Obsession this deep can't be healthy. Be forewarned.
The New York Times
June 15, 2006
Skin Deep
Do My Knees Look Fat to You?
By NATASHA SINGER
LOVE handles, saddlebags, turkey wattle. Self-conscious women have been trying to reduce those body areas for years. But now, with more efficient diets and fitness routines, women are turning to more obscure anatomical zones. The newest worries? "Bra fat" and "back fat."
"I had a little roll of fat hanging over the back of my jeans, like a spare bicycle tire in the back," said Dana Conte, a bartender in Manhattan. It was so obvious that her mother constantly came up behind her and pulled her shirt down over it, Ms. Conte said. "When your mother is doing that, it means there's a problem."
Ms. Conte, 34, says she has an hourglass figure that attracts whistles as she walks along the street. To get rid of the back fat, she tried working out — "like a lunatic," she said — five days a week. Then, she enrolled in Weight Watchers. When neither worked, she turned to plastic surgery.
Last August, she had liposuction on her lower back around her waistline, and in January, she had liposuction again, this time on her mid- and upper-back to eliminate "bra fat," bulges that can occur when "your bra pushes lumps of fat down your back and up over the bra fastening and to the sides right near your arms," Ms. Conte said.
The total fee for both procedures, $10,000, was well worth it, she said.
Last year, Americans had about 455,000 liposuction operations, making fat removal the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. But in the last two to three years, liposuction, once used predominantly to reduce the flabby abdomens, hips and thighs of average Americans, has become a tool to enhance the near-perfect body parts of the already fit.
For this designer-body approach, an increasing number of doctors are using a technique known variously as precision, selective or micro liposuction. The goal is to remove an ounce or three of fat from ankles, knees, chins, necks, backs and upper arms, according to some prominent plastic surgeons and dermatologists.
"This is mostly for people who do not need much work done," said Dr. Luiz S. Toledo, a plastic surgeon in São Paulo, Brazil, who has taught the technique to American surgeons at their annual medical meetings. "It's liposuction for skinny people."
But some sociologists and medical ethicists say that using liposuction — which can cause complications ranging from infection to death — for such tweaks raises profound questions about the increasing risks cosmetic doctors and patients are willing to take in the name of perfection. They say these microprocedures may signal a shift in beauty standards in which people come to regard the body the way they do their cars or kitchens: as an object able to withstand never-ending renewal and modification.
And they worry that the idea of precision liposuction carries an inherent suggestion that everyone should have surgery, even those who are already beautiful.
"The goal posts are changing so rapidly that what was once considered cosmetically unnecessary is now considered helpful," said Victoria Pitts, an associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York, who teaches a course called Sociology of the Body. "As calves, ankles, knees and even genitalia become zones of perfectibility, we will feel more and more pressure to get involved in projects that improve them."
Dozens of experienced American doctors have been performing precision liposuction for more than a decade. But in the last two to three years, hundreds of other doctors have been adding it to their surgical repertory because it seems easier to perform than it used to be and because more patients are asking for it, said Dr. Peter B. Fodor, a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles.
"Because our equipment has gotten better, surgeons who a few years ago would not have touched areas like kneecaps, inner thighs, back rolls, calves and ankles have extended their practices," Dr. Fodor said.
New types of ultrasound machines, which can be used to break up fat before it is extracted, and daintier cannulae, the blunt-tipped hollow tubes used to dislodge and suck out fat, have made it easier for doctors to fine-tune liposuction, Dr. Fodor said.
During liposuction operations, doctors anesthetize patients, inject a numbing solution and suction fat cells out of the body with a tube inserted into incisions in the skin. Patients may be sore and bruised for several days to weeks afterward, but doctors say results are permanent on the treated areas as long as patients maintain stable weight.
Because removing too much fat can be risky, medical societies do not recommend liposuction for the morbidly obese. But it has been widely used to reduce bulges on the merely chubby.
And now, as it has grown more precise, liposuction is attracting a new clientele of body-conscious people who want to improve physiques already honed by diet and regular exercise.
"Some of them are perfect 10's who want to be 10½'s," said Dr. Howard D. Sobel, a dermatologist in Manhattan whose liposuction patients have included models and personal trainers. "These patients' 'before' pictures are what patients in the past wished their 'after' pictures looked like."
One of Dr. Sobel's patients is Judy Goss, a former Ford model who works as a model agent. "By normal standards, I'm pretty skinny," said Ms. Goss, 38. She is 5-foot-10 and weighs 126 pounds, she said. "But my arms were getting a little flappy. I could feel it wiggle every time I shook hands."
Two years ago Dr. Sobel performed liposuction on her upper arms.
Dr. Lawrence S. Reed, the plastic surgeon who operated on Ms. Conte, the bartender, said some patients who choose micro liposuction want to reduce such negligible deposits that doctors can have trouble seeing the problem when the patients are undressed.
To pinpoint the little lumps of fat, Dr. Reed, who is based in Manhattan, asks patients to wear their favorite jeans or bra right before surgery so he can mark the areas with a pen.
Patients have developed their own nicknames for these obscure fat deposits. To help doctors understand the exact locations their patients are describing, the journal Dermatologic Surgery recently published an article titled "Lexicon of Areas Amenable to Liposuction." According to the article, patients are now asking for liposuction of the "buffalo hump" (upper back), the "wings" (bulges around the bra area), the "doughnut" (around the belly button), the "banana fold" (below the buttocks), the "piano legs" (calves) and the "chubb."
"Chubb is a Southern term for the kneecap area," said one of the article's authors, Dr. William P. Coleman III, a clinical professor of dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. He has not yet heard a colloquialism for ankle fat.
Even though these miniprocedures sound superficial, sometimes marketed as "lunchtime liposuction" or "liposculpture," they can cause medical and aesthetic problems. Possible complications include infection, scarring and perforated intestines.
Liposuction can also result in death from an overdose of anesthesia or from a pulmonary embolism in which clots block blood vessels in the lungs, Dr. Toledo said. He put the death rate from liposuction at one in 5,000 procedures in an article this year that appeared in the journal Clinics in Plastic Surgery. (Not all doctors agree on the risks: a survey by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated the death rate to be one in about 47,000 procedures.)
Dr. Fodor said operations for "lesser corrections" are technically and aesthetically more challenging because the areas that are not so fatty require more experience and wider anatomical knowledge. Ankles have superficial nerves and arteries that can be damaged, he said. Fat on the back or kneecap is very fibrous and can be difficult to remove evenly. And kneecaps have sac-like cavities that can be easily traumatized, Dr. Fodor said.
Doctors are grappling over where to draw the line. Last week Dr. Toledo saw a patient who wanted to have liposuction of her pubic area.
"In Brazil, bikinis are very small, and she complained that a little bit of fat stuck out over her bikini," he said. Dr. Toledo refused to do the surgery. He said removing the fat might make sex painful for her. "Sometimes a change is so small that it is not worth the time, money and risk."
Some medical ethicists are concerned that medical societies have not established standards or guidelines for doctors on what kinds of micro liposuction are too minor to be worth the risk. "Today the cutoff point is the pubic area, and what about tomorrow?" said Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University.
But Rosamond Rhodes, the director of bioethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, does not see an ethical concern. "Humans have always been willing to invest time, energy and risk in looking attractive, so I don't see smaller liposuction procedures as a sign of doom, gloom and the downfall of our culture," she said. "It's just medicine being used to address problems that it could not address before."
Still, Dr. Rothman worries that these tiny procedures may create a demand for serial liposuction in which patients come to view surgery as a maintenance technique, like fitness.
"We already have a model for this with Botox and Restylane, where people go to their doctors every few months to get another shot whenever they feel like it," Dr. Rothman said. "Maybe liposuction will become like a gym membership where you pay a doctor $10,000 for the year and you can have as much surgery as you want."
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Life is chemistry - from the college presidents to the criminals to the gays to the nerds to the college queens - we are likely just products (with very little variation) of our body chemistry. Enjoy.
The New York Times
June 15, 2006
The DNA Age
That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family
By AMY HARMON
Jason Dallas used to think of his daredevil streak — a love of backcountry skiing, mountain bikes and fast vehicles — as "a personality thing."
Then he heard that scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle had linked risk-taking behavior in mice to a gene. Those without it pranced unprotected along a steel beam instead of huddling in safety like the other mice.
Now Mr. Dallas, a chef in Seattle, is convinced he has a genetic predisposition for risk-taking, a conclusion the researchers say is not unwarranted, since they believe similar variations in human genes can explain why people perceive danger differently.
"It's in your blood," Mr. Dallas said. "You hear people say that kind of thing, but now you know it really is."
A growing understanding of human genetics is prompting fresh consideration of how much control people have over who they are and how they act. The recent discoveries include genes that seem to influence whether an individual is fat, has a gift for dance or will be addicted to cigarettes. Pronouncements about the power of genes seem to be in the news almost daily, and are changing the way some Americans feel about themselves, their flaws and their talents, as well as the decisions they make.
For some people, the idea that they may not be entirely at fault for some of their less desirable qualities is liberating, conferring a scientifically backed reprieve from guilt and self-doubt. Others feel doomed by their own DNA, which seems less changeable than the more traditional culprits for personal failings, like a lack of discipline or bad childhoods. And many find it simply depressing to think that their accomplishments might not be the result of their own efforts.
Parents, too, are rethinking their contributions. Perhaps they have not scarred their wayward children so much as given them bad genes. Maybe it was not their superior parenting skills that produced that Nobel laureate.
Whether a new emphasis on genes will breed tolerance or bigotry for inborn differences remains an open question. If a trait like being overweight comes to be seen as largely the result of genetic influence rather than lack of discipline, the social stigma connected to it could dissipate, for instance. Or fat people could start being viewed as genetically inferior.
Because tests for the genes that influence personality and behavioral traits are not yet commercially available, there is no way for most people to know which ones they have. And even if they could, the newly uncovered genes are thought merely to influence, not determine, their personalities. Biologists are also quick to emphasize the role environment plays in activating genetic dispositions that might otherwise never be expressed, or mitigating those that are.
But that has not stopped people from acting on their assumptions.
Mr. Dallas's wife, Mari, for instance, convinced that her husband is in some sense hostage to his daredevil genes, has insisted he draw the line at certain activities.
"If he had his choice, he would be getting a motorcycle," said Ms. Dallas, a pediatric oncologist. "I don't think that's such a good idea."
The public embrace of genetics may be driven as much by wishful thinking as scientific truth. In an age of uncertainty, biology can appear to provide a concrete answer for behavior that is difficult to explain. And the faith that genetics can illuminate the metaphysical aspects of being human is for some a logical extension of the growing hope that it can cure disease.
"More and more stories about who we are and how we live are becoming molecular," said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the interrelation of science and culture. "The older liberal worldview that it's all a question of willpower is still very present in America, but genetics has become a strong countercurrent."
That may be partly because the science has become more credible. Armed with the human genome sequence, along with a catalog of genetic variation in the human population, and tools that can inexpensively gauge any individual's genetic makeup, scientists can now pinpoint the genes associated with inherited traits.
Developed to dissect the genetic basis for complex ailments like heart disease and cancer, the methods are now being applied to less pressing areas like the way genes may influence sexual desire or attention deficit disorder. While scientists have yet to demonstrate any genetic cause that directly affects such behavior, they have found plausible associations. And for many people, that is all that matters.
"The scientific facts have changed," said Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard who documented cultural resistance to the influence of genetics on behavior in his 2002 book "The Blank Slate."
"We now have real evidence that some of the variation in personality is inherited," Dr. Pinker said, "and I think it may be affecting people's everyday choices."
Some people persist in believing in the power of the human spirit, but a growing number prefer to submit it to a DNA test. In the wake of the recent discovery that millions of people who carry a specific genetic variation are more likely to gain weight, Mike DeWolfe, a computer programmer who considers himself overweight, cannot help wondering if he is one of them.
"I really would like to have a test, because it would help reduce my guilt over it," said Mr. DeWolfe, 38, of Victoria, British Columbia, noting he would also welcome a genetic treatment as an alternative to his constant dieting. "That would make a big difference."
There is nothing new about the idea that temperament and behavior are shaped by genetic endowment. Families have long clucked over a trademark stubborn streak showing up in a new generation, or crowed about inherited creative abilities. But as science begins to corroborate intuition, the public is reassessing where credit and responsibility lie for character traits that may be in part genetically preordained.
"To summarize, want to live until a ripe old age? Have parents that live long," Joe Pickrell, a 23-year-old graduate genetics student wrote in a recent blog entry. "Think you're a friendly, peaceful guy 'cause your mom raised you right? Think again. Able to try drugs just a couple times and never get hooked because of your strong will? Nope." (Mr. Pickrell, of Chicago, punctuated each clause with a link to a recent scientific journal article describing the genetic component of life expectancy, aggression and susceptibility to drug addiction.)
Jacki Thorpe wondered for years why her older sister could quit smoking so easily, while her own numerous attempts have failed. After all, their upbringing had been virtually identical, and they had started smoking together when they were 12 and 14. Then she heard about a genetic variation that predisposes some people to nicotine addiction.
"I have it," guessed Ms. Thorpe, 42, an administrative assistant in Whidbey Island, Wash. "My sister doesn't." Determined to fight her presumed genetic destiny, Ms. Thorpe has sworn to try quitting one more time this summer.
A Stanford University student in a focus group on smoking and genetics was more accepting: "Let's say I'm still addicted to cigarettes 10 years from now," the student said in a telephone interview, asking that his name not be used because he has concealed his smoking habit from his family. "It might feel like it's not a total personal failure, just that certain things made it harder for me than other people. It kind of takes the weight off."
Friends and family members who worry about behavior that seems unhealthy or self-destructive sometimes suspect that blaming genes is an easy out. When Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, cited his family's history of addiction in admitting to a prescription drug addiction after he crashed his car near the Capitol last month, for instance, some scoffed. "Kennedy blames crash on 'car accident gene,' " read the headline on Antimatternews.com, a satirical blog, an allusion to the 1969 crash in which his father, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, was driving and a passenger was killed. Some bioethicists warn that the embrace of genetics as an explanation for troubling behavior threatens to let society off the hook, too. Taxing cigarettes, banning smoking in bars and not glamorizing it in movies is far more likely to lower smoking rates than drugs tailored to certain genotypes, these critics say.
Still, at Hazelden, an addiction-treatment center in Minnesota, teaching about genetics has become standard. Learning that roughly half the risk of alcohol addiction is associated with genes can remove a burden of guilt that otherwise serves as an obstacle to recovery, said Dr. Marvin D. Seppala, the center's chief medical officer.
"They've driven drunk, and they have children, and they're saying, 'I can't believe I did this,' " Dr. Seppala said. "To learn they have a disease with a genetic component like other diseases really helps them understand these crazy sort of behaviors."
As genetics comes to rival childhood experience as the favored lens through which to interpret behavior seen as deviant, parents who blamed themselves for their children's disorders are also finding some relief. Recent research has found that conditions like anorexia or autism, once thought to be largely psychological, are at least partly genetic.
"You would wonder, 'What's wrong, what aren't we providing?' " said Kathy Ramsay, 55, a legal secretary in Sacramento who has had three daughters who suffered from anorexia. The new DNA paradigm, however, can come with a new guilt trip.
"I passed it on to them," added Ms. Ramsay, whose daughter Heather volunteered for a genetic study of anorexia at the University of North Carolina after reading about the research in her local newspaper this year. "It was in me."
Some adults are more forgiving of parents' sins they now consider DNA-enabled. Others get angry, however irrationally, for being saddled with inferior genes. Tim McGrath, 45, said learning about the genetics of alcoholism had made him more determined not to follow the path of his father. Still, he is haunted that he has seen his own fate.
"It's like this demon out there, lurking," said Mr. McGrath, a teacher in Chicago. "And without the proper vigilance, or whatever, it could strike."
By suggesting a genetic basis for behavior previously believed by some to be the result of character flaws, scientists and others say the discoveries could make for more understanding of human differences. Some overweight people, for instance, hope it will reduce the stigma associated with being fat.
"Maybe it will help the rest of the world realize it's not lack of willpower, it's not stubbornness, it's not laziness," said Jane Perrotta, 52, a medical writer and contributor to the weight-loss blog The Skinny Daily Post.
"It's the hand you're dealt," Ms. Perrotta said.
Others fear that when certain behaviors once ascribed to personal choice are seen as genetic, the next step will be not tolerance for difference, but support for intervention. On a "fat-acceptance" e-mail list, several members suggested recent research will lead only to new ways for them to lose weight through genetic alteration, rather than be accepted as they are. And when scientists caused fruit flies to pursue flies of the same sex by altering a gene last year, some gay-rights advocates worried it would lend credence to the notion that homosexuality could be "cured."
People could also find their genes being held against them. Already, some scientists suspect a specific gene plays a role in violent behavior, for instance, and a discussion has already begun over how people bearing such genes should be treated.
"If we find a murder mutation, are we going to be more accepting of murderers, or are we going to lock them up even more tightly?" asked Jeffrey M. Friedman, director of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at Rockefeller University. "The more we find genes that play a role in determining all sorts of attributes, the more we're going to face these kinds of ethical issues."
Of course, for traits that are socially desirable, people may not be as eager to accept genetic explanations that seem to trivialize their skills or accomplishments. When scientists this year found two gene variations that appear at higher rates in professional dancers than in the general population, many dancers bristled at the news. In online message boards for the ballet magazine Pointe, several writers said success in dance was the result of hard work, passion and good mentors. "Being a dancer requires so much more than what's there in your body, an emotional strength," said Virginia Johnson, editor of Pointe and a former principal dancer with the Dance Theater of Harlem.
She paused.
"That genes can't really — well, I guess that's genetic, too, isn't it?"
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Placing the power of video in the hands of everyone is a trult democratic idea whose time has come. Now - create ! Will we ? Enjoy !
The New York Times
June 15, 2006
Camera. Action. Edit. Now, Await Reviews.
By SCOTT KIRSNER
The music video for the surreal folk song "I Got a Bunny," written and performed by Juanito Moore, is not something you will see on VH1.
But the video, shot on a rainy sidewalk in front of Mr. Moore's home in Grand Rapids, Mich., has another distinction: it was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut.
The minute-and-a-half video was shot with a digital still camera, which Mr. Moore occasionally swings around by its tripod as he lists the bizarre animals in his imaginary menagerie.
While sites like YouTube and Veoh have lately become popular for allowing users to share their self-produced videos, Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is part of a new class of sites that also offer simple tools for stringing together video clips and then adding soundtracks, titles, transitions and unusual visual effects.
All of the sites, which include Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper and VideoEgg, have been introduced within the last year. This summer, they will be joined by another site, Motionbox, based in New York.
Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.
"We wanted to make video editing over the Internet faster than desktop editing," said Jim Kaskade, co-founder and chief executive of Eyespot, based in San Diego. "We think it will broaden the base of people who are creative, but may not have thought they were, by creating this tool kit for them. Editing video is eventually going to be as simple as sending e-mail."
Mr. Kaskade refers to the process as "mixing," however, saying he believes that the term "editing" may sound labor-intensive to the amateur videographer. Previously, putting together a multishot video like Mr. Moore's would have involved installing and learning to use a piece of software like iMovie from Apple, Adobe Premiere or Studio from Pinnacle Systems. Some of that software is packaged free with new computers or sold for about $100.
The analyst firm Parks Associates estimated last year that only about four million people regularly use such software for video editing — far fewer than the number who capture video using camcorders, Webcams, digital still cameras and cellphones.
But with more videos of soccer games, weddings and cruise vacations being posted online — and potentially being seen by people who have not been dragooned into the living room for a showing — editing gains in importance, Mr. Kaskade says, even if it involves trimming only the dizzying camera whirls at the beginning of a shot, or the inevitable question, "Are you taping right now?"
People who have experience with both desktop software and the new online editing services say the desktop software offers a wider range of features and enables them to manipulate the video more precisely, but they appreciate the speed and simplicity of online editing.
GK Parish-Philp, a product manager at a San Diego software company, said that while he used Pinnacle Studio to assemble a video of his daughter's birth a year and a half ago, he had not used it in a long time. The birth video "came out really well, but it took forever," he said.
Instead, Mr. Parish-Philp now uses video clips taken with his digital still camera and edited on the Eyespot site (www.eyespot.com) to provide weekly video updates to his mother in Texas. One chronicled his family's recent trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, complete with deft cuts between close-ups and long shots, plenty of pointing at animals, and a soundtrack by the 1980's pop group Toto. (Their hit "Africa," of course.)
Many of the early users of online video editing are new parents like Mr. Parish-Philp, or pet owners, said Kevin Sladek, co-founder of VideoEgg (www.videoegg.com). "We see a tremendous diversity of things," Mr. Sladek said, "but the largest bucket of footage is baby videos."
Other users have been editing videos to support online auctions, as when Todd Hernandez tried to sell a Nissan 350Z coupe on eBay this year, or to stay in touch with friends back home, as when Lisa Boghosian, who moved to San Francisco recently, made a St. Patrick's Day video collage for her Irish friends in Massachusetts.
The number of online editors is still small, however.
"Eighty percent of our users want to watch videos, and about 20 percent want to share videos," said Jonathan Shambroom, a vice president of Grouper. "But only a small fraction of that 20 percent will edit their videos first — maybe a quarter."
All of the sites, except Grouper, require that video clips be uploaded to their servers before they can be manipulated. That can take a long time, and there are limits to the size of the files that can be sent. (For Jumpcut, the limit is 50 megabytes per clip.)
Users of Grouper (www.grouper.com) must first download a free piece of Windows-only software that works in tandem with the Web site. It permits users to trim and rearrange clips on their computer and upload only the finished product, in compressed form.
The sites make possible new kinds of collaborative editing. A group of parents attending a school play can upload all their video, and then edit a single version of the play that makes use of the best shots. Or a vacationer who returns with a shaky shot of the Grand Canyon can incorporate another person's river shot into the video — the home-movie equivalent of stock footage.
"Before, moviemaking was 'one computer, one author,' " said Jumpcut's chief executive, Mike Folgner. "What we've done, on a team level or a group level, is allow people to share these assets. You can make a movie out of anybody's stuff."
Steven Cohen, a Hollywood editor who was in the early 1990's one of the first in his profession to rely on a digital editing system for making a feature film, has tinkered with Jumpcut and Eyespot. While the current services are not as responsive or flexible as the high-end software he is accustomed to using, "online editing seems inevitable," he wrote in an e-mail message. "What makes it appealing is that it gets rid of the problem of storage, and for that reason it seems very freeing. Let somebody else worry about where all this stuff is and how to back it up!"
Many of the earliest users of the online editing services report two changes in the way they capture and assemble video. First, they tend not to use their camcorders as much, because the tendency with a camcorder is to record long, meandering stretches of birthday parties and parades, which are time-consuming to import to a computer and edit. Instead, they record more impressionistic scenes of a few seconds or a few minutes, using a digital still camera or a cellphone.
Second, even if they have experience using more powerful, PC-based editing software, they find themselves using the online services more often when they are working with the shorter snippets — and trying to assemble them quickly for a grandparent in a distant city.
Jan McLaughlin of North Passaic, N.J., makes three or four short movies a week, often using her Nokia cellphone. She spends only about 5 or 10 minutes, on average, refining her video with Eyespot.
"It's the difference between making a gourmet meal that takes days, or throwing something in the microwave," Ms. McLaughlin said. "Ultimately, sometimes you just need to separate the good footage from the bad and stick it together."
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"Angela y Siro," a photograph by Ouka Lele, in "How's Love Doing?" at La Maison de la Villette in Paris.
Love is the ONLY game in town. If you're not playing, you're missing out on the game. Enjoy
The New York Times
June 14, 2006
The Changing Story, the Unquiet Glory of Love
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS, June 9 — In the nonstop marketing of sex and violence, popular culture in the West too often ignores the changing face of love. Not boy meets girl: that is amply covered by sugary movies, novels and songs. What's missing is a recognition that love is more than a sentiment: it can also be an accurate — and at times disturbing — gauge of social evolution.
That at least is the premise of an unusual exhibition at the Maison de la Villette in eastern Paris, on view through Aug. 13. "L'Amour, Comment Ça Va?" the title asks, "How's Love Doing?" The show then offers an answer, not through sweet images of lovers by the Seine, but by looking at love through the prism of France's social convulsions over the last 40 years.
The conclusion? Love, too, has been radically transformed.
This political approach is not accidental. The works in the exhibition, including photographs, installations and film clips (spiced up by some not-very-relevant erotic engravings by Picasso), were not selected by an art curator, but by two French intellectuals, Arlette Farge, a historian, and Rose-Marie Lagrave, a sociologist.
"Our intention is to disturb the visitor," Ms. Lagrave notes in an exhibition pamphlet. "While people might expect to find images of physical contact and beauty, we show how difficult it is to love today."
Ms. Farge suggests a reason: "In the 18th century, a man and woman lived together for a maximum of three or four years because of wars, epidemics, death during childbirth and so on. Life was a succession of funerals and remarriages. In fact, until today, couples have never had to live together for a long time."
In other words, the organizers argue, love inside or outside marriage is now exposed not only to new challenges but also to an extended test of time.
To illustrate this, Ms. Farge and Ms. Lagrave have tapped the talents of artists like André Masson and Barbara Kruger; the filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders; and the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Raymond Depardon and Stanley Greene, among many others. Yet they seem as interested in ideas as in aesthetics.
The resulting mosaic of images, while often specific to France, reflects the experience of other Western societies in which patterns of love have been altered by a host of new or intensified variables: feminism, gay and lesbian rights, H.I.V./AIDS, longevity, late marriages and single mothers, plastic surgery, fashion, falling birth rates, advertising, immigration and unemployment.
In other words, nowhere does love exist in a vacuum. It must constantly confront new problems, freedoms and expectations.
The show's first section is purposefully sobering as it examines changes in the workplace. The decline of heavy industry, for example, in France and beyond, has increased unemployment and strained the lives of married couples and their families. Money may not buy love, but love is rarely helped by economic hardship.
This message of the 1980's and 90's is conveyed principally through photographs. These include Peter Marlow's series "Closed Down Britain," which captures families trapped in post-Thatcher industrial bleakness; Louise Oligny's photographs of French unemployed, poignantly titled "Stories Without Sound"; and Andreas Gursky's large-format pictures of dehumanizing factory assembly lines or brokerage house floors.
In difficult times, the show argues, love can take the form of solidarity: those coming together to fight a common injustice are also expressing a kind of love. In fact, Ms. Farge points out, "collective emotions" often spawn romantic love. "In the Resistance, there were ardent love affairs," she writes in a book accompanying the show. "And people later suffer when they can no longer share moments of emotional complicity, which can transform love."
In that sense the 1980's and 90's were a letdown after the social battles of the 60's and 70's, the focus of the show's second section. In France these struggles included the May 1968 student movement, which marked a generation, and also an intense campaign for increased women's rights related to birth control, legalization of abortion and stronger anti-rape laws.
News clips and excerpts from documentaries from the period capture the collective emotions of public demonstrations. The women's movement led in the 1970's to a campaign for gay and lesbian rights. And this, in turn, was reflected in a new awareness of love's changing face.
The show's final section leaps into the 21st century, "from love to subversion," as its organizers put it. By that they apparently mean subversion of the traditional rules of love as people set out in search of new versions of happiness, apparent in the rising numbers of gay marriages and falling numbers of heterosexual ones, the obsession with physical appearance and the anonymity of Internet dating.
One inescapable theme is the search for beauty and youth as a gateway to love. Sophie Brändström explores plastic surgery by photographing mannequin heads, duly made up to look pretty, as images of ideal beauty. Ms. Kruger confronts the physical and emotional with "Love" and "Hate" written across a laughing blonde's face, as well as a huge, posterlike declaration: "What big muscles you have!"
Under the category of seduction, pride in appearance takes an unexpected form in Erwin Olaf's color photographs of three mature women — Karen, 64; Clavelia, 63; and Cindy, 78 — happy to pose in skimpy apparel. And with similar insouciance, drag queens appear in their finest in an excerpt from a documentary. Is this love or simply a yearning to be loved?
Not everything in this show is solemn.
In fact, a such-is-life short movie, "Pacotille" ("Trinket") by Eric Jameux, drew the largest crowd one recent afternoon. In it Thierry gives a necklace with a little heart to Karine and points out the inscriptions: "More Than Yesterday" on one side, "Less Than Tomorrow" on the other. Karine doesn't understand. Thierry explains that each day he loves her more.
"But you said less!" she retorts.
Thierry tries again, but to no avail. "I want someone who loves me the same every day," Karine declares — and walks out on him.
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I have spent an inordinate amount of time (upwards of several hundred hours, i would guess) watching this show - since i was a child.
There's something captivating about being able to guess the cost of something - although it brings no appreciation of the value of anything. Enjoy.
The New York Times
June 13, 2006
Hoping to 'Come on Down' to 'The Price Is Right'
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES — The daytime television schedule may be littered with gabby talk shows, sunny news programs and adjudications of who, precisely, put his foot through the window of the neighbor's El Camino.
But nearly 35 years since Bob Barker first beckoned Americans to come on down, his game show, "The Price Is Right," continues to corner a certain market.
Thousands of fans — from 19-year-old Midwestern college students to octogenarians who have had crushes on Mr. Barker since he and they were middle-aged — continue to line up along Fairfax Avenue here at 3 a.m., four days a week, most of the year, hoping for one of the 325 spots in the studio audience.
They come in intergenerational groups or solo. They schedule vacations around tapings of the show, and spend months organizing friends and family members to meet them here, wearing T-shirts that identify them by their town or family name. (One man was recently spotted refusing to don his group's shirt at breakfast. Things did not go well for him.)
They stay by the dozens at the Farmer's Daughter hotel across the street from the CBS studio where "The Price Is Right" is taped, and get a nightly tutorial from a desk clerk on how to become members of the studio audience.
For every American who dreams that a singing voice, dance skills or back-stabbing boardroom tactics will earn him a piece of prime-time fame, thousands more have dreamed smaller, longing only to guess the price of a sectional couch or a pint of heavy cream. They don't want a record contract; they want an all-expenses-paid trip to Asia, or maybe a banjo.
"I have been watching this show all my life," said Gregory Bourgard, 26, who comes several times a year from Odenton, Md., to line up for a spot in the audience, even though he can never be a contestant again because he was once a showcase winner.
"I'm not trying to relive the moment," he said on a recent Sunday night at the Farmer's Daughter, where he was gearing up for visit No. 30. "I just want to be in the audience again."
Game shows may come and go, but "The Price Is Right" is a cultural touchstone for generations of Americans.
Who under 50 — except for those raised by parents who banned television and put rice cakes rather than Ring Dings in their lunchboxes — did not spend dozens of childhood mornings zoned out on the couch, playing along with the Dice Game or screaming at the fool from San Diego about to overbid on a bag of corn chips?
"We're here for our parents, our grandparents and people in our lives who have since passed on who watched the show," said Cindy Kilkenny, 57.
It is the democracy of the audience, and the show's theme — how to gauge inflation, essentially — that has sustained its appeal, said Mr. Barker, the show's 82-year-old host (and its executive producer).
"Everyone in the United States can identify with our show," he said. "On most game shows today you will see contestants between 20 and 45 who are physically attractive. We have people on 'The Price Is Right' who are between 20 and 45 who are physically attractive too."
"But we have people who, when they became 18, the first thing they did was come to 'The Price Is Right,' " he continued, "and I had a big winner on a recent show who was 95. We deliberately select contestants that are black, white and brown. We deliberately pick contestants from all over the United States. We have fat people, thin, short, tall, you name it."
How much stuff costs, he added, is what people think about every day, anyway. "The premise is so overpowering," he said. "Everyone identifies with prices. Whether you're a television executive or a newspaper reporter or a policeman or unemployed."
And while television may worship 22-year-olds and body parts created in the operating theater, Mr. Barker is also part of the show's grand appeal, and he has the X-rays to prove it. One overzealous fan bear-hugged Mr. Barker and broke a rib; several have crushed his toes; and one raced onto the stage and head-butted him in the solar plexus.
"It is a dangerous job," said Mr. Barker, who holds special affection for a fan who raced to her contestant's seat with such enthusiasm that her tube top fell down. She failed to adjust it for several live minutes.
The audience is largely filled by groups on buses who are guaranteed seats. The rest are fans who line up, often beginning at midnight, for the extra spots, which are doled out on a first-come-first-served basis. Some days there are two, others 200.
For these fans Ted Ott, a clerk at the Farmer's Daughter, gives free workshops each night before tapings (two on Mondays and one Tuesday through Thursday).
Mr. Ott, who lines up on his day off, uses a broken section of a backgammon board to represent the "Price Is Right" studio, and lectures for roughly 40 minutes, in between checking in guests.
He gives the following advice: Do not wear costumes. ("The show's producers have a horror of waking up and finding out they are on 'Let's Make a Deal,' " he said.) Show up on time to get your four-digit line-spot number, and guard it with your life.
If you get a spot in the audience — and are thus granted a 20-second interview with the producer to see if you might be called down — be clever. Don't go to the restroom when people are being called down. If you are thinking of bringing in a cheat sheet on prices, think again, because that is a felony.
But to that quintessential American question: is it worth it? For Sean Steiner, 22, who came from Akron, Ohio, to be the first in line for the show, it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience," he said. "I was feet from Bob. He was cracking jokes, telling stories about the ducks who live in his swimming pool during the commercial break. The best part was, I got to come home and watch myself on TV."
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Jada, with her owner, Carl Massicott, seeking out bedbugs for pay.
The New York Times
June 13, 2006
Dogs and Their Fine Noses Find New Career Paths
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
A year ago, Jada, a frisky black mutt, was living in a Florida pound, her days numbered. Today she commands hundreds of dollars an hour at some of Manhattan's most exclusive hotels and apartment buildings. Her fate turned on her newly gained ability to sniff out something reviled in New York these days: bedbugs.
Last month, the Motion Picture Association of America started using two dogs, Lucky and Flo, to sniff out DVD's in the cargo area of Heathrow Airport in London, a major transit point for pirated DVD's. "First we had Lassie, then Rin Tin Tin and now Lucky and Flo," said Dan Glickman, the president of the association.
Dogs have long been partners in law enforcement's searches for narcotics, explosives and people (both dead and alive). But now their keen noses are being put to use in a wider variety of areas, like medicine, environmental protection and anti-piracy efforts. The number of dogs with the new, specialized skills remains but a fraction of the number trained for more traditional law enforcement uses.
Still, dogs are entering new career paths, learning to sniff out mercury in Minnesota schools, invasive weeds in Montana, cancer in people — even cows in heat.
"The dogs do better than bulls," said Lawrence J. Myers, a professor of veterinary science at Auburn University who wanted to increase the success rate of impregnation attempts, a pressing demand in the dairy industry. Dr. Myers, a leading expert on dogs' sense of smell, added that because dogs "have no innate interest in cows in heat," it takes repetitive training to teach them how to know when the cows are ready. (The bulls do not benefit from the dogs' work. Dairy cows are usually artificially inseminated.)
Dogs' sniffing prowess, well known for ages, lends itself to any number of needs. "Cocaine or peanut butter: whatever you want to find, we can train a dog to find it," said Bill Whitstine, Jada's original trainer and the founder of the Florida Canine Academy in Safety Harbor, Fla.
Engineers are still years away from creating instruments as sensitive or as flexible as a dog's nose. Until then, Mother Nature remains the master engineer. "You can train a dog for anything that has a unique or mostly unique odor," Dr. Myers said. In the case of DVD's, the smell that Lucky and Flo have been trained to detect is polycarbonate plastic. In the case of cancer, scientists believe that dogs may be picking up biological compounds, like alkanes and benzene derivatives, that are not found in healthy tissue.
The cancer detection research is in a preliminary stage, but some early tests with a variety of cancers like lung and bladder show a success rate better than conventional tests'.
Because dogs have 20 to 40 times the number of nasal receptor cells that humans do, they can detect the tiniest levels of odors, even a few parts per billion, Dr. Myers said. In addition, the dogs' nasal anatomy is very effective at sampling air, so much so that researchers are studying whether they can adapt it for a mechanical detector.
To be sure, dogs are but one animal with an extremely acute sense of smell (think European pigs and truffles), but being man's best friend helps with employment opportunities.
"I don't think you could ever get a police officer to get a pig around a car for a narcotics search," said David Latimer, a dog trainer in Birmingham, Ala., who has taught a dog to sniff out cellphones, part of an effort to thwart terrorists who plan to use them to detonate bombs. The dog has not been put to use in the field, however.
The training process is similar for almost all odors. For months, the dogs are given multiple items in succession to smell. When they come to the target odor — bedbugs or mold, for example — they get a reward. Eventually they associate the odor with the reward.
"All animals strive for food, sex and praise," Mr. Whitstine said. "We can't give them the middle one, but we can give them the food and praise." The more odors a dog is being asked to pick out, the longer the training. Mold dogs, for example, are taught to detect about 18 toxic molds, some of which cause allergies.
The training has to continue even after the dogs start working, so they remain sharp. Every day, Jada gets a refresher course from her owner, Carl Massicott, who runs Advanced K9 Detectives in Milford, Conn. To conduct the retraining, he built a contraption out of aluminum bars, a lazy susan and plastic containers. He spins the wheel and says, "Jada! Seek! Seek!"
Jada sniffed around the containers — one containing bedbug carcasses and the others containing decoy materials like carpet and plaster. When she got to the one with the dead bedbugs, she stopped. Then she tapped the container with her paw. "Good girl!" Mr. Massicott said, giving her a snack out of his waist pack.
He also uses live bedbugs for the retraining, which troubles his wife. Once, one escaped. "We weren't going to bed until we found it," Mr. Massicott said. Jada tracked the wayward bedbug down.
Jada needs only two minutes to check a room that can take a human up to half an hour to inspect. She has rooted out clusters of bedbugs in $500-a-night hotel rooms, elegant Park Avenue co-op buildings and Queens low-rise rentals. She has found bedbugs behind radiators and in cracks in the wall.
Many dogs who end up as career sniffers are rescued from shelters or pounds, just as Jada was, because the most important trait for them is not pedigree but personality. Trainers look for dogs that are eager and enjoy games. A common test is to see if they react enthusiastically to a tennis ball.
"Some dogs are too smart," said Alice Whitelaw, who works for a nonprofit conservation group in Montana and uses dogs to track wild animal excrement for biological surveying. "They're like, 'I don't need this. I could be lying down all day.' "
There are other limitations, since dogs are not machines. Jada can look for bedbugs only six hours a day before her accuracy declines. Dogs get tired. They are temperamental. They make mistakes in trying to please their handlers. In fact, overly high expectations helped fuel a boom and bust in termite-sniffing dogs in the 1980's. "We realize their fallibility," said Mr. Latimer, the trainer from Birmingham who is also training bedbug dogs. "I think that has caused them to gain in popularity and, quite frankly, in credibility."
Also, using sniffing dogs makes economic sense only when there is sufficient demand, like the recent surge in bedbugs in New York City.
As for sensing cows in heat, Dr. Myers sighed. "There is economic interest, but not enough to sustain it."
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Important article for everyone to read and re-read. Money has a nasty habit of disappearing without a trace. ANda, as this article chronicles, it's the little spending habits (coffee, cigarettes, etc) that really do us in over the long haul. Enjoy.
The New York Times
June 10, 2006
Your Money
Advice to All You Graduates: Let's Start With That Daily Latte . . .
By DAMON DARLIN
This is the season for giving advice to graduates as they enter the workplace. Instead of listening to yet another recitation of the usual admonishments to "change the world," "carpe diem," or "wear sunscreen," those graduates — unless they are already trapped on the nonpaying internship hamster wheel — need to hear how to manage their paychecks.
Parents may have tried this. And many will undoubtedly send this article to their children.
But, dear graduate, before you wad this up and toss it next to the keg still sitting there from last week's party, consider this: If you think it is tough living on very little now, imagine what it will be like when you are old and sick.
Surveys say most of you already suspect Social Security will not be around after mom and dad deplete it sometime during your peak earning years. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old favored a system of privatized retirement savings accounts.
Let's start with the easy stuff first.
Make your own coffee You probably know you spend a lot at Starbucks, a company that collected $6.4 billion from coffee drinkers last year. You probably don't have any idea how much of that total came from you. A calculator at www.hughchou.org/calc/coffee.cgi let's you figure that out and also forecast how much you will spend over a decade of coffee breaks. (This Web site contains a treasure trove of financial planning calculators.) Say you spend just $3.50 every workday for your latte. If you drank the free office brew instead, you'd have more than $11,500 to play with after 10 years.
Does coffee shop coffee taste better than the free stuff? Probably, but ask yourself, do you want to live in a roach-infested studio apartment with two roommates your entire life?
By the same logic, if you smoke, now is a good time to quit. Doing so will save you on average $25,600 over 10 years.
Learn to cook Unless you have learned the art of sneaking into conferences at hotels to snag a breakfast croissant or cocktail-hour shrimp, you need to reduce your dining budget. A twice-a-week kung pao chicken takeout habit can easily drain you of about $10,000 over 10 years.
At the very least, learn how to pack a lunch. Taking your lunch to work may seem like the equivalent of sitting with the nerds in the school cafeteria, and going out to lunch with colleagues can sometimes be a smart career move. But bringing your lunch lets you be more choosy about who you are eating with and saves money. How much? Back to the online calculators (www.hughchou.org/calc/lunch.cgi) and you'll discover that the savings could be as much as $23,000 in 10 years.
The tally so far: $34,500 (for the nonsmokers), or enough to make a down payment on a $172,500 house. That won't get you much in most big cities, so you really need to exert yourself.
Pay yourself first If you do everything suggested so far, you haven't had to sacrifice much except perhaps a regular lunch with the office jokers. Now, prepare to sacrifice.
Set aside 10 percent of your paycheck in a savings or brokerage account separate from where the rest of your money goes. You'll be less tempted to spend it if it is hidden away there, unattached to a checkbook or an A.T.M. card. If your employer has direct deposit of paychecks, your paycheck can probably be directed to different places.
Here comes the tough part. You are going to squirrel away this money in addition to the pretax money that you take out of your paycheck to save in the company 401(k). Only 31 percent of workers 18 to 25 participate in a tax-deferred 401(k) retirement plan, according to a recent survey by Hewitt Associates, an employee benefits consulting firm. The others undoubtedly assume that they'll get to it later. About two-thirds of workers 42 to 59 have money set aside in a 401(k).
There is an important reason you want to start early, even though it hurts. Say you withhold $375 a month for your 401(k). In 40 years, you'll have $750,000. But those who waited a decade to get started would have only $377,000.
And guess who delayed? Mom and dad. The average amount in a 401(k) is less than $60,000, according to the Investment Company Institute, a trade association of retirement fund companies. Generation X isn't in any better shape. A study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that 49 percent of those born from 1965 to 1972 won't have enough money at retirement to maintain their standard of living.
Another bit of advice: Stick the money in the broadest stock index fund offered by your plan, not bonds and not a money market fund. Sure, the markets may stumble at some point during the next 45 years, but history has shown that they will rise over a period that long. You take risks when you are young.
Ignore your raises Every time you get a raise, and you'll get them because you are working hard instead of spending money you don't have, pretend you didn't get one. Bank the entire amount.
Over time, you'll start spending the money. It's human nature. But you'll start spending it more slowly. You'll keep the car another few years. You won't immediately move to a new apartment. All that helps money to accumulate.
By this point, you may be screaming: "I can't afford to do this. There will be nothing left for me to live on. Have you seen my student loans?"
A few words about those loans. The government will make its annual adjustment of interest rates on existing student loans on July 1 to reflect recent increases in all interest rates. Consolidating your loans at a fixed rate to lock in a lower interest rate is one possibility, but you need to calculate if the longer time frame of such loans — and the greater overall interest payments — offset the savings from the lower interest rate. (You can't consolidate consumer loans or credit card debt with the student loans.) You can always pay a loan off early once your salary increases.
Now, back to the hectoring. Having less to spend can help you spend less on frivolous things and save for worthwhile causes. Having less will also make you work harder to get more. If you are comfortable, you get complacent.
Don't borrow to buy depreciating assets Almost every consumer product from an iPod to a sofa is worth less the moment you buy it. You are just paying extra for it with a loan. Borrowing, by the way, means taking out a loan, buying it on installment or using your credit card when you don't have the money to pay off the balance. If you can't afford it, don't buy it.
An exception is a car, which may be a necessity that would be out of reach otherwise. One option to consider is a used car coming off a dealer's lease. They tend to be driven carefully and there are a lot of them thanks to recent incentives from manufacturers. Keep the term of the loan short to minimize cost. The latest edition of the Consumer Reports "Buying Guide" lists the most reliable used models, including the best ones for less than $6,000 like the 2002 Saturn SL sedan and the 2000 Toyota Echo. The guide also includes the less reliable models like the 2002 and 2003 Mini Cooper and the Volkswagen Beetle from 1998 through 2004.
Protect your credit Eventually you will have to borrow money for a car or a home. If you want to pay as little as possible in interest, you want pristine credit. So make yourself a credit card company's worst customer: pay your bills on time and never carry a balance. No exceptions. To help avoid temptation, use no more than two credit cards. Try to find one that gives you rewards — airline ticket rewards or cash — for using it, but still won't charge a fee for that privilege.
Another technique to cut down on incidental expenses is to train yourself to use the A.T.M. only once a month. Take out enough cash to get you through the month, and when you run out of cash near the end of the month, stop spending. Don't grab for the credit card.
Now go out and seize the day. And wear sunscreen.
E-mail: yourmoney@nytimes.com
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Debt sucks. Your income. Your energy. Your life. Don't do it. Be forewarned.
The New York Times
June 11, 2006
Chapter 1: The Nation
Reasons to Worry
By NIALL FERGUSON
Think of the economy of the United States as a dinosaur — one of those huge herbivores whose bulk shook the ground. A brachiosaur. A brontosaur. A diplodocus. Like them, the U.S. economy is mind-bogglingly enormous — two and a half times as big as the next largest economy in the world and almost as large as that of the six other members of the Group of Seven combined. The catch is that it has to consume almost incessantly to sustain its great heft.
Contrary to what we used to believe, leviathans like the diplodocus were not exactly sloths. It is now thought that they had the strength to stand on their hind legs in order to reach food at the top of trees. They may even have been able to run rather than merely plod. But it seems reasonable to assume that their reaction times were slow; it was a very long way from the diplodocus's tail to its brain. If a predator sank its fangs into that tail, it might have taken the diplodocus a few moments to feel the pain.
The big question about the dinosaurs is, of course, What caused their extinction? Why were so many species unable to evolve in response to environmental changes? The most common explanation is that a very sudden event, like a meteor's impact, gave the dinosaurs too little time to evolve and provided smaller and more dynamic life forms with an opportunity to take over.
An analogous question for economists is whether the United States is capable of evolving out of its present excessive indebtedness. Or could the global economic environment change so drastically as to threaten, if not extinction, then at least decline relative to smaller, more dynamic economies?
When the National Debt clock in Times Square was turned on in 1989, the federal debt amounted to around $2.7 trillion. Eleven years later, on Sept. 7, 2000, the clock read: "Our national debt: $5,676,989,904,887. Your family share: $73,733." That's when the clock was turned off, because, in those innocent days, it seemed as if the $5.6 trillion debt was set to decline, perhaps to disappear altogether. On that same date, CNN reported, "Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore . . . outlined a plan that he says would eliminate the debt by 2012." The proposal was uncontroversial. Economic advisers to the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, were said to have "agreed with the principle of paying down the debt," but their candidate had "not committed to a specific date for eliminating it."
That should have set the alarm bells ringing. (And, in fact, the National Debt Clock started running again in 2002.)
Since becoming president, George Bush has presided over one of the steepest peacetime rises ever in the federal debt. The gross federal debt now exceeds $8.3 trillion. There are three reasons for the post-2000 increase: reduced revenue during the 2001 recession, generous tax cuts for higher income groups and increased expenditures not only on warfare abroad but also on welfare at home. And if projections from the Congressional Budget Office turn out to be correct, we are just a decade away from a $12.8 trillion debt — more than double what it was when Bush took office.
Big public debts are not always bad, to be sure. It could be argued that in his first term Bush wisely used fiscal policy to boost aggregate demand and counter the impact of the dot-com bust. Public borrowing also allows "tax smoothing" by spreading out over time the cost of big one-off expenses like wars, three of which the United States has fought since 1999.
On the other hand, by requiring larger interest payments, big public debts devour revenue that could be spent on other programs. They may crowd out private investment by pushing up long-term interest rates. They may also have a regressive distributional impact, transferring economic resources from taxpayers to bondholders or from future generations to the present generation.
It all depends how you measure the debt. If you exclude bonds and bills in the possession of government agencies and programs, like the Social Security trust fund, the debt actually held by private investors is less than $5 trillion. Economists commonly calculate the debt burden as a percentage of gross domestic product. Counting only the debt held by the public, that works out to around 38 percent of G.D.P., a major increase relative to 1981 but still modest compared with the years after World War II. What's more, the C.B.O. forecasts (albeit with the rosy assumption of annual growth close to 5 percent) that the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio will actually decline in the decade ahead, to perhaps as little as 34.5 percent — even if today's lax budgetary plans are adhered to.
The trouble is that the officially stated borrowings of the federal government are only one part of the U.S. debt problem. For it is not only the government's debt that has grown large of late. Ordinary American households have also gone on prodigious borrowing sprees.
In the past five years alone, the value of U.S. home-mortgage debt has increased by nearly $3 trillion. Not all of that borrowing went to pay for real estate, the traditional function of mortgages. In 2004, net mortgage borrowing not used for the purchase of new homes amounted to nearly $600 billion. The International Monetary Fund estimates that this kind of equity extraction has risen from less than 2 percent of household disposable income in the year 2000 to more than 9 percent in the third quarter of last year.
And let's not forget those other debts that families did not formerly run up. Consumer credit in the 1960's and 1970's averaged less than 13 percent of G.D.P. In the past 10 years it has climbed to around 18 percent.
Not only do Americans borrow as never before; they also save remarkably little. The impressive resilience of American consumer spending in the past 15 years has been based partly on a collapse in the personal savings rate from around 7.5 percent of income to below zero. The aggregate national savings rate, which includes the public sector and corporations, averaged 13 percent in the 1960's. Last year it was just 0.8 percent.
The trouble is that, for demographic reasons, Americans need to save more than this. According to the 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey, 6 in 10 American workers say they are saving for retirement, and just 4 in 10 say they have actually calculated how much they should be saving — many of them figure that they will simply work longer. According to survey data, the average worker plans to work until age 65. But it turns out that he or she actually ends up retiring at 62; indeed, about 4 in 10 workers end up leaving the work force earlier than planned.
This has grave implications for the federal budget. Already, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid consume nearly half of federal tax revenues. And that proportion is bound to rise, not only because the number of retirees is going up but also because benefits programs are out of control. Over the past four years, Medicare benefits per recipient grew 16 times as fast as the real wages of the workers paying for them through taxation.
In short, the federal government seems to have much larger unfinanced liabilities than official data imply. If you compare the present value of all projected future government expenditures, including debt-service payments, with the present value of all projected future government receipts, the gap is about $66 trillion, according to calculations by the economists Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters. That's almost eight times the size of the official gross federal debt.
American consumption has been the principal engine of economic growth in the world over the past decade. But the readiness of American households and politicians to borrow has an inevitable corollary: the United States has become the world's biggest debtor.
In almost every year since 1992, the gap between the amount of goods and services the United States exports and the amount it imports has grown wider. This year the current account deficit, which is largely a trade deficit, could rise as high as 7 percent of G.D.P., nearly double its peak in the mid-1980's. What results is a remarkable accumulation of foreign debt. Estimates of the net international investment position of the United States — the difference between the overseas assets owned by Americans and the American assets owned by foreigners — have declined from a modest positive balance of around 5 percent of G.D.P. in the mid-80's to a huge net debt of minus 20 percent today.
What this means is that foreigners are accumulating large claims on the future output of the United States. However the borrowed money is used, whether productively or not, a proportion of the future returns on U.S. investments will end up flowing abroad as dividends or interest payments.
Asian central banks in particular have been buying large quantities of dollars and dollar-denominated securities. Chinese purchases of U.S. bonds in 2005, for example, are estimated to have risen as high as 2 percent of our G.D.P., a very significant proportion of America's foreign borrowing. At first sight, the channeling of Chinese savings into American bonds seems bizarre. The average American has an income of about $40,000 a year and has, as we have seen, a personal savings rate of zero. The average Chinese earns around $1,500 per year but has personal savings of 23 percent of his income — and is lending a large chunk of these savings, via the People's Bank of China, to the average American. The conventional explanation for this strange transaction is that the Chinese authorities need to buy dollar-denominated bonds to prevent their own currency from appreciating relative to ours. The logic is that China needs a weak exchange rate to ensure that its exports continue to flow into the American market.
Of course, it is not only the Chinese who have been engaging in the accumulation of dollars and dollar-denominated securities. The Japanese have been nearly as active, as have other Asian economies. Middle Eastern oil producers have also been running large trade surpluses, thanks to high oil prices, and investing at least some of the proceeds in the United States.
As a result, there has been an immense rise in foreign ownership of American securities of all kinds, but especially government bonds. Foreign ownership of the U.S. federal debt passed the halfway mark in June 2004. About a third of corporate bonds are now in foreign hands, as is more than 13 percent of the U.S. stock market. One analyst has half-seriously calculated that at the current rate of foreign accumulation, the last U.S. Treasury held by an American will be purchased by the People's Bank of China on Feb. 9, 2012.
To those familiar with the Latin American debt crises of the 80's and 90's, there's a case to be made that the United States is on the road to becoming a Latin American country. While it is certainly true that our net external debt is now as large in relative terms as some Latin American debts have been in past crises, there's a difference. Latin American countries have generally had to borrow in the currency used by their creditors. A decline in the borrowing country's currency, say the peso, threatens to send its dollar-denominated debt skyrocketing in peso terms.
But the happy position of the United States is more like that of Britain in the aftermath of World War II, when a substantial part of its war debt was owed in sterling to current or former colonies. Because Britain borrowed in its own currency, it had control over the unit of account. As the pound slid from $4 to below $2 from the 40's to the 70's, its sterling liabilities were reduced by half in terms of the key postwar currency.
Could the dollar follow a similar downward path? It has happened before. Between March 1985 and April 1988, the dollar depreciated by more than 40 percent against the currencies of America's trading partners. As a fiscal strategy, dollar depreciation has much to recommend it. At a stroke, American exports would regain their competitiveness overseas and Asian imports would become more expensive, leading to at least some contraction — though not an elimination — of the trade deficit. Foreign creditors would take the hit, finding their dollar assets suddenly worth much less in terms of their own currencies.
So what's the catch? A sudden increase in the dollar price of American imports could stoke inflation in the United States. There is already some patchy evidence of an upturn in inflation. Whichever measure you use, prices are certainly rising at a faster rate now than they were two years ago, as are hourly earnings. As measured by the spread between conventional bonds and inflation-proof bonds, inflation expectations are also up slightly.
But is that really a catch? Not necessarily. Because higher inflation means that the real value of your debt ends up being reduced (in terms of the purchasing power of the amount that you owe) — provided, that is, that your debt is not adjustable-rate or index-linked.
Alas, those are two really serious caveats.
It's a pretty safe bet that if a dollar decline shows signs of boosting inflation, the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. The credibility of the new Fed chairman would be on the line. Even a federal-funds rate above 5 percent might seem too low. Bear in mind that the federal-funds rate (the overnight rate at which the Fed lends to the banking system) has been going up for two years, from its nadir of below 1 percent in June 2004. Now ask yourself, Who has been most affected by this monetary tightening?
Two important categories of debtor spring to mind. First, there are the households with adjustable-rate mortgages. More Americans have variable-rate mortgages than ever before, even if most existing mortgage rates remain fixed. Since March 2004, there has been a 59 percent increase in one-year adjustable-rate mortgages. But that just means that they have become more expensive for new borrowers. The key question is, When do existing A.R.M.'s reset? The answer: Soon.
According to calculations published by Barron's in February, over the next two years the monthly payments on about $600 billion of mortgages taken out by borrowers in the so-called subprime market (those with checkered or nonexistent credit histories) will increase by as much as 50 percent. This is because many A.R.M.'s have two-year teaser periods to entice borrowers. After that, the meaning of "adjustable" suddenly becomes (in this case, painfully) apparent.
To which you might respond by saying, Caveat emptor. If borrowers fail to read the small print or to anticipate higher rates, then more fool they. And no doubt in the subprime market there are many people who made one or both of those mistakes and will pay dearly for doing so.
Yet the surprising thing is that the second category of debtor vulnerable to higher short-term rates can scarcely plead ignorance or naïveté. For it is none other than the federal government itself.
The protracted decline of long-term interest rates since the 80's has been a boon for an indebted government. Since 1990, the cost of servicing the federal debt has actually declined from 3.2 percent of G.D.P. in 1990 to 1.5 percent in 2005, even as the absolute size of the debt has soared. But that decline has been achieved partly thanks to the term structure of the debt — that is, to the relatively short duration of the bonds issued by the Treasury, which has allowed the government to take maximum advantage of falling rates. At the end of fiscal year 2005, for example, fully a third of the federal debt had a maturity of less than one year, and the average maturity of the entire debt was just 57 months (down from 74 months at the end of 2000).
This was wonderful so long as interest rates were falling. But now that they have started going up, it creates a potential fiscal nightmare: big slices of the federal debt that have to be refinanced at higher market rates. And that creates a new source of budgetary red ink: rising interest payments. It turns out that George Bush has the biggest A.R.M. in the world.
The most important lesson to be drawn from the history of debt is this: It's not the absolute size of your borrowings that matters. It's not even the relative size in relation to your income. The crux is whether the interest payments you have to make are more or less than you can afford to pay. And that, in turn, is a function of whether or not the rate can move, whether or not your income can change and whether or not inflation can help you or hurt you. On this basis, both subprime American mortgage-holders and a distinctly subprime administration may find the months ahead more painful than they anticipated.
The dinosaurs, we conjecture, succumbed to global climate change. The American beast — call it debtlodocus — faces a comparable economic challenge. The global economic climate seems to be changing. We hear no more talk of deflation; we hear a lot about rising rates.
For America's giant, dinosaurlike economy — with its small, wealthy head; its big, fat middle; and its long low-income tail — there is a tried-and-tested response to a change in the weather. Dollar depreciation and inflation have saved the debtlodocus before. The assumption seems to be that they will do the trick again.
Yet this time may be different. For sinking like a velociraptor's fangs into the tail of the debtlodocus are interest-rate hikes that may outpace and check any increase in inflation. And no one knows when and how violently the leviathan may react to this slowly discernible pain.
It is too soon to speak of extinction, of course. But one obvious inference to be drawn from the British experience of an indebted empire and a sliding currency, as well as from the history of the diplodocus, is that eternal life is not on offer.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard University and the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." His new book, "The War of the World," will be published in September.
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The fact that there was a need for this article is sad. We have never evolved a genuine "living authentically" rhythm of life here in America. It is SO focused on "work" that "life" has always taken a back seat. Enjoy.
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June 8, 2006
A Life Between Jobs
By ANNA BAHNEY
TAYLOR AIKIN'S new job is across the street from his current one, but he loves to tell people he'll be taking the long way getting there.
Next Wednesday, on his last day as a senior designer at a Manhattan architecture firm, he will roll out of work early on his 2006 Ducati Monster S2R 1000 motorcycle and not stop until he reaches the Virginia state line. Before starting his new position three and a half weeks later, he'll cruise through the South, head to the Rocky Mountains and return across the Great Plains.
Mr. Aikin, 28, who has been with his firm for three years, said this is the first time he is taking a real vacation.
"Talking to the guys who take care of my bike," Mr. Aikin said, "they're jealous, because you can really only do this when you quit your job."
Many young people in the workplace are finding that quitting their job is becoming the satisfying new alternative to the standard, entry-level benefit for vacation. As they found out, the two weeks allowed to most young employees is barely enough time to visit their parents for Christmas, go to a friend's wedding and take a long weekend.
"Normal life," Mr. Aikin said, "maintaining relationships with people who don't live nearby, requires at least two weeks of your life a year."
For others like him, the solution is simple: Stop jockeying with senior employees for the prime vacation weeks. Quit and start again — but first, get away.
"The transition between jobs is just about me," Mr. Aikin said. "It is a trip that I've wanted to do, not something that is going to benefit a bunch of people."
Generations before them, studies have shown, valued tenure and career advancement. But this group sees the chutes in the world as interesting as the ladders.
There are no recent studies of the employment patterns of Generations X and Y by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it reports that even those born at the tail end of the baby boom held an average of 10.2 jobs between age 18 and 38, from 1978 to 2002. A 2004 study by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group, polled Generation Y employees and found they were significantly more likely to leave their job than employees who were their comparable ages in 1977 — 70 percent, compared with 52 percent.
Some use quitting as an opportunity for a good, long visit back home, or to spend time with a dying grandparent. Others want the time to embark on real vacations or adventures.
And what's wrong with taking all that ambition and putting it into a bus trip through India? A climb up Kilimanjaro? A month studying Russian in Moscow?
The trend, career experts said, is an outgrowth of today's nomadic job culture, as well as an attitude among many young people open to adventure and big experiences — and, yes, a bit of indulgence.
Why not walk away when you are young, energetic and have the opportunity to camp at the Grand Canyon? Or to visit all the national parks?
That was Jesse Keller's big ambition.
After 10 years as a software engineer for a company in San Diego, Mr. Keller, 32, was ready for a break. He rarely used all of his vacation days. But last year he quit to pursue his goal: to visit all 58 national parks.
On the phone from Montana after crossing off Grand Teton National Park (No. 38), he said there is more than whim behind his expedition.
"As the retirement age pushes farther back and the finances for that time of life are less and less certain, it was almost unconscionable to not take advantage of the opportunity to travel now when I had the money and the health," he said.
He is not afraid of finding another job — believing his skills are in demand — and he is not tied down to any location. What worries him more is keeping from burning out again.
"The trick is finding a job that has the balance built in so that I don't have to go off on a grand adventure to recover from work," he said.
There are some risks to dropping out, career counselors said.
"Gaps in the résumé are still a red flag," said Carol R. Anderson, director of career development and placement at Milano the New School for Management and Urban Policy. But for those who are not following rigid career paths, "the cross-cultural competency that is best gained from living in a different country," for instance, can be a résumé builder, she said.
Employers are more or less at the mercy of those alternative ambitions.
"Gen-X'ers have demographics working for them: there aren't a lot of them," said Judith Gerberg, who has run her own career counseling company in Manhattan since 1985. That's particularly true as baby boomers begin to retire.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Gerberg said, young people "are used to creating wonderful opportunities for themselves."
A study done by the Society for Human Resource Management found that when human resource professionals were asked to select character traits from a list to describe age groups, baby boomers were characterized as "results driven," and "plan to stay with the organization over the long term." Generation X, though, was described as "like informality," and "seeking work/life balance."
So younger professionals, unlike older workers, are more willing to chuck it all away whenever things get to be too much, optimistic that they'll be able to start over.
Valerie Karasz, 33, had been working as a bankruptcy lawyer in New York for three years when she quit last November. After spending a leisurely holiday with family in Washington and Florida, she went to a wedding in New Zealand, then spent four months traveling in Australia, Southeast Asia and central Europe.
She started a new job at a law firm doing compliance work in the alcoholic beverage industry last Monday.
"I'm excited to go back to work and start in this new industry," she said. "I feel cleansed."
And maybe that's what the younger generation gets that their parents didn't: There's always another job. Having grown up in an era of relative prosperity and upward mobility, it's easy to come to that conclusion.
"Less employer loyalty is a product of this age group — watching their parents' lives turned upside down by layoffs, downsizings, plant closings," Ms. Anderson of the New School said. "The children of these parents understand that the 'employment contract' that existed only from the end of World War II has been broken."
So quitting is not such a big deal, as surveys show. While overall worker loyalty has improved slightly in recent years, young people are still highly mobile. According to a 2005 survey by Walker Information, which conducts research on customer and employee loyalty, 50 percent of employees 18 to 24, and 39 percent of employees 25 to 29, reported having a neutral or negative attitude about the employer and did not plan to stay. The study terms this group "high risk."
"The younger group weren't always negative about the company, they may be neutral, but it was clear that they didn't plan to stay for the next two years," said Chris Woolard a research consultant at Walker. "They weren't all that attached to the company and they don't really plan to stick around."
Kimberly Thrush, 35, never thought she was the type to quit and run. But when it all got to be too constricting, she left her job in Japan as a vice president at a large American bank, after working in banking for 13 years, and headed home.
"I am the type of person who would never think of quitting a job without having one to go to," she said, expressing misgivings about finding her next job. In the meantime, she has ambitious plans. "I'm going to look for travel specials and go somewhere different," she said. "Maybe Africa."
J. R. Briggs and his wife, Megan, had six weeks off between jobs. Mr. Briggs, 27, a nondenominational evangelical pastor and Mrs. Briggs, 26, a ministry coordinator and a counselor, recently left their posts at a 5,000-member church in Colorado Springs. Both have jobs at a church in suburban Philadelphia. But before they started last week, they visited family members in Chicago and Ann Arbor, Mich., and also spent 10 days in Costa Rica.
"To be unemployed for six weeks is a healthy thing to help you say 'I am not defined by what I do,' " he said. "It helps to understand who I am, who my wife is, and that our identity is more important than anything we do."
Todd Harvey, 32, found it almost impossible to take vacation time from his job caring for the homeless as director of housing development at a faith-based nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. He finally quit last July and traveled the country until he stumbled upon the Appalachian Trail and started walking all 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine with his dog, Soren Kierkegaard.
By renting out a duplex he owns in California, he is able to finance his backpacking adventure until he needs to report for graduate school in San Francisco on Aug. 28.
Others sock away money for months or give up expensive apartments so they can, at least temporarily, leave their paycheck behind.
In the end, timing is everything.
"Why now when I'm 28?" said Mr. Aikin, the architect, about his coming motorcycle trip. "Retirement is too far away. And I was too broke in college."
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Can't get more basic than deciding what kind of skillet in which to cook food. That's why i loved reading the results of this test. I have loved using plain old cast iron for decades now and Le Creuset has long been a fav of mine as well When i could afford it). Enjoy.
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June 7, 2006
In Search of a Pan That Lets Cooks Forget About Teflon
By MARIAN BURROS
LIKE many home cooks, I have sent my nonstick skillets to the moldy recesses of my basement, where they have joined the 1950's aluminum pots and the Dru casseroles (Dutch enamel coated cast iron, now eBay collectibles).
What led to this step were unsettling reports that an overheated Teflon-coated pan may release toxic gases. DuPont, the manufacturer of Teflon, says that its pans are safe and that their surfaces won't decompose, possibly releasing the gas, until the pan's temperature reaches 680 degrees. Some scientists say that an empty pan left on a burner set on high reaches 700 degrees in as little as three minutes. All pans with nonstick coatings are subject to the same problems, according to the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization.
I banished the skillets last year and spent months dithering over what to buy while making do with the pans I had left: a large Revere Ware skillet with a concave bottom; a small, warped hand-me-down from my mother; and a medium All-Clad in fine shape.
A few passes at online pot sellers made matters worse: there are too many choices. Finally, after consulting the ratings from Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated and calling several experts, I decided to do a test of my own, using the most highly recommended pans, along with a few of my own choices.
While Teflon lets manufacturers make inexpensive pans usable, uncoated cheap pans have hot spots, so cheaper pans — other than cast iron — were never considered.
The most important characteristic was how close the pans came to having the nonstick qualities people love about Teflon. Can they sauté and brown, even without oil? Almost as important, how easy are they to clean?
There were eight pans in the test, most of them 12 inches in diameter: All-Clad with an aluminum core, All-Clad with a copper core, Bourgeat copper; De Buyer carbon steel; Calphalon anodized aluminum; seasoned and unseasoned Lodge cast iron and Le Creuset enameled cast iron.
All-Clad was one of the top choices of most experts, but did not do well in my tests because sometimes food stuck to the pans and cleaning them was difficult. Top chefs with whom I spoke agreed. "All of my All-Clad sauté pans have brown spots on the sides and outside, too," said Scott Conant of L'Impero and Alto. "And eggs always stick."
That's the nature of stainless steel, said Harold McGee, author of "On Food and Cooking" (Scribner, 2004) and the scientist who can explain everything that happens in the kitchen. "Things stick to stainless," he said, "and polymerized oil is one of them."
For the two sets of tests, I cooked 6 dozen eggs; 24 pounds of chicken breasts with and without skin; 10 pounds of onions; and 10 pounds of potatoes. In one set of tests, pans were coated with one tablespoon of oil; in the other just a thin film of oil was applied with waxed paper. All the pans were preheated, the oil added and allowed to get hot enough to ripple; the food had lost its refrigerator chill.
With a tablespoon of oil, all of the pans cooked well and evenly. The chicken was nicely browned, the potatoes were crisp, the onions were meltingly sweet and the eggs were nicely done. The difference between cooking in All-Clad with copper and with aluminum is not significant enough for most cooks to make the more expensive copper pan worth the higher price. The Bourgeat copper pan, of course, cooked quickly and evenly, too, but the differences are too subtle in most situations to be worth the extra money.
But with just a film of oil, neither the All-Clad nor the Bourgeat pans cooked chicken or onions without sticking badly. But then, they don't claim to be nonstick.
The remaining pans cooked well with just a film of oil.
The Le Creuset pan and the two cast-iron pans produced amazing results. Nothing stuck, including the eggs, and it was quite easy to roll up omelets. There were almost no eggs to scrape up. I don't recommend browning potatoes or onions with a film of oil because they won't have much flavor, but these pans could do it.
The chicken, on the other hand, was moist and browned beautifully, a result you wouldn't get with Teflon-coated pans.
Calphalon did not do as well with just a film of oil: the chicken was nicely browned, but an awful lot of scrambled eggs stayed in the pan.
The carbon steel, an old workhorse that wins the prize for ugly duckling, cooked all the foods, with the exception of the eggs, quite well. Like the Calphalon, this pan had a lot of scrambled egg left in it, and one of the sunny-side-up eggs broke when it was being lifted out of the pan.
The only other difference was that the cast-iron pans, with or without enamel, took longer to heat up and cool down.
But bigger differences became clear when it was time for cleaning, the kitchen job I like least. The All-Clad, even more so than Bourgeat, required serious scrubbing to remove those pesky little brown spots that form when oil leaps up the sides of the pan and sticks. And food does stick to All-Clad sometimes, requiring removal by cleanser and elbow grease.
Cleaning the cast iron, Le Creuset and carbon steel was very easy. Food that clings to them can be easily scrubbed away with a stiff brush or, in the case of Le Creuset, soaked off. (Soap is not recommended for cast iron and carbon steel, but it can be used on the Le Creuset and the Calphalon.)
Unlike the Calphalon and carbon steel, the cast-iron and enameled pans are heavy. The handles get hot, so pot holders must be used.
The carbon steel and the untreated cast iron must be seasoned, though the process is simple. They must be dried thoroughly and lightly oiled or they will rust.
Cooking certain acidic foods like tomatoes in cast iron changes the taste and color, but it does add iron to the diet.
After all the tests, there was one pan I fell for: Le Creuset. It is easy to clean, and because of its enamel finish, acidic foods can be cooked without changes to color or taste. The cast iron pans were a very close second.
I recommend Le Creuset pans with a matte black enamel interior, not treated with any Teflon-like substance. (The company makes its black and white interior enamel from the same material, and says the black is fired at a higher temperature and withstands higher cooking temperatures.)
David Bouley of Bouley and Danube said he uses Le Creuset in his country house because "it is the most reliable."
For cooking fish, one of the most delicate of foods, Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin uses cast iron, as does Michel Richard of Citronelle in Washington. "We stopped using Teflon a long time ago," he said. "The skin started coming off, and I didn't want to give you a steak with a skin coating."
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Several close friends have died of skin cancer caused by NOT following the following precautions. Be good to yourself and those who love you: follow these rules:
The New York Times
June 6, 2006
Personal Health
Do Your Skin a Favor: Protect It in Summer
By JANE E. BRODY
With the outdoor season in full swing across the Northern Hemisphere, everyone's thoughts should turn to sun protection. That means you, whether you have light or dark skin, have blue or brown-black eyes, always sit in the shade, or often play or bask in the sun.
True, sunshine restores the soul, fosters the formation of vitamin D and helps plants grow. But no one is safe from its damaging ultraviolet rays. Getting a tan or using a tanning product that dyes the skin temporarily offers minimal protection against sun damage.
And true, 80 percent of UV damage from sun exposure occurred in childhood and adolescence, when we older folks knew nothing about sunscreen, sometimes suffered scorching sunburns, or lay in the sun slathered in oils to enhance tanning. But at every age, there are steps to take now that can minimize the harm done decades ago and prevent new problems.
Everyone should be replacing misinformation with facts about the effectiveness of sunscreens and sun-protective clothing, and then putting those facts to proper use.
The Right Priorities
How important is this? Very. More than a million cases of basal cell or squamous cell cancers are diagnosed annually in the United States. And while most of these are highly curable, they typically occur on exposed areas of the body — face, neck, arms and hands — and their treatment can leave noticeable scars or whitish spots.
Also, another form of skin cancer, melanoma, sometimes related to sun damage, is not so curable. About 62,000 cases of melanoma will be diagnosed this year, and more than 7,900 people will die of this cancer, which has been increasing in incidence by about 3 percent a year since 1980.
More myths than facts abound about sunscreens. And more people misuse them than use them properly.
First, there is no evidence that the use of sunscreen increases the incidence of skin cancer. Nor is there evidence that regular use of sunscreens can cause internal damage. These are surface agents only; they don't get inside cells or penetrate deep into the skin.
True, sunscreens reduce the body's ability to form vitamin D. About 15 minutes of sun a day in summer on unprotected face and arms can result in a year's supply in people under 65. But at any age, this essential nutrient is more safely obtained from foods and vitamin supplements.
Most sunscreens protect against both ultraviolet B radiation, which causes sunburns, and ultraviolet A radiation, which ages the skin. Both types have been implicated in skin cancer. But the S.P.F. rating (for sun protection factor) relates only to UVB exposure.
If a person who would get sunburned without protection in 20 minutes uses a product with an S.P.F. of 10, that burn should not occur until spending 200 minutes in the sun, assuming the sunscreen is slathered on properly.
What is proper slathering? The use of one ounce of a product on an average body wearing an average bathing suit. However, most people use less than half this amount, which would significantly reduce the protection factor.
Dermatologists recommend the routine daily use of a sunscreen with an S.P.F. rating of 15 or higher on all exposed areas — whether the day is sunny or cloudy and skin is light or dark. UV radiation readily penetrates cloud cover.
Those with fair skin and anyone who has already had skin cancer should use a sunscreen with a protection factor of at least 30, which blocks more than 97 percent of the sun's rays. The higher the number, the better; the added protection is real but very small.
The Right Stuff
But remember, the protection factor is only part of the story. A product with an S.P.F. of 30 may have a UVA protection rating of only 2. Your sunscreen should be a broad-spectrum one that also blocks UVA radiation. Two ingredients now used in "complete" sunscreens in cosmetically acceptable micronized forms are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.
Two other agents that offer broad-spectrum protection, Mexoryl and Tinosorb, help to stabilize UVA protection during prolonged exposures. They are available in Canada and Europe but have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration here.
Neutrogena, however, has a new product on the American market, Ultra Sheer, with an S.P.F. of 55, that is said to do the job of Mexoryl. It is also more affordable and is cosmetically comfortable. The company uses a patented Helioplex technology to stabilize two UV blockers, avobenzone and oxybenzone.
Because sunscreens must react with the surface of the skin to be effective, they should be applied 15 to 30 minutes before going out in the sun. Most products should be reapplied every two hours (one application of Ultra Sheer is supposed to remain effective for six hours or longer).
Swimmers and those performing intense physical activity should use a water-resistant or very water-resistant sunscreen. But all sunscreens, whether water-resistant or not, should be reapplied after swimming or profuse sweating.
And don't forget to use enough: one ounce, the amount in a shot glass, should be used to cover exposed skin in summer.
Sunscreens should be used by everyone over the age of 6 months. Younger infants should be kept out of the sun at all times; use sunscreen on them only in rare situations when sun exposure is unavoidable.
The Right Clothes
As with sunscreens, there are mistaken beliefs about clothing. Most summer clothing offers minimal protection, according to Dr. Susan H. Weinkle and Harriet Lin Hall, writing in The Skin Cancer Foundation Journal. A wet T-shirt on a swimmer provides at best an S.P.F. of 3; dry, the shirt offers on average a factor of 7.
Most protective are tightly woven fabrics in dark colors — not your usual summer attire. A green cotton T-shirt, for example, may have a protection factor of 10, while a long-sleeved dark denim shirt has a factor estimated at 1,700.
But there are now excellent clothing options for sun-sensitive people, if they can afford them. Several companies now make shirts, pants, hats and other garments from sun-protective fabrics that are lightweight and breathe and are reasonably comfortable to wear in hot weather.
Sun Precautions was the innovator, with its Solumbra line, which blocks more than 97 percent of UVA and UVB. A Solumbra shirt and hat are ideal for boaters and hikers. The garments are sold in stores or through the company's catalog (1-800-882-7860). They retain their protective properties through at least 100 washings.
Another less expensive option is to wash your clothes with SunGuard, a product produced by Rit that treats fabric with Tinosorb and offers 96 percent UV protection. One treatment retains its protective value through about 20 washings.
In addition to skin, eyes should be protected against UV damage. You need not spend very much to get sunglasses with 100 percent UV protection in a wraparound style. And not just for adults. Children need them, too.
Of course, the best option is to keep your entire body covered with clothing and wear a large-brimmed hat and sunglasses when out in the sun. This is not exactly standard beach attire, leaving the option of a generous coating of high-S.P.F. sunscreen and use of a beach umbrella.
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