leibovich, to be published by HarperCollins next month.
###
Monday, March 13, 2006
Panther, Panther
Regular readers know of my love for wild animals - here's a tale of the Florida Panther. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 14, 2006
A Rare Predator Bounces Back (Now Get It Out of Here)
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
OCHOPEE, Fla. — In the weeks before Valentine's Day, a healthy Florida panther kept emerging from the dense, sloshy wilderness around Big Cypress National Preserve to kill things he shouldn't: chickens, ducks, a turkey, a pig and a house cat, all on residential property that his stealthy species normally shuns.
The hungry panther — nicknamed Don Juan by scientists who had radio-collared him years earlier and knew he had fathered some 30 kittens — kept coming back for more, despite efforts to deter him. So on Feb. 16, wildlife officials had dogs chase Don Juan up a tree, shot him with a tranquilizer gun and removed him from the wild. It was no light decision, as the number of Florida panthers, the only subspecies of puma east of the Mississippi, is estimated at fewer than 100.
Cars have already hit and killed five other panthers in 2006, including one pregnant with four kittens and another that was crossing a road just north of the Florida Keys, far from typical panther habitat. A sixth was apparently killed by another panther, an increasingly common fate as the territorial cat loses habitat to subdivisions, golf courses and the like.
A new federal report in January announced the obvious: that the Florida panther population must grow to survive — ideally, to three separate populations of at least 240 each — but that it is ever more desperate for space. The report, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, rehashed the thorny old idea of moving some of the cats to Central Florida and eventually to other states where they once roamed, like Georgia and Arkansas.
But there are no firm plans, and with the panther population still endangered but healthier than it has been in decades, South Florida is facing an equally thorny new question: what to do when panthers get too comfortable on human turf?
The question is compounded by a scientific dispute: some researchers say Florida panthers no longer qualify as a separate subspecies, partly because many are descendants of a crossbreeding program with imported Texas pumas in the 1990's. If their classification were to change, they could lose their federal protection.
But whatever their status, they are making other species uncomfortable. After Don Juan attacked the domestic animals here, the National Park Service sent letters to about 500 residents of Ochopee and Copeland, tiny communities in the Everglades, stressing "the importance of securing livestock properly." They included tips like installing outside lighting ("will allow you to see if a panther is present"), and renderings of panther-proof pens. At a campground in Big Cypress National Preserve, a vast hodgepodge of cypress swamp, prairie, pinelands and hardwood hammocks — rangers scrawl warnings on a memo board when radio-collared panthers are detected nearby.
The federal government will soon go further, releasing a new plan for dealing with "panther-human interactions" and instructing people how to live among big cats. Stephen Williams, founder of the Florida Panther Society, an advocacy group, said Western states with large puma populations had adopted similar plans a long time ago.
Even before the exploits of Don Juan — who had a 620-square-mile range in the wild but is now living at Busch Gardens outside Tampa — the panthers of South Florida had encountered public relations problems.
In 2004, the Miccosukee Indian Tribe persuaded wildlife officials to relocate a young male panther that had been glimpsed several times near a sacred ceremonial site on tribal lands. The tawny cat was moved about 60 miles northwest, but it was killed within months by another panther, presumably in a turf battle.
The tribe complained again recently, this time about a female panther and two of her year-old cubs that it said were getting too close to residences, campgrounds and an education center on an isolated road in Big Cypress National Preserve. The tribe, which monitors some of the 33 or so collared panthers, wants the mother cat removed. Federal officials are considering doing so, despite protests from the National Wildlife Federation and even government biologists.
Darrell Land, the panther team leader for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said that unlike Don Juan, this cat had shown no signs of abnormal behavior and should not be moved from the dry and slightly elevated area, ideal panther habitat. Instead, he said, the center should install a fence so that deer could not stray into its yard and attract panthers.
"Her biggest sin is that people occasionally see her on that road or that, heaven forbid, she goes and chases a deer," Mr. Land said of the cat, known as Florida Panther 124. "I don't see that those behaviors have elevated to the point that I'd be concerned about human safety."
While California has experienced several mountain lion attacks in recent years, Mr. Land said he knew of only one documented case of a Florida panther's attacking humans, in the late 1800's. Deborah Jansen, a biologist at Big Cypress National Preserve, said California simply had far more people living in panther habitat.
Mr. Land said Florida panthers, which mostly feed on deer and wild boar, were curious enough to stop and perhaps stare if they saw people, but would flee if approached. He added that the radio-tracking program that has helped scientists better understand the cats now appeared to have a drawback: creating unnecessary public anxiety about them.
"It's one thing to know you live in panther country, but it's another thing to see a map showing a panther was 100 feet from your back door," he said. "Stuff like that has happened all along, but now we have the technology to show it. It gives people too much information, and we don't know how to deal with it yet."
Mr. Land and other government officials said they hoped the new federal plan for dealing with "panther-human interactions" and educating the public would avert conflicts like the one concerning Florida Panther 124. A draft of the plan sets protocols for sightings, encounters and attacks on pets, livestock and people.
A panther that stalked or showed other aggressive behavior toward people would immediately be removed from the wild. But with one that killed pets or livestock, or did not retreat when a human tried to scare it away, wildlife officials would first try "aversive conditioning": chasing it with dogs, hitting it with a slingshot or otherwise trying to deter it from returning to the area.
That plan, to be released soon for public comment, already has detractors. In letters to Big Cypress National Preserve, Billy Cypress, tribal chairman for the Miccosukee, said the tribe preferred a "three strikes and you're out" plan, under which panthers that lingered within 100 yards of a residence three times would unequivocally be relocated or removed from the wild.
David Shealy, who owns a campground in Ochopee and lost chickens, ducks and a turkey to Don Juan in February despite a fence he said he had installed to protect them, said there were already too many panthers.
"The Everglades has become a giant cage with limits and boundaries," he said, "and the amount of food available for these cats is just insufficient."
Mr. Shealy is among many landowners and developers who say the Florida panther is identical to pumas elsewhere in the country and so does not deserve species protection. Indeed, a 2000 study by Melanie Culver, a geneticist with the United States Geological Survey, found that panthers and other North American pumas shared enough genetics to be a single subspecies.
But others say that Florida panthers still have distinctive traits, like their nasal bone structure, and that the question needs much more debate. Even Dr. Culver said she would not advocate officially lumping the Florida panther with other cats.
"I certainly wouldn't push for the taxonomy to be formally changed because that would change their protected status," she said, "and that's the last thing I want to do."
The new federal report — the latest draft of a panther recovery plan last updated in 1995 — suggests keeping panthers far from urban areas by moving some of them into rural Central Florida.
But many scientists, including Mr. Land, are skeptical. They say that Central Florida does not have enough contiguous panther habitat, that the cats would have to cross more highways, and that much agricultural land would have to be turned into the dense forests that panthers prefer.
A better alternative, many scientists agree, is moving some Florida panthers to remote areas of Georgia, Arkansas or other states where they used to roam and where choice panther habitat still exists.
But as history and the recent tensions here suggest, getting the public to embrace what the report calls "large carnivore reintroduction" will not be easy. When Texas pumas were released in North Florida in 1988 and 1993, to gauge whether a permanent population of Florida panthers could be established there, local opposition was fierce and hunters shot some of the cats.
The federal Fish and Wildlife Service emphasizes that there is no schedule for moving panthers out of South Florida, to the frustration of many conservationists. "We were down there begging them to put time frames on it," said Mr. Williams of the Florida Panther Society, who was on the team that wrote the latest recovery plan. "The cat was listed as endangered in 1967 and we're still waiting, 39 years later."
In Arkansas, home to four of the nine recommended relocation sites, David Goad, deputy director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said panthers were unlikely to be welcome there.
"Before you can move a large predator into an area you've got to have a lot of support from the public," Mr. Goad said. "Their hands are going to be full getting that public support, and I would almost guess it's an insurmountable problem."
But what kind of reception panthers get elsewhere is a moot question until South Florida has a large and healthy enough population to dispatch them to other regions. Some scientists fear that will never happen if their habitat keeps shrinking.
Under pressure last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged that it had relied on incomplete data about the space panthers need. It looked only at their movements during the day, when they usually sleep. Critics said the faulty data had helped justify decisions to approve development in the marshes, prairies and pastures where the cats roam at night.
In its new report, the agency calls preserving panther habitat in South Florida its top priority. Yet construction has just begun on Ave Maria, a new town that will hold a Catholic university and up to 30,000 people, on 5,000 acres of panther habitat bordering Big Cypress National Preserve and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.
Since it is too late to save that land, Mr. Williams said, the focus should be on persuading its human inhabitants to accept panthers in their midst.
"North America's wonderful natural heritage without a predator?" he said. "It's doesn't make any sense. We need to learn how to live in the woods, instead of like we're in a glass capsule."
###
Opportunity knocking
This is the glory of the web: breaking the centralized stranglehold on the display of artistic creation.
Now anyone with the tools, energy and follow through can get their art seen and - hopefully - appreciated.
We should all be so lucky in our pursuits here on the Third Rock from the Sun.
Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 13, 2006
Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous
By RICHARD SIKLOS
On his computer screen, Jake R. Sanowski scrutinizes a short video of a baby eating its first pickle. Next is a skit of a woman getting drunker over the course of a meal at which, it turns out, her dining companion is a dog. That is followed by a clip of a band playing a song, but the lighting is so dim that the screen is nearly black. "I feel really bad for it," Mr. Sanowski said.
Mr. Sanowski, 24, who recently moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota, is an editor at iFilm, a company that displays short-form videos, movie trailers and music videos on its Web site (www.iFilm.com) He wades through many of the nearly 500 video submissions that the site receives each day from average Joes and Janes seeking fame — and now cash and prizes — via the Internet.
Many of the contributors are happy just to have their clips posted on the site for all to see. But the number of postings has jumped in the last few weeks since the company introduced a contest with the cable channel VH1 called "Show Us Your Junk" that will feature the best submissions on the television program "WebJunk20" and reward winners with digital gadgetry and flat-screen TV's.
Increasingly, the new, new thing in media is getting paid for the homemade. Reflecting the surge in the popularity of user-created material, both online and traditional media companies are opening their wallets to make sure that the best of it finds its way onto their television shows and Web sites.
Even Yahoo, the nation's most-visited Web site, has signaled a change in its strategy by moving away from creating its own professional content in favor of user-generated material — and it appears willing to pay for anything its users deem worthy.
All this is part of a trend seeking to turn conventional media business models on their heads in the digital age. Typically, media content was either paid for by consumers in the form of subscription fees or by marketers through advertising. In offering to pay users for creating content, companies like Yahoo are not looking to turn every amateur into a professional so much as acknowledging the growing appeal of homemade material to audiences and hence its value to media businesses.
"At some point in the next six to nine months, this will become competitive," said Michael Hirschorn, executive vice president for original programming at VH1, which, like iFilm, is owned by Viacom.
Already the money is starting to flow, mostly in the form of contests. YouTube.com, another Web site for sharing clips, is soliciting people to create a music video for a band from Seattle called Pretty Girls Make Graves. Aspiring auteurs can download the band's song "Nocturnal House," create a video and submit it; the winner gets $1,000 and a trip to New York to hang out with the band.
A similar Web site, Metacafe, is offering $2,000 for the best short video shot at Mardi Gras, as determined from the feedback of people coming to the site to watch them.
On Current, a cable television channel spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore that began operating in August, short videos are selected for broadcast by the votes of an Internet audience; successful entrants are paid $250 to $1,000 apiece.
Several networks have shows in the works featuring both found and original online material, including pilots from Bravo and NBC, the latter's starring the television host Carson Daly.
The USA Network, which is also part of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, is developing a pilot for a user-generated show based on another popular site, eBaum's World. In October, the Web site, named after its founder, Eric Bauman, began offering monthly prizes up to $1,000 for the best submissions, which can be jokes, audio files, flash animation or homemade video games as well as clips.
There is no scarcity of material as high-speed connections grow, cellphone cameras proliferate and more people become adept at editing video and creating flash animation. But user-generated content is much more. Think of it as anything not professionally conceived: it could be blogs or short videos, a salsa recipe on a bulletin board, a Web page created for a school class, a book review on Amazon.com or a withering comment posted on a magazine's Web site. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released in January, half of all teenagers in the United States have created material for the Web.
Of course, much of what finds its way onto Web sites is not ready for prime time or can seem like "America's Funniest Home Videos" with cybergloss. Mr. Sanowski and his colleagues at iFilm, for instance, marvel at the number of recent video creations that consist of young men dancing and lip-syncing music.
Still, user-created material increasingly competes for the audiences of traditional media companies and holds some appealing qualities as a business model. For one thing, it is cheap. And it taps into the social aspect of interactive media that has fueled the advance of the Internet.
It also represents an attempt to improve the quality of material online as people's desire to not only surf the Internet but also contribute to it rises at a breakneck pace. For example, the research firm Technorati estimates that in January there were 27 million blogs, and that number is doubling every 5.5 months, with 75,000 blogs created daily.
The notion of money flowing to people who generate the best material has been gathering steam. Google, the Web search leader, and Yahoo already run services that automatically place advertisements on other Web sites — allowing people who create their own Web pages and blogs to share in the growth of online advertising revenue without ever making a sales call.
Now Yahoo plans to begin offering cash prizes to people who generate the highest-rated responses to other people's questions on a Web service it introduced in December, Yahoo Answers. "Get rewarded for your best answers with cash," Yahoo Answers promised in a notice on the site that the company took down last week after three months because it had not decided just how the payments would work or when they would begin.
The head of Yahoo's programming operations said early this month that company was retreating from a strategy of creating original content for its sites in favor of attracting and highlighting the best user-generated content.
Jerry Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, said in an interview recently: "I think ultimately we're trying to field a community where people feel comfortable and productive, and that with every investment on Yahoo, they're getting more back. How we reward, and how we implement that, I think, is still very early."
Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the spread of financial incentives should not come as a shock in an industry whose biggest players have been given valuations in the many billions of dollars by Wall Street. Microsoft, for instance, is offering cash and prizes in a contest intended to get people to use its MSN search service over those of Google and Yahoo.
One question is whether the use of financial incentives will put a damper on the spirit of unfettered self-expression and generosity that has infused much of the growth of user-created material. "Right now, people are doing all sorts of things on the Internet for the good of the community — it's like volunteering," said Dan Ariely, a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. "The question is, In what ways will it change the willingness of people to help? In this way I actually worry."
On the Web site eBaum's World, the winner of the latest $1,000 prize is a faux trailer for the 1995 horror movie "Seven," starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. With the addition of schmaltzy music and a voice-over narrator, the movie is re-edited to look like a buddy movie turned love story between the two actors.
"I'm positively absolutely amazed at some of the things that people will do for $1,000," said Neil Bauman, who is chief financial officer for the Web site that his son Eric, now 25, founded as a junior in high school.
In its infancy, at least, it seems that financial gain is likely to be seen as a bonus, but not the main reason for creating content. For example, Anirudh Koul, 20, a computer science student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is among the highest-rated participants in Yahoo Answers. The Web site is a competitor to sites like Google Answers and About.com (owned by The New York Times Company), where people can access information from experts in specific fields, rather than just cull the most relevant results from a broad search.
The best answers are given rating points by people who visit the Web site, and it is here that Mr. Koul has answered more than 1,100 questions since the site began operating in December, including "Who did invent the Internet?" and "Can I download episodes of 'Kitchen Confidential?' " For now, Mr. Koul says, he enjoys interacting with others from his dormitory room and being recognized as the smartest guy in a digital room. "The only incentive one gets is the satisfaction in sharing some useful knowledge," he said in an e-mail message.
But since Yahoo makes money either by directly putting ads on its sites or indirectly by keeping Web surfers in its network, it is willing to share the spoils with people like Mr. Koul, just as it might pay an entertainment company for access to its content.
The idea of pay for content has been around in a small way for years in publishing; for instance, those who take part in surveys for the Zagat restaurant review books receive a free book. Robert J. Markey, a consultant specializing in consumer loyalty at Bain & Company, said that companies like Yahoo must be careful not to let financial incentives become the only reason for people to contribute material.
"If it's just about some ancillary reward," he said, "you're introducing an externality that degrades the value of the community itself. It undermines that whole model."
But while user-generated content can attract lots of attention, so far it has not been regarded as a winning format for major advertisers. A prominent example of this is the Web site Myspace.com, which was purchased by the News Corporation last year. While MySpace is adding as many as a million registered users each week who create or peruse Web pages of other members, sharing photos, blogs and such, it has so far attracted little advertising revenue relative to its audience size.
Viacom's chief executive, Tom Freston, while promising to expand its ventures in such social networking, said recently, "It's like inserting the advertising into a conversation between two people, and there are still a lot of questions about advertisers supporting user-created content."
Chris Charron, an analyst at Forrester Research, said people should not be left with the impression that they can make small fortunes sitting in their underwear at home surfing the Web.
"Many users who hope to make a lot of money creating content will probably be disappointed," Mr. Charron said. "All content is not created equally."
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Homebound
Liz Seymour, in white, sitting beneath a collection of hitchhiking signs, began an experiment in group living at age 52. Five of her six housemates are pictured; the youngest is Skye Tull, 6.Those who know me - know that i would love to do this kind of thing. Those of us who grew p in big houses with lots of people miss that. Enjoy.
The New York Times
March 9, 2006
Essay
Inviting Anarchy Into My Home
By LIZ SEYMOUR
Greensboro, N.C.
ON Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably roomy semicircle marked "married-couple household" on the Census Bureau pie chart and slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled "two or more people, nonfamily." Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.
Thoreau famously said that he had "traveled much in Concord." I would venture to say that I've traveled just as much, and maybe more, without ever leaving my house.
It happened like this: My husband and I had come to the end of the line, as married people sometimes do. We had helped each other into adulthood and careers (Bill is a high school English teacher; I'm a freelance writer). We had raised two daughters together, but with Isabell and Margaret grown and both of us entering our 50's, it was clear that our hopes and goals for the next couple of decades were diverging.
Bill longed for quiet and solitude; I wanted noise and movement. To complicate matters, I had become the court advocate for Justin, a 15-year-old runaway from a foster home who had been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 12. After a year of trying to find a workable home for him, I had concluded that the only recourse was to be his foster mother myself.
Now, faced with the prospect of becoming a 52-year-old single mother to a teenage boy and the challenge of supporting us both, I panicked. Trying to imagine how I could make it work, I found my mind turning to a collective house in Oregon where Isabell, my older daughter, had lived the summer before, and to a group of young anarchist artists and musicians in Greensboro whom I knew through both of my daughters.
After Isabell came home from college an anarchist herself, I began to put aside my preconceptions about these people — as disorderly, violent and destructive — and to see them as a community dedicated to replacing hierarchy with consensus and cooperation. (Isabell once described them as Quakers who swear a lot.) Over time I found myself drawn to their hopeful view that people know best what is best for them and to their determination, naïve or not, to build a better world right away. Anarchism, at least as practiced here, seemed to be more about building community gardens and making your own fun than about black bandannas and confrontations with the riot police (although it was about those things, too).
Amid the chaos of my own life I wondered if this approach to living might have something in it for me. Unconventional as it was, I figured it couldn't be any worse than struggling to pay the mortgage and being Justin's mother on my own.
So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on $500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our new household, we found that we had what we needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with people outside the house saved us thousands of dollars a year. If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60's or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.
That account, of course, leaves out the terror I felt through the summer of 2002 as I prepared to open my house to anarchy. Also the occasional awful days and nights early in the experiment, like the evening that began with Justin's skateboard at the bottom of the stairs and that ended with shouting, slammed doors and the skateboard flying out a second-story window. Then there were the guests who wouldn't leave; the short-lived but horrifying rat invasion (brought on, I suspect, by boxes of food from Dumpsters on the back porch); and the friends who drifted out of my life, baffled by my new living arrangements.
I still own about two-thirds of the house, sharing the title with two young women in the collective, Mackie Hunter, a 25-year-old full-time political activist who had an insurance settlement to invest, and Stef Smith, a 26-year-old drummer with a never-to-be-used college fund. Their investment, and my refinancing of the house, allowed me to buy out Bill after we divorced two years ago, and gave them about a third share of the property. Since I do not want to profit from the collective as its landlady, I have decided that the portion of the equity that builds up from my housemates' monthly rent will not go to me if the house is sold or refinanced, but will serve to help keep the collective going. In essence I've converted my capital from the house to the household. Twenty years from now, when I'm in my mid-70's, I may regret giving up my equity in return for time and community, but I don't think so. I'd rather take my retirement now.
The ages in the house span 50 years, from Jodi Staley's 6-year-old daughter, Skye, to me. Justin, now 18, moved out more than a year ago to live with his girlfriend; he hopes to go to a music conservatory. (He turned out to be one of those children it takes a village to raise, and he not only thrived under the group's care but rebelled into surprisingly mainstream respectability.)
None of us work full time. We support ourselves by painting houses, typing legal depositions, teaching (as substitutes), subjecting ourselves to medical studies, cooking in restaurants and writing. The time I save allows me to help care for an elderly relative, cook for a free meal program, spend time with friends and work on a book.
On paper we look like paupers. The monthly cost of living in the house comes to $160 to $245 a person, based on the size of one's bedroom. That includes the mortgage, property taxes, household insurance, utilities (we have an unlimited long-distance plan) and wireless Internet. In addition we each put $30 a month into a house fund that pays for bulk food like rice, beans, olive oil and spices, and supplies like toilet paper, light bulbs and laundry detergent.
As for produce, a typical evening of hunting and gathering in various grocery store Dumpsters brings in plenty of food: cartons of apples, oranges, potatoes, bananas and red onions, slightly soft or spotty perhaps, but still fresh and edible.
Every Sunday it is someone's turn to fix dinner while the rest of us sweep and mop, with Al Green or the Pixies blasting from the kitchen stereo. Since the dining room has been turned into a bedroom (as have the downstairs study and a small upstairs room that was my office), we eat on the screened-in side porch or in the backyard under the crape myrtle tree when the weather is warm, or around the kitchen table or in the living room when it is cool.
On Tuesday night we hold the weekly house meeting. It is surprisingly helpful to know who has a headache, who just fell in love, who is sleepy. More than one set of roommates have blown apart over dishes piled up in the sink and wet towels left on the bathroom floor; then again, so have quite a few nuclear families. We talk things out.
Though our daily activities are a lot closer to the Waltons than to the Weather Underground, we keep "In Case of Police Raid" instructions posted by our front and back doors. It is a reminder that houses like ours in other towns do get raided.
In spite of the stigma attached to the word "anarchist" and the scrutiny openly anarchist households receive, the number of such houses is growing. Anarchists are no longer just in college towns and big cities; there are now thriving anarchist communities and houses like ours in places like Lake Worth, Fla.; Machias, Me.; and Springfield, Mo. The online directory maintained by the Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 1,000 collective houses, ecovillages and co-ops in the United States, compared with about 400 in the 1990 directory. Although not all of them identify themselves as anarchist, more than half make their decisions by consensus. Even that number is clearly low: none of the five collective houses I know of in Greensboro, for example, are listed in the directory.
It is a rare week when we do not have at least one guest in residence. One winter we had a Danish filmmaker living in the garage. On a rainy night last spring an entire old-time string band showed up on the doorstep. The musicians had been hopping freight trains around the country and gotten stranded; they played fiddle, banjo and musical saw in the living room and left the next day. Another guest walked from Maine to North Carolina, the first leg of a trip home to Oregon. He stayed for a week, mended some rips in his backpack, then walked off down the driveway due west.
I have friends who tell me they could not live the way I do. I believe them. The constant sound of footsteps on the stairs, the coffee cups in the sink, the mysterious things in the refrigerator that no one claims, the sheer intensity some days of so many personalities rubbing up against one another, is not for everyone. But then neither are more conventional living arrangements. For me, a household of friends — more loosely bound than a family but tied together by loyalty, affinity and shared space — satisfies a need for kinship and companionship that did not end when my family did.
The old house's former incarnation as a middle-class, nuclear-family household still rises up in my mind now and then. Someone will ask about an umbrella or a bottle of aspirin or a pair of needle nose pliers, and I'll picture so clearly the place where the object used to be that for a moment I'm there instead of here. It is not an unpleasant sensation, just a little strange.
For the most part, though, my memory keeps up a pretty sturdy firewall between the time I have come to think of as "before" and now. Where I live now is not utopia. What it is, though, is fun. It is fun to hear people laughing on the porch; it is fun to dance in the kitchen; it is fun to go out on a Wednesday evening Dumpster run. As messy as it is, to my mind it is a lot more interesting than utopia could ever be.
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Tuesday, March 07, 2006
The Eyes Have It
When I was a little boy, eyeglasses were a symbol of "elder" status. My grandparents wore them, but neither my parents nor any of us eight children wore them; I assumed you had to be a certain age to even need them.
All that gradually changed as I grew older and saw my father, then mother, then, at 20, myself, come to need them. Along the way I've met and interacted with many vision-impaired people.
In fact, I am one of them, needing prescription eyewear to correct my less-than perfect eyesight. This is an excellent pair of articles about our plight.
Enjoy.
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
February 28, 2006
Personal Health
Sane Steps May Save Your Precious Central Vision
By JANE E. BRODY
Dr. Sidney Schreiber, a cardiologist from Scarsdale, N.Y., was in his mid-70's and still working in the lab and caring for patients when he noticed that he could not see clearly with his right eye.
A visit to his ophthalmologist produced a discouraging diagnosis. Dr. Schreiber had macular degeneration, a rapidly progressive form at that, and within three years he lost 90 percent of his vision, leaving him functionally blind.
An estimated 10 million Americans have this progressive retinal disease, though most are not as severely affected as Dr. Schreiber, and some are not yet aware that they have the painless condition. It afflicts one person in four older than 75 and is the leading cause of legal blindness in Americans over 55.
The numbers affected will continue to climb as the population ages, prompting an escalating race to develop more effective treatments and, perhaps, even preventives, including measures based on recently identified genetic factors that raise the risk of developing the disease.
A Familiar Regimen
Meanwhile, there is much that people can do now to ward off this disabling condition or slow its progress. Interestingly, the very same steps that lower the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and some cancers can also help protect the eyes.
Though peripheral vision remains intact, macular degeneration robs people of their central vision, making it hard or impossible to read, write, drive, watch television, see the time, recognize faces and see where they are going.
Still, many who are seriously afflicted manage to pursue active lives. The late Don Knotts, a co-star of "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Three's Company," was 57 when his disorder was diagnosed. But he continued to work almost until his death on Friday at age 81.
"I got pretty depressed for a while," the American Macular Degeneration Foundation quotes him as saying. "And then one day I said to myself, 'I bet a blind person would give his right arm to have the vision I have.' "
Although most patients are over 55 when found to have what is commonly called age-related macular degeneration, some develop macular disease as children or young adults. Marla Runyan was in the fourth grade when she was struck with a juvenile form of the disease. Yet she finished college and competed twice in Olympic running events despite being legally blind.
Dr. Schreiber, the cardiologist, was an accomplished artist when macular degeneration forced him to abandon his hobby and his career. Like Mr. Knotts, he lapsed into a serious depression for nearly two years, emerging only after a visitor from Lighthouse International showed him all he could do with low-vision aids.
Encouraged by his wife, Freda, who became his eyes, he gradually resumed his favorite activities, with modifications. He visits museums (his wife reads the legends aloud), listens to recorded books ("I've never been so well-read"), gardens (though he sometimes pulls up flowers instead of weeds) and has resumed painting, his artistic talent apparently intact judging from a recent rendition of poppies in a vase.
He has even been able to put his medical training to good use. Now 84, he is scientific director of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, which sponsors research and provides support and information. It also publishes a quarterly newsletter and has produced the helpful "Hope & Cope" DVD, both available for a $25 contribution. The foundation can be reached at P.O. Box 515, Northampton, Mass. 01061-0515 or at (888) 622-8527. Its Web site is www.macular.org.
The macula is a dense collection of light-sensitive cells in the middle of the retina along the back of the eye. These cells are used for the "straight-ahead" vision needed to read, sew, drive and see fine details. Most cases of macular degeneration begin and remain in one or both eyes as what is called the dry form of the disease. Yellow deposits called drusen form under the retina, increasing in number and size until they destroy macular cells and blur central vision.
The disorder can progress so slowly that deteriorating vision is not noticed until it is quite advanced. But as it worsens, more light may be needed to read and faces may become hard to recognize. Far less often, macular degeneration occurs as the wet form, leading to a rapid loss of central vision when abnormal blood vessels grow under the retina and leak blood and other fluids, raising the macula off the wall of the eye. In about 10 percent of cases, dry macular degeneration eventually develops into the wet form.
Looking for Early Signs
Dr. Schreiber said: "I might have had the dry form for 10 years, for all I know. It's probably my fault for not seeing an eye doctor every year."
Which raises a critical point. Early signs can be readily detected by a thorough eye exam in which the pupil is dilated, allowing the doctor to examine the retina and optic nerve for signs of trouble. People 50 and older should have such exams yearly, or twice a year with signs of disease.
A simple test can be done in any doctor's office (or at home) to detect vision distortions that might not otherwise be noticed. It uses a graphic device called the Amsler Grid, a box of cross-hatched lines with a black dot in the center. Covering first one eye, then the other, a person stares at the black dot. If any of the straight lines appear wavy or missing, that could be a sign of macular degeneration.
Prevention and Treatment
The established risk factors offer strong clues to avoiding or delaying onset of the condition. They include smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, sedentary living, overexposure to sun and a diet deficient in green leafy vegetables and fish.
Other risk factors are being a woman, farsighted or Caucasian and having light eye or skin color, cataracts and a family history of the disorder. Two factors, oxidation and inflammation, appear to cause macular injury. Studies sponsored by the National Eye Institute found that daily consumption of a high-dose formula of antioxidants and zinc could reduce the risk that early macular degeneration would advance.
Various products sold over the counter contain this formula or one like it: 500 milligrams of vitamin C, 400 I.U. of vitamin E, 15 milligrams of beta carotene, 80 milligrams of zinc oxide and 2 milligrams of copper. Smokers should avoid products containing beta carotene, which may increase their risk of lung cancer.
In addition, most experts recommend a supplement of lutein, zeaxanthin or both, carotenoids found in dark green leafy vegetables like spinach and collards. Twinlab makes a supplement, Ocuguard Plus, that contains lutein.
Several drugs, Visudyne by QLT and Novartis and Macugen by Eyetech Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer, have also been shown to slow deterioration of eyesight in wet type macular degeneration. One Visudyne patient in six is said to have shown improved vision, a most exciting advance. Another drug awaiting approval, Lucentis by Genentech, may also help.
This is the first of two columns on vision problems. Next: Living with low vision.
The New York Times
March 7, 2006
Personal Health
Latest in Technology Gives Life a Clearer Focus
By JANE E. BRODY
Is low vision limiting your world?
This condition, which can result from a number of eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, often results in depression and social isolation.
But vision rehabilitation services, the use of low-vision aids and help from family members, friends and caretakers can bring back a productive, enjoyable and independent life for most people who are visually impaired.
Remarkable advances have been made through electronics, computerization and miniaturization to create devices that can help patients read, see and function well again. New and better gadgets are continually being developed at places like the Schepens Eye Research Institute.
But the devices are useful only if patients can afford them, know how to select those that are most likely to help, and receive training and practice in their use. All too often, people spend heavily on devices that are either not right for them, or they never learn to use them properly.
Knowing Where to Turn
The cost of low-vision aids is not yet covered by insurance. Before wasting money on products that may be less than useful, patients should consult an eye doctor who specializes in low vision. Even with professional help in selecting an appropriate vision aid, arranging a trial period to test the equipment may be wise.
A great place to start is Lighthouse International, a source of referrals to low-vision specialists around the world and educational and rehabilitation services for both old and new low-vision aids. This 100-year-old nonprofit organization, at 111 East 59 Street, New York, N.Y. 10022, can also be reached by phone (800-829-0500), e-mail (info@lighthouse.org) or through its Web site (lighthouse.org).
Also helpful is Prevent Blindness America at (800) 331-2020 (preventblindness.org), which, among other services, can help patients find support groups in their areas.
Low vision is not the same as blindness, but it can make normal life a tremendous challenge. As Dr. Eleanor E. Faye, a low-vision ophthalmologist in New York and longtime affiliate of Lighthouse, pointed out about people with low vision:
"Daily life becomes complicated when they are unable to read their mail, check price tags in stores, read nutritional information on food packages, drive, sew or travel alone. Social isolation often becomes the rule when they can no longer see facial details or enjoy simple activities such as playing cards or going to a movie. Even their health may be compromised when they cannot recognize medications or labels or when they lose interest in cooking because the microwave panel or stove dials are indiscernible."
There are both adaptive aids and optical aids. The former include large-type books and recorded books (available from the Library of Congress); talking clocks and calculators; boldface, Braille and talking watches; big button telephones; large-print cards and address books; easy needle threaders; bump dots to help with location (for example, on an oven dial, computer or telephone) and high-intensity lamps and lighting.
The variety of devices is endless. Magnifiers, for example, come in different strengths and styles. There are hand magnifiers, stand magnifiers, pocket magnifiers, magnifiers that look like tiny telescopes and others that look like glasses. Some are worn, others attach to lamps, and some have built-in lights.
Optical aids include simple and advanced electronics. They include closed-circuit television systems (even portable ones), special goggles onto which images from a video camera are projected and computer programs that enlarge text and switch it from black on white to white on black, reduce distracting color to black and white, and convert text to speech.
Computer accessibility aid is available for PC users through microsoft.com/enable and for Mac users through apple.com/accessibility. Before buying any device to make a computer more accessible, be sure it has adequate memory and the needed ports.
Training and practice in the use of optical aids is critical to success. Even learning to use a simple magnifier can require practice. For example, a hand magnifier should be held straight — tilting will distort the image — and on the paper, not lifted to the eyes.
But in focusing on devices, low-vision patients often neglect simple "housekeeping" aids. For example, the Low Vision Center in Bethesda, Md., suggests that hallways and staircases have good lighting that shines on the walls, floor, steps and railings. Mark the edges of steps with contrasting strips.
When working on a task or reading, good lighting should be provided throughout the room. Move lamps close to the work area and light it from both sides to eliminate shadows. Reduce glare by covering shiny surfaces with carpeting or clothes, placing shades on bare bulbs, using adjustable blinds and curtains on windows, and sitting where you don't look directly at a window.
Provide contrast wherever possible. Avoid clear drinking glasses. Rather, use a dark glass for a light-colored drink, and vice versa. Likewise, place foods on plates of contrasting colors. Use contrasting-colored drawer pulls and door handles throughout the home.
In the bathroom, use a toilet seat that contrasts with the wall and floor, and place contrasting-colored tape on the edge of the sink if it is the same color as the wall. Use different colored containers for shampoo and conditioner and use soap that is a color different from the wall. A lighted magnifying mirror is useful for shaving and applying makeup.
To keep track of medications, ask the pharmacist to provide a large-print label and information sheet. Color-code different medications or use bump dots.
Outdoors, the Low Vision Center suggests painting gates and doors in different colors from fences and walls to aid in their location.
Helping a Low-Vision Person
Family, friends and helpers can do much to aid the functioning and safety of people with low vision. Always ask first if help is wanted or needed. A person with limited vision may want to retain as much independence as possible.
When you approach a person with low vision be sure to identify yourself, and tell the person when you leave the room. In social situations, grasp the person's hand in greeting — your extended hand may not be seen. Try to avoid sudden changes in illumination, like having the person go from a brightly lit room to a dark one.
Night lights should always be used wherever there are dim areas and in bedrooms at night. Furniture should contrast with the walls and be positioned to avoid collisions day and night. Needless to say, trip hazards like shoes, clothing or books left on the floor are unacceptable.
In guiding a person with impaired vision, be precise. Say, for example, "There's a flight of steps going upstairs directly to your left," not just, "There are steps over there."
In serving food, identify what is on the plate using the clock — "the meat is at noon, the potatoes at 4, the string beans at 9."
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