David Chelsea

May 22, 2005
Cubicle Cupid: Nothing Personal
By ALYSON M. GOMEAU

THERE’S someone out there for everyone. It makes a charming notion for love. It also happened to make an airtight refund policy for the online dating conglomerate I was working for in Los Angeles. Lovelorn hopefuls paid my employer for the opportunity to leap into a seemingly bottomless pit of potential mates, but if they hit bottom alone, it was their own fault, and they were not reimbursed.

A cold corporate approach? Perhaps. Whatever, it didn’t apply to me. Fresh off a breakup and cross-country move, I’d reached the stage where I was mourning less the loss of my boyfriend than the Gore-Tex anorak he refused to return, and I wasn’t yet in the market for a new one (boyfriend, not anorak). Besides, I wasn’t allowed to look even if I’d wanted to; employees were required to check their hearts at the front desk.

I’d been working there for three months, ever since the tenacious rep at the temp agency, unfazed by my lackluster Excel scores and general apathy about cubicle jobs, called while I was organizing my Vogue magazines in reverse chronological order and said, “You can wear jeans.”

It was data entry; the parking was convenient, the pay negligible. I was in my mid-20′s, among the legion of aspiring screenwriters in need of some way to pay the bills. As such, I was forced to concede that this job was at least something.

Less than an hour later, ensconced at a cramped computer station in a windowless room that smelled of Cool Ranch Doritos, I wondered if I should have held out for more. The flourishing company maintained a half-dozen of the most popular dating Web sites, each merely a twist on the obsolete personal ad. The client – known flatteringly as the “single” – provided brief answers to mind-numbingly general questions like “Life Motto?,” which, along with an optional photograph, served as his or her profile. Anyone could post or view a profile; paying members received photo space and expanded profile and, most important, could contact one another. The Internet dating scene had reached its post-9/11 apex of popularity, and the company was besieged with hundreds of thousands of profiles from men and women hot on the trail of their special someone.

My job was to preview each new profile for obscenities, objectionable references and prohibited contact information (phone numbers, addresses, instant message handles). And I was to do this task at a constant steady speed. You were not to read, needlessly edit or laugh. And certainly not look for your own match.

The profile-entry department was a stock crew of aspirants: the actor, the singer, the writer, the former assistant to a B-list celebrity, all of us frog marched to a bland building on Wilshire Boulevard by our lofty artistic goals and loftier Visa bills. We had drawn the dreaded 6 a.m. shift, and the combination of early morning proximity, professional frustration and poor ventilation had helped us forge a thin alliance.

We acted happy when the actor scored a commercial for a discount hair-cutting chain, laughed too hard when the singer regaled us with the tale of her gig as a dancing bear at a sub-par amusement park, rallied mildly around the agent trainee after he was terminated for filching the e-mail addresses of pretty single women. We acted as if we cared. But the job was short term, and so was our interest in one another.

Besides, the truly interesting people were the ones on our filmy computer screens. These singles were hardly wallflowers or workaholics; they were confident and unabashed, with evidently all the time in the world to compile rosters of astrological preferences, height requirements, and in one case, a 16-item list of music the future betrothed could never, ever, listen to.

At first I tried to help. True, there was no Vera Wang fitting in my immediate future, but I had done O.K. in the past – nobody had ended a long-term relationship with me via a voice-mail message – and my current singleness was voluntary, intended and celebrated: a new city, a new time zone, a whole new video store.

We were strictly monitored, so my assistance took a minimalist approach. A few snips and that rambling sentence about a single’s “five-year social sabbatical” no longer seemed so intense. The removal of an errant adjective and voilà: the single’s Yorkshire terrier was still a dog but no longer “transcendental.” I may not have been an expert in all things love, life and grammar. But they just wanted to be happy. Couldn’t I help them cut in line?

As the weeks dragged on, however, I lost enthusiasm for meddling. Time was passing. The old department was fading away, with the actor and singer moving on to bigger and brighter things while I remained rooted, half-asleep in the chair closest to the floor fan, now a mentor to the novices in the acclaimed “Control/Shift” shortcut key.

And I began to resent the singles. I grew angry at their sloppy, impassive prose. If SanDiego44 really had “waited a lifetime for love,” couldn’t he have squeezed in another 10 seconds to check the spelling of his work? And could PwrBrkr36 spout off a few more clichés about men and commitment? This was love they were looking for. It took time, effort, a thesaurus. Elusive, evasive, slippery love. What made them think they could catch it so easily? If they wanted happiness, they could get in line. Behind me.

Because even though I’d chosen this life, I was starting to get restless. The temp agency had called with other assignments, but the compensation – financial or intellectual – was no greater, and the rep had not been able to guarantee the free chai lattes I enjoyed now. This had become one priority I could not shift.

When my VCR began to rewind and fast-forward on its own in the dead of the night, I heaved it into the Dumpster and bid adieu to entertainment as I knew it. Careers, major appliances and love all seemed to require owner’s manuals I could no longer locate.

And so it was that after spending most of the morning staring out the window at an unusually cloudy Southern California sky, I did the unthinkable: I began to search the profiles. I signed on as a guest member, entered an age and location, and read the results. I skimmed past the men who favored blondes, mountain biking and “Fear Factor.” I scrolled 15 pages of potential. And then I stopped.

He was a newly certified architect. He declined to discuss Woody Allen unless the other party had seen both “Sleeper” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” He was originally from the East Coast, enjoyed Thai food and didn’t know what he was doing on this Web site because he wasn’t sure what he was doing on this planet. His photo was unpretentious, his smile genuine, and, unlike a startling number of his peers, he had not cropped the shot from his wedding portrait.

I looked out the window again. I had not turned on my home computer in over five weeks. Opening my freezer required an alarming amount of manufactured enthusiasm. The recent Valentine’s Day had passed unrecognized until the chatty drug store clerk pointed out her plastic heart earrings to me. “They’re supposed to flash, but I couldn’t be bothered to find the right batteries,” she said with a smile, but her eyes were weary. “You know how it is.”

I did know. But suddenly, alone in that cubicle, I fully understood how my months of immersion in the loneliness of others had seared and anesthetized me to the point where I’d forgotten how it felt to discover that you both liked Interpol before everyone else did.

NOW, reading – really reading – the architect’s careful words, I felt the ether wearing off and the sensations rushing back. The singles on my screen no longer seemed picky, demanding or needy. They were vivacious, honest, funny and, most of all, brave. So what if they wrote lists defending the raw-food diet lifestyle and spoke of May-December like it was a real month? They hoped for the best. They actually believed there was someone out there for them.

Two clicks later and I had the architect’s private e-mail address on my screen. I had my pen out and a Post-It ready. I probably also had a laminating kit nearby. For this could be it. It was all there in front of me in a respectable font without so much as a semicolon smiley face. This could be my someone.

But my hand stopped midletter.

What was I doing? How had I allowed myself to be seduced by this electronic candy machine of shrink-wrapped soul mates?

My old boyfriend, whom I loved, who was as close as I’d come so far, talked loudly during movie previews, used a duck-shaped lint remover on his sweaters, refused to run from the rain and had an uncontrollable, contagious laugh that was the best compliment you ever received. How does one capture that in a profile?

We’d met by chance, not keyword search. He was running late, I was leaving early. We were two people headed in opposite directions down a long hallway, blissfully unaware of each other’s shared astrological signs or Life Mottoes. Two strangers who hadn’t been reduced to cliché, category or classification. I knew absolutely nothing about him, and yet there was that instant, immediate, time-suspending connection. …

Click.

I closed out of the screen, threw my cold latte into the trash. As I walked out onto the street, I remembered that I’d left my time sheet back in the cubicle, and I hesitated. It was already past due, and I would have to fax it by this afternoon if I wanted to get paid.

But the sun had just burst indignantly through the dispersing clouds, and there were actual people out here on the sidewalk, gloriously unclassified, without any preferences blaring from their foreheads in 16-point Helvetica Narrow.

I kept walking. Let them keep their money. I had smuggled out my heart. We could call it even.

Alyson M. Gomeau, who lives in Los Angeles, is a screenwriter.

New York Times.

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

ATTITUDE: C. J. Charles-Niles at the Ultra-Omni party.

May 22, 2005
Still Striking a Pose
By GUY TREBAY
Los Angeles

SELVIN KOOL-AID GIVENCHY was stalking the runway, letting fly his hands and his wild invective. “Work it, girls! Serve it like a legend!” said Mr. Givenchy, who is something of an underground legend himself, what with his Moms Mabley mug, his colossally oversize sweatshirt and a mouth that would make that raunchy comedian’s seem snowflake pure. “Remember,” Mr. Givenchy commanded the ladies, although ladies was not the word he employed. “I am in charge of the girls!”

The girls were not girls, of course, and the boys not boys. The runway was a makeshift theater on which, over the course of a long evening, the girls and the boys would stomp and pose and parade and dance attired in zoot suits or chiffon dresses or else very little at all. The gathering was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the New York-based House of Ultra-Omni, one of the last of the original drag queen houses whose balls proliferated in the 1980′s, then faded from memory and, seemingly, disappeared.

Whatever vague awareness most Americans may have of this bygone scene probably comes from Madonna’s “Vogue,” the influential 1990 hit that was either an act of homage to the underground that inspired it or one of creative larceny. A fuller introduction was provided by “Paris Is Burning,” Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, a remarkably clear-eyed appraisal of the epoch and the quirky “legends” who gave it birth.

No one can say for sure when or how voguing seemed to vanish, and with it the houses that brought it into the world. Those houses constituted groups of gay men organized and run by “mothers” and “fathers,” populated by “children” and named for fashion designers no one involved had ever met. Then and now, even people who were in on the scene might have been forgiven for assuming that its practitioners had moved on in the decade after “Vogue” and “Paris Is Burning,” or, as likely, were now dead.

The reality, it turns out, is astonishingly different. True, AIDS decimated the ball world, carrying away many of its founders. But far from fading out, the balls survived and are being revived by a new generation that has exported them from the urban centers where they first flourished to the Sun Belt and the Midwest.

Balls are now being staged almost every weekend in cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit. The House of Ultra-Omni alone has branches in 10 states. A dozen or more Web sites are devoted to the scene, which also has its own magazine and newsletter and is the subject of a new documentary that brings things vividly up to date. “How Do I Look” was filmed over the past decade by the German filmmaker Wolfgang Busch; fresh from making the rounds of an academic circuit still eager for tales from the gender front, the film will be released on DVD next month.

“People thought it all ended with ‘Paris Is Burning,’ ” said Wayne Tanks, the father of the Wisconsin chapter of the House of Ultra-Omni. Along with dozens of other children, Mr. Tanks had traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate his house’s quarter-century mark. “But we’re still here.”

In Los Angeles this was made abundantly clear as members arrived to represent venerable houses like Ninja, Versace, Mugler, Cavalli, Moschino, Bizarre, Blahnik, Givenchy, Balenciaga and Prestige. Mothers and fathers and children from each of these clans descended on a Westin hotel near L.A.X., curiously resplendent beings whose existence gave proof to the survival of an implausible phenomenon conjured from the raw material of hard lives.

They came to commemorate, to celebrate, to dance and posture and do serious battle on a catwalk in an overlighted banquet room. They also came, if one may borrow back a phrase from Madonna, to strike a pose.

“When I first heard about the houses, I thought, this culture is so underground,” said Brandon Harp, a member of the Atlanta House of Ultra-Omni. “Then I found that, in places like Kentucky, where I had never been, people knew who I am and what my best category is.”

MR. HARP arrived in Los Angeles prepared to walk in a category called Butch Queen Realness, a kind of extravagantly performed commentary on self-presentation, in which an out gay man impersonates an apparently straight or closeted gay man by wearing a costume that exaggeratedly telegraphs masculinity. Mordant social commentary has always been at the core of the voguing balls, and long before academia institutionalized the notion that gender is performance, the ball children were tartly making the same point at elaborate fetes where competing groups vied to outdo each other at caricaturing the masks of sex. Wealth and power, it should be mentioned, also tend to come in for some sharp appraisal at these gatherings, critiques the more pointed because ball children have historically possessed little of either.

Throughout their history, ball children have strutted down improvised runways in categories like “executive realness,” “femme attitude” and “sex-siren effect.” The costumes they donned were most memorably of the feather boa sort. But, just as often their “drag” runs to “executive” suits and wingtips or else do-rags and Timberlands worn by Down Low types.

In the past the ball children battled in gay clubs and leased Elks halls. They took trophies and earned credibility and status on a circuit that was both intricately networked and, at the same time, so seemingly informal one would think the balls were arranged ad hoc. All that has changed, Mr. Tanks said. Thirty members of his house split their time between working up ensembles for catwalk competitions and creating outreach programs promoting “awareness and prevention of H.I.V.” and other forms of sexually transmitted disease.

Social service was a galaxy away from anyone’s concerns at the Westin hotel on this spring evening, as the ball children tucked into a dinner of poached chicken and mesclun with slices of Brie. The meal was a marked departure from balls of the past, where the food, if there was any, tended to be chips or pretzels or anything useful at soaking up booze. If not an entirely sober occasion, the 25th anniversary of the House of Ultra-Omni was a Kiwanis picnic by contrast with the frenzied, and often drug-stoked, blowouts of earlier days.

Still, it was a serious ball, serious meaning frivolous to a nearly demented degree. As Mr. Givenchy repeated any number of times, “The girls better serve it serious, they better work, and they better come out here punishing my runway with a nasty attitude and a sickening walk.” Irony being mother’s milk in the ball world, words like sick and nasty and over (or “ovah”) are terms of the highest approbation: Webster’s take note.

Of all the contributions the ball world has made to culture, dance is probably the most durable, athough that oddly seems to have escaped much scholarly notice. “Voguing is truly an evolution of ancient African dance forms rehearsed and refined into a form of first-world party artistry,” explained Muhammad Ultra-Omni, real name Salaudin Muhammad, before taking to the stage in a white linen suit and a white straw hat whose crown was cut out to allow for his fountain of dreadlocks.

Once onstage Mr. Muhammad put in play the stylized walks and poses and dips and spins and chest poppings and stupefying dead drops that have qualified him for legendary status on a scene where legend is a hard-won formal honorific.

“Break dancers get together and do stuff like this, and it’s fully accepted,” said Willi Ninja, surely the most celebrated dancer ever produced by the ballrooms, speaking in a mainstream sense. “If Madonna does voguing, it’s O.K.,” he added. “But when the ball children dance, even now, people say, ‘Oh, it’s a bunch of crazy queens throwing themselves on the floor.’ “

Yet even the most skeptical observer would have trouble disputing that real artistry is involved when Muhammad or Ninja takes the floor. And not even a churl could keep from being charmed by the House of Cavalli, a posse of refrigerator-size men who swept into the Westin ballroom near midnight wearing demure French twists and dresses of diaphanous chiffon that had to have been cut from acre-sized bolts.

To the chanted (and entirely unprintable) exhortations of Mr. Givenchy, each performer took his thrashing, popping, stalking, prancing or whirling turn on the runway and posed and performed in a way that one contestant described as “so nasty and ovah it’s sick.”

The clear high point of the evening, for this observer at least, was reached when Warner McPherson, also known as Hershey Ultra-Omni, pranced onstage with his lean body oiled and naked but for a G-string kitted out with plastic Wal-Mart foliage. In a blur that lasted less than three minutes, Mr. McPherson miraculously managed to conjure the entire history of voguing in a performance so stylized and manic that inspired is hardly an adequate word. It was possessed.

“Work it, Miss Hershey! Bring it! Serve it! Show them girls how it’s really done!” The voice belonged to Kevin Burrus, or Kevin Ultra-Omni, who helped found the house of that name 25 years ago in New York. “You know, seeing Hershey makes me emotional,” explained Mr. Burrus, as his protégé performed. “After all that we have been through, with the AIDS and the drugs and the death and the homophobia, I see Hershey dancing and realize that the ball children are still strong and still out here, carrying on.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Contact Us Back to Top

Ann Johnsson for The New York Times

Warner McPherson, a k a Hershey Ultra-Omni, took over the runway at the ball.

Off White Productions/ Everett Collection.
A clip from “Paris Is Burning,” a 1991 documentary.

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

Taz Brookins gets ready for the ball.

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

Muhammad Ultra-Omni, a dance floor legend

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

Kevin Ultra-Omni, who founded the house 25 years ago

Trump Is Desperate
It’s not pretty.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:24 PM PT

Is Trump over?

The Apprentice was a brilliant career move for Donald Trump, setting off a virtuous cycle of egomaniacal profiteering. The TV show brought free advertisements for his Atlantic City casino, promotions for his apartment projects in New York and Chicago, endorsements, and book deals. That moneymaking publicity, in turn, fueled the TV show.

But now, after a glorious year for The Donald, this cycle is turning vicious. Ratings have fallen, and Trump has engaged in increasingly strange publicity stunts that don’t bring him any income at all and that may end up costing him money. It turns out that Trump’s desperation is almost as compelling as his success.

In its first season, which ran from January through April 2004, The Apprentice was a runaway—and surprise—hit for NBC and Trump. The finale attracted a massive audience: an average of 28 million viewers. Trump moved to exploit the success and build buzz for the next season, churning out books like Stephen King. The spring of 2004 brought Trump: How To Get Rich and Trump: The Way to the Top: The Best Business Advice I Ever Received. The same month, Trump began to appear in advertisements for Visa. His assistant, Carolyn Kepcher, rushed to get Carolyn 101 into print for the fall of 2004, and it did well.

Despite all the buzz and collateral promotion, viewership dropped sharply in the second season. The September 2004 debut drew 14 million viewers. The finale, an excruciating three-hour extravaganza, drew fewer than 17 million viewers.

Trump clearly felt pressure to do something drastic to attract attention for the third season. But he didn’t have a best-selling book to plug or a new endorsement gig. So Trump decided to do the promotional work himself. He married his longtime companion, Slovenian supermodel Melania Knauss. And apparently, the only weekend Mar-a-Lago was available for the nuptials was in late January 2005, just when Apprentice 3 was about to start.

The Apprentice’s third season was marketed as “street smarts vs. book smarts,” but the conceit failed to capture viewers’ imaginations. Ratings fell again. And so as plans were laid to expand the franchise to include a Martha Stewart spinoff this fall, Trump careened from moneymaking endorsements and book deals to cheap publicity stunts.

On May 12—the same day Episode 16 aired—Trump appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews (synergy, baby!) and slammed the design of the Freedom Tower proposed for the World Trade Center site. The following week, Trump engineered a classic example of what historian Daniel Boorstin labeled a pseudo-event. On May 18, Trump held a press conference at which he announced he could rebuild the Twin Towers—even though he doesn’t control the site and couldn’t hope to raise the funds to rebuild there. This time, the non-NBC media world played along. (In the New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer sneaked a fine bit of sarcasm past her editors: “It was clearly a coincidence that Mr. Trump held his news conference a day before the season finale of his network reality show, The Apprentice.”) The same week, Trump also succumbed to the ultimate in celebrity abasement—talking about your relationship on Larry King Live, which he and Melania did on May 17. All to no avail. The finale of Season Three attracted just 13.7 million viewers, as realityblurred.com notes. It got trounced by CSI.

While the TV franchise is listing, the collateral products are tanking. When King asked Trump how his new book of golf tips is doing, Trump responded: “It’s selling like hot cakes.” Yeah, like hot cakes at a convention of people suffering from celiac disease. The only thing in the six figures about Trump: The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received is its Amazon.com ranking.

So what does Trump have planned for this fall? Well, he’s already starting an online university, which will offer neither degrees nor grades. And we can probably expect more desperate publicity stunts—perhaps a crisis in the marriage, to be discussed at length on Dateline. Or maybe he’ll show up in Baghdad to critique the reconstruction of Iraq and offer his own expertise, an event sure to be covered by the Today Show.

And as Playbill notes, Trump, TV producer Mark Burnett, and Broadway producers Barry and Fran Weissler plan to turn The Apprentice into a musical for the spring of 2006. (That sound you hear is New York Times critic Ben Brantley sharpening his talons.) This strikes me as the most desperate move of all. Broadway is a notorious cesspool for outsiders’ capital. Besides, the Great White Way already has a long-running smash hit that’s a tribute to Trump: Hairspray.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate‘s “Moneybox” column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Surely, Diddy never dirties his white suit


Just Dandy
The enduring mystique of the white suit.
By Inigo Thomas
Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005, at 4:20 AM PT

A month ago, I bought a white suit. Cheap it was: just over 100 bucks at the downtown Brooklyn branch of Daffy’s, the discount-clothing store, one of the best shops in New York City.

Now, a white suit, however inexpensive, is always an absurd impracticality, even an act of defiance against all practicality. It is also, in life as in movies and books, never neutral. Like a white Rolls Royce, for example, a white suit connotes grandness, tackiness, egotism, sex, and cash. Such a confluence is found in Fitzgerald’s first presentation of Gatsby, dressed to impress Daisy in a “white-flannel suit, silver shirt, and a gold-colored tie.” There was no way, that afternoon, that Jay Gatsby could have worn dark blue.

A man in white is never innocent; no woman in white is necessarily innocent either, though the conventional idea is that she may be. A man in white is often searching for something: dirt, or life, or love, money or blood, fame or notoriety. A white suit attracts what you don’t have or what you want more of. At least that’s the idea, though the experience of wearing a white suit doesn’t always follow the script. After Lawrence of Arabia, in which he starred, won best picture, Peter O’Toole bought a white suit in Los Angeles, rented a white Rolls Royce, and cruised Sunset Boulevard. He waved to people in cars and on the sidewalks, as if he was mother of the Queen of England at a parade. “No one took any f—— notice,” he told a friend, “but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

If a white suit is a way to draw attention to oneself—maybe, maybe not—it can also be a way to associate oneself with someone else. Wear a white suit and you might hear someone remark, as they pass you by, “Very Hemingway,” or “Very Evelyn Waugh,” or “Very Graham Greene,” or, as I did, “Very Mick Jagger.” Not once did I hear anyone say, when I was wearing mine, “Very Tom Wolfe.” That was interesting-ish, because the most famous wearer of white suits in recent times is Wolfe.

The problem with Wolfe’s suits is the problem with the white suit: They never seem to entirely belong to you. It’s as if they’re always on loan—a rental, more hotel than home. In other words, white suits are a distraction, a way of losing yourself, or of going abroad. Wolfe’s suits always evoke the image of another author, Mark Twain. Twain wore his brilliant white suit in winter and summer, at the opera and at home, and though he was not the first man to wear a white suit—Samuel Pepys possessed one back in the 17th century—he is, as far as I know, the first man who wasn’t a pope to be famous to make a point of dressing almost always in white. Prior to his appearance before Congress in December 1906, he explained to Capitol Hill journalists why he wore white: “I have found that when a man reaches the advanced age of 71 years, as I have, the continual sight of drab clothing is likely to have a depressing effect upon him. Light-colored clothing is more pleasing to the eye and enlivens the spirit.”

Like every suit, the white suit is a uniform, not of the office but of the street or the cafe. In the movies, Mafia bosses are often in white—like Fanucci, the Lower East Side extortion merchant in The Godfather, who is murdered in a Lower East Side tenement building by the young Vito Corleone—but in life, they tend to wear drearier colors, unless they’re death-wish or arrest-wish inclined, as some are, and this is why they wear white. Such fatalism, of course, is another attribute of the white suit. There’s the inevitability of its getting dirty, which in the movies is translated into the certainty of blood. And red on the screen is a more convincing and dangerous color when set against white.

The white suit can also be about power. FDR and Truman were white-suit men in summer months, though lately white suits haven’t been presidential. Then there’s the white suit of the Southern plantation owner (which I suspect was more myth than true), but white has always gone hand in hand symbolically with lording it, and with empire. Photographs of a great uncle in the ’30s, then governor of Singapore, depict the epitome of the white-suited Englishman overseas. And though the empire has gone, the white suit hasn’t. “As supplied to the Foreign Office,” read the tag on a white suit bought by a friend in London’s Piccadilly a few years ago. In the imagination, “our man” in the tropics is always in white.

That kind of white-suited Englishman is often contrasted with its famous variation: the man in the rumpled white suit. This is the man from the pages of Graham Greene’s fictions, symbol of the man gone wild in the jungle, who, like a plant taken from Europe to the equator, has become a monstrosity with no hope of returning home, no hope of redemption, but mainly with no hope of finding a cleaner to attend to his white suit. Not that this kind of man is intrinsically English. He can be an American imitating English airs. In Michael Herr’s book about the war in Vietnam, Dispatches, American CIA types sit in Saigon cafes dressed in white suits, reading Brit kitsch boy stuff: Lawrence of Arabia, the adventures of Richard Burton, and the end of General Gordon at Khartoum. One can’t imagine that their suits stayed white for too long.

Would anyone buy a white suit that never got dirty and never became rumpled? Isn’t this part of their allure? In the movie The Man in the White Suit, the boffin played by Alec Guinness creates a white suit resistant to grime. He invents the sartorial equivalent of the light bulb that never needs be changed. He and his invention are crushed by evil mill owners who have no interest in seeing a small man successfully rob them of their profits from traditional, dirt-absorbing cloth.

Of course it’s how a white suit becomes dirty that is interesting. My own white suit is now filthy: I sat on a blackened fire escape one warm Sunday morning. Among all else, a white suit is folly, though I’ve always preferred people who expose some of their follies to those who hide them. My suit will soon go to the cleaners for a few days. It’s not the best suit I’ve owned, but it is the cheapest, and as a suit for a summer in New York, where the awfully formal-informal dress code is that you shouldn’t wear white earlier than Memorial Day—a rule I have not been observing—I shall be curious to see how it records the course of the next three months, each indelible stain it and I acquire as part of a diary of a summer in the city.

Inigo Thomas lives in New York. He is writing a book on 18th-century French botany

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women
An economics detective story.
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 3:42 AM PT

What is economics, anyway? It’s not so much a subject matter as a sort of tool kit—one that, when set loose on a thicket of information, can determine the effect of any given factor. “The economy” is the thicket that concerns jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the economist’s tool kit can just as easily be put to more creative use.

Consider, for instance, an incendiary argument made by the economist Amartya Sen in 1990. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Sen claimed that there were some 100 million “missing women” in Asia. While the ratio of men to women in the West was nearly even, in countries like China, India, and Pakistan, there were far more men than women. Sen charged these cultures with gravely mistreating their young girls—perhaps by starving their daughters at the expense of their sons or not taking the girls to doctors when they should have. Although Sen didn’t say so, there were other sinister possibilities. Were the missing women a result of selective abortions? Female infanticide? A forced export of prostitutes?

Sen had used the measurement tools of economics to uncover a jarring mystery and to accuse a culprit—misogyny. But now another economist has reached a startlingly different conclusion. Emily Oster is an economics graduate student at Harvard who started running regression analyses when she was 10 (both her parents are economists) and is particularly interested in studying disease. She first learned of the “missing women” theory while she was an undergraduate. Then one day last summer, while doing some poolside reading in Las Vegas—the book was Baruch Blumberg’s Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus—she discovered a strange fact. In a series of small-scale medical studies in Greece, Greenland, and elsewhere, researchers had found that a pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely to have a baby boy than a baby girl. It wasn’t clear why—it may be that a female fetus is more likely to be miscarried when exposed to the virus.

Oster was suitably intrigued. She set out first to see if she could use data to confirm Blumberg’s thesis. A vaccine for hepatitis B, she learned, had been available since the late 1970s. She found good data on a U.S. government vaccination program in Alaska. Before the vaccinations began, Alaskan natives had a historically high incidence of hepatitis B as well as a high birth ratio of boys to girls. White Alaskans, meanwhile, had a low incidence of hepatitis B and gave birth to the standard ratio of boys to girls. But after a universal vaccination program was carried out in Alaska, the Native Alaskans’ boy-girl ratio fell almost immediately to the normal range, while the white Alaskans’ ratio was unchanged. A vaccination program in Taiwan revealed similar results.

Convinced now of the relationship between hepatitis B and birth gender, Oster set out on a vast data mission to determine the magnitude of that relationship. She measured the incidence of hepatitis B in the populations of China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and other countries where mothers gave birth to an unnaturally high number of boys. Sure enough, the regions with the most hepatitis B were the regions with the most “missing” women. Except the women weren’t really missing at all, for they had never been born.

If you believe Oster’s numbers—and as they are presented in a soon-to-be-published paper, they are extremely compelling—then her detective work has established the fate of roughly 50 million of Amartya Sen’s missing women. Her discovery hardly means that Sen was wrong to cry misogyny, at least in some parts of the world: While Oster found, for instance, that Hepatitis B can account for roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China, it can account for less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap in Sen’s native India. The culprits behind the disappearance of the 50 million women whom Oster did not find are likely the horrible ones that Sen and others have suggested. But Oster’s analysis does show that economics is particularly useful for challenging a received wisdom—in this case, one that was originally put forth by another economist.

The key to Oster’s research was the availability of large and reliable sets of data. This is an advantage in economics that is not always conferred on the other social sciences. Consider now a different piece of groundbreaking research in developmental psychology.

In the early 1980s, a group of psychologists and linguists banded together to write Narratives From the Crib, a study of how children acquire linguistic skills. Narratives was built around the speech patterns of one child, a 2-year-old girl. Her parents had noticed that she often talked to herself in the crib after they said good night and left her room. They were curious to know what she was saying, so they began to record her chatter. They turned on the tape recorder while they were tucking her in and then left it running. Eventually they gave the tapes to a psychologist friend, who shared it with her colleagues. The big surprise to these experts was that the girl’s speech was far more sophisticated when she was alone than when she was speaking with her parents. This finding, as Malcolm Gladwell would later write in The Tipping Point, “was critical in changing the views of many child experts.”

The 2-year-old girl in question was referred to as Baby Emily. Her full name? Emily Oster. In retrospect, it would appear that Narratives From the Crib suffers what researchers call an “n of 1″ problem, with “n” representing the size of the sample set—a problem that is gravely exacerbated when the one subject turns out to be … well, a good bit brighter than average. Studying how children learn to talk by observing Baby Emily may be a bit like studying how children learn to play golf by studying Tiger Woods. Now that she’s an economist, Emily Oster has at least assured herself that she will never contribute to another “n of 1″ problem. The challenge in her field—and so far she has met it well—is quite the opposite: to take a mass of disparate numbers and somehow wring from it one thing that is true.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Embryoglio
By Eric Umansky
Updated Wednesday, May 25, 2005, at 4:16 AM PT

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today all lead with the House voting to relax restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, a bill President Bush has promised to veto. Though the measure passed with 50 Republican votes, it didn’t get enough support to be veto-proof. The Senate is expected to pass a similar version soon. The Wall Street Journal says that rather than risk a veto of a popular bill, the White House is considering pushing for some sort of backroom “compromise” in the House-Senate conference. According to one poll, 57 percent of Republicans support embryonic stem-cell research.

The WSJ world-wide newsbox and Washington Post lead with the fruits of the (mushy) filibuster compromise: The Senate voted 81-to-18 to clear the way for a full floor vote on judicial nominee Priscilla Owen. Meanwhile, the compromise itself wasn’t looking so robust. “This is a truce, not a treaty,” said Senator Orrin Hatch.

Citing three top unnamed government officials, the Post‘s off-lead says the military nearly shot down the Cessna that recently wandered over Washington. SecDef Rumsfeld had given the OK, and according to one official, fighter jets were “15 to 20 seconds” from taking the prop plane out. The WP also briefly raises the other side of the coin: The Cessna was sputtering along at about 100 MPH and the F-16s still barely made it in time. In the current setup, are the fighters ready to intercept a faster plane, such as a jetliner?

Everybody mentions a jihadist Web site’s report that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been seriously wounded. Only the WP fronts the rumor/news. It’s also the only paper that appears to have spoken with a member of Zarqawi’s group. “It’s true,” said one commander in Zarqawi’s group. “We ask Muslims to pray for him.” U.S. and Iraqi officials said, basically, they have no idea if the report is true.

Eight U.S. soldiers have been killed over the past two days in Iraq, including at least four yesterday in assorted attacks. The Post mentions what appears to be ethnic fighting in the northern town of Tal Afar, where two dozen Shiites were killed earlier this week. “Shiites’ armed men are walking around looking for Sunnis to kill,” said one police colonel.

In a piece TP missed yesterday, the LAT went inside with a depressing analysis of the recent offensive in western Iraq. The Marines in Operation Matador might have wounded Zarqawi, but most insurgents got away. There just weren’t enough troops in the area and there still aren’t. Essentially much of the Anbar province has been ceded to guerrillas. “[Commanders] can’t use the word, but we’re withdrawing,” said one unnamed U.S. military official. “Slowly, that’s what we’re doing.”

The WP and NYT go inside with a report from Human Rights Watch alleging that two American brothers were detained and tortured for months in Pakistan while the FBI occasionally came in to question them and ignored their pleas for help. “The FBI didn’t torture us directly,” said one brother, who explained, “We were beaten severely, kept awake all night or hung upside down by Pakistani agents before each of about 10 interrogation sessions by FBI agents.” The brothers were suspected of connections to al-Qaida and eventually released without charges.

The Journal goes up high with Democrats “conceding” that with the filibuster battle headed off for now, U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton has a better chance of getting Senate confirmation. Meanwhile, the NYT details Republican Senator George Voinovich’s full-bore campaign against Bolton, which has included an open letter to colleagues: “We cannot afford to put at risk our nation’s ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective Ambassador to the United Nations.” A vote could come this week.

The LAT and WP front a study showing that breast cancer patients have a roughly 50 percent lower mortality rate if they exercise regularly. Apparently, the key is the lower levels of estrogen that result from exercise.

The NYT and USAT front the latest realtor data study, which shows the housing market getting quite…frothy. Median home prices last month were up 15 percent from a year ago, the biggest increase in 25 years. “There’s clearly speculative excess going on,” one economist told the NYT. “A lot of people view real estate as a can’t lose.”

On Monday, First Lady Laura Bush praised Egypt’s election “reforms” as “a very wise and bold step.” As this morning’s Post notes, she defended those comments yesterday. And as it happens, the WP has another piece detailing how the reforms are working out:

The campaign of Ayman Nour, the only opposition candidate challenging President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s fall election, was reduced to this on Tuesday: A clutch of 20 Nour supporters bought tickets to the movie “Kingdom of Heaven” in order to have an excuse to loiter in front of a downtown cinema and shout anti-Mubarak slogans.

The ruse to overcome police restrictions on public meetings didn’t work for long. Within a half-hour, a phalanx of thick-forearmed plainclothes security agents backed by dozens of club-carrying riot police marched down narrow Abdel-Hamid Said Street, shoved the protesters into the lobby of the Odeon Theater and scattered reporters and passersby down the block.

ThinkFilm                   
Jerry Garcia.

Fred Moore, the founder of the Homebrew Club. Apple Computer’s Stephen Wozniak came to the first meeting

May 22, 2005
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Start the Computer Revolution
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

LET’S get this straight: Jerry Garcia invented the Internet while he was tripping on acid. No, actually, it was Ken Kesey, who thought computers were the next thing after drugs – which, according to John Markoff, they really were.

“What the Dormouse Said: How the 60′s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” (Viking, 287 pages) is Mr. Markoff’s hymn to the 1960′s, and to the social idealists and, well, acid freaks who wanted to use computers to promote an agenda of sharing, openness and personal growth.

His brief is that the longhairs liberated computers from I.B.M. and the military industrial complex and profoundly shaped the technology that is ubiquitous today. Formerly sequestered behind forbidding glass walls, computers went on to become accessible, usable and friendly. The industry had its consciousness raised – became a vehicle of togetherness.

Grant, at least, that computers became cool. During my adolescence, computers were evil. You remember HAL – the electronic demon of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Computers made people powerless. They represented war, capitalism and grownups. Then (I think I was out for coffee) kids took over. So now computers are about freedom. As I explained to my daughter the other night, “Turn the darn thing off.” Read a book, for Pete’s sake.

According to Mr. Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times and the author of other books on computers, the counterculture made it happen. He demonstrates that a good many of the electronics freaks who were working on inventing the future in the 60′s and early 70′s were, simultaneously, soaked in drugs, antiwar politics and weird ideas.

At the heart of his story is Doug Engelbart, a Navy veteran trained in radar during World War II who became obsessed with the idea that computers could augment human intelligence. Mr. Engelbart set up a research group at Stanford that, despite its Pentagon funding, became an outpost for young, creative and sometimes radicalized engineers.

In the 1960′s, computers were machines for math – for “computing.” Mr. Engelbart saw much more. His team invented or envisioned “every significant aspect of today’s computing world” – point-and-click screen control, text editing, e-mail and networking. Mr. Kesey, the writer, was shown how Mr. Engelbart’s computers worked and declared them to be “the next thing after acid.” Even Mr. Engelbart, a white-shirted pied piper, experimented with LSD, encounter groups, Chairman Mao and est. It’s a wonder he got anything done.

Actually, he didn’t. In 1968, he demonstrated computer interactivity at a conference that wowed everyone and that the author, appropriately, dubs the “computing world’s Woodstock.” And then – nothing. Too dreamy to part with his technology until perfected, Mr. Engelbart never got around to developing commercial applications. His staff gradually defected to Xerox, which was actually interested in selling products. Xerox ultimately blew its commercial opportunity, but its technology would be widely cloned.

Occasionally, the tale splinters like an acid trip that goes on too long, with side trips and fervent hyperboles that, in a strange way, do put one in mind of the 60′s. Engineers show up at Stanford, protest the war and drop out to join communes. One of them will “alter the world’s politics”- by which Mr. Markoff means the engineering student staged a fast against the R.O.T.C.

Stewart Brand, one of the most interesting figures in the book, shepherds Mr. Kesey through an acid trip, an event to which Mr. Kesey invited guitarist Jerry Garcia and his band – giving rise to the Grateful Dead. Then, Mr. Brand turns up as the cameraman at Mr. Engelbart’s computing Woodstock.

This is the kind of psychedelics-to-circuits connection that Mr. Markoff makes much of – sometimes too much. Anyway, Mr. Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a very hip compendium of random information that was, as I recall, perfectly useless. But Mr. Brand had a singular insight with regard to information – “it wants to be free.”

When Whole Earth got to be a drag, Mr. Brand staged a demise party, at which he stunned guests by giving away $20,000, his original investment. There was a debate over how to spend it. Came the sage investment advice, “Give it back to the Indians.” It was decided that Fred Moore, an ardent pacifist of anti-R.O.T.C. fame, would safeguard the funds, which meant putting them in a tin can and burying them. Did this have anything to do with computers? Actually, it did.

Money made Mr. Moore unhappy. Computers excited him, as did a sense of community. In 1975, he founded an enthusiasts’ society, the Homebrew Computer Club. Hundreds of hobbyists came to the first meeting, including Stephen Wozniak, who went on to co-found Apple Computer. The idea was that everyone would share information. Mr. Moore believed that his club “should have nothing to do with making money.”

But it did. Twenty-three entrepreneurial seedlings, including Apple, would trace their roots to the club. Mr. Markoff writes, “The deep irony is that Fred Moore lit the spark . . . toward the creation of powerful information tools.” This is hyperbole. Lit a spark would be fair.

The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800, had been developed – in New Mexico, 1,000 miles away – before Homebrew ever assembled. But the attendants did, excitedly, pass around a copy of software written for the Altair, which had been developed by the infant Micro-Soft, as it was then known. Bill Gates, its 20-year-old tycoon-to-be, sarcastically objected to the pirating of his product. “Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share.” Needless to say, Mr. Moore’s view of sharing was not endorsed by Mr. Gates. At this point, Marx and the history of the software industry diverged.

IN Mr. Markoff’s view, the PC era, which placed each user in charge of an isolated box, was a long detour from the higher aim of information sharing conceived by Mr. Engelbart. This purpose was vindicated by the Internet. The tension still persists between profit-seeking publishers and, ahem, idealists who would love to share what belongs to others – music rights, for instance. According to the author, this is today “the bitterest conflict facing the world’s economy.”

Such overwrought claims aside, at the core of “Dormouse” lies a valid and original historical point. Computer technology did turn out to be creative, spirited and even freeing. Most of this was a result of the fabulous advances in the power of the microchip. But perhaps, also, in the tactile clicking of the mouse, you can hear the faint strumming of a guitar.

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Darko Zeljkovic for The New York Times

Two Afghan workers scraped opium paste from a field of poppies near Kandahar. The U.S.-backed poppy-eradication program has had little effect.

May 22, 2005
U.S. Memo Faults Afghan Leader on Heroin Fight
By DAVID S. CLOUD and CARLOTTA GALL

WASHINGTON, May 21 – United States officials warned this month in an internal memo that an American-financed poppy eradication program aimed at curtailing Afghanistan’s huge heroin trade had been ineffective, in part because President Hamid Karzai “has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.”

A cable sent on May 13 from the United States Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said that provincial officials and village elders had impeded destruction of significant poppy acreage and that top Afghan officials, including Mr. Karzai, had done little to overcome that resistance.

“Although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar,” said the cable, which was drafted by embassy personnel involved in the anti-drug efforts, two American officials said.

A copy of the three-page cable, which was addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was shown to The New York Times by an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication.

The cable also faulted Britain, which has the top responsibility for counternarcotics assistance in Afghanistan, for being “substantially responsible” for the failure to eradicate more acreage. British personnel choose where the eradication teams work, but the cable said that those areas were often not the main growing areas and that the British had been unwilling to revise targets.

The criticism of Mr. Karzai reflected mounting frustration among some American officials that plans to uproot large swaths of Afghanistan’s poppy crop have produced little success. These officials said they worried that heroin trafficking could threaten the American-led reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and worsen corruption in the country’s fledgling central government.

In Washington, State Department officials defended Mr. Karzai, who is scheduled to visit next week, saying the effort had been hampered by bad weather and logistical problems as well as by political resistance.

“President Karzai is a strong partner and we have confidence in him,” said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher. “We are succeeding in our overall effort” to address the drug problem.

American and Afghan officials decided late last year that a more aggressive anti-poppy effort was too risky. State Department officials had proposed aerial spraying of poppy-growing areas, but the plan was opposed by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and American military officials in Afghanistan who agreed, though effective at killing poppies, spraying fields by aircraft could lead to protests and unrest.

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office defended the choice of targets. “We don’t believe we are picking the wrong targets, but we have a long struggle to go,” she said. “We work very closely with the U.S. and other partners.”

The spokeswoman said that eradication only worked if there were alternatives in place for the poppy growers, and that is where Britain is placing most of its emphasis.

A major reason Britain was put in charge of counternarcotics efforts is that much of the heroin produced from Afghan poppies ends up in European countries – roughly 50 tons a year, compared to the 20 tons estimated to go to the United States.

Mr. Boucher said his department was working to resolve the disagreements over the British targets.

Since beginning work last month, the country’s Central Poppy Eradication Force, an American-trained group, has destroyed less than 250 acres, according to the two American officials. Its original goal was to eradicate 37,000 acres, but that target has recently been reduced to 17,000 acres. With the poppy harvest already under way, the actual eradication levels will probably be far lower, the American officials said.

The department’s annual drug-trafficking report, released in March, warned that Afghanistan was “on the verge of becoming a narcotics state.”

American officials have said publicly that Mr. Karzai recognized the severity of the poppy cultivation problem and was determined to combat it, albeit gradually, to avoid inciting unrest among Afghans whose incomes are dependent on growing poppies for the drug trade. Congress recently passed a supplemental spending bill that included $260 million for the State Department’s anti-drug effort in Afghanistan this year.

A senior State Department official said that Mr. Karzai had wanted the eradication team to begin work before the poppy harvest season began in March, when he felt there was a better chance of persuading farmers to give up that lucrative crop. But because of bad weather and other delays the team did not begin work until early April.

The American officials involved said they also believed that Mr. Karzai might not want to challenge local Afghan authorities and thus incite opposition and even violence ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for next fall.

The eradication effort got under way last month in the southern province of Kandahar and in neighboring Helmand and has now shifted to the Balkh Province in the north.

In Kandahar Province this week, farmers were scraping the last resin from poppy plants, in plain view of the main road, just 10 minutes outside the provincial capital, once a stronghold of the Taliban.

“Karzai’s order will only be acceptable when he sends money to the farmers and helps them,” said a poppy farmer, Jan Agha. After investing in water, fertilizer and labor, farmers would resist eradication, he said, adding, “In the villages people would fight.”

A State Department official said that the United States remained optimistic that, through a combination of eradication and reduced plantings, it could achieve a 70,000-acre reduction in poppy planting from last year’s record crop, which was estimated at more than 500,000 acres.

Because of the faltering eradication effort, much of the acreage reduction the Americans hope for is likely to be from farmers deciding not to plant, the officials conceded. And even if that goal is reached, the crop may still be the second largest ever, a senior American official said.

A Karzai spokesman, Jawed Ludin, said that foreign donors had failed to follow through on promises to help farmers shift to other crops and find other sources of income.

Mr. Karzai called for a “jihad” against drugs after his election last November, Mr. Ludin pointed out. But he also noted that Mr. Karzai would risk losing his moral authority if promised assistance to the poppy farmers was not forthcoming.

“It is actually the international community that is showing a lack of seriousness, by failing to show that there is an alternative for farmers,” he said.

On their first day of operations in early April, in the Maiwand district of Kandahar Province, the eradication force encountered armed farmers blocking the fields. Gunfire broke out, resulting in the death of at least one Afghan protester and the wounding of several others.

The American officials said they suspected the protesters had been organized by traffickers and local officials with a stake in the drug trade.

Over the next eight days, according to the embassy cable, American and British officials in Kabul sought help from the Afghan minister responsible for the anti-drug effort, Habibullah Qaderi, to end the confrontation in Maiwand and a similar standoff in nearby Panjwayi. But he was unable to persuade the Kandahar authorities to help, the embassy cable said. Mr. Qaderi could not be reached for comment.

The embassy cable praised Muhammad Daoud, the deputy minister of the interior for the anti-drug effort, for trying to win access for the eradication teams, but it said he had “no support whatsoever from key members” of the government, “namely President Karzai.”

When the eradication unit did begin work, it was permitted to destroy only limited amounts of poppies in fields designated by local officials, the cable said, which were widely scattered. On most days, only 40 to 100 workers showed up to help, not the 300 to 400 promised by the local leaders, the cable said. This month, the teams are working in the northern province of Balkh, officials said.

Afghan Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 21 (Agence France-Presse) – One American soldier was killed and three others were wounded in a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, a military spokeswoman, Lt. Cindy Moore, said.

The casualties occurred during a patrol in the Shinkay district of Zabul Province, she said.

David S. Cloud reported from Washington for this article and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Kandahar.

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