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Letter: Philanthropy and Parks

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 28 Februari 2013 | 13.25

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Re "In Era of Big Gifts, Overlooked Parks Groups Ask: What About Us?" (news article, Feb. 18):

The Central Park Conservancy is grateful to its donors, both large and small, who support parkwide improvements and help sustain Central Park's role well into the future.

But the conservancy was not the recipient of such generous gifts when it was founded in 1980. In the first decade of our stewardship, acquiring private donations was a challenge. Our earliest successes were due largely to low-cost changes in park maintenance.

By 1985, we had established a horticulture intern program, the successful and long-term maintenance of New York City-financed restoration projects like the Maine Monument and Bethesda Terrace, a turf crew dedicated to Sheep Meadow and a graffiti removal team. These developments cost us little more than ingenuity, planning and dedication.

Today, philanthropists support not just Central Park but the conservancy's 32-year track record. Their investment in the conservancy also supports the economic engine of the city, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and New Yorkers' quality of life.

The conservancy shares the value of its expertise by helping maintain more than a dozen parks and public spaces in Manhattan beyond Central Park and consulting with other nonprofits and governments that seek our advice.

Central Park's role — economic, cultural and recreational — is special. But for every park that affects the public's quality of life, there can be a proportionately sized friends' group responsible for leveraging the public's dedication — whether through volunteerism or donations — and introducing small management changes that have a big effect. And just as we have been since 1980, the conservancy is here to help.

DOUGLAS BLONSKY
President and Chief Executive
Central Park Conservancy
New York, Feb. 21, 2013


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Letters: Nearing D-Day on the Budget Cuts

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To the Editor:

Your Feb. 25 editorial "Defense and the Sequester" rightly likens the abrupt and indiscriminate budget cuts known as the sequester to a "political machete," but wrongly concludes that the Pentagon can easily absorb these cuts with "prudence and good management."

We at the Defense Department are ready to implement the sequester and will do everything possible under this deliberately restrictive law to mitigate its devastating effects on national security. We also recognize that the Defense Department should help put our nation's fiscal house in order; that is why we have begun to cut $487 billion in defense spending over 10 years.

We also know we deserve only the budget we need, not the budget we once had. That need should be constantly reassessed. As former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and his predecessor, Robert M. Gates, have repeatedly said, we need to get better value for every defense dollar we're given.

But good management is undermined by sequestration and by something that your editorial does not mention but that is as much of a problem — the fact that we have no new appropriations bill and are living under last year's law. These two factors together lead to dangerous absurdities like having to curtail soldiers' training, ships' sailing and airplanes' flying. Our military will therefore not be fully ready to meet contingencies other than Afghanistan.

A strategic approach to defense spending is being seriously compromised by gridlock in Washington. That is why we urgently need Congress to pass a balanced deficit reduction package that President Obama can sign, and appropriations bills for the Defense Department and all federal agencies.

Our nation's security depends on it.

ASHTON B. CARTER
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Washington, Feb. 27, 2013

To the Editor:

I was assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis from 1970 to 1973. My staff and I were responsible for the defense planning, programming and budgeting system.

I am convinced that, given that staff and responsibility today, we could design a defense program that would ensure our capability to provide the forces needed to meet the challenges and objectives in the next decade, while reducing the budget to the levels called for by the sequester.

The keys would be to think through anew and carefully what those objectives and challenges may be, and the capabilities required to meet them, and to determine the extent to which we can plan to share with our allies the responsibility for providing those capabilities. Then we would need to develop the American share and work with our allies to see the complementary joint shares developed.

GARDINER L. TUCKER
Shelton, Conn., Feb. 25, 2013

To the Editor:

I read with interest your reasonable analysis of how "with prudence and good management," the Defense Department could absorb the cuts in the sequester. But the next day, you seemed to say there was no way to avoid significant damage if domestic cuts took effect ("The States Get the Bad News," editorial, Feb. 26).

Isn't "prudence and good management" possible across the board?

JIM FAIX
Menlo Park, Calif., Feb. 26, 2013


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Letter: Scribblings in the Orchestra Pit

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To the Editor:

Re "Philharmonic Adds More Archives on the Web" (Arts, Briefly item, Feb. 22):

The scribbling of musicians in their orchestra parts are mostly about cues, unexpected tempo changes and interpretive instructions from various conductors that are not in the printed score.

Yet I have noted that while my younger colleagues in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra confined their orchestral graffiti mostly to musical matters, the older musicians (like me) were more concerned with physical needs and a relentless struggle against boredom, particularly when playing repeated eighth notes in a bel canto opera one has played a hundred times.

Consequently, we old-timers meticulously penned in the number of minutes of each act.

Moreover, during long rests (as in Wagner's "Ring"), both young and old musicians often resorted to doodling, cartooning and (forgive me, Maestro Levine!) caricatures of singers and conductors that were not always flattering.

LES DREYER
New York, Feb. 22, 2013

The writer is a retired violinist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.


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Opinionator: How Much Does Race Still Matter?

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Tags:

Democratic Party, Elections, Governors, Elections, House of Representatives, Obama, Barack, Presidential Election of 2008, Presidential Election of 2012, Race and Ethnicity, Republican Party

Earlier this month, I wrote about research by social scientists at Brown and the University of Michigan who reported that despite the fact that President Obama won a higher percentage of the white vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since 1976, racial resentment had increased during Obama's first term.

Over the past three weeks, a number of experts in race relations have brought contrary findings to my attention.

Seth K. Goldman and Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania find that the Obama 2008 campaign, in and of itself, had a strong, positive impact on racial attitudes. The two have co-written a book, "The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes," which will be released later this year by the Russell Sage Foundation.

In October 2012, Goldman published a closely related paper in Public Opinion Quarterly arguing "that the Obama campaign produced a significant and substantive decline in white racial prejudice." Goldman compared the relatively sharp decline in prejudice during the last six months of the 2008 Obama campaign with the much slower reduction in prejudice over the previous 20 years, as measured by public opinion data from the American National Election Studies, the General Social Survey and the National Annenberg Election Study.

Goldman points out that "the 'Obama Effect' was dramatic, reducing racial prejudice by a rate between 5 and 14 times faster than the secular [long-term] trend of decline in prejudice over the previous two decades." He provided Fig.1:

Standardized Change in White Racial Prejudice per 6-Month Period
Historically (1990–2008) and during the 2008 Campaign (July 2008–January 2009)

To measure levels of prejudice, Goldman used questions from the three surveys, asking whites to rate

whites and blacks on three scales, ranging from hardworking to lazy, intelligent to unintelligent, and trustworthy to untrustworthy.

The higher the score, the higher the level of prejudice.

The enormous television exposure of the public to Obama, both on news shows and in campaign commercials, was crucial to the decline in racial prejudice during the 2008 campaign, according to Goldman:

Throughout the campaign, innumerable images of Obama and his family contradicted negative racial stereotypes and changed the balance of black exemplars in mass media in a positive direction, thus causing reductions in prejudice among political television viewers.

It did not matter, Goldman found, whether stories about the Obama campaign appeared on conservative or liberal television shows; both Republican and Democratic commercials featuring Obama had a prejudice-diminishing effect:

even exposure to conservative programs that criticized Obama's politics reduced prejudice because these programs nonetheless portrayed him as countering negative racial stereotypes.

Fig. 2 shows a sharp decline in prejudice among whites living in the 25 most contested states where the airwaves were saturated with political ads, compared with the much more modest changes in states that were not contested and thus not heavily advertised in:

Change in White Racial Prejudice in the Top and Bottom 25 States in Television Advertising Spending by the Obama Campaign.

Goldman reports that

racial prejudice declined to a greater extent among McCain supporters, Republicans, and conservatives" than among Obama supporters, Democrats, and liberals "because exposure to a counter-stereotypical black exemplar should be most informative and surprising for those with more negative preexisting images of blacks. On the other hand, counter-stereotypical black exemplars should not provide much new information for those with already low levels of prejudice.

A separate study by the political scientists Susan Welch, of Penn State, and the late Lee Sigelman, of George Washington University, "The 'Obama Effect' and White Racial Attitudes," used data from the A.N.E.S. survey to measure racial prejudice and found a steady decline in prejudice beginning in 1992, when poll questions on the topic were first asked:

Obama's emergence as an important figure in American politics, his candidacy, and his election did seem to accelerate that trend (as well as reflect it). Thus, Obama's pursuit of and election to the nation's highest office can be seen as one of those historical events — such as World War II, the civil rights movement, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that move mass public opinion in a more egalitarian direction.

Welch and Sigelman write that

on one hand, the Obama campaign enhanced the salience of race in general. On the other, his own characteristics in particular — his obvious intelligence, discipline, and interpersonal appeal — were made salient topics for media and public discussion.

They also note that

Obama is the type of black political leader who has been historically most popular among whites — one who was not part of the civil rights movement, who accommodates rather than confronts, and who maintains close personal and political ties to whites.

Welch and Sigelman find the strongest shifts in a positive direction to be among the youngest and oldest voters. The youngest voters, they argue, have fewer "deeply ingrained negative racial stereotypes" than older voters and their "views of African Americans in general were open to being shaped by the first 'new' national political leader that they encountered."

Welch and Sigelman suggest two possible factors to explain the diminution of bias among the oldest and historically most prejudiced voters. First,

because Obama so clearly defied the racial stereotypes that had prevailed when older whites were growing up, he directly challenged their prejudices and caused many of them to rethink their image of blacks in general.

Second,

Mortality is selective on education and cognitive functioning as well as on health. Thus, it may be selective on intolerance, directly or indirectly, because tolerance is related to education and cognitive functioning. If that were so, the older generation would become more tolerant as the number of its members shrinks.

Fig. 3 gives five age cohorts of whites and their increasingly positive views of black Americans from 1992 to 2008 — the youngest, those who came of voting age during the presidencies of either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, and the oldest, who first voted before the civil rights movement gained momentum and who had attained the age of at least 73 by 2008. Before the Obama campaign, older voters revealed more racial bias than other age groups. Those differences disappeared altogether by 2008 in terms of evaluating the work ethic of blacks and whites:

The findings of Goldman and Mutz, taken together with those of Welch and Sigelman, stand in contrast to the two studies I reported on Feb. 6. Michael Tesler of Brown and David Sears of U.C.L.A. (whose work I discussed) found that "racial resentment" became a stronger predictor of voters' negative assessments of the Democratic Party and of their likelihood of switching parties after Obama became the nominee than had been true in previous years. "Indeed," Tesler and Sears wrote,

the effect of these attitudes on both general election vote preference in 2008 and presidential approval in April 2009 were considerably greater than they had been at any other time in the preceding decades.

I called Tesler up to ask him to ask him how his findings jibed with Goldman's demonstration of declining prejudice. He said that Goldman's work found that "the effects were very small." Tesler remains convinced that since Obama emerged as the Democratic nominee in the summer of 2008, "all racial measures are increasing in importance" and that divisions between blacks and whites are increasing. He does not hold back. "Obama," he told me, "has had a negative effect on racial polarization."

As I noted on Feb. 6, Josh Pasek of the University of Michigan, Jon A. Krosnick of Stanford, and Trevor Tompson, the director of the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, have also produced research finding that from 2008 to 2012 there was a substantial increase in "explicit anti-black attitudes."

The difference between these conclusions and those of Goldman and Welch may rest upon the differently phrased survey questions on which they base their conclusions.

Goldman tallied survey responses to a battery of six questions from the A.N.E.S., G.S.S., and N.A.E.S. asking whites to rate both whites and blacks "on dimensions ranging from hardworking to lazy, intelligent to unintelligent, and trustworthy to untrustworthy."

Tesler, as I mentioned earlier, used a scale

constructed from how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with the following assertions: 1) Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. 2) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. 3) Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. 4) It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.

The Tesler approach, which is deployed by a number of other scholars, has produced a contentious, and often bitter, dispute between warring camps within academia.

The leading critics of the Tesler approach are Edward Carmines, a political scientist at the University of Indiana, and Paul Sniderman, a highly respected political scientist at Stanford. Together with Beth Easter, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, they contend in a 2011 article, "On the Meaning, Measurement, and Implications of Racial Resentment" that "rather than being a measure of racism, racial resentment measures primarily racial policy attitudes." They make the case that Tesler is not measuring racism, but is instead essentially "asking respondents whether blacks need, require, or are entitled to help and assistance."

If that is the case, Carmines and his colleagues argue, the questions used by Tesler are not just tapping into attitudes toward African-Americans, but are eliciting race-blind conservative support for self-reliance over dependence on government.

Obama's 2008 and 2012 victories lend weight to the optimistic assessments of Goldman and his collaborators. Tesler and Pasek to the contrary, there appears to be a far greater consensus, not only among political scientists but among strategists, candidates and the electorate at large, that race prejudice is in decline.

Welch and Sigelman write:

Americans' racial attitudes have been driven by both demographic changes and specific events and trends. In most cases, these events and trends have moved opinions rather gradually in a more positive direction, but in some arenas, the shift has been minimal or even retrograde.

They go on to add that

the gradual growth of the black middle class, the increase in the number of elected black officials at all levels of government, the growing presence of African Americans in prominent positions in business and the arts, and the rise in the political and economic prominence of members of other ethnic groups along with women of various races and ethnicities all have presumably propelled and reinforced the growth of more favorable attitudes toward African Americans.

Are the Tesler and Goldman findings irreconcilable? Both are based on changing responses to different sets of poll questions. Race prejudice can and does decline, as documented by Goldman and Welch, while the salience of racial issues can increase, as shown by Tesler and Sears. Obama's candidacy inevitably brought race to the forefront, and the intense media focus on Obama and his family as "positive exemplars" forced many Americans to re-evaluate negative stereotypes.

The gains in 2008 were not irreversible, however. Goldman's more recent research shows that with the cessation of Obama's prominence in campaign advertisements, the end of the presidential election news cycle, and with the lowered profile of Michelle Obama and their two daughters, by the 2010 midterms, prejudice had shifted back to pre-2008 levels.

As readers will recall, Republicans not only wrested back control of the House in 2010, but elected majorities in 54 state legislative chambers, the highest number since 1952, and won key gubernatorial contests in pivotal states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida.

While prejudice continues its decline at varying rates of speed, the more pressing question becomes: what will happen as Americans of all races adjust to the fact that Hispanics have displaced African-Americans as the nation's dominant minority, and now outnumber blacks 50.5 million to 37.7 million?

The United States faces the ascendance of racial and ethnic minorities when the political response to rising levels of debt is forcing adoption of austerity policies at every level of government. One dominant issue in the coming years will be the competition between urban blacks, Hispanics and whites over increasingly scarce government resources. These conflicts will concern not only attitudes but fundamentals: who gets medical care and who does not; which children go to quality schools and which do not; who has food security and who does not.

Domestic racial and ethnic conflict, in turn, could well be subordinated to transnational turmoil as America's pre-eminence declines and as global competition for markets, for food, for energy, for high-tech professionals, for arable land and for sanctuaries from climate change intensify.

How salient is race? I would say the ability of the United States to go from legal segregation a half century ago to the election of a black president suggests there is enormous elasticity in the American political system, and that the country has the capacity to deal with what it now faces, both inside and outside its borders.


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Opinionator: It's the Sugar, Folks

Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it's fast becoming clear that it's the major one.

A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population's food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.

In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn't cause diabetes: sugar does.

The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study's authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, "You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one."

The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding "Bradford Hill" criteria for what's called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that's available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don't start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).

The key point in the article is this: "Each 150 kilocalories/person/day increase in total calorie availability related to a 0.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence (not significant), whereas a 150 kilocalories/person/day rise in sugar availability (one 12-ounce can of soft drink) was associated with a 1.1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence." Thus: for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country's food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent. (The study found no significant difference in results between those countries that rely more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup and those that rely primarily on cane sugar.)

This is as good (or bad) as it gets, the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see. (To prove "scientific" causality you'd have to completely control the diets of thousands of people for decades. It's as technically impossible as "proving" climate change or football-related head injuries or, for that matter, tobacco-caused cancers.) And just as tobacco companies fought, ignored, lied and obfuscated in the '60s (and, indeed, through the '90s), the pushers of sugar will do the same now.

But as Lustig says, "This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it's time to do something about it."

The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the "sweet" molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the "generally recognized as safe" list, because that's what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply.

On another front, two weeks ago a coalition of scientists and health advocates led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the F.D.A. to both set safe limits for sugar consumption and acknowledge that added sugars, rather than lingering on the "safe" list, should be declared unsafe at the levels at which they're typically consumed. (The F.D.A. has not yet responded to the petition.)

Allow me to summarize a couple of things that the PLoS One study clarifies. Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.

And as Lustig lucidly wrote in "Fat Chance," his compelling 2012 book that looked at the causes of our diet-induced health crisis, it's become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it's metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of "normal" weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars. This explains why there's little argument from scientific quarters about the "obesity won't kill you" studies; technically, they're correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.

The take-away: it isn't simply overeating that can make you sick; it's overeating sugar. We finally have the proof we need for a verdict: sugar is toxic.


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Letters: Should Social Security and Medicare Be Means-Tested?

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 27 Februari 2013 | 13.25

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Re "Old and Rich? Less Help for You" (Op-Ed, Feb. 20):

Yuval Levin has it exactly backward; means-testing Social Security and Medicare is the worst possible plan.

Social Security is our most successful antipoverty program, more successful than any welfare grants. Medicare is our most successful medical care program, more successful than Medicaid. In each instance the program available without means-testing works better, without stigma and with general approval and political support. Means-testing turns applicants into potentially fraudulent beggars for charity.

The problems of Social Security can be fixed with a few tax and benefit tweaks. The problems of Medicare are serious, but they are the problems of our entire health care system and will need the same solutions.

Entitlements without means-testing unite us into one country. Means-testing divides us into rich and poor, each resenting the other. Our tax system is a much more effective mechanism to deal with disparities in wealth and income.

HASKEL LEVI
Oakland, Calif., Feb. 25, 2013

To the Editor:

Yuval Levin pinpoints the crux of Social Security's sustainability problem: the program is a safety net that ensnares everyone, including those who don't need it.

Providing Social Security payments only to those who actually need federal assistance would drastically shrink the program and its revenue requirements without affecting the program's societal purpose, to ensure that our elderly citizens' most basic needs are met when they can no longer work.

Mr. Levin's means-testing proposal is a legitimate vision for the future of the program. Providing a substantial one-time tax credit to the rich beneficiaries who choose to forgo their Social Security entitlements would be an appropriate first step toward that vision.

BRAD ROGERS
Boulder, Colo., Feb. 20, 2013

To the Editor:

Yuval Levin's proposal may sound reasonable, but it is horrific policy.

I am someone who earned a modest income through my career but who lived frugally and managed to accumulate a substantial sum of retirement money. My neighbor who earned a similar salary but who spent lavishly on vacations, luxury cars, furnishings, entertainment, clothing and so on and amassed a large level of debt may be entitled to full Social Security and Medicare benefits under "means testing."

I, on the other hand, would have to forgo such "entitlements."

Why would any reasonable person follow my example? He or she would rightly be considered a chump.

RON ALLEN
St. Louis, Feb. 20, 2013

To the Editor:

Re "Our Second Adolescence," by David Brooks (column, Feb. 26):

I am a working-class senior, but I reject means-testing Medicare and directing that savings to children and infrastructure. Medicare is an insurance program, not a welfare program.

If Mr. Brooks wants to finance children's programs and infrastructure, there are other ways to do it, like raising taxes on the wealthy, corporations and Wall Street; raising the capital gains tax; eliminating carried interest; eliminating subsidies to oil companies and agriculture; and cutting military spending.

I am fed up with this war against the elderly by the mainstream media.

REBA SHIMANSKY
New York, Feb. 26, 2013


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Letter: Lone Star Shift? A Daughter of Texas Speaks Out

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In "Lone Star Blues" (Op-Ed, Feb. 20), Richard Parker writes that "turning Texas blue — or even purple — is going to be a lot harder than most folks imagine." He points out that Democratic Party leaders are hanging their Stetsons on the increase in Hispanic voters in the state. But there is another critical element for anyone seeking electoral success in Texas: women. They are fed up with the backward policies coming out of Austin — and by the way, women make up a majority of the growing population of Hispanic voters in Texas.

Gov. Rick Perry and his party have given priority to anti-women's health policies, first slashing money for the state's family planning program and then creating a costly health program that denies women access to Planned Parenthood's preventive health care services. This strategy is out of touch with what Texans want.

A new poll confirms that the majority of Texans — including 77 percent of Hispanics — support state-financed family planning, including access to birth control.

Texas has benefited from this powerful coalition before — as Mr. Parker rightly points out, my mother, Gov. Ann W. Richards, built a similar one and brought great prosperity to the state — and it can be done again with the right strategy, one that includes women.

CECILE RICHARDS
President, Planned Parenthood
Action Fund
New York, Feb. 22, 2013


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Letter: Preschool in New York

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We applaud your editorial board ("Getting Preschool Education Right," editorial, Feb. 16) and David Brooks ("When Families Fail," column, Feb. 15) for calls to carefully consider President Obama's proposal to expand quality early care and education. In New York City, where we have the largest publicly financed early care and education system in the country, we recently launched EarlyLearnNYC with best-practice elements that could be a model for the country.

Rather than "glorified day care," EarlyLearnNYC demands more professional development for teachers, rigorous performance standards, the use of a developmentally appropriate, research-based curriculum and measurable outcomes. Our model maximizes a combination of federal, state, city and private money.

Our EarlyLearnNYC providers have been charged with preparing our city's youngest residents from our lowest income communities for success in school and in life.

Washington lawmakers must take the long view now, investing in better prepared children for school tomorrow and the labor work force for the decades ahead.

RONALD E. RICHTER
Commissioner, Administration for Children's Services
New York, Feb. 22, 2013


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Op-Ed Columnist: Is Mexico the Comeback Kid?

Visiting Mexico this past week reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from my days in Beirut. It was when a hostess asked her dinner guests during the Lebanese civil war: "Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?" One of the lessons of both Mexico and Lebanon is how irrepressible is the human spirit — that no matter how violent a country becomes, people will adapt and take risks to innovate or to make profits or get to school or to just have fun.

That is a key reason that Mexico is making something of a comeback these days. Whether it will make it back in a sustainable way is unclear. Mexico still has huge problems: stifling monopolies in energy, telecom and media; a weak K-12 education system; violent cartels; and a corrupt police and judiciary. Together, they will keep a lid on Mexico's prospects if they're not addressed, the human spirit notwithstanding.

That said, it's useful to look at what Mexico has gotten right, despite its problems. The first two had to do with actions by the government — improved higher education and macroeconomic policy. The third happened naturally. It's when a critical mass of youth "just don't get the word" — they don't get the word that the government is a mess or that China is going to eat their lunch or that the streets are too dangerous. Instead, they take advantage of how the Internet and globalization promote individual empowerment and opportunities to start stuff and collaborate on stuff really cheaply — and they just do it. Let's look at all three.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank: Despite Mexico's weakness in K-12 education, in the past 10 years, Mexico doubled its number of public education institutions at the postsecondary level, and many are dedicated to science and technology. It now graduates many more engineers. On Sept. 19, The Financial Times reported that "according to Unesco, the number of engineers, architects and others in disciplines related to manufacturing graduating from Mexican universities has risen from almost 0.4 per 1,000 people in 1999 to more than 0.8 today. ... The number for the U.S. over the same period has remained roughly flat at 0.6 per 1,000." That is a reason that Mexico in 2012 became one of the largest exporters of information technology services in the world, approaching the likes of India, the Philippines and China.

As for economics, Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, summed it up in a Nov. 2 speech, when he said of Mexico: "Between 1975 and 2000, there was one crisis after another: in 1976, 1982, 1985-88 and 1994." But thanks to a series of monetary and fiscal reforms, Fisher argued, the Mexican economy's vital signs look a lot healthier. "The U.S. deficit is 7 percent of gross domestic product," said Fisher. "Mexico's deficit is about 2 percent of their G.D.P." Meanwhile, he added, America "is growing slowly, weighed down by debt and the pervasive uncertainty caused by our nation's fiscal imbalances and growing regulatory complexity. Mexico, in contrast, is growing robustly, and, in contrast to their Washington counterparts, Mexican policy makers are demonstrating remarkable commitment to fiscal discipline."

As for Mexico's "just do it" generation, I'd put it this way: Monterrey has tens of thousands of poor living in shantytowns. They've been there for decades. What is new, though, is that this city, Mexico's Silicon Valley, now also has a critical mass of young, confident innovators trying to solve Mexico's problems, by leveraging technology and globalization. 

I met a few of them: There was Raúl Maldonado, founder of Enova, which has created an after-school program of blended learning — teacher plus Internet — to teach math and reading to poor kids and computer literacy to adults. "We've graduated 80,000 people in the last three years," he told me. "We plan to start 700 centers in the next three years and reach six million people in the next five." There was Patricio Zambrano from Alivio Capital who has created a network of dental, optical and hearing aid clinics to provide low-cost alternatives for all three, plus loans for hospital care for people without insurance. There was Andres Muñoz Jr. from Energryn, who demonstrated his solar hot-water heater that also purified water and could cook meat. There was the administrator from Cedim, a start-up university offering a "master's in business innovation." And there was Arturo Galván, founder of Naranya, a mobile Internet company that offers a range of services, including micropayments for consumers at the bottom of the pyramid.

"We've all been here for many years, but I think that the confidence is starting to happen," said Galván. "You start to see the role models who started from zero and are now going public. We are pretty creative. We had to face a lot of challenges," As a result, he added, "we are strong now, we believe, and the innovation ecosystem is happening."

Naranya is based on the Spanish word for "orange," or naranja. Why that name? I asked Galván. " 'Apple' was already taken," he said.


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Room for Debate: The Constitution's Immoral Compromise

Emory University students marched in anger last week over a decision that was reached more than 200 years ago. They were outraged, among other things, that the school's president called the Constitution's "three-fifths compromise" one of the "pragmatic half-victories" that assured the union.

Americans today are repulsed by the fact that the Constitution let each state's House delegation be determined by adding all free citizens, except most Indians, and "three fifths of all other Persons." Southerners wanted all slaves counted. Northerners thought none should be. The compromise let the South keep humans as property, increasing the region's political power.

But did the framers have a choice? Could the compromise have been avoided? Would any other path have prevented a united United States or did the bargain only delay that division?

Read the Discussion »
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Letter: Science Award: A Vote for Humanity

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 26 Februari 2013 | 13.25

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To the Editor:

Re "At $3 Million, New Award Gives Medical Researchers a Dose of Celebrity" (news article, Feb. 20):

While I am delighted to see this group of entrepreneurs supporting the work of groundbreaking scientists, I am thrilled at their effort to realign what we value as a culture.

To me, this is a strong vote in favor of the human race. It should also serve as a rebuke to members of Congress who support slashing billions from the federal budget for basic research this year.

REGINA WEISS
Brooklyn, Feb. 20, 2013


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Letter: A Proposal for New York: Instant Runoff Voting

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Re "Move New York City's Primaries to June" (editorial, Feb. 12):

We agree that an immediate solution is needed to address the city's runoff election, which is too soon after the September primary because of requirements with the new voting machines. We recommend a simpler fix: instant runoff voting. New York is in the middle of a major city election year. Moving the primary to June at this late stage will advantage established candidates, while newer candidates will be harmed.

Allowing voters to rank their choices for candidates in citywide offices in the September primary will not change the election calendar while saving upward of $20 million by eliminating the need for a runoff, as one can be conducted instantly.

Instant runoff voting is in use in other major cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis. It is also not a new idea for New York City: the 2010 Charter Revision Commission cited instant runoff voting as a potential alternative to the runoff.

DICK DADEY
Executive Director, Citizens Union
New York, Feb. 12, 2013


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Letter: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lead

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To the Editor:

It's a cheap shot to argue, as some do, that because Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, is rich and powerful, her experience and advice are irrelevant to most women ("A Titan's How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling," front page, Feb. 22).

When I was editor in chief of Working Woman magazine in the mid-90s, virtually none of the top corporate women wanted to address the inequality and discrimination that exist in the workplace — and very few do so today.

We should all applaud Sheryl Sandberg for using her powerful platform to talk about these issues. It may even embolden other women (and men) at the top to follow her lead.

LYNN POVICH
New York, Feb. 23, 2013

The writer is the author of "The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace."


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Editorial: Confirm Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary

Barring some last-minute snag, the Senate is expected to vote to end a Republican filibuster on Tuesday and then move on to confirm Chuck Hagel as defense secretary. The filibuster was pernicious from the start, and Mr. Hagel should be approved without further delay.

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Nothing in the public record remotely warrants disqualification, despite a vicious and long campaign by Republicans against him. In particular, Mr. Hagel has been pilloried by former Republican colleagues in the Senate who proclaim devotion to the nation's defense but thought nothing of politically battering Mr. Hagel even if, as many admit, they could not defeat him.

Mr. Hagel already has enough on his plate managing the budget cuts that start kicking in on Friday, leading the troops and representing the United States globally.

Yet the debate rages on. Senator John McCain, a Republican who can't forgive Mr. Hagel for opposing the Iraq war, once again called him a friend on CNN on Sunday and said he deserved to have the Senate vote on his nomination. But Mr. McCain declared that a man he once suggested should be considered for defense secretary is not qualified and wouldn't have his vote.

The Senate has a constitutional duty to review top executive appointments. But it's one thing to raise serious questions about a candidate's character or political views; it's quite another to distort a nominee's views on Israel and Iran as some conservative Republicans and the most rigidly pro-Israel groups have with Mr. Hagel. Some accused of him of receiving money from a group called "Friends of Hamas" — a rumor that started with a joke about a nonexistent group.

In addition to blocking a vote for two weeks, the Senate has demanded that Mr. Hagel answer some 162 question submitted after the confirmation hearing. The vast majority came from Republicans, and the White House says, are way in excess of previous nominees.

Mr. Hagel did himself and Mr. Obama no favors with his lackluster performance at his confirmation hearing. Still he has strong backers, including Bob Dole, the former Republican Senate majority leader, who called him uniquely qualified to run the Pentagon.

A decorated Vietnam veteran, Mr. Hagel is one of a fading breed of moderate Republicans whose independence and past willingness to challenge Republican orthodoxy on Iraq, sanctions on Iran and other issues is admirable.

If confirmed, Mr. Hagel will have to try to mend at least some fences in the Senate. But it would be a tragedy if the confirmation process stifled his willingness to speak out and provide Mr. Obama with the best advice possible.


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Op-Ed Columnist: Rebuilding on Their Own

"Cities change from the bottom up, block by block," said Roberta Gratz, as we drove down Magazine Street, on our way to the Lower Ninth Ward here.

The author of "The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs," Gratz, like her friend and mentor Jacobs, is a student of what she calls "urban regeneration." Since 2007, she has owned a home in New Orleans, and she was giving me what amounted to a tutorial on her next book subject: the rebuilding of the city post-Katrina.

"Look at this," she said, gesturing to storefronts. "This is one of the longest shopping streets in the country. There are residential and commercial buildings, and local stores and chain stores. Very little was done for streets like this because the big money went to the tourism districts," she said. "This grew back organically." Which, she believes, is the way it always happens.

I was already coming around to that point of view. Some months earlier, when I had gone to the Rockaways, a stretch of New York coastal towns that had been pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, I had been struck by the lack of government response. Personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up offices, where they sipped coffee while waiting for Sandy victims to drop by. The city's sanitation department did heroic work, but other city agencies were largely invisible. (City officials later complained that they had done much more than I had acknowledged.)

Mostly, people helped other people. Churches donated space where victims could get staples. Nonprofit organizations were everywhere. Volunteers went from house to house, helping homeowners clear out debris.

I remember wondering at the time if it was always going to be like this. Despite the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for Sandy recovery, would the rebuilding be as ad hoc, and as volunteer-dependent, as the initial emergency phase? If New Orleans is any indication, the answer is yes.

It is not as if New Orleans didn't have a grand plan. Its plan was put together by many of the city's machers, which concluded that the Lower Ninth, the poorest district in the city, which had been virtually wiped out by Katrina, should never be rebuilt. The plan called for turning a neighborhood that once had 14,000 residents into "green space." The plan died a quick, deserved death.

And then?

"I remember going to visit a house in the Lower Ninth four months after Katrina with the owner, who was seeing it for the first time," said Gratz. "It was as bad as anything you'd ever seen. He looked at it and said, 'It was in bad shape when I got it. I fixed it once, and I'll fix it again.' "

Gratz told me this story in a sweet little restaurant called Café Dauphine in the Lower Ninth. It had been open for nine months. The woman who owned it lived across the street. Business was good, said the maître d'. Many of the houses on the surrounding street had been rebuilt, but there were still many that had not been touched since Katrina.

That is what you saw all over the Lower Ninth. People had trickled back — not everyone because not everyone could afford to come back, but more than you'd think. Volunteer groups were helping to rebuild homes. Neighbors were helping neighbors. Most strikingly, Brad Pitt's rebuilding organization, Make It Right, has spent $24 million to build around 90 colorful, environmentally friendly homes in the Lower Ninth — with plans to build about 60 more. There are many people in New Orleans, Gratz included, who believe Pitt is one of the true heroes of the rebuilding effort.

The city government no longer ignores the rebuilding in the Lower Ninth. It has small but meaningful programs to help smooth the path for people who want to move there. Then again, it has idiotically planted palm trees along one of the Lower Ninth's major streets, an inexplicable choice in a city known for its great live oaks.

Back in the Rockaways, the "ground up" rebuilding has already begun. Habitat for Humanity has arrived in force. In 2005, firefighters from New York went to New Orleans to help out after Katrina; now, firefighters from New Orleans are returning the favor. A group called Friends of Rockaway, using grant money from the Robin Hood Foundation, the primary philanthropy of the hedge fund industry, is employing local people to rebuild homes in their neighborhoods.

And government? New York City started a program called Rapid Repairs. People would order a boiler from the program and then wait for weeks for it to arrive. And half the time, it was the wrong boiler and had to be returned. It only reinforced what people in the Rockaways were coming to understand.

They're on their own.


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Letter: Testing the Gifted

Written By Unknown on Senin, 25 Februari 2013 | 13.25

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Re "Schools Struggle to Separate the Truly Gifted From the Merely Well-Prepared" (news article, Feb. 18):

What we test for signals what we ultimately desire. The use of tests for which 4-year-olds can be prepped signals that we want to find those youngsters who can do well on future tests. In that way, the process works perfectly — whether in China or in New York City.

If we desired people who were likely to make creative advances, we would look for youngsters — be they 4 or 14 — who have a passionate interest that they pursue without a lot of prodding. If we desired people who would help build a more civil and more generous society, we would look for 10- or 12-year-olds who have found a need in their school or community and have taken steps to help meet that need.

In the unlikely event that these skills could be coached, at least we would end up with adults who could not simply ace the next standardized test.

HOWARD GARDNER
Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 18, 2013

The writer is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.


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Letter: Housing the Homeless

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Re "For Some Landlords, Real Money in the Homeless" (front page, Feb. 9):

New Yorkers should be disturbed at excessive costs for renting threadbare rooms without a bathroom or a kitchen. It was worth the landlords' while to offer premiums of $25,000 to long-term, market-rate renters simply to move out. But that's only one side of the story.

At well-run, client-centered nonprofit shelters, staff members committed to serving homeless people run very good operations, providing quality facilities and operating in tight margins.

Unlike the landlords in the article, most nonprofit shelters aren't guaranteed a profit but are constantly in jeopardy of missing an imposed performance goal that can result in a reduction in payment.

In recent years city financing of these shelters has been at constant risk. No money has been available for increased staffing costs, so many nonprofit shelter employees haven't seen pay raises for several years. It's far less expensive, and more effective, to finance a rental subsidy program to move homeless people from shelters to permanent private or supportive housing.

The city's recent explosion of homeless people tracks directly with eliminating the Advantage rental subsidy program, which, though it could have been improved, helped tens of thousands of homeless people obtain housing at far lower taxpayer cost at a fair market rate profit to landlords.

BOBBY WATTS
Executive Director Care for the Homeless
New York, Feb. 12, 2013


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Letter: Alternative Investments

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Re "Complex Investments Prove Risky as Savers Chase Bigger Payoff" (front page, Feb. 11):

We at the Investment Program Association, the trade association representing non-listed direct investment vehicles, take sharp exception to your article's overall portrayal of non-listed alternatives.

First, there's simply no "wave of investor fraud." While there may have been questionable behavior in select cases, there are "few good statistics," as your article admits. It's wrong to assert that these problems are the norm, let alone a wave.

Second, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has chosen to review non-listed real estate investment trusts and business development companies. A review isn't a warning, which is another category altogether.

Third, non-listed REITs are among the most regulated of all vehicles an individual can buy. Non-listed REITs must file the same Securities and Exchange Commission forms that listed REITs do and are subject to federal and state oversight, just like equities, bonds and mutual funds.

Finally, non-listed REITs aren't new or untested. They have been offered for more than 25 years, have an investment history in varied market cycles and are offered today by more than 50 sponsor firms. These projects create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The 1.5 million investors who own non-listed REITs and business development companies have benefited by generally above-average distributions of around 6 percent paid by solid, reputable companies.

KEVIN M. HOGAN
President and Chief Executive Officer
Investment Program Association
Ellicott City, Md., Feb. 14, 2013


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Letter: Nail Clippers and Guns

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To the Editor:

I grew up in New York City when most families did not have to have weapons to protect their homes and themselves. I admit to being somewhat out of touch when it comes to household armaments. If I felt my family were in danger, my reaction would be to move somewhere safer, like Beirut or Cape Town.

I am too old to deal with such matters, but I will continue trying to understand why I have to surrender items like a small bottle of spring water or a nail clipper every time I board a plane while other people have no problem purchasing assault weapons.

PHILIP G. SPITZER
East Hampton, N.Y., Feb. 21, 2013


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Letters: Starting Out: The Lawyer’s Apprentice

In "To Practice Law, Apprentice First" (Op-Ed, Feb. 18), John J. Farmer Jr., the dean of Rutgers School of Law in Newark, correctly identifies several faults with legal academia and the legal profession, but his proposal to require law graduates to apprentice at low wages would not solve the problem, but would only assure that law school revenues would remain ever-increasing.

Reducing graduates' wages will do little but keep a law education out of reach for anyone without the means to pay inflated tuition out of pocket, while subsidizing law firm profits. Serious solutions share the costs equitably.

An underpaid apprenticeship scheme would be much better received if it replaced the (largely unnecessary) third year of law school, but don't hold your breath waiting for law deans to get behind a 33 percent revenue reduction. And students would be more likely to pursue lower-paying public service careers if tuition were reduced; Rutgers's fully loaded cost for in-state students living off campus is nearly $50,000 a year.

DAVE SILBERMAN
Guilford, Conn., Feb. 18, 2013

The writer, a corporate lawyer and 2001 graduate of Columbia University School of Law, still owes approximately $55,000 in law school loans.

To the Editor:

I would go one step further than John J. Farmer Jr. The law school process is too long, too institutionalized, too expensive and too arrogant.

First create a bachelor of laws degree: that is, revive the L.L.B. Start with an elite school that has no law school, like Dartmouth, Brown or Amherst. Four years of schooling with two summers of internship.

Start with the current law school core curriculum, then add an intensive course on drawing legal documents and briefs. Any remaining credit hours could be filled as electives so long as they are approved by the student's law program mentor, who would be assigned to the student upon acceptance into the program.

It would means fewer student loans, an upgrade of academic discipline in nonscience courses in college and recognition that the liberal arts degree has already abandoned the traditional canon.

CHRISTOPHER DENTON
Elmira, N.Y., Feb. 18, 2013

The writer is a lawyer.

To the Editor:

John J. Farmer Jr. is right to call for new lawyers to apprentice at the start of their careers. Apprenticeships, however, should not be limited to litigation and similar court-focused proceedings. Legislative work is legal work.

Legislatures are the primary authors of the law. Often, they can solve problems faster and better than litigation. And yet, as my research has demonstrated, there is a profound lack of legislative work experience within the legal profession. Law clerkships in legislatures and other legislative apprenticeships are important steps toward a profession better trained in how the law is actually created and practiced.

DAKOTA S. RUDESILL
Washington, Feb. 18, 2013

The writer is a visiting professor and the interim director at the Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic of the Georgetown University Law Center.

To the Editor:

As a student at Central Michigan University who wishes to attend law school, I was told by an adviser, a retired attorney, to avoid getting an internship at a law firm. She said: "You will become very good at making photocopies and getting into courthouses, and you will learn nothing of real value. It probably won't look very good on a résumé, either, because most law schools will know you were just a mule." Why is this?

Perhaps part of alleviating the shortage of competent defenders is in firms' taking the time to educate students on the practicalities of the profession before they even enter law school.

Treating interested undergraduates like apprentices would go a long way toward preparing talented students and deterring those not cut out for the profession before they accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debt. BEN HARRISMount Pleasant, Mich., Feb. 18, 2013


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Opinion: Tennis: Love-Love

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 24 Februari 2013 | 13.25

Bounce, bounce, bounce. It's four-all, 40-30, and I'm serving. I toss the ball high and in the act of reaching up I over-adjust my swing and hit it long. Fool. One more chance to redeem myself, to succeed, to set in motion, at the very least, an opportunity to win the point, the game, the set. Who knows what heights remain to be scaled, what triumphs lie in wait?

I float a wobbly second serve over the net and — phew! — it's good.

But count no man happy until a point is over.

Nick Taylor, taking advantage of its weak velocity, angles a cruel forehand that just eludes my flailing Babolat. Deuce. Two more points, both lost — don't even ask — and it's 4-5. We go on to lose the next game and set.

But there will be plenty of time for redemption.

After all, this is "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Tennis Game in New York," as it's known by those fortunate enough to be affiliated with it. There are eight of us. We play for two hours every Saturday, changing partners three times in the course of the morning with the elegant complexity of dancers in a Jane Austen novel. And so it has been since 1946, when a World War II veteran named Peter Schwed — he would become editorial chairman of Simon & Schuster — assembled an informal confederate of players for a weekly game.

Over the years, players joined and played and died. New recruits were enlisted. The game moved from place to place; when I joined it was in a facility in Brighton Beach where the instructors spoke Russian. It has always had a high concentration of workers in the literary trade. (The legendary agent Sterling Lord was an occasional participant in the early days.) But on Saturday mornings, it doesn't matter what anyone does. We're here to play tennis, not to network.

To say that the logistics of The Game are tightly organized doesn't convey the military precision with which rides are arranged at various locales (most of them on the Upper West Side) at times designated to the minute and accompanied by geographical data that leave no margin for error: "Manny will pick up Jim on the southeast corner of Columbus and 77th Street at 8:25." Greg, Peter's son, handles the accounting. "I understand that Jim picked up 10 cans of balls," he calculated in a recent e-mail: "Assuming they cost about $2.50 a can, that means each of the eight owes Jim a bit more than $3. I guess Alex owes him about $1.50. Oy."

It's not a young crowd. Most of us are in our 60s or early 70s — though Ephraim, rumored to be on the far side of 80, is a player whose shrewd tactics and preternatural sense of where a ball is going to be hit more than compensate for the inevitable creakiness that all of us are beginning to show: bum knees, arthritic ankles, pulled back muscles. These afflictions, however insistently proclaimed, don't seem to slow us down: we still chase after lobs, smash overheads, unleash crisply executed cross-court forehands. Like the zoological cast of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," we are all equal, but some are more equal than others. Having been known to flub an overhead while standing two feet from the net, I am just equal.

Before the start of play, Nick, our undesignated but official handicapper, drapes over the nets of our two courts the day's lineup, neatly typed and prefaced with an acerbic headline reflecting current events: " 'Washington Leadership Invisible!' 'Scientific Breakthrough Open,'  '113th Congress Sworn In,' 'Send in the Clowns Invitational.'  " Play then begins: hard play, accompanied by much groaning, panting, cries of frustration, mutterings of self-rebuke, but also hand-against-racket clapping, backpats, high fives, palms-splayed-downward gestures like an umpire's "safe" sign to indicate a shot that's "good" (even if it landed two inches outside the line; we err on the side of our opponent here; I've never heard a call disputed). And — a welcome corrective to the insane competitiveness that dominates our workweek; remember, this is New York — sets end not when one side or the other wins but when, I don't know quite how to explain it, the two games wind down and it's time to shuffle the lineup. We cluster around the draw to consult the next configuration. If I had to articulate the ethos, it would be something like: Play hard, try not to lose, but if you do, hey, it's just a game.

Or is it? By the end of two hours, I'm dripping as if I've just exited a Navajo sweat lodge. Why do we put ourselves through this ordeal week after week? Our exertions have changed nothing in our lives. But it's not about athletic prowess; it's about forgiveness. To forgive the teammate who double faults (a small number when you consider how many faults most of us commit in a day); the opponent who, having sensed that you're about to poach, slams a wicked passing shot down the line; above all, to forgive yourself for the netted volley, the backhand that went long, the drop shot that failed to drop. And, having forgiven, to persist. I cite the tennis enthusiast Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Driving back to the city, we talk about books, movies, politics, whatever. The banter continues via e-mail throughout the week, as if we're reluctant to let go of our fellowship. After one Friday-night barrage of jocularity, I shut down the chatter like a camp counselor with a cabin of unruly charges: "O.K., guys, lights out. We've got a big game tomorrow."

Continue reading "Games People Play": Solitaire: Me vs. Me by Francine Prose, Ping-Pong: Head Game by Pico Iyer, Poker Is America by Charles A. Murray and Frisbee: Ultimate Sport by Jason Lucero.

James Atlas is a contributing opinion writer and the author of a forthcoming book about biography.


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Opinion: Ultimate Sport

Founded in the late 1960s, in the heyday of hippiedom, ultimate Frisbee is often associated with pot smoking and people who don't like rules. In college, ultimate is relegated to "club status," the stepchild of athletic departments.

Adult leagues and pickup games are often improvised amalgams of like-minded eccentrics, forever in search of adequate field space. The sport is very popular in Canada. You know something is misunderstood when you look to Canada for a sense of identity. I've been playing ultimate for 25 years.

Leave it to a bunch of weirdos to invent the perfect game. Ultimate is intensely physical, a mix of measured teamwork and bursts of individual athleticism.

It's like playing football if you played all the positions — quarterback, receiver and defensive back, and played them continually, without breaks. (We'll rest when we're dead.)

It's fluid in the way basketball and hockey are fluid — fast-paced and constantly evolving between offense and defense. But even in its most contested moments, the culture of the game requires civility. It's only a matter of time until professional football players carry handguns during games. In ultimate, there is no bullying — no hard fouls to earn respect, retaliatory fouls to show even less respect, none of it. We don't have or need referees — we play with a commitment to fairness. Our hippie forefathers reasoned well: ultimate is a game; it should be fun and only fun. It is.

You feel a play developing, see a momentary advantage. Your teammate sees you open and throws not to where you are, but to where you will be, but only if you sprint. (Playing well requires decisive choices on myriad hypothetical outcomes. Graduate students love the game.)

I look forward to playing this weekend. I'll see my friends, people I've been playing with for years, many of whom I know only in this context. Doctors, economists and firemen among us. Our day jobs have nothing to do with the game — if anything, ultimate offers respite from all that. We're here to lose ourselves in, and to, the game, and it works every time.

Because Frisbees float as they arc through the air, the game feels as if it's playing out in slow motion. (How unexpected that we often experience this sensation only when moving at top speed.) You run down a long throw, catch it with your fingertips only inches before it touches the grass. Scoring yields a burst of elation, an instant of incontrovertible victory. This sense of glory lasts until play resumes. Once it does, the past is forgotten.

I'll play this weekend because the unique sense of exhilaration the game offers exists only in the present tense. I also need more glory. Come join us. You, too, can be a weirdo. We have the last laugh. In degrees of excellence only one word can aptly describe our game. Are you really going to make me say it?

Continue reading "Games People Play": Tennis: Love-Love by James Atlas, Solitaire: Me vs. Me by Francine Prose, Ping-Pong: Head Game by Pico Iyer and Poker Is America by Charles A. Murray.

Jason Lucero teaches filmmaking at N.Y.U. and Columbia.


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Opinion: Solitaire: Me vs. Me

When friends tell me that they are trying to give up smoking, I suggest they take up solitaire. As a reward for having completed a task, as a mini-holiday from everyday stress, as a means of improving one's mood without a doctor's prescription, the game offers many of the same benefits as cigarettes, only it's cheaper and doesn't have the harmful effects of tar and nicotine. When I gave up smoking, it wasn't because I'd replaced it with the pleasures with solitaire. It's more that the pleasures of solitaire remind me of what I used to like about smoking.

I learned to play solitaire as a child. Its advantages over other games were obvious, even then. No need to persuade a friend to play or explain the boring rules, no hard feelings when someone won or lost, no lessons required, no costly equipment to badger my parents into buying. I could play whenever and wherever I wanted. All I needed was a deck of cards.

The cards were a problem: 52 slips of paper conspiring to hide in the couch cushions or at the bottom of my toy basket. Laying them out required space: a dining table, a desk.

Computer solitaire solved all that. I remember when I learned. I told the department secretary at the college where I was teaching that I was having trouble switching over (young people won't know what this means) from using computer key commands to using a mouse. She said that playing computer solitaire was a great way of getting comfortable with the mouse. She demonstrated the basics — and that, as they say, was that.

I know maybe a dozen writers hooked on computer solitaire. It's the ideal writer's game. It even feels a little like writing, only more relaxing. You're sitting at the same desk, working with the same keyboard and monitor. You don't even have to get up. Like writing, it's entirely private, the exertion is purely cerebral; you're playing against yourself, against your previous best, against the law of averages and the forces of chance. You're taking random elements and trying to put them together in a pleasing way, to make order out of chaos.

No wonder so many writers (including myself) play more solitaire than we should. All I have to do is complete a decent paragraph to feel I've earned the right to take a break and play a few games. Like many sports, it's right on the border between addiction and pastime. That's why teaching someone to play computer solitaire can feel like the equivalent of a giving a junkie that first shot, though the toll it takes isn't in money or health, but in time, the writer's most precious gift.

Of course, there are moments when I think: what a ridiculous waste! I keep resolving to quit. But how could I ever give up that little burst of hope whenever a new game deals itself out, or the lightly adrenalized buzz of seeing the cards, when I've won, bounce in joyous cascades across the screen and set off computer solitaire's version of fireworks?

Continue reading "Games People Play": Tennis: Love-Love by James Atlas, Ping-Pong: Head Game by Pico Iyer, Poker Is America by Charles A. Murray and Frisbee: Ultimate Sport by Jason Lucero.

Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of "The Turning."


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Opinion: Poker Is America

Let's start by getting this straight: poker is about money. If you took the money out of it, I wouldn't play. But even when I lose, I've had a good time. I love playing poker as an escape from the world I usually live in, and I especially love playing at Hollywood Casino in Charles Town, W.Va., where you can find me about two afternoons a week.

A poker table is America the way that television commercials portray it but it seldom is. A normal table of 10 at Charles Town has at least two or three Asians, one or two blacks, maybe a Latino, another one or two players who hail from some other part of the world, and maybe four or five plain-vanilla whites like me. Age is distributed from young guns in their 20s who raise relentlessly to geezers like me who are too tight and passive.

The occupational and income mix is so random that we might as well have been drawn out of a hat. On a typical table a few weeks ago, I had a retired Army colonel across from me sandwiched between the owner of a Vietnamese restaurant and a farmworker who weighed north of 250, tattoos covering both arms. I had too much sense to ask what the player on my right with the big diamond earring, radiating street cred, does for a living. On my left was a matronly woman who runs a construction firm with her husband. At a table nearby was a top White House official from a previous administration.

Occasionally you'll sit at a silent table, but more often there's conversation about sports, families, girlfriends, boyfriends and poker — almost never about politics, thankfully.

If you're a regular, you know the dealer, who has dealt to you for many hours over the months, and probably already have a friendly acquaintance with two or three of the players. The conversation is not only good-natured but carefully polite. "Sir" is used more often at a poker table than anywhere outside a military base. For example, when your opponent has made an incredibly dumb call but ended up winning the pot, poker etiquette dictates that you say, preferably with a mildly inquiring tone, "How could you call that raise, sir?"

Poker is mannerly in other ways. To gloat over winning a big pot or complain about losing one is equally bad form. When you've won by getting lucky, it is appropriate to acknowledge your luck to the person you beat. "That was really sick" is a useful formulation.

Poker tables are pure meritocracies. The pecking order of respect at Charles Town is determined by how good you are at the game. Other players may like you personally, but if you're a bad player you're a bad player, and nothing about your status in the outside world makes any difference. For readers with high-powered degrees and high-powered jobs, let me suggest that nothing will do more to keep your feet on the ground than to start playing poker in a public casino. Poker is a game of incomplete information involving complex intellectual tasks, self-discipline and the courage to take properly calculated risks. When you are outthought and outplayed not just once, but regularly, by a skinny 28-year-old wearing a football jersey and with his baseball cap on backward, it is hard to condescend to him because he doesn't wear grown-up clothes and never went to college. It will also do you good to be in the deference-free zone that is a poker room — as in recently, when I was cashing out and the woman in the cashier's cage, noting my stack of chips with the patterns on the edges carefully aligned, said confidentially, "Your O.C.D. is showing, baby doll."

Apart from putting overeducated elitist snobs in their place, the dealers and players at Charles Town could give lessons to the rest of the country about making the melting pot work. In the year and a half I've played there, I have not experienced a moment of tension arising from anything involving race, class or gender. I'm not saying such moments never occur, but they've never occurred around me. Better than that, it has been as if those issues don't exist.

I guess there was one exception, though it didn't involve any tension. I was at a table where the four players to my immediate left and right were ethnically Croatian, Afghan, Korean and Indian. All four had apparently grown up in the United States, judging from their perfect colloquial English. The conversation turned to children, and I revealed that my daughter was engaged to an Italian — a real Italian, living in Bologna. A silence ensued. Then the Afghan asked earnestly, "Do you trust him?" The others murmured that they wondered the same thing. I was in the midst of a bunch of American guys being solicitous of one of their own and dubious about foreigners. And I said to myself, is this a great country or what.

Last year I published a book called "Coming Apart," lamenting that America's new upper class is segregated from, and ignorant of, life in ordinary America. I got a lot of criticism for not recommending any policies that would fix the problem. O.K., now I've got one: Don't just make poker legal. Make it mandatory.

Continue reading "Games People Play": Tennis: Love-Love by James Atlas, Solitaire: Me vs. Me by Francine Prose, Ping-Pong: Head Game by Pico Iyer and Frisbee: Ultimate Sport by Jason Lucero.

Charles A. Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "Coming Apart."


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Opinion: Ping-Pong: Head Game

A gold-toothed man of 76 polishes his $300 paddle. The tall, elegant gentleman who is used to overseeing maquiladoras in Tijuana silently pulls three-star balls out of a box. Mrs. Fukuoka, 80 next month, flicks shots into the corner at such cunning angles that she wins every other point. "I'm never tired," she giggles, hiding her smile behind her bat, "because I never move." At another of the eight championship tables, a bald guy and a grandmother exchange low forehand topspins with such relentless intensity they attain a rhythm that's almost sexual.

This is not the kids' game I grew up playing in my dorm at school.

It's not the spring break romp that dissolves in giggles beside the pool at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood.

In Japan, Ping-Pong is how you keep your wits about you and your reflexes, limbs and senses intensely sharp. Almost every afternoon for nine years, I've walked 15 minutes uphill to our local health club, here in suburban Nara, or taken a bus to an ancient gymnasium in a nearby park, to engage in furious bouts of table tennis with a group of 30 or so Japanese neighbors who teach me about engagement in their retirement years as once they did with co-workers or family members.

I soon begin sweating even on mid-February days while some of my pals are swathed in jackets, mufflers and gloves and our breath condenses in front of us, indoors. When it hits 100 degrees in the old wooden space in July, I slip away discreetly after 90 minutes, while my aged friends continue for up to four hours. "Pico-san," they say, next time they see me. "What's up? You're the youngest by 20 years and you're the first to stop." "I'm the only non-Japanese," I want to say.

Some play tight, wily games with a Chinese "pen holder" grip mastered before World War II. Others brandish the long, cool "shake" forehands of a Western style.

With every stroke, I might be watching Japan address its central question: whether to honor the distant past or the future, Confucius or California.

It's a sport of intelligence, of course, which is why eight of the first nine world table tennis championships were won by Hungary. It's a game of authority, which is why it was invented, many claim, by imperial Brits in the late 19th century, perhaps as an after-dinner game for the Raj. It's an exercise in unyielding patience: when the first point between two (defensively minded) players in the 1936 World Championship lasted two hours and 12 minutes, the umpire had to be replaced midpoint, one player started playing with his left hand, and the rules had to be re-evaluated on the spot to prevent matches that could go on for 16 days. I watch the high-toss serves of track-suited former salarymen, I hear the shouts (in quasi-English) of "deuce one!" or "all seven!" from adjoining tables, I dive for a lightning backhand drive from a toothless doctor and I think, "How can a training in attention be so ridiculously fun?"

Continue reading "Games People Play": Tennis: Love-Love by James Atlas, Solitaire: Me vs. Me by Francine Prose, Poker Is America by Charles A. Murray and Frisbee: Ultimate Sport by Jason Lucero.

Pico Iyer is a fellow at Chapman University and the author, most recently, of "The Man Within My Head."


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Op-Ed Columnist: Dire Consequences and Denial as Sequester Looms

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 23 Februari 2013 | 13.25

The sequester's automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are set to go into effect on Friday, and there is no plan as yet to stop it.

America, this is your feeble government at its most ineffective and self-destructive.

The White House favors a balanced plan that would include spending cuts and some tax increases for the wealthy. Republicans reject any solution that includes tax increases.

These are two fundamentally different perspectives, only one of which is supported by a majority of Americans.

A Pew Research Center/USA Today survey released Thursday found that only 19 percent of Americans believe that the focus of deficit reduction should be only on spending cuts. Seventy-six percent want a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, with more emphasis on the former than the latter.

But the impasse could have dire consequences. A study last year by Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, estimates that the sequester could cost 2.14 million jobs and add 1.5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. Fuller's analysis was cited in a Congressional Research Service report prepared for members of Congress.

What's more, the sequester would reduce military spending by $42.7 billion; nonmilitary discretionary spending would drop $28.7 billion, in addition to a mandatory $9.9 billion reduction in Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In anticipation of the very real possibility that the sequester could come to pass, some Republicans are leaning on the shoulder of an old friend: denial.

This week on CNN, Senator Rand Paul pronounced the $85 billion in mandated cuts a "pittance" and a "yawn" that is "just really nibbling at the edges." He also called President Obama's warnings about the sequester's impact "histrionics," "ridiculousness" and "emotionalism."

What a perfect segue to Rush Limbaugh, who took to the air this week to denounce predictions about the sequester's effects as a "manufactured" crisis, saying that "for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country."

Limbaugh continued:

"In truth, we're gonna spend more this year than we spent last year. We're just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It's all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn't. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I'm sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over."

Those not denying the crisis are hoping to exploit it.

Karl Rove, writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, called the president "a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps" who will subject the American people in the short term to a "slew of presidential photo-ops with those whom he claims will lose jobs." Mr. Rove advised House Republicans to "pass a continuing resolution next week to fund the government for the balance of the fiscal year at the lower level dictated by the sequester — with language granting the executive branch the flexibility to move funds from less vital activities to more important ones."

Rove supports the steep cuts but wants to allow the president "flexibility" in applying them. That Rove is as slick as an eel. In other words, he wants to force the president to rob Peter to pay Paul and take the flak for making all the tough choices.

Another Pew Research Poll released this week found that although many Americans favor cutting government spending in the abstract, most don't agree with cuts to specific programs. "For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels," Pew found. "The only exception is assistance for needy people around the world."

Ah, foreign aid, the tired old whipping horse that would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit, as it accounts for a paltry 1 percent of the federal budget.

Rove's plan to shift to the president the burden of choosing where to bring down the ax is Rove's way of getting Republicans "to win public opinion to their side." That is a roundabout way of acknowledging that right now they're losing. A Bloomberg poll released this week found the president's job-approval rating at its highest level and the Republican Party's favorable rating at its lowest since September 2009.

Furthermore, the Pew/USA Today survey found that if a deal isn't reached in time, about half the public will blame Congressional Republicans while fewer than a third will blame the president.

And if the sequester happens, we'll all lose. It will be a disaster for the job market and the economy. But no one can accuse these politicians and pundits of caring about such things as long as their own jobs are secure.


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Op-Ed Contributor: A Chance to Right a Wrong in Haiti

On Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, rejected a legal claim for compensation filed in 2011 on behalf of cholera victims in Haiti. Through a spokesperson, Mr. Ban said the claims, brought by a nongovernmental organization, were "not receivable" because of the United Nations' diplomatic immunity.

Regardless of the merits of this argument, the United Nations has a moral, if not legal, obligation to help solve a crisis it inadvertently helped start. The evidence shows that the United Nations was largely, though not wholly, responsible for an outbreak of cholera that has subsequently killed some 8,000 Haitians and sickened 646,000 more since October 2010. The United Nations has not acknowledged its culpability.

Now, as the cholera epidemic appears to worsen, Mr. Ban and the United Nations have an opportunity to save thousands of lives, restore good will — and, yes, fulfill the mandate that brought the organization to Haiti in the first place: stabilizing a fragile country. The United Nations should immediately increase its financial support for the Haitian government's efforts to control the epidemic. While that may not satisfy everyone, it will go at least some way toward compensating the people of Haiti for the unintentional introduction of the bacteria that caused the epidemic.

Before October 2010, cholera — a diarrheal illness caused by consuming water or food contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae — had never been reported in the country. In the epidemic's first year, the striking loss of life attracted international media attention. Even in its third year, the outbreak continues to sicken thousands.

There were 11,220 cases nationwide during the month of December — significantly more than the 8,205 cases seen during December 2011. Our clinic in St. Marc treated more people with the infection last month than in the previous eight months combined.

That soldiers at the United Nations camp were responsible for introducing the bacteria seems apparent. After local and national protests and an Associated Press investigation, Mr. Ban empaneled a group of international experts to determine the disease's source. Their report stated that evidence "overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the source of the Haiti cholera outbreak was due to contamination of the Meye Tributary of the Artibonite River with a pathogenic strain of current South Asian type Vibrio cholerae as a result of human activity." The strain was not indigenous to Haiti.

The report also found that sanitation conditions at the United Nations camp were not sufficient to prevent contamination of the local waterway with human waste. Investigators found that the potential existed for feces to enter the tributary from a drainage canal in the camp and from the open septic disposal pit that was used to handle the waste.

A research study published in January 2011 in The New England Journal of Medicine lent further support to the claim that the cholera came from the United Nations camp, as did an August 2011 study in another scholarly journal.

The interplay of biosocial factors inherently involved in epidemics make it difficult to pinpoint causality. If Haitians had better access to clean water and sanitation, of course, the cholera epidemic would have had a smaller impact and thousands of deaths might have been averted. (By comparison, there were few, if any, deaths from cholera in countries with effective water and sanitation systems where the organism appeared as part of this same epidemic — including the United States.)

But all of this is background to the urgent matter at hand. The United Nations recently started a 10-year initiative to eliminate cholera in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, based on a plan that was developed with multiple partners, including the governments of both countries. It is a collaborative and comprehensive approach that aims to eliminate transmission of the disease with substantial investments in water and sanitation infrastructure, as well as through prevention and treatment.

On Feb. 27, Haiti's minister of health will introduce one important component of this plan — an initiative to expand access to cholera vaccination.

If the United Nations were to finance this initiative, along with the rest of the government's anti-cholera program, it could have a significant and immediate impact on stemming this epidemic. As of now, however, the United Nations plans to contribute just 1 percent of the cost. That is not enough.

Meanwhile, the organization's stabilization mission in Haiti is budgeted for $648 million this year — a sum that could more than finance the entire cholera elimination initiative for two years.

It's time for the United Nations to rethink what true stabilization could be: preventing people from dying of a grueling, painful — and wholly preventable — disease is a good start.

Louise C. Ivers, a senior health and policy adviser at Partners In Health and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, has been leading cholera treatment and prevention activities in Haiti.


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The City Life: Rats That Won’t Stay Put

Of all the New Yorkers who have coexisted with the city's enduring population of rats, few have had the upper hand like John James Audubon, who retired in the middle of the 19th century to a patch of uptown wilderness at what is now West 156th Street. He soon was shooting rats and painting them in a lively family tableau.

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Rattus norvegicus, the city's ubiquitous brown Norway rat, did not need Audubon's art for immortality. The rodents remain voracious survivors wherever humans strew edible garbage, which is pretty much everywhere. New Yorkers shrug when tourists excitedly take photos of rats nonchalantly crossing subway tracks. But lately some have noticed that floods from Hurricane Sandy have sent rats scurrying to drier ground in higher neighborhoods.

So far, this migration has not shown up on the city's five-year-old Rat Information Portal, an Internet data map that lets people click on neighborhoods and individual buildings for the latest in rat tracking.

The rats are "smart and getting smarter," says Timothy Wong, one of the city's many entrepreneurial pest fighters enjoying a business boom. Mr. Wong, who is wary of exaggeration, says he has never seen a cat-size rat, a common urban legend. "More kitten-sized," he allows. Two years ago, a double-size albino rodent was pitchforked by a park worker. It was later identified as a Gambian pouched rat — someone's house pet that wandered into misfortune.

So no need for alarm. Any subspecies on the move has not yet been dubbed Relo-Rat, the way Super Rat was saluted in the 1970s when it seemed to feast on pesticide. Rats seem to quietly outlive their headlines ("Rodents a Menace to Upscale New York Neighborhood," said The Huffington Post recently), same as humans.


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