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.