Video Games Conquer Retirees

Seth Schiesel
The New York Times
Friday, March 30th, 2007
pg A21
The Story
The Summary: Senior citizens are joining the video game craze.

When I first saw the title of this article, I got worried. I know people who don't have jobs, don't go to school, but they play video games all day. But they grew up in the '90s... in the midst of the video game era. I don't like the idea of my grandma wasting away her final years in front of the TV playing "God of War." (Although, I don't think I have to worry about my grandma playing video games, she doesn't quite understand how solitare on the computer works)

After reading the article, I love the idea. From retired Roman-Catholic sisters playing mini-games like Bejeweled to seniors playing Wii Bowling instead of regular bowling, games aren't taking over seniors lives, they're enriching it.

Most games (like those for the X-box and the PS3) are created for the young male, with complicated graphics and storylines. The games that seinors are picking up on are the simple games created by companies like PopCap games, or those created for the Nintendo Wii. These games are often refered to as "casual games," mostly because of their simplicity and ease.

A senior who started a Wii bowling league says he prefers Wii bowling to regular bowling because he doesn't have all the aches and pains from the weight of the ball. Yet there's still an element of low-impact exercise to it. My roommate, who owns half a Wii (the other half is owned by her fiance) said she woke up with sore arms after playing Wii boxing one evening.

The Wii has taken the industry by storm. Going back to the principles of early games, when the systems were simple, so the games had to be fun, Wii games are simplistic, but fun. They're also the most interactive home video games. Unlike most systems, there's activity for all of your body, not just your fingers and thumbs.

I'm a big fan of social games. If you can hang out with people, yell, scream, and have general conversation while playing, it's fun. I'm not a big fan solo games that take over your life.

To social, casual games!!!

Up in the Attic, New Millennium Style

Fred E. Bernstien
The New York Times
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
pgs D1&D5
The Story
The Summary: The attic, tradtionally used for storage, is getting a make-over into interesting living space.

I've always love spaces like attics or basements. Little corners of houses where you could hide, they were different and interesting from the norm.

There was a room in my grandma's basement that was an "office." It was actually a very small bedroom that my brothers and I would play office in, it even had an old typewriter. I think that's part of the fun of attics and basements. All of the old things stored there. Things with family history, fun things from the past, just things that aren't part of a normal routine.

The spaces these families created with their attics are incredible, especially the one in Texas. (Check out the article... pictures are attached!)

I love interesting spaces. I think that's part of why I like the house I live in. At one point it was a traditional "Bemidji Skinny" (a thin house located in Bemidji, they were supposedly very popular back in the day) Someone purchased it and, due to its close location to campus, realized they could make money if the split the house into two apartments - up and downstairs. So they created a bathroom and kitchen out of nothing upstairs. We also have a random sink in the back room surrounded by cabinents, we still haven't figured out what they're for, and we've been living here for 1.5 years. After awhile, the owners of our house realized there was wasted land in the backyard, and added on a third apartment, they added on a poorly constructed third apartment. At somepoint, someone decided that it could once again be two apartments instead of three. So we live in a house that has five sinks, 4+ bedrooms, and strange additions everywhere.

I wish you could get pictures of a house through the years before you move into it. Like, this is what it looked like when it was first built, this is what changed in the '72 remodeling, here's what we changed in the 90s... Information like that is sometimes crucial, but also interesting.

I wish I had the money to buy a house and create a space like the ones from this article. They're fantastic!

Overcoming a Frat Party Reputation

Eric Asimov
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
pgs D1&D6
The Story
The Summary: Beer is growing up, from a frat boy guzzle to sophisticated sip, two Boston brothers are taking a lead in the revolution.

Curious, I traveled to the Boston area last week to meet the Alströms, whose Web site beeradvocate.com has become a lightning rod for the pent-up passions of beer lovers everywhere.

They started it 10 years ago, posting notes on beers they enjoyed or despised. Now it is a full-featured site with news, essays on beer history and styles, forums and voluminous notes on brews from around the world. The Alströms say they have more than 100,000 members. Reversing the usual direction of print to Web, they’ve begun publishing Beer Advocate magazine, a glossy monthly about beer and beer culture.

I've often described myself as a beer girl. "Spirits" have never been my thing, wine is alright, mixed drinks are normally to girly to too "college." There's something about a good beer. It can be -26F outside, but a cold beer is wonderful with a hot meal. I love beer with almost anything cooked on the grill. It's great with steak or chicken or fish or... well, you get the idea.

In fact, both are far more mild-mannered and thoughtful than they might appear online. In person, Respect Beer is neither a demand nor a request but a reasonable approach to a beverage that, given a chance, offers the same sort of pleasure and conviviality as a good glass of wine. But it needs the chance.

“I go to a really high-end restaurant, and they come out with a really nice wine list and a book of cocktails, but the beer list is just something the waitress recites and they’re all awful,” Todd said. Jason adds, “That really disturbs me. But some have caught on and they really get it.”

Beer has been the alcoholic beverage of lower class males, that's just that. With beers like Natty Light for less than $10/case, it almost deserves it. Beer has this cheap aura about it. But not all beers are cheap. In fact, I've come to live by "Life's too short to drink cheap beer." I bought a twelve pack of Miller Lite before Christmas break, I gave 6 to my uncle at Christmas, there are still four in my fridge. I try to give them away when people come over, it doesn't work. I might make beer cheese soup one of these days.

“One of our main goals is trying to raise the image of beer as a whole and bring back the beer culture,” Todd said. “We had a beer culture but Prohibition kind of reset the button.”

The popular image of beer drinkers has always been the industry’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The slobbering yahoos at the football game with the bare chests and painted faces; the snarling mud wrestlers battling over “tastes great, less filling,” and the usual array of good ol’ frat house antics are all representations from the mass-market beer industry itself, which has succeeded by aiming low. The cost has been respect, and the result has been a decades-long battle to win it back.

Beer was the first alcohol to come back after prohibition ended, during the Great Depression. Everyone was poor back then. From then on it was the alcohol of the commoner. With that came the slob and the college oafs.

While fraternity behavior is largely associated with beer drinking, serious beer lovers have spent years on the outside of polite society.

Without the pastoral mystique that has been appropriated by wine producers or the suave, sophisticated imagery of the wine drinker, beer lovers have largely retreated to the antistyle precincts associated with such proverbial social outcasts as computer nerds and science fiction fanatics. Bizarre facial hair, unflattering T-shirts and strange headgear are standard equipment among beer geeks.

I know plenty of people who can have a beer or two after work, or with supper. It's here that the normal people and the beer geeks collide. The middle-class man who comes home to a can of Bud Light might be introduced to Sam Adams, and from there become more exploritory with their selections at the liquor store, exchanging quantity for quality.

Everyone can be a bit of a beer freak. It doesn't mean you have to be a complete snob, just be more open. Don't worry about ratings on websites so much, drink what you like. If you like Miller Lite, drink it. I've found that most beer snobs like dark beer. I don't like bitter, dark beer. I'm sorry. My favorite is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss Bier. It gets horrible ratings, but it's popular here.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

I'm gonna go get a beer.

LIFE Magazine, Its Pages Dwindling, Will Cease Publication

Katherine Q Seelye
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
pg C2
The Story
The Summary: LIFE magazine is closing, again, this time for good.

Time Inc. announced yesterday that LIFE magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since LIFE’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.

This time, the magazine’s demise looks permanent, largely because LIFE is moving its huge archive of photographs onto the Web, where consumers will be able to download them free.

I wish I would have been around when LIFE was in its heyday. I would have loved to be an editor at LIFE. People don't appreciate great photographs anymore. (or so it seems) The world has become about getting the story, not getting the story well. First it was the clock, now it's the camera... everything has a camera in it. It's not so much about taking a good photograph as it is about having proof. Some sort of evidence that this happened.

Time Inc., part of Time Warner, has been in turmoil with layoffs and an overhaul of its flagship Time magazine as the company shifts its attention to the Internet. It blamed the newspaper business for the demise of Life, which has been carried as a newspaper insert since October 2004.

“While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life, with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement,” the company said in a statement.

This really is the end of an era. Much of American history can be viewed in the photographic archives of LIFE. While the magazine hasn't actually existed for seven years, this final closing of LIFE is like someone dying in the nursing home. You knew it was coming, but you had kind of hoped that it would pull through and be better.

The newspaper supplement racket is hard to be sucessful in, since it isn't soley consumer driven. People can request that their newspaper carry a certain supplement on Sunday, but often newspapers are owned by a larger company that determines that. Our own Bemidji Pioneer is owned by the Fargo Forum. One can only imagine that the parent company makes such decisions.

Although rumors of LIFE’s impending death have persisted over the last two years, Bill Shapiro, LIFE’s managing editor, said that he “started hearing the drumbeat in the last week or so.” Mr. Shapiro had reinvented the magazine to be what he called “an antidote” to grim news headlines, but its reincarnation as a newspaper supplement had come at the wrong time.

“The pall cast over the newspaper industry didn’t make it a sexy sector in which to advertise,” he said.

The magazine began as a weekly and was first closed in 1972. LIFE was revived as a monthly in 1978 and shut down in 2000. In its heyday, it occupied five floors of the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan; today its staff takes up a corner of one floor.

Goodbye LIFE!!! We'll miss you!!!

The Album, a Commodity in Disfavor

Jeff Leeds
The New York Times
Monday, March 26th, 2007
pgs C1&C8
The Story
The Summary: As people buy songs as digital singles rather than in albums the industry is signing artists in the same way.

Last year, digital singles outsold plastic CD’s for the first time. So far this year, sales of digital songs have risen 54 percent, to roughly 189 million units, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital album sales are rising at a slightly faster pace, but buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.

Because of this shift in listener preferences — a trend reflected everywhere from blogs posting select MP3s to reviews of singles in Rolling Stone — record labels are coming to grips with the loss of the album as their main product and chief moneymaker.

The music industry is now embracing the digital single. When Napster was at the height of its popularity the digital single was the music industry's biggest threat. The popularity of mp3 player and the advent of legal digital downloads has made CD almost obsolete.

At the same time, the industry is straining to shore up the album as long as possible, in part by prodding listeners who buy one song to purchase the rest of a collection. Apple, in consultation with several labels, has been planning to offer iTunes users credit for songs they have already purchased if they then choose to buy the associated album in a certain period of time, according to people involved in the negotiations. (Under Apple’s current practice, customers who buy a song and then the related album effectively pay for the song twice).

But some analysts say they doubt that such promotions can reverse the trend.

“I think the album is going to die,” said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner at Radar Research, a media consulting firm based in Los Angeles. “Consumers are listening to play lists,” or mixes of single songs from an assortment of different artists. “Consumers who have had iPods since they were in the single digits are going to increasingly gravitate toward artists who embrace that.”

I love my iPod, and I only have a little one. It's so much easier than a CD player for long trips. I'm not taking my eyes off the road to change a CD (yes I've done it, and yes, I know it's stupid), I'm just blindly grabbing for my iPod while paying perfect attention to my driving. And you can run with them, take them for bike rides, I never liked working ou until I got my iPod. I even have a special playlist for working out. It's full of high-energy songs that help me work harder.

“For some genres and some artists, having an album-centric plan will be a thing of the past,” said Jeff Kempler, chief operating officer of EMI’s Capitol Music Group. While the traditional album provides value to fans, he said, “perpetuating a business model that fixates on a particular packaged product configuration is inimical to what the Internet enables, and it’s inimical to what many consumers have clearly voted for.”

There's really no point in putting the money and energy into a produing a full-length CD when no one will buy it. Maybe K-Fed should have thought of this. Maybe if he would have released a few novelty singles, he would have been a bigger success.

A decade ago, the music industry had all but stopped selling music in individual units. But now, four years after Apple introduced its iTunes service — selling singles for 99 cents apiece and full albums typically for $9.99 — individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States. And that does not count purchases of music in other, bite-size forms like ring tones, which have sold more than 54 million units so far this year, according to Nielsen data.

One of the biggest reasons for the shift, analysts say, is that consumers — empowered to cherry-pick — are forgoing album purchases after years of paying for complete CD’s with too few songs they like. There are still cases where full albums succeed — the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ double-CD “Stadium Arcadium,” with a weighty 28 tracks, has sold almost two million copies. But the overall pie is shrinking.

The last CD I bought was Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" I'm a big "single" person myself. I like to hear the songs I want, with out all the BS. Half the time I skip over half the songs on my iPod.

I also don't normally have the patients to sit through a whole CD by one artist. I like variety, variety is the spice of life. A little bit from column A, a little from B, along with C, D and E as well.

Like the article says, it's a trend. We've gone from the single to the album, and now we're back to the single. In a fifty years, who knows what we'll be listening to. No one could have predicted the iPod in the 80s, the record was just dying out, giving the cassette tape its 15 minutes of fame before the CD took it away. In fact, no other format has had the same run as the record. If digital music lasts as long as records did before falling out of favor, its worth it for the music industry to invest in singles.

Affluent White Families Lead Way in Manhattan Baby Boom

Sam Roberts
The New York Times
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
pg A19
The Story
The Summary: What was once thought to be a place only suitable for people with out children, Manhattan is becoming quite the family place, mostly because of rich white people.

Manhattan, which once epitomized the glamorous and largely childless locale for “Sex and the City,” has begun to look more like the set for a decidedly upscale and even more vanilla version of 1960s suburbia in “The Wonder Years.”

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

We have to face it, it's become fashionable to have children again. Everyone in Hollywood is doing it. A baby was once a killer for a career, now, it's just another person to love and accessorize. A combination of all the modern conveniences and the societal embrace of the working mother has made it more than acceptable for rich people to keep their lifestyles and have children.

Fashion has embraced children as well. A mother can buy a $750 diaper bag that's just as stylish as her purse (and matches quite well). Her son can wear the same pants as her husband (in his sizem, of course).

What those findings imply, demographers say, is not only that the socioeconomic gap between Manhattan and the other boroughs is widening, but also that the population of Manhattan, in some ways, is beginning to look more like the suburbs — or what they used to look like — than like the rest of the city.

This scares me. I grew up in the country, fantasizing about Manhattan. When I finally get there, I don't want it to be over run by toddlers in trendy overalls. I want the city from Sex and the City, I don't want day-care and playdates to out run bars and hot hook-ups.

Compared with those in the rest of the city, the youngest children in Manhattan are more likely to be raised by married couples who are well off, more highly educated, in their 30s and native born.

“This differs from the rest of New York City and the suburbs, where small kids are present among a more diverse array of economic and demographic groups — single-parent families, renters, those in their early 20s with low to middle income,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Educated, career-driven people wait to have children. There's nothing surprising about that. There are people who are content to get married and have children and make that their life. Then there are people who want a good life, and wait to bring children into that life. I don't quite understand the people who choose the first option.

But Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union, said a growing population of upper-middle-class residents was an asset. “How different it makes Manhattan from other cities,” Mr. Siegel said.

Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian, said: “Imagine the reverse — that nobody with money wants to live here, and then you have Detroit. I don’t see how anybody benefits in that circumstance.”

Professor Siegel said that until now, at least the cost of private school and the demand for space prompted many parents to move when their children got older.

Sub-urban life was supposed to be better, wasn't it?

Urban children grew up to be in gangs or druggies or something, didn't they?

Aparently, urban children in the largest city in the country go to private schools and drink $5 coffees with their parents on their way to school.

Mr. Osborne, 44, an expert on the Russian economy for a firm of financial advisors said: “If both parents are working, it actually becomes logistically difficult to live in the suburbs. If you’re 90 minutes away, we just don’t like that feeling.

“Even if we were disposed to — for the usual space, quality of life reasons — to go to suburbs, we would have to consider the practical difficulty.”

This is a wonderful example of how people are giving up less to have children, and said children are benefiting. Their parents have a 20 minute walk to work in the morning, rather than an hour and a half train ride. They get to experience the city. I love "the city" any city... growing up on a farm in the middle of no where, nothing was in walking distance, we had to drive everywhere. There was nothing to see except for fields and other houses for miles.

I'm not saying one is better or worse, but I have a feeling I missed out on something with that lifestyle, that I'm never going to have what I could have if I lived somewhere bigger.

While the number of children of all races between ages 5 to 9 in Manhattan has declined slightly since 2000, the number of white children of that age grew by nearly 40 percent.

David Bernard, 42, and Joanna Bers, 38, run a management and marketing consulting business and live with their 17-month-old twin sons on Fifth Avenue. Both grew up in suburbia.

“I like the idea of raising them in the city because they’re prepared for pretty much anything,” Mr. Bernard said. “The city challenges you; it prepares you for life.”

This whole article reminds me of an particular episode of Sex and the City that, among other things, sums up a lot of my feelings about love, marriage, and children. It's titled "A Woman's Right to Shoes." Carrie attends a baby shower, and is forced to remove her $485 brand-new Manolo Blahniks because her friends don't want stuff tracked into their apartment. When she returns to her shoes, she finds them missing. Her friend sends her home with a pair of ratty tennis shoes, saying she's sure Carrie's shoes will turn up. When Carrie returns the forementioned tennis shoes and confronts her friend about the shoes, the friend offers to pay for them, but refuses to give Carrie the full amount, saying that she "has a real life" and shouldn't have to pay for Carrie's "extravegant lifestyle."

Apparently, being single and have fabulous shoes (among other things) isn't a real life. This story means that there are less Carries, and more mommies. I'd rather be a Carrie.

The Year Without Toilet Paper

Penelope Green
The New York Times
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
pgsD1&D7
The Story
The Summary: A family in Manhattan is trying to make "No Impact" by only buying food, fresh produce and the like, and making no waste.

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.

Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.

I couldn't imagine it! No garbage, no waste (or as little as possible) I know I couldn't do it. I try not to create too much garbage, and we recycle fairly well at my house, but nothing as drastic as this. I couldn't imagine a compost heap inside an apartment. Compost is an outside thing... it's for gardens. I don't think I'd like the smell of rotting food in my house constantly. It's bad enough when the trash needs to be taken out.

Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)

In this household, food was something you dialed for.

“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”

As drastic as the experiement is, I think everyone could take a few pointers from this family. They basically went from one extreme to the other. There's a happy medium that I think is attainable for everyone. Doing things like switching regular light bulbs for flourescent ones, and cooking more and eating out less, and using carbon-based travel as little as possible(I try to get groceries and run other errands after work, so I'm not making two trips across town) are things that every household can do.

The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

Think about how much healthier these people will be after this year. No junk food, their legs will be ripped from taking all the stairs, their arms all buff from carrying baskets of clothes up and down said stairs. A cleaner lifestyle is definately a healthier one. Of course, reader's of the author's blog have criticized the Colins-Beavan's for that:

“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”

I think that awareness is the first step. And, yes, it takes some waste to get the word out there. Overall, I think that these things can only do good. Things have been getting better. Most paper products contain a percentage of recycled paper, many are becoming high content to 100% recycled. More and more people are using flourescent bulbs, one of my roommates and I got our other two roommates to start recycling more. (If I could only get them to shut off the lights when the leave.) People are becoming more aware. It's the day to day stuff that makes the most impact , anyway. It's not everyday most people see a movie or buy a book.

For Orange Zest, Substitute Kool-Aid

Celia Barbour
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
pgs D1&D2
The Story
The Summary:Recipes on the web have everyone thinking their food critics. Is this a good thing?

Cooks have always adjusted recipes, for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps they didn’t have certain ingredients on hand, so they substituted others. Perhaps they knew that a half teaspoon of cayenne would make a dish too hot for their taste, or that their families preferred chicken to fish. Perhaps they had to observe dietary restrictions. Or perhaps they simply had what they thought was a better idea.

Until recently, recipe tweaks and adaptations took place in the privacy of the kitchen. Not anymore. Cooking Web sites including epicurious.com, recipezaar.com and allrecipes.com (which had unique visitors in February 2007 of roughly 2.4 million, 2.5 million, and 5 million respectively, according to Nielsen/NetRatings) reveal that the urge for cooks to make a dish their own is widespread and passionate.

Has anyone ever made a recipe exactly as it states? Who hasn't made a tweak here and there? Isn't that what cooking's all about? Making it your own? I can't remember a time I haven't made some substitution, it might be something simple (and thrifty) like substiting fresh for dried or canned, or something more complicated, like steaks for chicken.

“Gourmet has 8 test kitchens and 11 food editors,” said Zanne Stewart, media food editor at Gourmet magazine. “Even if we think a recipe is right the first time, we cross-test it. It’s likely to go through a bare minimum of four iterations, really refining it, before it’s written up and passed along to the cross-tester. Then everyone gathers around for the discussions. Is it right? Could it be better?”

So what does Ms. Stewart think of the endless tinkering that cooks boast about on the Web? “It makes me a bit sad, considering how much work went into the original,” she said.

Again... no one makes a recipe exactly as it says. And when a recipe goes from very sophisticated tastes like the chefs and staff at Gourmet to the simpler tastes of the general public, of course they're going to want to make changes. I'm still a little weary of the idea of meat and fruit mingling together in the same dish. I'm getting better, but I like meat and veggies for a meal, and fruit for dessert or snacks. I did grow up on a farm in the midwest, the fanciest thing my mom does with fruit is put apples in her stuffing (which is delicious).

Of course, home cooks were taking charge of recipes long before the arrival of the Internet. And you didn’t need to go online to get feedback from readers.

Susan Spungen, a cookbook author and former food editor at Martha Stewart Living, said magazine readers would call her hoping she could predict how a recipe would turn out if they made substitutions.

“They want me to tell them what will happen if they replace all the butter in the cake with oil,” she said. “I always say, it might be fine, but I haven’t tested it that way, so I can’t be sure.”

Substitutions gone wrong: oh I can relate! I've substituted chicken breast tenders for drummies... they don't take as long to cook, so I ended up burning a lot of little peices of chicken. (but substituting whole breasts worked great!) I've found: the more expensive the recipe, the closer one should follow the recipe. Other times, substitutions work great (I substitute 1/2lb margrine and 1/2lb crisco with a whole pound of butter in my chocolate chip cookies, it only makes them better.)

Television has also had a role to play in bolstering the home cook’s sense of adventure.

“You see Emeril, the most genial guy in the world, making a U-turn in the middle of a recipe, and people think they should cook like that, too,” said Ms. Stewart of Gourmet. “They forget that he’s a highly trained chef.”

It is not uncommon for Web site users to describe such radical departures from an original recipe that the result is a completely different dish.

This woman from Gourmet Magazine is kind of a snob. Just becasue we didn't go to culinary school doesn't mean we're all bad cooks. I bet my grandmother could teach Emeril a thing or two... she never went to culinary school, but she does have 60 years or so of kitchen experience. My mother, on the other hand, has had horrible results when she has messed with recipes. I have a really good lasanga recipe that uses chicken and alfredo sauce (it's divine). She tried to do the same thing, but didn't drain the juice from the chicken mixture, and then added extra sauce. The result was really chunky baked alfredo soup. The taste was okay, and I got to say "I told you so," so I was kinda happy.

As tantalizing as new cuisines and exotic ingredients may be for many cooks, the lure of the familiar is still strong. Arugula, fresh halibut and Parmigiano-Reggiano have been nudging aside iceberg lettuce, frozen fish sticks and Velveeta in supermarkets throughout the country. But many cooks still want to create food that tastes familiar, even if they’re using ingredients that aren’t. So these new ingredients often turn up in recipes alongside garlic powder, Lawry’s Seasoned Salt or Wishbone salad dressing.

It's fun to experiment with new ingredients in old recipes. I've come to prefer the taste of fresh baby bella mushrooms over canned, and I use finely chopped fresh garlic in my spread for my garlic bread. A co-worker introduced me to the mix of a can each of black beans, whole kernal corn and diced tomatoes with chili peppers... I add it to everything... rice, any mexican style hotdish I might make... it's yummy, and it's good on it's own as a dip, as well.

Barbara Kafka, writer and editor of 13 cookbooks, including “Vegetable Love” (Artisan, 2005), applauds the improvisational impulse. “People should make recipes their own,” she said. “Only by doing that will they use them and enjoy them fully.”

“On the other hand,” she added, “some people think that it doesn’t make a difference” which directions you follow and which you ignore. “Laundry starch will not substitute well for cornstarch,” she said dryly.

Now, wait — does she actually know someone who did that?

Indeed she does: “My mother.”

And you can't substitute white vinegar for balsamic vinegar... white vinegar shouldn't even be consumed... it's for cleaning (or maybe canning) purposes only!

Tortillas Like Mamá’s, but This Is No Bodega

Kim Severson
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
pg D1&D5
The Story
The Summary: A chain of grocery stores in Los Angeles, Los Vegas, and Colorado has become more specialized, catering to several Hispanic cultures.

In the produce section, a dollar will buy you three avocados. The tilapia are sold live. Stacks of fresh tortillas, made from 600 pounds of corn ground in the store daily, are always warm. And maybe, if the local political winds shift, shoppers might one day be able to buy a chicken that was slaughtered and plucked on site a few hours earlier.

The store’s slogan pretty much says it all: “Si es de allá lo tenemos aquí.” Translated, “If it’s from there, we have it here.”

I love the idea of specialty grocery stores, especially with the advent of Walmart Supercenters. Not only can I get the same hamburgers everywhere (McDonald's), the same pasta everywhere (Olive Garden), but there isn' much local flavor in the grocery stores, as well. Even with chain stores, they had a regional feel. Now, every Walmart is the same, and carries just about the same thing. I wish we could get something like this for Scandinavian, Polish and German food.

Rancho Liborio is not the only grocery chain hungry for more affluent shoppers whose families have roots in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The 65-store Minyard chain in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is pumping money into its Latino-theme Carnival stores. In Northern California the Super Mercado México chain, based in San Jose, has started buying old Albertsons stores. Publix, one of the biggest grocery chains in the country, is experimenting with Publix Sabor stores in Florida.

Everyone is going to Hispanic themed grocery stores, as they will be the largest "minority" in the United States in a few years.

For decades small markets and bodega-style stores in cities like Los Angeles, Dallas and New York catered to new immigrants looking for lower prices. But larger, more traditional chains are now trying to capture shoppers in those cities, as well as in places like Denver, Atlanta and Minneapolis.

They are finding that it takes more than a few Mexican products mixed in among the ranch dressing and Fruity Pebbles to attract them.

“If you add jalapeños to the produce department, it doesn’t become a Hispanic store,” said Jack Rosenthal, the food service supervisor for the two Rancho Liborio stores in the Denver area. Mr. Rosenthal, who was born in Peru, speaks English, Spanish and German fluently.

A lot goes into specializing a supermarket. I've never gotten the vibe that the "Hispanic" section is actually meant for Hispanics. I kinda feel like it's for white people who want to experiment with Mexican food. I've never gotten a good vibe from the Mary and Jesus candles. They're just kinda creepy.

Attracting Hispanic shoppers is a delicate business, said Juan Guillermo Tornoe, who runs Hispanic Trending, a market research company in Austin, Tex. Buyers for big chains will often go to Hispanic food trade shows, order everything in sight and then wonder why their efforts to market to Latinos fail.

“Well, what are you buying?” he said. “Are you buying hot sauce and expecting to sell it to Cubans?”

"Hispanic" is not a one-item category. It's like saying European or Asian (except it's cross-continental). There are several different cultures wrapped up in that one word. It's not the Tex-Mex food most Americans are used to.

In the meat section at Rancho Liborio, nary a T-bone is to be found. Most people from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America cook with thinner cuts, so the 10 varieties of beef are stacked like crepes, separated by pink paper. The chicken section is stocked with both the smaller inexpensive yellow-skinned chickens that Jack Rosenthal said are popular with recent immigrants and the plumper white-skinned birds more popular with people who were born here.

When the chain started its expansion into Colorado, the owners had hoped a polleria would be the star attraction. Live chickens would be shipped in every morning, then slaughtered and processed by noon. But the polleria, which has met the federal Agriculture Department’s guidelines, sits unused at the Commerce City store, the first in the chain to open in Colorado, because the idea of chicken slaughtering didn’t go over with some city officials and residents.

YUM!!!! Fresh chicken. That sounds pretty damn cool. I don't see what the problem is. You do the same thing to lobsters. Couldn't they build a smaller building on the grounds, like a butcher shop, and still have fresh chicken daily?

And in fact the Liborio markets are attracting white, black and Hispanic customers. When it comes down to it, a grocery shopper is a grocery shopper.

“It’s not so much the cultural stuff,” said Marie Lopez, a dental hygienist in the Denver area. “Everything here is fresh, and the prices are good. That’s really what I’m looking for.”

I'd totally shop there. I love to try new and authentic recipes, and it's hard to find some of the ingredients at a Walmart, or even a real grocery store, especially in the north. (Sorry Lueken's, your baking department kinda sucks... not your bakery, your baking goods aisle.) It would be really fun to have a specialized market for a cultural sector.

Tracing the Cigarette’s Path From Sexy to Deadly

Howard Markel, MD
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
pg D5
The Story
The Summary:Cigarrette weren't always smoking cancer sticks, once they were something even doctors did to be cool.

Allan M. Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard, insists that recognizing the dangers of cigarettes resulted from an intellectual process that took the better part of the 20th century. He describes this fascinating story in his new book, “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” (Basic Books).

In contrast to the symbol of death and disease it is today, from the early 1900s to the 1960s the cigarette was a cultural icon of sophistication, glamour and sexual allure — a highly prized commodity for one out of two Americans.

Back in the day where cigarette's weren't bad for you, when mom stayed home and baked apple pies, dad had a good job (but didn't go to college) and Jr. was a football star. There was so much we didn't know back then, and so much we wish we still didn't know. It's an interesting phenomena how something so desired in the age of the nuclear family has become so horrible in our "age of sin." It's hard to imagine the days when schools had smoking rooms, and no one had a "smoke free class of" shirt. (My class of 2003 was indefinately NOT smoke free)

The years after World War II, however, were a time of major breakthroughs in epidemiological thought. In 1947, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill of the British Medical Research Council created a sophisticated statistical technique to document the association between rising rates of lung cancer and increasing numbers of smokers.

The prominent surgeon Evarts A. Graham and a medical student, Ernst L. Wynder, published a landmark article in 1950 comparing the incidence of lung cancer in their nonsmoking and smoking patients at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. They concluded that “cigarette smoking, over a long period, is at least one important factor in the striking increase in bronchogenic cancer.”

It started in the 1940s, but we didn't have no-smoking laws until just recently. (It really is nice to go into a bar and NOT have smoke everywhere. I like not smelling too bad when I come home at night.) People still didn't know the dangers of second-hand smoke, and no one had made the nicotine connection yet.

In the 1980s, scientists established the revolutionary concept that nicotine is extremely addictive. The tobacco companies publicly rejected such claims, even as they took advantage of cigarettes’ addictive potential by routinely spiking them with extra nicotine to make it harder to quit smoking. And their marketing memorandums document advertising campaigns aimed at youngsters to hook whole new generations of smokers.

This is when the "smoke-free" class and other anti-smoking campaigns began. It fit right in with Nancy Regan's "war on drugs." (This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs) People began to understand the dangers of smoking, finally.

Apparently, the judge, Gladys Kessler of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, agreed. Last August, she concluded that the tobacco industry had engaged in a 40-year conspiracy to defraud smokers about tobacco’s health dangers. Her opinion cited Dr. Brandt’s testimony more than 100 times.

Dr. Brandt acknowledges that there are pitfalls in combining scholarship with battle against the deadly pandemic of cigarette smoking, but he says he sees little alternative.

“If one of us occasionally crosses the boundary between analysis and advocacy, so be it,” he said. “The stakes are high, and there is much work to be done.”

According to the American Lung Association, 20.9% of adults were current smokers in 2004. According to the article, 50% of Americans smoked back in the day. That's a start. Smoking has become something that people who live in trailer parks do, not high-class individuals, people with money don't smoke anymore. It'll come around, and no one will smoke, eventually.

MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users

Brad Stone
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
pg C3
The Story
The Summary: Myspace is starting to crackdown on its user's personal use of the site, such as selling and advertising.

But to some formerly enthusiastic MySpace users, the new restrictions hamper their abilities to design their pages and promote new projects.

“The reason why I am so bummed out about MySpace now is because recently they have been cutting down our freedom and taking away our rights slowly,” wrote Tila Tequila, a singer who is one of MySpace’s most popular and visible users, in a blog posting over the weekend. “MySpace will now only allow you to use ‘MySpace’ things.”

Rupert Murdoch owns Myspace. He also owns FoxNews. These two are about polar opposites in the realm of users and media. I would totally expect something like this. He's one of the richest men in the world. He's not known for generousity, that's for sure. Rupert Murdoch wants money... it shouldn't be a surprise.

MySpace says that it will block these pieces of third-party software — also called widgets — when they lend themselves to violations of its terms of service, like the spread of pornography or copyrighted material. But it also objects to widgets that enable users to sell items or advertise without authorization, or without entering into a direct partnership with the company.

Basically, you can't use any embeded program that myspace didn't create or authorize. When you think about it, that's a lot. It makes me think how far they'll go. Will I not be able to put up a picture or animation that wasn't created by/for myspace? Will I be able to put up silly quizes anymore? Part of what sets myspace apart from facebook is the creativity and flexibility of being able to use html. If this current trend goes, we might lose our freedom of expression (on myspace).

At first I was scared by the whole free HTML stuff, it kinda freaked me out, especially when people go overboard, and you can't really read what's on their site anymore. Will I not be able to go to pimpmyspace anymore and used their layouts? Will they all have to be customized through myspace's offical editor?

But Justin Goldberg, chief executive of Indie911, said MySpace’s actions undercut the notion that the social networks’ users have complete creative freedom. “We find it incredibly ironic and frustrating that a company that has built its assets on the back of its users is turning around and telling people they can’t do anything that violates terms of service,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t they call it FoxSpace? Or RupertSpace?” Mr. Goldberg said, referring to the News Corporation’s chief, Rupert Murdoch.

I'm surprised there isn't more reference to Fox and it's sister stations on myspace. Maybe if more people realized who owned it, less people would use it. I've been a myspace user for less than a year, and I like it so far. You can always tweak your security or opt not to give out certain peices of information. Part of what I've come to love about it is the personalizability of the site. Everyone's page looks different, everyone's.

“Every attempt everyone has ever made to try to dictate what a person’s Internet experience will be has ended up coming up empty,” he said. “You have to accept the fact that you are never going to be the be-all and end-all of everyone’s experience. They are one click away from everyone else on the Web.”

As for Ms. Tequila, who wrote on her blog that she was a personal friend of Mr. Anderson, the MySpace co-founder, she wrote that she felt bad about blasting the site but that she could not stay silent.

“You guys used to be so cool,” she wrote of MySpace. “Don’t turn into a corporate evil monster.”

Myspace seemed like the anti-corporate. Conservatives hate it. "What's with this social networking stuff, anyone can see your picture, your address, your phone number....ANYONE! It's evil... I don't like it" People have been up in arms about the use of it by minors, and how it creates a haven for child preditors. Simple solution: help your child create their page. Not only do you have a degree of control over what goes on their page, but you also embrace their use of the site, rather than just monitor it. (too big-brother)

Myspace has had this aura of newness and rebellion about it, but that is slowly going away as we begin to understand it, and as it becomes just another pocket in Rupert Murdochs already large pants.

All the World’s a Story

David Carr
The New York Times
Monday, March 19th, 2007
pgs C1&C2
The Story
The Summary: Crowdsourcing, a type of wiki for journalism, has become an experiment headed by Jay Rosen, of New York University.

A new experiment wants to broaden the network to include readers and their sources. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts — an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.”

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

This caught my eye (obviously) because it is the perfect example of my (hopefully) future profession and the principles of this class (Weblogs and Wikis) coming together in an educational experiment.

In this instance, the topic will be be crowdsourcing, so the phenomenon will be used to cover the phenomenon itself. Citizens with a variety of expertise — the “people formerly known as the audience,” as Professor Rosen describes them — will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.

“This is designed as a pro-am approach to journalism. I think I saw possibilities here that others did not, and you can only do so much writing about it,” Professor Rosen said. “There is so much up for grabs right now, and the barriers to entry, the costs of doing something have become low enough to where it seemed it was best to just give it a try.”

The information will be provided by they general public, but it will still be formed into a readable article by someone who is trained and gifted enough before it is formally published (or so I think)

Of course, there’s an economic rationale, as well. Many hands make light work and cheap ones if they belong to volunteers. But Gannett is also betting that people will be more compelled to stay with a product they helped make. (Ms. Carroll said that jobs will not be cut, but redefined. We’ll see about that.)

I think that this is a great tool for learning. An opportunity for those such as myself to practice their craft. The gathering information part is the scary part for me. I'm really good about the writing part. Give me a police report and I can give you an article, but ask me to interview the victim, I might just be scared sh*tless. If I the public provides resources I would definately find it easier to write something, I can sit at my desk and pump it out in no time.

“We are not creating a robot that is some kind of journalism machine,” said Ms. Sandler, the editor of the project. “This is not a death knell or a new utopia.”

“It’s like throwing a party,” she added. You program the iPod, mix the punch and dim the lights and then at 8 o’clock people show up. And then who knows what is going to happen?”

I think I'd need to see the results before I can form a fair opinion, but I like the idea, it's definately worth experimenting with. There's a portion of the public who wishes they could be journalist, this allows them to itch that scratch without completely overhauling their lives, it also eases up journalists, creating a source for quotes and first-hand accounts of events.

Hot but Virtuous Is an Unlikely Match for an Online Dating Service

Brad Stone
The New York Times
Monday, March 19th, 2007
pgs C1 & C2
The Story
The Summary: True.com, a relatively new online dating site has been critized by fellow sites and users alike for its advertising and other practices.

True’s rise has been controversial. The company has riled competitors like Match.com and Yahoo Personals, which say that True’s lowbrow advertisements clash with its high-minded lobbying and legal efforts. True, which conducts criminal background checks on its subscribers, is the primary force behind a two-year-old campaign to get state legislatures to require that social Web sites prominently disclose whether or not they perform such checks.

Honestly, the whole online dating thing kinda creeps me out. I mean, you really can't find decent people in your area? There's no one to date you unless you look online? It's kinda strange to me, but there are pleanty of people that have fallen in love and gotten married because of online dating sites. Maybe it's the whole eHarmony commercials, really. First off, the eHarmony dude is kinda creepy all by himself. Then there's the "we look so you don't have to" thing. I don't want some creepy dude to tell me who's good for me. There's one commerical that comes to mind where a couple says that they weren't looking correctly because they didn't know what to look for, and eHarmony showed them the way. CREEPY!!!! It's like some strange religion.

“True is the controversial child in the Internet dating industry. They are loathed by everybody,” said Joe Tracy, publisher of Online Dating Magazine, a Web site on the industry.

Mr. Vest, a Vietnam veteran with a Texas accent, brushes off the criticism. “If there was a popularity contest among the entire population of the United States, I most assuredly would come out at the very bottom of that,” he said. “But you are not going to stop me by calling me names.”

True joined the crowded online dating scene in 2004. To distinguish itself from the pack, it offered a range of personality and sexuality surveys. It also hired the data broker ChoicePoint to perform background checks on customers to ensure that they had no criminal record and were not married.

I like the idea of criminal background checks, but they only work if the person is being 100% honest. And we all know former criminals are known for being completely honest (yes, I know that a lot of people do their time and grow up and move on) As far as the company knows, it could be some guy with a stolen wallet. In theory, they're great.

Mr. Vest sold his company to Wells Fargo for $128 million in 2001, then gravitated to the online dating market, with the professed aim of restoring family values. “I looked at the divorce rate and said, ‘That’s a bunch of nonsense. I can do something about that,’ ” he said. He himself underwent what he called a painful divorce in 1991 and has remarried.

True.com grew too quickly in its first year and sailed into financial trouble. At the end of 2004, Mr. Vest, its primary investor, laid off 90 employees, more than half its staff.

Soon after, True became more aggressive, and sex-themed, in its advertising. While the site continued to pitch itself as a safe way to date, its ads now featured voluptuous women and slogans like “Come and get them while they’re hot.”

Really, isn't dating just about sex anyway? Who hasn't watched latenight TV and seen the ads for Tango Personals or RedHot DateLine? Those give me the creeps, too. First of all, you know the people on the other end of the like aren't anywhere near as attractive as the people in the commericals, and second, the "dates" the girl has on the phone will probably end up being creepy phone sex that she doesn't realize she's a part of until it's way too late. I've seen the True ads on Myspace, they are definately give off the same vibe. That hot guy is not waiting. for me.

The ad carpet-bombing has worked in one way: last year, True jumped to the top of several lists of the most visited personals sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, True.com’s 3.8 million visitors in February put it slightly behind Yahoo Personals and Match.com, but ahead of older rivals like eHarmony and Spark Networks, which owns JDate.com and other sites.

However, True still significantly trails those players in more important categories, like time spent on the site. That suggests that many users are either not signing up for paid memberships or are quickly dropping the service once they do.

So they can get people to their site, but not to use it. Makes sense. Who hasn't clicked errantly into blank space before a page loads, only finding the ad that will go there is already linked, and whoops, you're at true.com. (I've fallen victim to this several times while our internet is slow) All in all , True sounds almost worse than eHarmony (can you believe it?). They're really false advertising and bad business practices to boot.

Preston Roder, a 54-year-old liquor store manager in Mundelein, Ill., said he tried to quit True.com last September after an unfruitful yearlong membership but was still hit with an array of charges over the next four months.

“True is a big company, but they could care less when you try to cancel,” said Mr. Roder. “They got your money so they are through with you.”

My dating advice: don't look for "the one" If it's meant to be, they'll come to you. They're not using an online dating service. On the other hand, if you want a one-night stand (and possibly and STD) go ahead and check out Tango or RedHot.

Will you regret staying home with your baby?

Leslie Bennetts
Glamor Magazine*
April 2007
pgs 269-270
The Story
The Summary:The article was adapted from a new book: The Feminine Mistake and looks into the dangers of choosing to be a stay-at-home mom.

Across the country, young women are jettisoning careers to stay home with their children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 5.6 million mothers stayed home to care for their families in 2005, about 1.2 million more than a decade ago. The trend of opting out “has been broader than previously believed, with women at all income levels taking job breaks,” The Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Women originally entered the workplace in large numbers during WWII, and then not again until the late 70's/early 80's with the women's movement and the ERA. Since then staying at home or working have been major choices in motherhood. Some women feel that they have stretched themselves thin, others feel they had too much time on their hands. There's a story behind everyone's choice. But choices can have consequences.

Staying at home with your kids can be a fulfilling choice, but it’s also a risky one, and you should know beforehand what those risks are. Divorce, a spouse’s job loss, widowhood—all these leave far too many women broke and unable to support themselves and their children. I decided to write my new book, The Feminine Mistake, to warn a new generation about the hidden costs of financial dependency.

Divorce and a spouse's job loss are probably the hardest situations to deal with (people, especially in the midwest, often are more willing to help someone when their spouse has died, divorce and job loss are seen as bad, controlable things) Divorce is the one no couple wants to think about when they walk down the aisle or are the guest of honor at a baby shower, but statistically, half of all married couples end up going through it.

There's also the question of getting back into the workforce. If your husband just lost his job, do you really think it will be easy for you to jump into a job with just as much pay?

In fact, it’s not so easy to reenter the working world, and a time-out can inflict heavy penalties. More than a quarter of women who want to go back to work don’t manage to do so, according to a 2005 study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, and only 40 percent of those who resume work return to full-time employment. If they get a job after opting out, their paycheck takes a major hit: The same study found women lose a staggering 37 percent of their earning power when they spend three or more years out of the workplace.

Let's say you choose to stay home with your kids until your youngest is in kidnergarten, at 5 years old. You decide to have three children, each 2.5 years apart. That puts you out of the working world for 10 years! Look at the technological changes alone that have happened in the last 10 years. Imagine that in a specialized industry! At my part-time retail job, the product in my store has changed and evolved so much in the 2.5 years I've worked there. Leaving for a week and going back is stressful.

“It’s very nice to believe, ‘I don’t have to worry, I can have someone take care of me,’” says Lucy Peters,* a stay-at-home mother who was 33 years old when her husband left her and ceased to support her and their two children, even though he was earning more than half a million dollars a year. “But you never know when he’s going to stop wanting to take care of you, or lose his job, or drop dead. There are too many what-ifs to be lulled into a sense of complacency like that.”

I don't like the idea of someone "taking care of me" at least not financially. I've spent 7 years with varied degrees of financial indepedence, and it's nice to not have anyone to answer to about my spending. When I dropped $200 on Sex and the City, the Series I didn't have anyone making me feel guilty for spending money on something I knew I wanted, and would get plenty of use out of. Name one housewife who could do that. When someone else provides your money, you loose a part of yourself. You don't know how to take care of yourself.

As for the stress of working motherhood that Eames is dreading, it may be exaggerated. In one study, sociologists found that homemakers who went to work full-time reported a decrease in psychological distress. Many experts believe working women enjoy more power and more options in their lives, crucial components of happiness.

Moreover, their children turn out just fine. “The research on the impact of working mothers on kids shows that there isn’t any,” says Pamela Stone, Ph.D., a sociology professor at Hunter College in New York City. “Since the forties, this has been researched every which way.”

It's not bad to be a working mom. No one said you had to be working 80 hours a week, either. Part time is fine. The article in the magazine shared tips about the smart financial moves to make if you do choose to stay home with your children, like putting away money in your name, making sure the benefits of you husband's life insurance go to you and/or your children, and making sure your name is on all bank and investment accounts.

I can understand why one would want to stay home with their children, but I don't get why one would want to drop out of the workforce/world completely. Even if you voluneteer one day a week at a soup kitchen or animal shelter for a few hours, it looks good on a resume 10 years down the road. A voluneteer spot where work would have been looks better to an employer than "stayed home with kids" There are plenty of women who didn't, why wouldn't he hire one of them.


*I'm a big magazine reader, and I found this article very interesting, so even though it's not in the New York Times(NYT), I felt it deserved a spot on my blog. Also, the NTY was not available over spring break, which is why the two previous articles have no page numbers, only web addresses.

In an Easter Dress, a Social Set Revealed

Guy Trebay
The New York Times
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
The Story
The Summary: A classic dress is a window to the working women of the past.

Who can say when the cherry dress came into being? People here can tell you only that it was always there. For 50 years the cherry dress has been the holiday uniform for the fine-featured towheads at places like the St. Louis Country Club or exclusive Midwestern summer resorts like Harbor Point or Charlevoix, Mich. For 50 years, the cherry dress has been a consistent best seller at the Woman’s Exchange of St. Louis, a modest nonprofit shop and institution itself about as old as electrification, having opened its doors in 1883.

Clothes have become a throw-away item, especially in the middle class. We wouldn't dream of spending $500 on a pair of shoes, but spend $20 on a pair that will go in the garbage at the end of the season. The clothes the middle class can afford aren't made as well as they once were, and their prices reflect this. (I recently bought a slough of $2 shirts and $3 skirts at Rue 21, stating that even if they don't last, or I wear them once, I only spend $2) This dress looks back on a time when you bought an item, wore it until you couldn't anymore, and then passed it along to the next person.

What is it about the cherry dress, one may ask? What was it about any of the simple preppy staples that turned into classics, things like penny loafers or blue blazers or button-down shirts?

They functioned so well that people forgot to change them. They were so stylistically generic that, for a very long while, they escaped the tentacles of fashion. They were so reassuringly dowdy that they became background, no small point in a world where people still think that it is one who wears clothes and not the other way around. And they were durable.

“There’s a timeless quality to them, and they’re dresses that you hold on to,” Carrie Polk, one of four sisters with deep family roots in this river city, said of cherry dresses. “Three generations in our family have worn them. They’re like clothes from before the disposable-clothes era, with hems the size of Texas. You didn’t just spill chocolate on one and pitch it. You got it cleaned and ironed, and if you grew, you brought down the hem.”

...that place itself is a historical rarity, perhaps the largest among the remaining outposts of a once-thriving national network of nonprofit “exchanges” for women’s work.

Of scores that existed at the height of the movement, there are now about 20 left, including outposts in Memphis, St. Augustine, Fla., and Brooklyn. The women’s exchanges, voluntary social service agencies, originated in 19th-century Philadelphia as places for genteel ladies fallen on hard times to discreetly earn a living without leaving home.

Imagine the time when it was scandelous for a woman to work outside the home, at least women of a certain stature. Even the richest women these days have some sort of income, even if it is "just for fun." The idea of the Women's Exchange is interesting. It was a job, an consignment shop that you brought your homemade goods to to sell. The idea of it is almost shocking in our foreign-made $2 shirt world.

Even as the populations of consigners shifted from genteel ladies down on their luck to new immigrants trying to find a toehold, the women’s exchange in St. Louis stayed afloat, in the way that successful retailers do, by understanding its market. The city has an unusually robust country club scene and its members patronize the gift shop and tearoom as avidly as their mothers and grandmothers did.

The few exchanges that have stayed afloat do so by family tradition. The story of the woman who sews the cherry dress is somewhat inspirational.

It's nice to see old traditions going strong. There is so much that has died in the wake of large chains and franchises. Unique-ness in region and industry is becoming a thing of the past. I can get the same hamburger anywhere in the world thanks to McDonalds, and the same shirt thanks to Walmart. When I go to a new place, I want to expeirience the local flavor, but there's less and less of that. I can go to Applebee's in Bemidji, why would I want to go to one in Chicago or New York? St. Louis has it's Cherry Dress, I hope it holds on to it.

Critics to Marketers: Suicide Is No Joke

Stuart Elliot
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 14th 2007
The Story
The Summary: Several people and groups are upset with television ads that feature their main characters facing suicide.

The backlash against a spate of advertising with suicide themes has claimed a third commercial. Washington Mutual has stopped running a spot that showed actors playing bankers poised atop a building as if about to jump.

The commercial for Washington Mutual, by Leo Burnett in Chicago, was among four spots — all appearing in early February — that had suicide as a central point in their humorous or lighthearted narratives.

Suicide is a serious issue. It's so serious, we can't talk about it. Suicide is scary. It's one of those scary things we think will go away if we avoid it, if we don't talk about it. It's at the top of the list of scary things to talk to teens about. (Other topics include sex and drugs) One of the largest myths about suicide is that talking about it to someone will put the idea in their head, but that's as far from the truth as anything. (again, like sex and drugs) You can't prevent something without discussing it.

So-called shockvertising, in the form of ads that are deliberately provocative to draw attention to themselves, is becoming increasingly popular. The reasons include a need to stand out amid the growing clutter and the rise of Web sites like YouTube, which enable people to watch repeatedly — and share with friends — attention-getting ads.

“So many commercials rely on shock value that we’ve gone to the edge on all possible shocks, death,” said Barbara Lippert, the ad critic for the trade publication Adweek.

“But suicide and buying stuff, they’re not exactly go-togethers,” Ms. Lippert said. “There’s an insensitivity that makes no sense.”

I don't find the WaMu ad (or the GM ad, for that matter) offensive. I don't see how they can be offensive. The suicide portrayed in the WaMu ad was a false threat, the suicide in the GM ad is that of a robot... in dream.

I don't see how these ads can harm overall. Neither of these ads make light of people with mental illness. The WaMu guys are old coots threatening a last ditch effort. The GM robot is at his last end. He's obviously depressed, but it's not making fun of depression in it's humor. I only see these ads as a way to spark conversation about suicide.

“It was not borne out of any desire to be dark or do harm,” Mr. Hirshberg said. Rather, “in building a character, a robot, to get across the idea of G.M.’s commitment to quality,” he added, “the most natural place to go for the story, if someone’s obsessed with quality and fails, is suicide.”

“In the last 10 years, 300,000 people have died from suicide in this country,” Mr. Gebbia said, yet “you see this kind of ad poking fun at suicide.”

“You wouldn’t see an ad poking fun at someone dying of AIDS or cancer,” he added. “We don’t think it’s appropriate to make fun of suicide or people with mental illness to sell products.”

A conversation starter about suicide in the mainstream media is something we need. Most movies about such topics get swept under the rug, ending up on channels that aren't taken seriously, like Lifetime, televison for women. Humor about serious topics can be offensive, but if done right, can be witty and enlighting, sparking conversation and raising awareness.

A Youth Ministry Some Call Antigay Tests Tolorence

Jesse McKinley
The New York Times
Friday, March 9th, 2007
pg A10
The Story
The Summary: A Christian youth group based out of Texas that has a repuation for being anti-gay is holding a large youth conference in San Francisco, "the Gayest city in the country."

A two-day event called BattleCry starts Friday at AT&T Park, the downtown baseball stadium. Organizers say the gathering, which includes performances by Christian rock bands and inspirational speakers, is a way for young Christians to speak out against what they view as destructive cultural elements, including sex on television, obscene music and violent video games.

The youth group scene is that one last effort for churches to get their hooks into teens before they go off in to "the real world." I have no problems with Christianity. I call myself a Christian, I hold many Christian beliefs. I do have a problem with the church scene. I grew up Catholic (the church of all churches) but have been exposed to several other Christian religions. Their major flaw is the lack of free thinking. They tell you how to think about certain subjects by handing out literature or more directly by sermons.

But several prominent San Francisco political leaders say Mr. Luce’s group is the one doing the damage, using its young members as a conduit for a message of intolerance.

“They are being fed, spoon-fed, hate,” said Tom Ammiano, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, who is gay. “And it is incumbent on any group receiving that hate, particularly gay people, to speak out.”

The message is normally: "This is wrong, here's why it's wrong..." but never stating the good about it. Example: Premarital sex. There isn't one church that will tell you that most people who do end up waiting to have sex get married very young. A 1995 study showed that 40% of people that married under the age of 20 eventually get divorced. Statistics show that most people can either wait for sex, or wait for marriage, but not both. Churches don't like to tell the awful truth.

Ben Rosen, a San Francisco organizer with World Can’t Wait, which is leading the protests, said his group was trying to repudiate what it sees as the deeper goals of BattleCry, including “imposing their biblical fundamentalist worldview on the country.”

That said, Mr. Rosen said protesters recognized that they were dealing with a delicate balance of expressing their opinions without appearing to be intolerant themselves.

“We’re not out to yell at kids that believe in Jesus; that’s awful,” he said. “It would be great,” he said of BattleCry, “if it didn’t have this very serious, very pernicious backbone to it.”

Fight fire with fire, fight closed mindedness with open thinking. As long as all protest remain peaceful (Christians claim to be peaceful, the gays tend to be peaceful) I love the idea.

Mr. Luce echoed that sentiment, saying his group loves gay people, but does firmly believe their sexuality is sinful.

“We see homosexuality like a lot of other things that do harm to us, like lying, or cheating, or stealing,” he said, adding that he said he had seen studies suggesting that many gay people are depressed or unhappy. “And it’s not very loving to leave them in that state and not show them another way.”

A perfect example of Christians giving one side of a story. Wouldn't you be depressed if there were entire groups telling you that a your sexual preferance was a sin? If thousands of people told me being blonde was a sin (and yes, I was born with this hair color, it wasn't a choice, and I don't want to change it!) I think I would be pretty depressed, too.

Joe D’Alessandro, the president of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, a private nonprofit group, said the two-day event was too small to have a significant impact on the local economy, but he said its organizers should be allowed to hold BattleCry nonetheless.

“I think we have to practice tolerance, whether or not they practice tolerance,” Mr. D’Alessandro said. “I’m gay myself, and I find their beliefs very offensive. But they have a right to come to our city.”

I'm impressed by the San Francisco city officials. They are definately doing the righ thing, but you know an uber-Chirstian southern city would probably turn down a gay rally.

Hooked on Storage

Suzanne Gannon
New York Times
Thursday, March 8th, 2007
Pg D1, D6
The Story
The Summary: Americans are using more long-term rented storage units than ever before. The average American family has shrunk, the average American home has increased, and Americans have more stuff than ever before.

They are not the only ones taking this approach to clutter. According to Michael T. Scanlon Jr., president of the Self Storage Association, a trade group, 11 million American households currently rent storage space, an increase of 90 percent since 1995 — even as the size of new American houses has grown and the size of the American family has shrunk.

We are a nation addicted to stuff. What are we putting into these storage spaces? What is so important that we can't throw it away, but not important enough to keep in our households? Yes, there are pleanty of people who benefit from paying an extra $75 or so a month and storing seasonal things such as Christmas decorations, while housing with enough room to store such items would cost much more, and probably more space than most people need for every-day living.

The people observed for this story all had different reasons for keeping long-term storage, most didn't plan keeping their storage for as long as they did. The reasons for keeping long-term storage is the same as short-term, moving, divorce, waiting for a larger place.

Storage-space users have traditionally rented for short periods, Mr. Scanlon said, most commonly during life changes like divorce or relocation. But in recent years a new kind of renter has emerged, one who rents for longer periods, sometimes paying thousands of dollars a year, sometimes for units in faraway cities. These new renters seem compelled to keep trading up, from a cozy “personal closet,” say, to a garage-like room, and then to a second unit or even a third. They represent what Diane Piegza, a spokeswoman for Sovran Self Storage, which owns the Uncle Bob’s chain of storage facilities in 22 states, calls “a segment of the population that has truly embedded storage into its lifestyle.”

Pack-rat syndrome effects everyone at some point, but never has their been an industry that catered to it so well. We all keep things for a little longer than we should, whether it's a term paper that we got an "A" on, or that cute shirt that used to fit, and only if we loose a few more pounds. There just comes a time that we have to throw things out, or sell them, or donate them. Rented storage is just another way people can live outside their means. It's like the credit card of stuff: "I don't have room for it now, but I might later"

Which creates a perfect segway for the next issue: the money spent on storage units.

...They rented their first unit in 2005 and filled it within six months, then added a larger, 10-by-15-foot space just down the hall. They now pay $335 a month for the two, or roughly $4,000 a year, a figure that Ms. Wagner said took her by surprise when her husband recently checked the bills...
...added to Mr. Balis’s space constraints, so he rented a 10-by-6-foot walk-in unit in Kingston, N.Y., for which he pays $97 a month, as well as a 5-by-5-foot closet at Manhattan Mini Storage, for which he pays $65...
...Together, the Manhattan and the Huntington Station units cost $325 a month, but Ms. Silver Pilchik considers it money well spent...

If some of these people could chuck or sell the stuff they're keeping in storage, they might be able to afford that new place sooner than they think. Imagine having an extra $4000/year. Saving classic, well built peices of furniture or seasonal items(that come back every year) that you may not have room for otherwise might turn out to be profitable, but trendy items and stuff you haven't used in a year or two can probably go. Donations to such charities as Goodwill can actually be written off, similar to a nominal donation. Ask your accountant about the details.

Storage is a beautiful example of American excess. Not only do we live in big houses and drive fancy cars, we also have more things than we can stuff in our big houses. The sad thing is, very few of us aren't guilty of this at least a little bit. After reading this article, I'm really tempted to start cleaning. I am moving in a mere three months.

Through Tulle and Tears, Perfecting That Special Day

Alessandra Stanley
The New York Times
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Page B1, B6
The Story
The Summary: A new show on Fox created by David E. Kelly named "The Wedding Bells" centers on a three sisters running an inherited wedding planning business. Drama ensues.

If I didn't have to work tonight, I might watch this show, just to laugh. Lately, the more and more I realize how much goes into wedding planning (thanks to roommates who are getting married, as well as my new love Engaged and Underage on MTV) the less I want a wedding.

For a television writer who created so many smart, original female characters in serious dramas like “Chicago Hope” and “The Practice,” Mr. Kelley has shown a surprisingly mean-spirited edge when it comes to comedy. The change was evident even before his disastrous and short-lived series in 2002 about kittenish young lawyers, “Girls Club.” Ally McBeal, for all her insecurities and irritating tics, was the heroine of that series...It’s almost as if, having ridden the wave of feminism early in his career as a writer on “L.A. Law,” Mr. Kelley has fallen into a reactionary sulk...

I'm not surprised, though. If you've ever watched Bridzillas, the women on that show aren't normally the most intellegent. I'm not saying that smart women don't have big weddings, but smart people also tend to be more rational, and rational people don't normally blow up at people who are trying to help them.

Fifty percent of couples may divorce, but weddings remain a boom industry, fueled by things like the weddingchannel.com and “Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?,” a reality show on the Style Network. With the recent sitcom “Big Day,” ABC has already tried and failed to wrap a series around a wedding. The “Today” show boosts its ratings by letting viewers choose between competing betrothed couples in a kind of Matrimonial Idol; NBC pays for the wedding of the winning husband and wife.

“Engaged and Underage,” a new reality show on MTV, follows very young couples, many of whom choose to remain virgins until marriage, as they navigate the treacherous shoals of bouquets, tuxedo rentals and mothers-in-law. And, of course, the WE channel has “Bridezillas,” a recurring reality series that profiles brides on the verge of a wedding meltdown.

Weddings have become a source of entertainment, both in and out of the church. But I'm beginning to rethink this country's celebration of weddings... the beginning of a marriage. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.(pdf)Why should I give someone a wedding gift for getting married when it can end a year later? That's not fair. I don't dislike marriage, it's weddings I have a problem with.

If you've ever watched My Super Sweet Sixteen, a show about spoiled children, mostly girls, who have elaborate parties on or around their 16th birthdays. Now place this in the context of a wedding! The author of the review states that some of these women seem a little catty.

The premiere begins with a jittery, chain-smoking bride who bolts seconds before the ceremony begins. Another bride, the rich, spoiled and imperious Amanda (Missi Pyle), keeps correcting the staff, even the wedding singer and his band. “This is my moment,” she hisses.

After witnessing reality shows along with friends and relatives getting married, I can only see this as an accurate portrayal of modern brides. Alessandra Stanley might feel that Mr. Kelley is setting back women, but I think we need to see ourselves like this to move on from it. Sometimes we just need a mirror to see the mud on our faces.

Broadcasters Agree to Fine Over Payoffs

Jeff Leeds
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
Page C1, C7
The Story
The Summary: For years, radio stations have been taking payoffs from major record labels in exchange for promising to play their artists more, leaving independent record labels and their artists behind.

The new penalty, which would come as part of a consent decree with the radio companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Entercom Communications and Citadel Broadcasting — would reflect perhaps the toughest F.C.C. enforcement of the decades-old regulations that prohibit broadcasters from taking secret payments in exchange for playing specific songs. Critics have accused the agency of lax enforcement.

The coalition between broadcasting giants and recording giants has put a choke-hold on the independent labels as well as new and up-and coming musicians. In an industry where looks mean just as much (if not more) than talent, it hurt the truly talented ones.

Payoffs for playtime have been happening for a long time, and has been illegal since 1960.

Media consolidation doesn't help the situation much either. It makes it harder for bands to grow a local fanbase, as most radio stations have set play-lists from their corporate offices, and can't stray from them. Independent internet radio has grown, as has the popularity of satellite radio, but they have drawbacks as well. (as I'm writing I'm listening to my boyfriend's internet radio show)

The new penalty, which would come as part of a consent decree with the radio companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Entercom Communications and Citadel Broadcasting — would reflect perhaps the toughest F.C.C. enforcement of the decades-old regulations that prohibit broadcasters from taking secret payments in exchange for playing specific songs. Critics have accused the agency of lax enforcement.

It's true, since the 2004 "Wardrobe Malfunction" at the Superbowl, the FCC has concentrated less on media consolidation and other dealings of the such, and more on obsenity and sexual content. I'm sorry, but I see a nipple, two even, at least once everyday, most days more. Any one who glances in the mirror before they bathe does. What I don't get to do everyday is here good music from new artists who may not have signed with a major record label.

Mr. Spitzer reached a series of settlements with the four major music conglomerates — the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the EMI Group and the Warner Music Group — totaling more than $30 million. CBS Radio and Entercom settled cases with Mr. Spitzer’s office for a combined $6.25 million.

The settlement with the F.C.C. comes at the same time as a separate arrangement in which the broadcasters agreed to devote more time to playing artists who are not signed to contracts with the four big record companies.

The new agreement sounds intersting:

The deal, negotiated by the American Association of Independent Music, provides that the radio companies will broadcast the equivalent of 8,400 half-hour segments of music from such artists. The segments can run any time from 6 a.m. to midnight any day of the week, according to people briefed on the deal.

Drive time is prime listening time. Between 6am and 9am and 5pm and 8pm are the optimal hours for listenin to the radio. Under these rules the radio companies can shove those in during the work day, or during the late hours when people watch TV or have family time. Listening to the radio isn't one of my evening activities.

I'm glad the FCC is focusing more on the business of media, rather than it's content. I can understand some of the reasoning for some of it's policies, but at the same time, when we fear words we only hurt ourselves. The late embracing of such words as "bitch" or "pimp" and their new meanings has brought the fear of them down. I can call my best friend a bitch, and it's a term of endearment. For more, listen to George Carlin's take on the seven dirty words.