Diberdayakan oleh Blogger.

Popular Posts Today

Letter: Radiation Fears Are Real

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 31 Oktober 2013 | 13.26

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

To the Editor:

Re "Taming Radiation Fears" (Op-Ed, Oct. 22):

David Ropeik, a specialist on risk perception and risk communication, plays down the mass of scientific and medical literature that amply demonstrates that ionizing radiation is a potent carcinogen and that no dose is low enough not to induce cancer.

Large areas of the world are becoming contaminated by long-lived nuclear elements secondary to catastrophic meltdowns: 40 percent of Europe from Chernobyl, and much of Japan.

A New York Academy of Sciences report from 2009 titled "Chernobyl" estimates that nearly a million have already died from this catastrophe. In Japan, 10 million people reside in highly contaminated locations.

Children are 10 to 20 times more radiosensitive than adults, and fetuses thousands of times more so; women are more sensitive than men.

Radiation of the reproductive organs induces genetic mutations in the sperm and eggs, increasing the incidence of genetic diseases like diabetes, cystic fibrosis, hemochromatosis and thousands of others over future generations. Recessive mutations take up to 20 generations to be expressed.

HELEN CALDICOTT
Bermagui, Australia, Oct. 23, 2013

The writer is the pediatrician, author and antinuclear advocate.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 30, 2013

An earlier version of this letter misspelled the surname of the Op-Ed writer the letter was responding to. He is David Ropeik, not Kopeik.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial Observer: The Hat With the ‘B’

On the Q train Wednesday morning, I was sandwiched between two men in Red Sox caps, with Game 6 of the World Series just hours off. All the way to Times Square, the men stood unmolested, even unnoticed.

How things have changed. Ten years ago, wearing that navy-blue hat with the raised red "B" in the heart of enemy territory was an invitation to potential mayhem.

I wore mine in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium once, in 2003. Never again, I said. First, it was just peanuts fired at the back of my head, which I endured as only a skinny kid with no meaningful reinforcements would.

Then Shea Hillenbrand hit a home run to left in the eighth. I turned to my assaulters, smiled and tipped my cap — an ill-advised gesture that provoked a degree of vitriol and threats of imminent and specific bodily harm that I had, to that point, seen only in movies.

So what if it was liquid courage at $7 a pint? It was a different time. My mother called every day to make sure I was alive.

That October, after Grady Little overcooked Pedro and then Aaron Boone, and you know the rest, I wore the hat as I stalked home grimly through the gauntlet of bars on Bleecker Street. Yankee fans tumbled out on both sides, taunting and threatening me. The world still made sense to them then.

They were winners, and the Red Sox were still part of an unbroken line of losers. It was in the natural order of things.

One year later, that world turned upside down. No four days will ever mean as much to Boston sports fans as Oct. 17, 18, 19, and 20, 2004. In an instant, the hat was transformed from a target into Kryptonite. For weeks I wore it wherever I went, fully aware of the silent rage it evoked in people walking by.

The best part was the mutual understanding: We both knew that nothing they could say could hurt me anymore. I was trespassing on the lawn of a great mansion, and no one could kick me off. "19-18! 19-18!" was a children's song from a forgotten land.

The only person to say anything was a cop, and only then from the safety of his cruiser's megaphone. "Red Sox suck," he officially reminded me. Never has a man with a Glock on his belt seemed so harmless.

Now, 2013. I have the same hat, but when I wear it outside these days, I get nothing, just like the men on the subway: no glares, no swears, no peanuts.

I see the red "B" everywhere, in fact, as though over the past decade we've slowly crept out of hiding. Maybe it's all the non-natives who continue to roll into town. Or maybe it's 12 years — soon, no doubt, to be at least 16 — of a Red Sox fan running City Hall. Or maybe it's just that we win.

New York doesn't accept us, but it tolerates us. Like so many of the city's daily nuisances, we've been absorbed.

This might seem preferable to the regular threat of violence, but if I wanted to live where everyone agreed with me I'd go back to Boston.

Perhaps it's folly to say, but a part of me misses the old days.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Endless War, Endless Suffering

Add a potential polio epidemic to the threats that innocent civilians now face because of Syria's civil war. It is part of what American officials say may be the worst humanitarian disaster since the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people. But while the tragedy is unfolding in full view, many countries, including Russia and China, have given hardly anything to the United Nations campaign to meet the Syrians' basic needs.

Civilians have paid a terrible price ever since President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used force to crush peaceful protests that began in 2011, touching off a full-scale civil war. Officials now put the death toll, including combatants, at 115,000.

Of the Syrians who have survived the war so far, some five million are virtual refugees in their own country — trapped in neighborhoods isolated by military blockades, or uprooted from their homes and living in vacant buildings, schools, mosques, parks and crowded homes of relatives. Most are desperately short of food and medicine, a deprivation likely to worsen as winter sets in.

Meanwhile, another two million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, meaning that seven million people, or about one-third of Syria's population, have seen their lives upended by the war.

Now comes another trial: the country's first outbreak of polio in 14 years. United Nations officials have begun to vaccinate 2.5 million children in Syria and more than eight million others in the region after discovering that 10 children in the eastern city of Deir al-Zour have contracted polio. A 25-year campaign by the World Health Organization had largely eradicated what had been a global scourge, narrowing the afflicted states to Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Public health experts suspect that jihadists who entered Syria to join the fight against Mr. Assad may have been the carriers.

The United Nations has asked its members for $1.5 billion to provide food, schooling and medicine to vulnerable Syrians. That is short of the need, yet the response has been disgraceful. Only 61 percent of the money earmarked for refugees outside of Syria has been collected, while 36 percent of the aid for Syrians inside the country has been collected, according to United Nations figures. China, the world's second-biggest economy after the United States, has donated a miserable $1 million, while Russia, awash in oil and gas profits, has given $10.3 million.

An analysis by Oxfam America, the international aid agency, says that relative to their wealth, France, Qatar, Russia and the United Arab Emirates have donated far less than they can afford. The United States, at more than $1 billion, is the largest contributor, but it can still do better, Oxfam said. Because of the difficulty of obtaining comparable numbers, China was not part of this analysis.

The best way to help the Syrians is to end the war. The next best thing is to mitigate the suffering by contributing generously and by pressuring both sides in the conflict to allow aid workers to deliver essential supplies.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Scott Stringer for New York City Comptroller

Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, faced a tough primary battle for New York City comptroller against a far richer and better known candidate, Eliot Spitzer. But when Democratic voters considered their choice — the solid public servant or the scandal-scarred former governor — they elected Mr. Stringer by a wide margin. Now Mr. Stringer faces the Republican, John Burnett, in the general election on Nov. 5.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Mr. Burnett, making his first bid for elective office, has built a strong private-sector résumé in 20 years on Wall Street. He grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens, and earned degrees from New York University and Cornell University. He says he has the money-management experience that Mr. Stringer lacks, and he promises to bring entrepreneurial skills and independence to the office.

Mr. Burnett's emergence is good news for New York's Republican Party, which is short of fresh, appealing candidates. But Mr. Stringer is better qualified to be comptroller, a position responsible for overseeing the city's pension funds, conducting fiscal audits and acting as a watchdog over day-to-day operations and contracts.

Mr. Stringer, who got his start in reform-minded government by volunteering for Bella Abzug and serving as teenage community board member in Washington Heights, represented the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the State Assembly for 13 years, and he shone there, occasionally angering party bosses while promoting a good-government agenda.

As borough president, Mr. Stringer has ushered in an array of excellent initiatives, like screening applicants to make community boards more diverse, competent and accountable. He has raised the office's profile with investigations like one that criticized the City Council's tainted practice of allowing members to use taxpayer funds for pet projects in their districts. He promises to make the comptroller's office more streamlined, to upgrade its technology, to hedge more cautiously against deep downturns, and to use his audit power to help agencies work better.

Mr. Stringer would bring the right mix of experience, doggedness, political skills and integrity to the job, which is why we recommend him for this office.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: The Uproar Over Insurance ‘Cancellation’ Letters

Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, took a lot of grief Wednesday from Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who were outraged that some people's individual insurance policies had been "cancelled" because of health care reform.

Some of the rants bordered on the comical. Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, brandished his "cancellation" letter and demanded that Ms. Sebelius nullify the health law for all residents of his congressional district.

Most lawmakers mentioned President Obama's unfortunate blanket statement that all Americans would be allowed to keep their insurance policies if they liked them. He failed to make an exception for inadequate policies that don't meet the new minimum standards.

But in between lashings, Ms. Sebelius managed to make an important point. Yes, some people will be forced to upgrade their policies, she said. But that's preferable to the status quo before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, when insurers could cancel policies on a whim.

"The individual market in Kansas and anywhere in the country has never had consumer protections," she testified at the hearing. "People are on their own. They could be locked out, priced out, dumped out. And that happened each and every day. So this will finally provide the kind of protections that we all enjoy in our health care plans."

A true cancellation is when someone gets a letter saying that she's losing her insurance and cannot renew. That was common practice in the individual market for people with expensive conditions. Under the new law, no one will ever get a letter like that again. They cannot be turned down for insurance.

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday's hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that they didn't include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government would dare intrude on an insurance company's freedom to offer a terrible product to desperate people.

"Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari," said Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. "And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You're taking away their choice."

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy is no longer a Ferrari; it is now a basic right. In the face of absurd comments and analogies like this one, Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country will be far better off.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Putting More Controls on Painkillers

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 30 Oktober 2013 | 13.26

The Food and Drug Administration took an important step last week to curb an epidemic of overdose deaths from misuse of prescription painkillers that contain hydrocodone, such as Vicodin, Lortab and their generic equivalents, in combination with another painkilling drug. The only regret is that it took so long for the agency to make up its mind.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration first asked that the F.D.A. conduct a review to tighten restrictions on the painkillers in 2004 by changing the drugs from Schedule III, where restrictions on prescribing and using the drugs are only moderate, to Schedule II, where they are much more stringent.

But the F.D.A. resisted that change, until it reversed course on Thursday and announced that it would recommend that products containing hydrocodone be reclassified into Schedule II, which governs more powerful painkillers like OxyContin. The change is likely to go into effect in 2014.

The new regulations apply to combination pills that include hydrocodone along with a nonaddictive painkiller such as acetaminophen or aspirin. The rules would limit patients to a 90-day supply of the combination drug and would require patients to visit a doctor for a new prescription and to take a prescription to a pharmacy rather than have a doctor call it in. The regulations for Schedule II drugs also impose tight storage and record-keeping requirements on pharmacies.

Some doctors and patient groups are complaining that the change will make it harder for some patients to get the medicine they need. But the F.D.A. has struck a reasonable balance between patient access and restricting drugs that have contributed to an upsurge in overdose deaths and addictions.

On Friday, however, the agency announced a troubling decision to approve a pure hydrocodone drug without the protections that many experts deem necessary. It is a new medication (not combined with an analgesic such as acetaminophen) for extended relief for chronic pain. The drug is known as Zohydro ER, made by Zogenix, a specialty pharmaceutical company. It will be a Schedule II drug subject to the tight restrictions in that category.

The concern raised by critics is that patients might overdose on the high-potency opioid drug, either deliberately or accidentally, because it is not formulated in a way to deter abuse. An expert panel that advises the F.D.A. voted 11 to 2 against approval in December because panel members said that before approving this drug or any more like it, the products should be made more resistant to abuse or tampering and the current rules on monitoring of doctors and pharmacists and educating health professionals on how to prescribe them safely should be strengthened.

F.D.A. officials contend that the technology of abuse-resistance is in its infancy and cannot be applied to all products. They are requiring the manufacturer to conduct postmarketing studies of the amount of misuse, abuse and addiction associated with the drug. But that approach may not be enough to protect patients from potential harm.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: A Dynasty to Duck

Dick Cheney and Mike Enzi are in a tiff over whether they're fishing buddies or not.

Enzi, the conservative senator from Wyoming who's trying to fend off a carpetbagger challenge from Liz Cheney, is lucky he wasn't hunting buddies with the trigger-happy former vice president.

Then he might not be in the race at all.

One of the best things about the 2008 race was ushering out the incalculably destructive Dick Cheney. Except now, in 2013, he's once more ominously omnipresent. Even blessed with the gift of a stranger's heart, and looking so much healthier, he's still the same nasty bully.

He's trying to bully Enzi in an attempt to help his daughter — who has never held elected office — muscle her way into the Senate by knocking off the popular three-term incumbent Republican.

Showing that bullying runs in the family, Lynne Cheney told old friend and former Republican Wyoming senator Alan Simpson to "shut up" in an exchange tied to the contentious campaign, in which Simpson is supporting Enzi.

This is one dynasty we want to duck.

Dick Cheney is hawking a book he has written with his cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, about his heart transplant at the age of 71. Calling it "a spiritual experience," he told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos: "I wake up every morning literally with a smile on my face, grateful for another day I never thought I'd see."

Yet even in this blissed-out state, he still can't emulate the respectful restraint of his former partner, George W. Bush. He grabs every opportunity to snarl at President Obama, who is still mopping up from the Bush-Cheney misrule, as does his mini-me.

"Obstructing President Obama's policies and his agenda isn't actually obstruction; it's patriotism," Liz said.

Dick Cheney's chutzpah extends to charging the Obama administration with "incompetence" in the Middle East and saying that the president has done "enormous damage" to America's standing around the world.

When Bill O'Reilly asked Cheney on Fox News what "we get out of" the Iraq war, given that "we spent $1 trillion on this with a lot of pain and suffering on the American military," Cheney repeated his delusion about Saddam's W.M.D. — the imaginary ones — falling into the hands of terrorists: "We eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that."

And, of course, he disdains Obamacare, telling Rush Limbaugh that it's "devastating" — begrudging less well-off and well-connected Americans the lifesaving and costly health care he got on us when he was in the White House.

In his "60 Minutes" interview with Dick Cheney, Sanjay Gupta made it clear that Cheney had gotten special treatment to ascend to the vice presidency, given that he'd already had three heart attacks, the first one at 37. As Dr. Gupta noted, the Bush campaign was concerned enough to check with the famed Texas heart surgeon Denton Cooley, who talked to Dr. Reiner and then informed the Bush team — with no examination — that Cheney was in "good health with normal cardiac function."

"The normal cardiac function wasn't true," Dr. Gupta said to Cheney.

"I'm not responsible for that," replied the man who never takes responsibility for any of his dark deeds. "I don't know what took place between the doctors."

Four months after being cleared, Cheney suffered his fourth heart attack during the 2000 recount and had to get a stent put in to open a clogged artery.

If the doctors had not signed off on Cheney's heart as "normal," then Cheney would never have been vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld never would have been defense secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz never would have been his deputy, etc., etc. And W. wouldn't have been pushed and diverted into Iraq.

In this alternative scenario, "It's Not a Wonderful Life," where Cheney is not peddling his paranoia, how many Americans would not have lost their lives and limbs?

Dr. Gupta also asked the question that even Cheney's Republican pals have puzzled over: Could his heart disease, limiting blood flow to the brain, have affected his judgment on the Iraq invasion and torture? Asked if he had ever worried about that, Cheney said "No."

Speaking to Stephanopoulos, Cheney belittled his daughter's opponent, saying he had never been his fishing buddy and noting that Liz garnered 25 percent of her funds from Wyoming while Enzi only got 13 percent of his from the state. In sparsely populated Wyoming, it's not easy to raise money. And Liz has gotten a lot of help from daddy's rich friends.

While other Republican elders, from Jeb Bush to John McCain, chided Tea Party lawmakers for vaingloriously and recklessly closing the government, and National Review warned of "perpetual intra-Republican denunciation," Dick Cheney gave the shutdown a shout-out. He knows Liz's best shot is being seen as part of the "new generation" of Tea Partiers rather than a habitual beneficiary of old-fashioned nepotism.

"It's a normal, healthy reaction, and the fact that the party is having to adjust to it is positive," he said on the "Today" show about the Tea Party.

You know you're in trouble when Dick Cheney thinks you're a force for good.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Allies in Revolt

It is not every day that America finds itself facing open rebellion from its allies, yet that is what is happening with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. The Obama administration has denied there are serious problems. But there are clearly differences, some perhaps irreconcilable.

Here's a quick summary: Saudi Arabia and Israel are deeply worried about the Obama administration's decision to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran — their mortal enemy. Saudi Arabia and Turkey are sore at President Obama's refusal to become militarily involved in ousting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in particular his decision not to respond with military strikes to Mr. Assad's use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama instead chose a diplomatic deal under which Syria's chemical weapons would be dismantled.

The Saudis are also unhappy that Mr. Obama withdrew support for Hosni Mubarak, the deposed Egyptian president, and then worked with Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who was elected to replace Mr. Mubarak but was later thrown out.

All three countries have resorted to threats and displays of pique to make their points. Saudi Arabia renounced a United Nations Security Council seat it had worked hard to win because, it said, the United States and the United Nations had failed to achieve a Mideast peace agreement or solve the Syria crisis, as if either objective could be easily delivered by America alone. Although it is hard to see how other countries like China and Russia would be better alternatives, Saudi officials have gone so far as to complain that they regard the United States as unreliable and would look elsewhere for their security.

Meanwhile, Turkey, a NATO member, has said it would buy a long-range missile defense system worth $3.4 billion from China because China's bid was lower than bids from the United States and Europe. The decision may also, however, have reflected Turkey's annoyance with Mr. Obama's Syria policy. (It's a dumb deal, too, and Turkish officials now seem to be reconsidering it; China's system will be hard to integrate with NATO equipment, thus undermining alliance defenses and Turkey's.)

As for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing his best to torpedo any nuclear deal with Iran, including urging Congress to impose more economic sanctions on Iran that could bring the incipient negotiations between Iran's new government and the major powers to a halt.

Much of this anger at the United States is driven by a case of nerves. The Arab Spring uprisings shook the old order, plunged the region into chaos, created opportunities for Iran to expand its influence in Syria and Iraq and threatened to worsen the Sunni-Shiite divide. Saudi Arabia, a Sunni-majority country, in particular, fears an American rapprochement with Shiite-majority Iran.

But Mr. Obama's first responsibility is to America's national interest. And he has been absolutely right in refusing to be goaded into a war in Syria or bullied into squandering a rare, if remote, chance to negotiate an Iranian nuclear deal.

In addressing the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama reinforced his intention to narrow his regional diplomatic focus to the Iranian nuclear deal and an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Some have read this as weakness and retreat, rather than pragmatism. We wish he had put more emphasis on Egypt and Iraq. But his priorities make sense. His task now is to reassure the allies that the United States remains committed to their security.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: A Mixed Decision on the Texas Abortion Law

Under a phony guise of protecting the health and safety of women, states with Republican governors and state legislatures have been keeping busy enacting one burdensome scheme after another designed to radically curtail access to safe and legal abortion care.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

On Monday, a federal judge in Texas rejected one of the most underhanded of these legislative efforts by blocking an important part of the state's new abortion law, which would have required doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

Ruling the provision unconstitutional, Judge Lee Yeakel of the United States District Court in Austin declared that the law's "admitting-privileges provision is without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion."

Coming a day before the provision was to take effect, the judge's rejection of the hospital-privileges rule was an enormous victory for women and an important vindication for principled defenders of reproductive rights, including Wendy Davis, the Democratic state senator who is now running for governor. She tried unsuccessfully to block the measure by leading an 11-hour filibuster that attracted major national attention.

Had Judge Yeakel ruled the other way, as many as one-third of the state's 36 licensed abortion facilities would have had to have stopped offering the procedure. Similar provisions have been kept from going into effect by courts in Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, Judge Yeakel largely upheld a second bogus "safety" measure. He allowed to stand the provision in the law limiting medication abortions to an outmoded protocol for the use of abortion-inducing drugs. The protocol was established years ago by the Food and Drug Administration. Current medical practices now use a safer and more effective protocol.

His misguided conclusion will have the practical effect of leaving many women who might safely opt for a medication abortion with only a surgical option.

Judge Yeakel recognized that the old protocol requires "at least one additional visit to a clinic and allowing less control over the timing and convenience of the medically induced miscarriage," but nevertheless he said it did not impose an "undue burden" on abortion rights because surgical abortion is still available. He did, however, allow a small number of medication abortions to occur for health reasons between 50 and 63 days after a woman's last menstrual period, which is a longer time period than allowed under the F.D.A. rules.

Judge Yeakel's decision will not be the final word on the new statute. Texas has already filed an appeal of the judge's decision with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And, on Tuesday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, responding to questions from the United States Supreme Court, explained that it found Oklahoma's restriction on medication abortion unconstitutional because it "restricts the long-respected medical discretion of physicians" and effectively bans medication abortions and the nonsurgical treatment of women with ectopic pregnancies.

The justices must now decide whether to proceed with their tentative plan to hear the Oklahoma case. If they do, they should affirm the Oklahoma court's decision that prohibiting women and their doctors from using the latest forms of medication abortion is unacceptable.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: When Class Trumps Identity

Last week, I wrote about Bill de Blasio's victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, and mentioned that exit polls showed that his support was "consistently high among all income groups."

But the top income category in the exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, was made up of voters in households that earn $100,000 or more, which is too blunt a measure for a city with at least 389,100 millionaires, 2,929 multimillionaires and 70 billionaires.

Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at NYU, wrote to me pointing out that the Times's own detailed map of precinct results shows a more complex and interesting pattern.

"Just looking at voters over $100K misses something. $100K is zilch in Manhattan," Rosenthal observed. Christine Quinn, the city council president, "basically carried all the precincts bordering Central Park East, South, and West" – some of the richest precincts in the city.

It turns out that Rosenthal's point is well taken. Democratic politics in New York City — a cauldron of self-destructive ethnic and gender conflicts for the past 20 years — may be on the cutting edge of a post-racial politics.

The Times compiled a set of data more detailed than that provided by the exit polls, data that showed both actual precinct results and household income levels. The first map using this data, Figure 1, shows Manhattan winners by precinct or election district with de Blasio in blue and Quinn in beige. Quinn's success in precincts on three sides of Central Park is striking.

The second map, Figure 2, focuses on central Manhattan election districts with median annual household incomes of more than $215,000. Quinn beat de Blasio in these districts – the most affluent in the city, many of them clustered on the Upper East Side.

The pattern is fixed. If you look at the outcome in other distinct areas – upscale Manhattan Assembly Districts – you see the same pattern of precinct-level voting. Quinn decisively carried the 73rd Assembly District, one of Manhattan's most affluent East Side neighborhoods, 6,031 to de Blasio's 4,360 and to William C. Thompson Jr.'s 3,513.

Quinn came in a very close second in the 67th Assembly District, which covers a good chunk of the Upper West Side — 8,472 votes, 35 short of de Blasio's 8,507.

While there are clear dangers in over-interpreting primary results — turnout in September was a dismal 691,801, just 22 percent of registered Democrats — the Democratic primary electorate, small as it was, determined who would wield executive power for the next four years.

I asked Howard Graubard, a political blogger who writes under the name Gatemouth, for his take on the election, and he emailed back, "it is safe to say that Quinn's base was among the highest income voters." This was apparent not only in Manhattan, but in affluent sections of other boroughs, including "coastal brownstone Brooklyn, Park Slope and Forest Hills."

One of the most interesting conclusions that can be drawn from the primary results was that class trumped race, gender and sexual identity, all factors that have played strong roles in recent Democratic contests.

"Any racial vote for Thompson simply disappeared," NYU's Rosenthal noted. "Gender and sexual orientation were of at best marginal benefit to Quinn. So I think the election was largely about redistribution," Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal suggested that the differences in voting based on income point to internal party conflicts between what could be called the investment banker wing of the party and its less affluent counterpart, what Rosenthal calls "the tension between Steve Rattner and Citigroup (Robert Rubin, Peter Orszag, Jack Lew) Democrats and the mass of voters." The outcome, in Rosenthal's view, was "a repudiation of the money wing of the Democratic party."

Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton who wrote the book "Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches" with Rosenthal and Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, said that their research has shown that:

"there are big regional differences in party support related to social issues, culture etc., but within regions, voting is very much determined by income. So the primary is a pretty good illustration, in that even within a very liberal primary the results break down by income."

In a roundabout fashion, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fixture in the politics of race, made the same point in the immediate aftermath of the primary:

"What the election showed the other night is a lot of the identity politics of 20 years ago, 30 years ago has now become identity politics of policy."

Interested in exploring the startling notion that New York City Democratic politics would become a mainspring of post-racial, post-gender politics, I sought out Seth Barron, an acute observer of the intricacies of city politics, who blogs at CityCouncilWatch.

"Quinn's stronghold was the silk stocking district," Barron wrote:

"From the beginning Quinn was the candidate of business New York: real estate, finance, media etc. Her fundraising was mostly drawn from the same sectors."


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Sandy’s Unfinished Business

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 29 Oktober 2013 | 13.26

A year ago Tuesday evening, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the Eastern Seaboard, destroying lives and homes and entire neighborhoods. On the first anniversary of the storm, politicians are busily touting what they've done since, while, at the same time, assiduously dodging legitimate complaints from people who are still suffering.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

The delays have been excruciating for many. Although the federal government approved almost $60 billion in aid for the region, thousands of homeowners have seen barely a trickle. In New Jersey, more than 26,000 people are still out of their homes a year later, and, in New York City, at least 20,000 households still need help rebuilding and returning to functioning homes.

On the plus side, and despite all the unfinished business, Sandy has forced people to reimagine the future. Because the storm was just a taste of what's coming as the earth's temperatures rise and oceans expand into human territory, many politicians and private citizens have realized the folly of rebuilding what was there before.

The federal flood insurance program, for instance, has been re-evaluated and revised. The government is mapping out new flood-prone areas and reducing subsidies for second homes or other properties in areas that have been flooded repeatedly. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has argued that flood insurance for homeowners of modest means should not skyrocket to the point where it becomes unaffordable, but, in the long run, it makes sense to demand that insured properties be made more resilient.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, meanwhile, has offered a promising program to buy out damaged or destroyed homes. But it is proceeding slowly. Of more than 500 properties in a particularly devastated section of Staten Island — mostly the Oakwood Beach area — there are fewer than a dozen buyouts so far. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has offered $300 million in buyouts.

Other sensible proposals would reinforce the shoreline with dunes and wetlands, oyster beds and rock berns — all designed to allow nature to help absorb the shock of a future Sandy. And we can be fairly certain that another one will occur.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in September that the odds of a Sandy-like disaster happening again in New York City have increased 50 percent; the predictions for the end of the century are even more dire.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: A Delayed Deadline Could Disrupt Reform

It is no surprise that Congressional Republicans are seizing on problems with the federal health insurance website as reason to delay by a year the deadline for enrolling in new plans under the Affordable Care Act. It is their latest ploy to disable a law that they have tried repeatedly to repeal.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Postponing the deadline for enrollment would create havoc for the insurance plans that have set their costs based on a March 31, 2014, deadline — and possibly increase insurance premiums the following year and beyond. This won't happen if the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to go along or the White House vetoes a delay. But it is disturbing that a group of 10 Senate Democrats sent a letter on Friday to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, asking for an extension of the enrollment deadline past March 31 if substantial technical problems persist. There is no evidence yet that a delay would be needed five months from now.

Under the law, consumers who want their coverage to start on January 1 have to enroll by mid-December. If they want their coverage to start later in 2014, they must enroll by March 31. If they miss that date, an uninsured adult would have to pay a penalty of $95 or 1 percent of applicable income, whichever is higher.

The website — HealthCare.gov — will probably be more operational by the first deadline. Jeffrey Zients, the troubleshooter appointed to fix the site by President Obama, told reporters on Friday that by the end of November the portal "will work smoothly for the vast majority of users." That's enough time for anyone who has not enrolled to compare and choose a policy by mid-December. (Some state websites are working properly and have already enrolled thousands of people.) Even if Mr. Zients is overly optimistic, the March deadline is five months away and it is almost inconceivable that the site won't be fixed by then.

It better be. It is crucial that enough younger, healthier people enroll to help subsidize the costs of older, sicker people. Most of the early enrollees may be chronically ill people who couldn't get coverage from insurers or were charged exorbitant premiums. Healthier, younger people, whose participation is needed to broaden the risk pool, may wait to enroll at the last minute.

Any delay past March 31 would disrupt the basis on which premiums were set for the new policies going into effect next year. The insurers have assumed that everyone would be required to have coverage by March 31. If the enrollment period is extended for a significant period, the sickest people are most likely to sign up early and the healthiest will likely hang back, driving up the costs for insurers and making premium increases likely the following year.

Consumers will be able learn what policies and subsidies are available, either from the federal website, telephone call centers or counselors trained to guide them through the process, from state governments, or directly from private insurers. Meanwhile, there is no need for despair. In the long run, the technical problems can and will be fixed and most Americans will be better off.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: The White House on Spying

The White House response on Monday to the expanding disclosures of American spying on foreign leaders, their governments and millions of their citizens was a pathetic mix of unsatisfying assurances about reviews under way, platitudes about the need for security in an insecure age, and the odd defense that the president didn't know that American spies had tapped the German chancellor's cellphone for 10 years.

Is it really better for us to think that things have gone so far with the post-9/11 idea that any spying that can be done should be done and that nobody thought to inform President Obama about tapping the phone of one of the most important American allies?

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, kept repeating that Mr. Obama ordered a review of surveillance policy a few months ago, but he would not confirm whether that includes the tapping of the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, or the collection of data on tens of millions of calls in France, Spain and elsewhere. It's unlikely that Mr. Obama would have ordered any review if Edward Snowden's leaks had not revealed the vacuum-cleaner approach to electronic spying. Mr. Carney left no expectation that the internal reviews will produce any significant public accounting — only that the White House might have "a little more detail" when they are completed.

Fortunately, members of Congress have been more aggressive in responding to two broad disclosures. One, that both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations misinterpreted the Patriot Act to permit the collection of metadata on phone calls, emails and text messages of all Americans, whether they were international or domestic. And, second, that the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were being stretched to excuse the routine collection of data from 60 million telephone calls in Spain and 70 million in France over two 30-day periods.

Legislation scheduled to be introduced on Tuesday by Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, would end the bulk collection of Americans' communications data.

The administration has said that such data collection is permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, although Mr. Sensenbrenner, who wrote that section, has said it is not. The bill, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, would require that the "tangible things" sought through data collection are "relevant and material to an authorized investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." They would also have to pertain to a foreign power or its agent, activities of a foreign agent already under investigation or someone in touch with an agent.

Currently, the government conducts metadata collection by periodically vaguely informing a federal court in secret that it is working on security-related issues.

The bill would require a court order in order to search for Americans' communications in data collected overseas, which falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it would restrict "reverse targeting" — targeting a foreigner with the goal of getting information about an American. The bill would not address spying on foreigners, including such abuses as in the Merkel affair. Those activities are governed by a presidential order that is secret and certain to remain so.

We are not reassured by the often-heard explanation that everyone spies on everyone else all the time. We are not advocating a return to 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson banned the decryption of diplomatic cables because "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." But there has long been an understanding that international spying was done in pursuit of a concrete threat to national security.

That Chancellor Merkel's cellphone conversations could fall under that umbrella is an outgrowth of the post-9/11 decision by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that everyone is the enemy, and that anyone's rights may be degraded in the name of national security. That led to Abu Ghraib, torture at the secret C.I.A. prisons, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, grave harm to international relations, and the dragnet approach to surveillance revealed by the Snowden leaks.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Make ’Em Pay

Where do you go if you're a "Deadliest Catch" kind of guy, manliest of manly men, but couldn't fish for king crab because some jelly-bellied Republicans threw a tantrum 5,000 miles away and shut down the government?

What do you do if you're a farmer in Kansas who could not put winter wheat in the ground or get this year's cattle vaccine because your government agriculture office was deemed nonessential? Whom do you see about the home loan that was held up, the family restaurant near the federal building that couldn't meet October's payroll, the bookings lost at season's end in dozens of national parks?

Real Americans, the wind-chapped toilers so often invoked by politicians in a phony froth, lost real money from the real pain inflicted on their livelihoods by the extortionists in Congress this month.

How much money? At least $24 billion was the estimate given by Standard & Poor's. Small business was hit particularly hard. And it's a rolling pain, affecting consumer confidence, that will be felt through a holiday buying season that can make or break many retailers.

"I am a small businessman in a big ocean with big bills," said Captain Keith Colburn, an Alaska crab fisherman, in Senate testimony during the shutdown. "I need to go fishing." But the skipper, who is featured in the reality TV show "Deadliest Catch," said he was being held back by "a bunch of knuckleheads" who prevented marine regulators from doing their jobs.

So, who pays? For years, Republicans have been trumpeting the idea that when a government action hurts a private business, the government should compensate for the loss. This principle is based on a broad reading of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment; it's usually summoned as leverage against environmental regulation.

But in the case of the federal shutdown, of course, the economic hit on millions of Americans didn't come from government — it came from one political faction in the House of Representatives. You could sue the Tea Party, but what is that? A bunch of costumed zealots on Fox are not responsible for anything that comes out of their mouths and lands in the porous mind of someone like Representative Ted Yoho of Florida.

You could sue Ted Cruz of Texas for initiating the calamity with a marathon of self-absorption. But the senator, like all members of Congress, has broad protection to pretty much say or do anything he wants inside the thick-walled refuge of the Capitol, a free speech guarantee that is warranted even when abused by vanity projects like Cruz.

What's left is the ballot box. And here, Red State America can do a huge service for the rest of country. The states hit hardest by the shutdown, it now appears, were those where Republicans prevail. Virginia, with its wealth of government jobs and businesses that depend on those jobs, is Exhibit A. There, Republicans are likely to lose the governor's race next week in part because their party disrupted so many lives in October's meltdown.

The more difficult job will be ousting, from hardened, gerrymandered districts, the people who put ideology ahead of common sense and commerce. They seem faceless and buffoonish. They act as if they are immune from majority sentiment. But each of them is up for re-election a year from now, and the good news is that almost 75 percent of voters say most Republicans in Congress don't deserve to be sent back to Washington.

In some districts, it will be civil war. What's left of moderate Republicans are organizing to go after the crazies. "Hopefully, we'll go into eight to 10 races and beat the snot out of them," former Representative Steve LaTourette of Ohio told the National Journal. His group of fed-up Republicans, Defending Main Street, plans to raise $8 million to target the looniest of the loons.

Make Steve King of Iowa pay. As key government offices across the country were shuttered, as farmers in his district could not get their loans processed, King crowed, "We're right!" He exists because political theater requires new players in clown makeup. The Des Moines Register recently suggested a slogan for King: "Send me back to Washington so I can continue to embarrass Iowa."

Make Darrell Issa of California pay. Using the vast apparatus of his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he is going after National Park Service rangers. Having shut down the government, Issa wants to know why popular parks and monuments were closed. The audacity! During an earlier hearing, a fellow congressman provided an answer: He held up a mirror and aimed it at Republican lawmakers.

And certainly make Marlin Stutzman of Indiana pay. This congressman gave history the money quote on the shutdown. "We have to get something out of this," he said. "And I don't know what that even is." A year from now, he can find out.

Joe Nocera is off today. David Brooks is on book leave.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: The Storm Inside

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

A year ago, when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, our son, William, was heavily sedated in St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan, never conscious of the storm outside or its aftermath.

Just over a week earlier, William had suffered storm damage of his own — cardiac arrest following an overdose of heroin. First responders restored his heartbeat and rushed him to the hospital. There, doctors and nurses deliberately lowered his body temperature and heavily sedated him in an attempt to prevent seizures.

While the windows rattled, the rain fell in sheets, and the city, too, was paralyzed, William was unaware that the nurses and doctors tending to him were working double shifts, sleeping on cots in the hospital, unable to get to their homes. Unaware that the hospital was filling beyond capacity with patients transferred from facilities ravaged by the tempest elsewhere in the city.

His mother, sister and I stayed by his side, trying to glean any positive signs we could, discovering how to track any changes in his condition from the battery of monitors attached to his head, hands and heart. We read him selections from George Carlin, played Stevie Ray Vaughan and sang to him, doing our best to stimulate and comfort him — if indeed such a thing was possible. It was our way of coping with catastrophe.

From time to time, one or the other of us would leave his bedside to grab something to eat or pace about in the family lounge. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave us a view of the hurricane at work, while high on the wall was another monitor, a television with every station detailing downed power lines, flooded subways, trees felled across roads. The disrupted network of a city. From time to time we also got a sense of the track of the storm. Our house in the Catskills was in line to get hit, but we didn't care.

While the clouds outside the windows started lifting, our lives only got darker. We kept a vigil for another five weeks. As the news carried reports of homes washed away, beaches destroyed, and the first early reports of rebuilding, we had to reconcile ourselves to the fact that the magnitude of damage to William's brain was too great. He was, in his own way, washed away. We removed him from life support, still singing, reading, playing music and talking to him — in the hope, until he drew his last breath in our arms, that he might comprehend anything at all. Our attempt to reach the unreachable.

William's last heartbeat was on Dec. 2. We stayed at our apartment in the city through the winter. Our grief kept us from going to our home in the Catskills. Many of the happiest parts of his life and our life were there. Too many reminders of the boy we loved and missed so sorely. Legos, Hess trucks, soccer balls, baseball gloves, old computers, artwork, books, recorders, CDs, DVDs, jackets, T-shirts, camp pictures.

We finally worked up the courage to return for the first time in the warmth of early April. We found a changed landscape: Sandy had uprooted trees, washed out a portion of the trail below our house, and blown out some storm windows, which were scattered in pieces about the lawn on the south side of the house.

That Sunday afternoon, I put on gloves and began picking up the shards, moving carefully and deliberately about the task. The grass was brown, still wintering. The glass sparkled in the sunlight, easy to spot. It pinged and jangled when I dropped it in the trash bucket. I worked my way down the slope of the lawn and across the back of the house, to where part of a window had smashed against the stonework. There, at the base of the wall, the grass was taller and thicker, unmown since late summer. As I finished the job, carefully pushing back the tall grass, there was a burst of purple, then a flash of white, and finally a tiny cluster of green. It was the first crocuses and the tips of daffodils, using the warmth of sunlight off the wall to work their way to the new spring, unaware of the fragments of the fall still lying around them.


Bill Williams is a theater teacher and freelance writer.


13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?

Written By Unknown on Senin, 28 Oktober 2013 | 13.25

Much of the speculation about the future of news focuses on the business model: How will we generate the revenues to pay the people who gather and disseminate the news? But the disruptive power of the Internet raises other profound questions about what journalism is becoming, about its essential character and values. This week's column is a conversation — a (mostly) civil argument — between two very different views of how journalism fulfills its mission.

Glenn Greenwald broke what is probably the year's biggest news story, Edward Snowden's revelations of the vast surveillance apparatus constructed by the National Security Agency. He has also been an outspoken critic of the kind of journalism practiced at places like The New York Times, and an advocate of a more activist, more partisan kind of journalism. Earlier this month he announced he was joining a new journalistic venture, backed by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who has promised to invest $250 million and to "throw out all the old rules." I invited Greenwald to join me in an online exchange about what, exactly, that means.

Dear Glenn,

We come at journalism from different traditions. I've spent a life working at newspapers that put a premium on aggressive but impartial reporting, that expect reporters and editors to keep their opinions to themselves unless they relocate (as I have done) to the pages clearly identified as the home of opinion. You come from a more activist tradition — first as a lawyer, then as a blogger and columnist, and soon as part of a new, independent journalistic venture financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Your writing proceeds from a clearly stated point of view.

In a post on Reuters this summer, media critic Jack Shafer celebrated the tradition of partisan journalism — "From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald" — and contrasted it with what he called "the corporatist ideal." He didn't explain the phrase, but I don't think he meant it in a nice way. Henry Farrell, who blogs for The Washington Post, wrote more recently that publications like The New York Times and The Guardian "have political relationships with governments, which make them nervous about publishing (and hence validating) certain kinds of information," and he suggested that your new project with Omidyar would represent a welcome escape from such relationships.

I find much to admire in America's history of crusading journalists, from the pamphleteers to the muckrakers to the New Journalism of the '60s to the best of today's activist bloggers. At their best, their fortitude and passion have stimulated genuine reforms (often, as in the Progressive Era, thanks to the journalists' "political relationships with governments"). I hope the coverage you led of the National Security Agency's hyperactive surveillance will lead to some overdue accountability.

But the kind of journalism The Times and other mainstream news organizations practice — at their best — includes an awful lot to be proud of, too, revelations from Watergate to torture and secret prisons to the malfeasance of the financial industry, and including some pre-Snowden revelations about the N.S.A.'s abuse of its authority. Those are highlights that leap to mind, but you'll find examples in just about every day's report. Journalists in this tradition have plenty of opinions, but by setting them aside to follow the facts — as a judge in court is supposed to set aside prejudices to follow the law and the evidence — they can often produce results that are more substantial and more credible. The mainstream press has had its failures — episodes of credulousness, false equivalency, sensationalism and inattention — for which we have been deservedly flogged. I expect you'll say, not flogged enough. So I pass you the lash.

Dear Bill,

There's no question that journalists at establishment media venues, certainly including The New York Times, have produced some superb reporting over the last couple of decades. I don't think anyone contends that what has become (rather recently) the standard model for a reporter — concealing one's subjective perspectives or what appears to be "opinions" — precludes good journalism.

But this model has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession. A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful "here's-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won't-resolve-the-conflicts" formulation. That rewards dishonesty on the part of political and corporate officials who know they can rely on "objective" reporters to amplify their falsehoods without challenge (i.e., reporting is reduced to "X says Y" rather than "X says Y and that's false").

Worse still, this suffocating constraint on how reporters are permitted to express themselves produces a self-neutering form of journalism that becomes as ineffectual as it is boring. A failure to call torture "torture" because government officials demand that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demonstrably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul.

Worst of all, this model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: ‘Not One More’

President Obama urged Congress on Thursday to revive immigration reform, which is not dead but not moving, either. He was talking mostly to House Republicans, though he also urged business, labor and religious groups to "keep putting the pressure on all of us to get this done."

It's good that Mr. Obama said "us." It acknowledges his own role in this continuing disaster.

Much of the responsibility to fix what Mr. Obama calls the "broken immigration system" lies within his own administration. He can't rewrite immigration laws, but he can control how well — or disastrously — they are enforced. He can begin by undoing the damage done by his Homeland Security Department. Mr. Obama has just nominated Jeh Johnson, a former Defense Department general counsel, to replace homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano, who resigned in July. It's the perfect opportunity for a fresh start. Here is what it might look like:

STOP NEEDLESS DEPORTATIONS The Obama administration has kept up a frantic pace of 400,000 deportations a year, and is closing in on two million. Those numbers are driven by politics, not public safety. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has wide discretion to determine whom it detains and deports. It can retool all its policies to make noncriminals and minor offenders — the people most likely to benefit from the reform now stalled in Congress — the lowest priority for deportation.

The deportation surge is fed by programs like Secure Communities, which does immigration checks on everyone arrested by local and state law enforcement, and Operation Streamline, in which border crossers in the Southwest are prosecuted en masse, with little access to legal representation. Mr. Obama turned the dragnet on, and can turn it off. In marches and vigils across the country, protesters have made one plea on deportations to Mr. Obama: "Not one more." He should heed it.

ACKNOWLEDGE THE CRISIS As he makes the case for immigration reform, Mr. Obama often mentions the economic consequences of failure — jobs unfilled, crops unpicked, investments not made and taxes not collected. He would do well to highlight the human costs of enforcement without reform, in separating families, and violating the civil and labor rights of workers.

Defiant advocates in Tucson, Ariz., recently blocked buses carrying Operation Streamline detainees, drawing attention to the damage done by indiscriminate deportation. In East Haven, Conn., last week, two police officers were convicted of abusing Latino residents, part of an egregious pattern of abuse. There and elsewhere, the Justice Department has done much to investigate and stop illegal policing and civil rights abuses; Mr. Obama should redouble administration efforts to protect the rights of immigrants and noncitizens.

GET BEYOND POLITICS The talk in Washington has focused on how, after the shutdown debacle, Republicans and Democrats might exploit immigration for political advantage. But last week, the genuine immigration crisis intruded, as if from another universe. Busloads of Arizonans — parents, children, students known as Dreamers — lined up outside House Speaker John Boehner's office, pleading for a meeting and praying for action on reform. Mr. Boehner had no time for them.

The shutdown was a fake emergency. Immigration is a real one, harming lives every day in every state. Mr. Obama has sometimes been resentful when immigrant advocates remind him of his failures. Now, at least, he has invited their pressure.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Why Prisons Are Shrinking

The mandatory sentencing movement that swept the United States beginning in the 1970s drove the state prison population up from less than 200,000 to about 1.4 million today and made corrections the second-fastest-growing state expense after Medicaid. But bipartisan sentencing reforms in a growing number of states are starting to reverse that trend — causing the prison population to decline by about 3.8 percent since 2009.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Underlying the state reforms is a relatively new and more sophisticated way of using data about the offender — including criminal history, drug abuse and instances of antisocial behavior — to assess the likelihood of that individual's committing a new crime. And by examining arrest, sentencing and probation data, the states can revise policies that might be driving people back into prison unnecessarily.

States have found that many inmates go back to prison not for committing new crimes but for technical violations, like missing appointments with parole officers or failing drug tests. With that knowledge, states have moved to less costly and more effective sanctions — a brief jail stay, community service or more frequent meetings with the parole officer — for such offenses.

Some states are also embracing what is known as the "justice reinvestment" approach, under which they channel significant sums of money into improved parole or probation services while beefing up the drug treatment and mental health services that many ex-offenders need to stay out of trouble.

Despite the merits of a risk-assessment approach, a report issued earlier this year by the Council of State Governments Justice Center said that many states are still flying blind, because they don't have the resources to gather data. Moreover, the study noted, handling high-risk and low-risk offenders in the same way is a big mistake, because "low risk individuals have an increased likelihood of recidivism when they are oversupervised or receive treatment or services in the same programs as medium- and high-risk individuals."

There are proven ways to move away from discredited, ruinously expensive corrections policies. More states need to adopt these approaches.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: For Extending New York’s Judicial Terms

The judicial retirement ages embedded in New York State's Constitution are a relic of a time when average life expectancy was much shorter than it is today. A sensible proposal on the Nov. 5 ballot, Proposition 6, would modestly extend the age limits for certain state judges and help ease court system backlogs by allowing seasoned judges to stay on past age 70. We urge voters to approve the change.

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Under the plan, members of New York's Supreme Court — comprising the state's primary trial court and the intermediate appellate court — would be eligible to serve up to five more two-year terms once they reach 70, allowing them to serve until age 80. Now, a State Supreme Court justice may serve three two-year terms beyond the age of 70, so the change would raise the cap by four years.

These five-term extensions would be subject to medical certification of continued fitness, just as the current three-term extensions are. In all, 28 judges would become eligible for the extra extensions in the next four years, according to court officials. This would give court administrators new flexibility to assign judges to family court and other areas where there is a pressing need.

Proposition 6 would also let members of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, serve past that court's current mandatory retirement age of 70. Just a few years ago, the state's former chief judge, Judith Kaye, one of the nation's most able jurists, was forced to step down because of that rule for no good reason. Under the ballot proposal, Court of Appeals judges would be allowed to serve out any 14-year term on the court begun before they reach age 70, subject to a requirement that they step off the bench by the last day of the year in which they turn 80. Judge Kaye's successor, Jonathan Lippman, for example, would be allowed to stay on the court until his term ended in early 2023, at age 77. For reasons of continuity, fairness and judicial independence, the reform is overdue.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial | The City Life: A Real Job in Make-Believe

It's called "faking New York" — making a movie or television show in some other city with locales ginned up to resemble the one and only. "A lot of people were faking New York," says Katherine Oliver, the commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, looking back over the last 11 years. "They were making a movie about Rudy Giuliani in Montreal! Ridiculous."

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Things have turned around, as any New Yorker could see in checking out the production caravan parked last month on Riverside Drive, where the cast and crew of "The Good Wife" was, as usual, faking Chicago. In the current TV season, 26 prime-time series used locations in the city, versus seven a decade ago.

The industry accounts for an estimated $7.1 billion in direct spending in the city a year, employing more than 130,000 people. At the entry level are production assistants, running errands and holding up pedestrians. A case in point is Jessica Mayfield, who got her chance as a production assistant after graduating from the five-week "Made in NY" course designed by the city's media office and the nonprofit Brooklyn Workforce Innovations. She is a 27-year-old Manhattan native who needed a job three years ago and stumbled onto a career track while pausing at a film location. "I'm lucky," she says of being promoted from her boot-camp start to her latest job as a producer's aide specializing in actors' contracts.

New Yorkers complain about inconvenience, particularly when prime parking spots are taken over by film crew caravans. But Ms. Mayfield and the more than 400 production assistants who have gone through the program are the upside to all the klieg-lit commotion.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial | Notebook: The A Train to Autumn

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 27 Oktober 2013 | 13.25

Byron Smith for The New York Times

A 4 train headed toward Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx offers great fall views, as do the other subway lines with elevated tracks.

Leaf-watching season in the Northeast is dazzling but fleeting. If you haven't already taken Amtrak's Adirondack train, with its special glass-domed car, up the Hudson Valley and beyond to see forested riverbanks in their coats of many, many colors, you've pretty much missed that chance — the leaves have peaked, and dome car service ends Tuesday.

But if you're in New York City, you don't have to go far — not even to Yonkers — to see leaves that haven't peaked. Get yourself a MetroCard, a cup of coffee and a smartphone with a tree-identification app. And stand clear of the closing doors, please.

From mid-Manhattan, take an outbound train. It could be the A, the 7, the 1, the 4 or the Long Island Rail Road to Jamaica. As long as the line ends up above ground beyond Manhattan (very important), it almost doesn't matter.

Take the A, for instance. It climbs into daylight near Liberty Avenue in Queens on its way to Jamaica Bay and the Rockaways. You see row houses and scrubby street trees — this is definitely not Vermont. But tune out the concrete, brick and asphalt, and soon you won't see the city for the trees: lush, brazen, almost incandescent in the morning sunlight. Over by Aqueduct Racetrack, vines and a dense tree canopy appear to be devouring the platform: green vengeance, soon to turn crimson, ocher, gold.

On the other side of Queens, on the elevated 7 line, the World's Fair grounds form an ample urban woodland. After you cross the verdant Grand Central Parkway (thank you, Robert Moses), turn your back on Citi Field and look south upon the meadows of Flushing. The express inches through a copse of trees, then over the Flushing River, with its old pilings and mud at low tide, and a pair of bonus ducks. You have already seen more leaves than you would have ever expected, from the subway.

But the best is yet to come. On the 4, up and beyond the East Side, past Yankee Stadium and the Kingsbridge Armory, among the brick apartment blocks and rocky outcroppings: stands of stubborn ailanthus and oak, subway platforms choked in blush-red ivy.

The end of the line is a forest: Van Cortlandt Park, one of the city's largest, next to Woodlawn Cemetery, the leafy permanent address of Herman Melville, Miles Davis and Fiorello La Guardia.

Head out of the turnstiles, go up the block, onto a wooded path. Signs tell you of Norway maple, pin oak, sweet gum. And poison ivy, now lustrous red and yellow.

Heading back toward the subway, you pass two workers in helmets and orange vests talking park business. Heedless of trail etiquette, they walk by without a nod, not even looking up. This may be the woods, but it is still the Bronx.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinion: Riding Out Sandy in the Rockaways

Jonah Markowitz

Life after Sandy. James Culleton prepares for a day of fishing aboard his boat, the Easy Rider, in Howard Beach, Brooklyn, in the summer of 2013.

WHEN the morning tide came in you could tell it was going to be a big one. I live in Arverne, a neighborhood in the Rockaways, and in the morning when I was walking up Thursby Avenue I could already see the water coming in on that first tide.

But no one was really panicking yet. We get flooding from time to time. But the wind hadn't even started blowing yet and already the water was coming down the road.

That's when I see these two swans. They're just as happy as can be floating down the middle of the road. The water went around the corner and the swans went that way too. I wonder what happened to them.

Come nighttime, the wind's really starting to blow. I didn't really think about evacuating. My idea — I was going to sit in my boat and ride it out like a Viking. I've been in hurricanes before.

Anyway, during the day I caught a load of fish 'cause, you know, when a big storm's coming you better have something on hand that you can sell afterward.

Around 7 p.m. I get in my truck. Suddenly I see a huge wave coming down the road. I turn down another road and there's an electrical wire in the water, sparking, so I go up the next street.

I turn around and see a friend of mine on the porch of his house and I say, "Hey, Mike, you need a hand?"

He says, "Yeah, come on in, I could use some help."

We go down in the basement and start putting up all the electrical equipment. We take a break and watch a little TV, try to see what's happening on the Weather Channel. It doesn't sound too bad so far.

All of a sudden the basement window lets go and the water starts pouring in. The kids go flying up the stairs and we're following them.

I realize I gotta move my truck. I reach in my pocket and I remember my keys are downstairs under six feet of water. I can't get home.

Now all hell breaks loose. The wind's howling, the rain's cutting you like a knife in the face. And the wires are arcing and sparking on the side of the house.

Now here comes more water, pouring down the road. The funny thing is when floods come in and the cars go underwater, all the lights in the cars go on like something from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" — all the car lights are on, the windshield wipers are going, the horns are blowing.

Jonah Markowitz

After being evicted from emergency housing, Mr. Culleton stayed with friends or slept in his truck outside the local police station.

I see the lights go on in my truck and I say to myself, "That's it."

Now the water's coming up the front steps and we tell the kids and the wife to go upstairs. We say, "Don't worry about it, it looks like the water's going down." The wife turns around and gives this knowing look.

Then the lights in the house go off. The place gets eerie. Like something out of a horror movie. The car lights underwater are the only thing you could see. You wonder, "What the hell's next?"

I'm thinking about my house with no basement down in the low area down by the bay — can't be much left of it. And then I'm thinking about my boat, my livelihood. Not knowing is worse than knowing.

We start smelling smoke and hearing popping noises. We look out the front window toward the east; that's where the wind's coming from. There's a fire coming and looks like it's whipping straight at you — sparks, flames shooting everywhere. We can't figure where anything is. It's just hell. I start calling 911 — that's a waste of time. Better off talking to your shoes. All you get is a recording.

Jonah Markowitz

Mr. Culleton takes a moment to rest at a single room occupancy residence in Rockaway Park.

I realize it's like being in your boat. No one's gonna help you.

So I said maybe we have to try to get the kids out and hopefully the fire don't come. You could see the shock in the wife's face. You could see it but she was hiding it to make the kids not be scared. They're upstairs playing with their Transformer toys.

And the water keeps coming and I'm thinking about the people down south during Hurricane Katrina — how they got caught in their attics and drowned. I think we might need to cut a hole in the roof. We got a cordless saw. But we got no power.

And that's when I look out the window and I see the water joining up — the bay is hooking up with the ocean. The water's all around. It's just like being on a boat at sea. We go upstairs. And finally the water starts going down and we collapse.

The next morning we wake up. Everybody's walking around like zombies. It's not just the loss of property, it's the mental trauma. The unknowing of the future. We go outside and it's a new world. Stuff everywhere. All five blocks around us burned to the ground.

I end up staying at Mike's for two weeks — that's how long it takes me to get my house keys back from the bottom of the basement.

Around that time Mike's next-door neighbor, the only one with a working car, he goes down to the boat yard. And he says, "Hey, I seen your boat. Your boat made it." So I go back home. And I see my boat, the Easy Rider. It made it through O.K.

But my yard's so full of garbage I can't get in the front door of my house. I climb over the neighbor's fence. I see all my equipment is wiped out. I open the other door and a busted pipe blasts me in the face with water. I turn the water off, nail the front door shut and say: "The hell with this place. I gotta get my sanity back."

I been working on fixing the house for a year now. I still can't go home.

James Culleton is a fisherman based in the Rockaways. This account was told to Paul Greenberg, the author of "Four Fish" and the forthcoming "American Catch."


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

News Analysis: Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You

ZOMBIES may be hogging the pop culture spotlight these days in "World War Z" and "The Walking Dead," but now that the flesh-eating undead are selling Sprint cellphones in television ads, one has to wonder: have they finally jumped the shark as the monster of the moment?

Well, there's a new wave of evildoers waiting to step in: cannibals.

At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Eli Roth's hungry-savages film, "The Green Inferno," and Manuel Martín Cuenca's dark love story "Cannibal" played to gore-loving crowds. Other releases this fall include "Butcher Boys," an urban thriller based on Jonathan Swift's satirical 18th-century essay "A Modest Proposal"; "The Colony," about flesh-eating survivors of an apocalyptic attack; "We Are What We Are," about a father and his cannibal children; the German-language "Cannibal Diner," with young women on the menu; and "Evil Feed," a comedy about a restaurant that serves the body parts of losing participants in an underground fighting ring.

On the small screen, NBC's crime drama "Hannibal," based on Thomas Harris's notorious flesh muncher Hannibal Lecter, will return for a second season. And two plays (both closing this weekend) brought cannibalism to the stage: In New York, "feeling" told the story of a woman who talks with Jeffrey Dahmer; in Minneapolis, "Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals" took a comic-book approach to the subject.

So what's behind this burst of fascination with flesh eating?

For Mr. Roth, the director of "Hostel" and an expert on pushing the boundaries of horror, the fear of cannibals "is not just having your own flesh devoured, but that you would have a taste for another person's flesh. It's a primal feeling."

The tag line for "The Green Inferno," showing on Nov. 2 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies series, is, "The only thing more terrifying than Mother Nature is human nature."

Gunnar Hansen, who played the weapon-wielding Leatherface in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), a pioneering foray into cannibalistic terrain, sees it as a sign of the times, just as the cold war gave rise to fever dreams of space invaders and Vietnam ushered in a modern zombie era with "Night of the Living Dead."

"You can look at the economy and say the past is about to bite us literally and figuratively," said Mr. Hansen, whose new memoir is called "Chain Saw Confidential." "We are at the point where a new generation has nothing to look forward to."

Or perhaps there's something more visceral at work. Another early favorite of horror cognoscenti — and an inspiration for Mr. Roth's "Green Inferno" — is Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980), about a documentary crew that's attacked by the flesh-eating tribe they are filming in the Amazon. Its depiction of real-life animal slaughter, which still shocks today, suggests a weird affinity with today's animal-rights' movement.

"People rarely think of steak or fried chicken as consuming a dead thing," said Tim Kelly, who writes about the cannibal genre for Cinematallica.com. "Cannibals force you to confront something you don't want to understand, which is the truth of what you are consuming."

Then again, maybe it was just a matter of time before pop culture caught up with real-life reports of cannibalism, like the case of a New York police officer who was convicted in March for a plot to kill and eat women.

And there's always the possibility of shock fatigue. "Ten years ago nobody would laugh at a movie about eating people," said Aaron Au, a co-writer of "Evil Feed." "But the zombie genre desensitized us to be accepting of it."

On another, even creepier, level, what sets cannibals apart from zombies may simply be their humanity. As Kimani Ray Smith, the director of "Evil Feed," put it: "A cannibal's just a smarter zombie. You need more cunning to get away with being a cannibal. But cannibals still have day-to-day problems. They still have to pay the rent."

Erik Piepenburg is an editor in the culture department of The New York Times.


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Great Divide: Division Street, U.S.A.

We don't talk much about "the wrong side of the tracks" in public anymore, but the distinction between one place and another is implicitly understood and often explicitly specified. That location matters greatly for housing values, for example, is taken for granted. Less appreciated is the persistence of neighborhood inequality and its extensive reach into multiple aspects of everyday life. An increasing separation at the top has intensified the effect of spatial divisions on everyone else.

Our understanding of the neighborhood as a consolidating feature of American inequality has roots in a classic tradition of scholarly research. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson brought the geographic isolation of poor urban blacks to public attention in 1987 in a book he famously called "The Truly Disadvantaged." A few years later, the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton underscored the profound separation of blacks and whites by neighborhood.

Although much has improved in the inner city since then, it is still common in American cities to find neighborhoods struggling with poverty rates well above the national average, sometimes just streets away from neighborhoods brimming with affluence. While racial segregation has modestly declined in recent decades, the latest data reveal that approximately 60 percent of blacks or whites in metropolitan areas across the United States would have to relocate to achieve racial integration. In New York City, an eye-popping 81 percent of whites or blacks would have to move.

Fifty years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to African-Americans on a "lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity," racial and economic disparities by place not only remain but are closely connected. Nationwide, close to a third of African-American children born between 1985 and 2000 were raised in high-poverty neighborhoods compared with just 1 percent of whites. Crucially, income does not erase place-based racial inequality — affluent blacks typically live in poorer neighborhoods than the average lower-income white resident.

The stigmatization and widespread social exclusion of poor neighborhoods is corrosive.

The great neighborhood divide extends to many of the fundamentals of well-being. Violence, poor physical health, teenage pregnancy, obesity, fear and dropping out of school are all unequally distributed. Getting ahead economically is also shaped by where you live, even more than you might think. Despite the effects of globalization and the rise of technologies that allow us to work or interact virtually anywhere, the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that upward mobility — the odds of a child raised in the bottom fifth of income rising to the top fifth as an adult — is lower for those who grew up in cities characterized by racially and economic segregated neighborhoods.

What many have come to call "mass incarceration" has a local face as well — only a small proportion of communities have experienced America's prisoner boom whereas others are relatively untouched. I was taken aback to learn that the highest incarceration rate among African-American communities in Chicago was over 40 times higher than the highest ranked white community. This is a staggering difference of kind, not degree. And it does not go unnoticed, even by children. In one neighborhood I came across a wall behind a school with sketches of the grim faces of black men behind prison bars. An open book and diploma were drawn underneath — hope to be sure, but against a backdrop of despair.

The stigmatization and widespread social exclusion of poor neighborhoods is corrosive. Cynicism toward institutions is high despite the commitment of residents to conventional values. In Chicago, for example, lower income and minority residents are more likely to condemn smoking, drinking and fighting among teenagers than upper class or white residents. Yet concentrated poverty lowered perceived trust and social cohesion among fellow residents, reinforcing a negative feedback loop.

Even the simple act of mailing a lost letter you find lying in the street varies greatly. As part of our larger project, a team at the Institute of Social Research conducted a field experiment to determine the rate at which strangers mailed back over 3,000 stamped letters randomly dropped in the streets of Chicago. The rate of return by neighborhood ranged from zero to over 75 percent. After adjusting for things like weather conditions, land use and housing patterns, concentrated poverty predicted lower rates of return.

Less visible are the long-term consequences of growing up in concentrated poverty for human capital development. In Chicago we found that early exposure to severely disadvantaged communities was associated with diminished verbal skills later in childhood. We estimated that living in concentrated disadvantage depressed the rate of future verbal learning by about four I.Q. points, akin to missing a year of school.

An experiment begun in the mid-1990s by the Department of Housing and Urban Development looked at a similar issue in a different way. Housing vouchers were randomly assigned to poor families that could be redeemed only by moving to a lower poverty neighborhood. Even though final destinations were just marginally better, poor children whose families moved out of the most severely disadvantaged neighborhoods in Baltimore and Chicago showed the largest improvements in cognitive skills. These cities have concentrated poverty, racial segregation and violent crime rates higher than those of Boston, New York or Los Angeles, the other project sites. In other words, in cities with more desperate pockets of isolation, the move was more advantageous.

Neighborhood disadvantage can extend across surprisingly long periods of time in the lives of children and families. My colleagues and I just completed a long-term follow-up of over 1,000 children from the study in Chicago that we began in 1995. We tracked a birth cohort, 9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds, no matter where they moved in the United States. Among the near-majority of black infants born in high poverty neighborhoods in 1995, more than half remained there in 2012; 13 percent had "moved up" to low poverty.

What about downward mobility? Over a third of black infants born in low poverty ended up in high poverty neighborhoods, compared with 2 percent of white children.

The results for adolescents show even greater inequality by race: almost 70 percent of black adolescents raised in concentrated poverty areas remain there as young adults; 55 percent of the small group raised in low poverty nonetheless ended up in high poverty. Again the contrasts are striking: almost no adolescent whites experience concentrated poverty in the first place, and for the majority who were raised in low poverty, only 9 percent were downwardly mobile 17 years later.

The extent of intergenerational transmission of neighborhood disadvantage is also notable. A study by Patrick Sharkey of N.Y.U. found that approximately half of black families in the United States had lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in consecutive generations since the 1970s, compared with only 7 percent of white families.

These durable inequalities seem paradoxical when we consider the changing American landscape.

Inequality may persist in the lives of individuals, but what about neighborhoods themselves? Do the same neighborhoods remain poor decade after decade, or is poverty "reshuffled"? And what about gentrification?

Although there is always population turnover of individual residents and fluctuations in the poverty rate over time, it turns out that if we know where a neighborhood starts out statistically, we can do rather well predicting where it will end up relative to other neighborhoods. Many poor neighborhoods get stuck for decades.

The "stickiness" of inequality by place is also notable at the high end. The Gold Coast of Chicago is as golden as ever, and elite neighborhoods from the Upper East Side of New York to Bel-Air in Los Angeles are in no danger of even relative decline.

These durable inequalities seem paradoxical when we consider the changing American landscape. Poverty is increasing most rapidly in the suburbs, crime has decreased just about everywhere, and gentrification is reshaping many working-class and poor areas of central cities. New York is the poster child these days for crime reduction and a new type of urban renewal. The media has focused attention on Brooklyn, for example, highlighting neighborhoods undergoing gentrification that were in despair not long ago.

The phenomenon is real but the fact that it makes the news is precisely the point — "rags to riches" is no more common among neighborhoods than it is among people. For every poor neighborhood on the move, more struggle out of the media glare. And while large cities like Detroit have been much in the news for spectacular failure, smaller cities and towns like Flint, Mich., and Port Clinton, Ohio, contain some of America's poorest and hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, many social policies tend to accentuate these trends rather than mitigate them. The persistent geography of inequality is reinforced by exclusionary zoning, persistent red lining, selective withdrawal of public services, the segregation of low-income public housing, "stop and frisk" policing concentrated in minority areas, school funding tied to property values and the political fragmentation of metropolitan areas. The city line is more than just geography, it typically means a sharp social boundary.

The good news is that we are experimenting with a number of policies, some place-based and others person-based. Both are needed, but in either case the durability of poverty calls for profound long-term investments. Although funding levels are still too low relative to the magnitude of the challenge, sustained investment in disadvantaged communities is at the core of the Obama administration's "Promise Zones" initiative, modeled in part after Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. There are also some encouraging results from a long-term effort to develop mixed-income housing in suburban Mount Laurel, N.J. In addition to promoting quality early childhood education and affordable housing, reducing violence must be central to any community intervention.

There is no magic bullet, however, and historical trends caution against quick solutions. In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, neighborhoods have an effect on people's lives in part because people and institutions act as if neighborhoods matter, further reinforcing the reproduction of inequality by place. Crime, perceived safety and the quality of local schools lead to reputations that have real consequences. Neighborhood reputations may well be sturdier than those of individuals, a point not lost on real estate agents.

The tendency of humans to segregate by place has also persisted across long time spans and eras despite the transformation of specific boundaries, political regimes and the layout of cities. Research by archaeologists indicates that spatial divisions like ours were found in ancient cities, too.

The greatest divisions of place today are at the very top, creating what we might call the new 1 percent neighborhoods. In recent decades, cities have been pulling apart; income inequality by neighborhood has increased. As a consequence, the kinds of mixed-income neighborhoods many of us remember from growing up have grown rarer, while exclusively affluent and exclusively poor neighborhoods have grown much more common.

The Great Recession has exacerbated this divergence. Just as they have been among individuals, economic hardships have been unequally shared by neighborhoods: poverty, vacancy rates and particularly unemployment rates increased at a greater clip in disadvantaged and minority neighborhoods from 2005 to 2011 than elsewhere.

We live in a free society, of course, but the high-end spatial concentration of income and its associated resources, like well-endowed schools, security, abundant services and political connections, in effect pulls up the drawbridge from our neighbors. The hypersegregation of "the truly advantaged" speaks volumes about the continuing significance of place and raises important questions about what kind of society we want to be.


Robert J. Sampson is a professor of the social sciences at Harvard and the author of "Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect."


13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More
techieblogger.com Techie Blogger Techie Blogger