The Great Flip-Flop Flap
Why we scorn the lowly thong.
By Amanda Fortini
Posted Friday, July 22, 2005, at 2:52 PM PT

The last time a thong was glimpsed at the White House, it was clinging to the backside of Monica Lewinsky. But recently thongs of a different sort—the shoes more popularly known as flip-flops—appeared at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In a photograph of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team taken with President Bush, four sets of flip-flops are plainly on display. The president, a lacrosse stick in each hand, appears characteristically unfazed. The girls smile tranquilly, unaware that their exposed toes are a scandal in the making.

Upon seeing the photo on the team’s Web site, midfielder Kate Darmody’s dismayed older brother shot off an e-mail: “YOU WORE FLIP-FLOPS TO THE WHITE HOUSE???!!!” The Chicago Tribune ran an article fretting about whether flip-flops were appropriate for formal occasions, quoting a team mother: “As somebody who is 52 years old it mortified me. I don’t go out of the house without pantyhose on.” The young women were forced to defend their faux pas. “I tried to think of something that would go well with my outfit and at the same time not be that uncomfortable,” the 22-year-old Darmody said. “Nobody was wearing old beach flip-flops,” noted her teammate, 20-year-old Aly Josephs, who had opted for a bejeweled brown pair. While the controversy obviously reveals a generation gap when it comes to views on casual dressing, it also raises the question: Why do we scorn the flip-flop?

It is often assumed that the flip-flop provokes us because it reveals too much flesh: toe cleavage, phallic protrusions—the foot’s private parts. In truth, however, we aren’t nearly so prudish. Mules and open-toed shoes, for example, both expose plenty of skin and fissures and are generally inoffensive. In the lacrosse team photo, the other front-row athletes wear strappy sandals that are at least as minimalist as their teammates’ flip-flops. About these shoes there has not been a critical word.

If it’s not the foot revealed by the flop-flop that bothers us, then it must be the flip-flop itself. Partly, I think, it’s that the flip-flop seems altogether lazy—not only on the part of the wearer, who can’t be bothered with buckles or laces, but on the part of the shoe. The flip-flop, essentially a flat piece of rubber or leather held on the foot by a thin strip (known to designers as a “toe plug”) that fits between the first and second toes, seems too simple, crudely put together, lacking in underlying design. We’d like our shoes to be the product of more ambition. Our contempt for the flip-flop might also arise from the “toe plug,” that undignified strip content to slum around precincts other sandals wouldn’t be caught dead in. The trouble may not be that the flip-flop reveals the toes, but that it prefers the dark, dirty places between them.

Mostly, though, our problem with flip-flops is one of pedigree. While the style has been around for centuries—Cleopatra likely slipped her hennaed feet into some version of flip-flops—in the United States, the shoe’s origins are shady. They were first favored by fringe groups: surfers and habitual beach-goers. (Mules and stilettos, by contrast, were originally worn by Hollywood starlets.) Most fashion historians agree that flip-flops first appeared in this country sometime around World War II, as rubber imitations of the wooden thongs, called zori, that had long been worn in Japan. Elizabeth Semmelhack, a curator for Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, has stated that returning soldiers brought flip-flops back as souvenirs, while other scholars have argued that the rubber thongs were created during the war for use in submarines. Whatever the case, the flimsy sandals, dubbed “go-aheads” because it was nearly impossible to walk backward while wearing them, first caught on in California and Hawaii after the war, and then spread to beach communities across the country.

These were the cheap, poorly constructed flip-flops sold in large bins at the local grocery or discount store, made of shoddy rubber that could be smelled all the way down the aisle. These were the ever-breaking shoes Jimmy Buffet sang about in “Margaritaville”—”I blew out my flip-flop/ Stepped on a pop-top”—and for years, they remained the official footwear of the beach bum. Two forces brought them into the mainstream: The dot-com boom of the early ’90s created “casual Fridays” and gave the slob-with-a-lot-of-leisure-time look a certain cachet; and the fashion world, ever fond of the ironic gesture, adopted the lowbrow shoes as a wry counterpoint to expensive clothing. By early 2003, flip-flops had completed their journey from subculture accessory to cultural staple. Designers like Helmut Lang, Burberry, and Manolo Blahnik offered various interpretations, and fashion writers crowed about the “Year of the Upmarket Flip-Flop.” With women and men flip-flopping down filthy streets all over America, the trend shows no signs of abating.

In fact, it appears that the flip-flop’s status is changing, perhaps because the young have no memory of its humble beginnings. Teenagers now wear flip-flops to prom under long sequined gowns. Celebrities prefer them to stilettos for walks down the red carpet. Fara Abramson, the self-proclaimed “Flip-Flop Guru” and co-owner of www.flipfloptrunkshow.com, says that many women get married in white flip-flops, as Sarah Michelle Gellar did. And perhaps the president didn’t notice the girls’ shoes—or lack of them—because his own daughter Jenna is an enthusiast; she wore a black pair with pink Capri pants to her court appearance in 2001. If this isn’t enough to convince you that flip-flops are fast becoming part of our cultural uniform, consider that Old Navy, the McDonald’s of clothiers, declared April 3, 2005, the “First Official Day of Flip-Flops,” announcing sales of “more than 45 million pairs.” (There are now so many flip-flops in the world that discarded rubber thongs wash up by the thousands on the shores of Australia’s Cocos and Keeling Islands.)

Why have flip-flops caught on? Perhaps it’s because they provide a certain visceral satisfaction. There’s the catchy, onomatopoeic name. And the metronomic noise they make when you walk—pleasing, I suspect, because it confirms your existence with every step. But for most, flip-flops are about ease and comfort; they’re easy to slip on and more comfortable to wear than shoes with some structure. And this is precisely why the recent instance of flip-floppery met with such objection, even as the shoes have become mainstream: You’re not supposed to be at ease when you’re meeting the president.

Amanda Fortini is a Slate contributor.

Police are appealing for help from witnesses of the failed attacks

Experts hail ‘forensic goldmine’
As the search for evidence continues after Thursday’s London blasts, experts feel the unexploded devices will provide a wealth of clues.
Similarities between the latest attacks and those of 7 July suggest there might be a connection.

Detailed chemical analyses are expected to reveal why the bombs did not go off.

Investigators also hope to get help from a number of passengers who witnessed the failed attacks and described the suspects to the media.

Early indications suggest Thursday’s incidents and those of a fortnight ago may have been masterminded by the same group.

Clues pointing in this direction include the type of rucksacks used to carry the bombs around, the chosen targets – three Tube trains and one bus at compass points on the travel network – and the type of explosive itself, said the BBC’s Mark Urban.

‘Signature’

The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, said the new attacks were meant to cause mass casualties.

But why did all the devices fail to detonate?

Speaking on BBC Two’s Newsnight programme, Mike Granatt – a government counter-terrorism adviser – said the science of bomb making was not precise.

“People who are doing things in a hurry and under tension get things wrong – and thank God they appear to have got things wrong,” he said.


They can…trace back the materials that were used to make the bomb and indeed the signature of the bomb maker
Mike Granatt

He added that the clues left behind by the bombers, including fingerprints on the rucksacks, might provide investigators with a “forensic goldmine”.
“Unlike the fingertip forensic search we saw in Tavistock Square which went on for days, they (the police) have got something complete, they’ve got the fingerprints on there possibly,” he said.

“They’ve got other material on there, they can take a look at it, compare it and try and trace back the materials that were used to make the bomb and indeed the signature of the bomb maker.”

‘Forensic bingo’

Former government intelligence analyst Crispin Black said the chance to examine the bombs themselves was “forensic bingo”, saying: “This is as good as it gets.”

In addition, Dame Pauline Neville Jones – who formerly chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee – believes the forensic trail would “lead back to real knowledge”.

But she warned that tracking down the terrorists might take a long time.

“You build up an intelligence picture of something which is as complex and as potentially widespread as the sort of threat that we face only slowly and only very carefully,” she told Newsnight.

“I think the resources will be thrown to this task in a manner which means that we won’t allow ourselves years to do it.”

Thousands of police officers are involved in the hunt.

Roy Ramm, former Commander of Specialist Operations for the Met police, said police had an amazing opportunity to find the bombers.

“These devices haven’t detonated so the evidence remains intact,” he said.

“They’ll want to take these bombs apart in most minute details. They’ll be looking at everything from sticky tape that may have held a detonator to the bomb to see if there’s fingerprints on the back of that.

“They’ll be looking for fragments of DNA – we know that people have been convicted of robbery on one hair or fragment of dandruff – so these are very powerful investigative tools.”

‘Loud pop’

Police will be hoping that numerous apparent sightings of the suspects will also help boost the investigation.

Each of the failed bombings were witnessed by passengers.

Several of them described the attackers as “scared” or “surprised” as their bombs failed to cause a proper explosion.

Kate Reid, who was involved in the Oval accident, said she was on the train when she heard a “pop” as if a big balloon had burst before seeing a young-looking, dark-skinned man with a bag at his feet who looked “really scared”.

Witnesses also described how the suspects were chased by other passengers as they made their way to the exits.

One passenger told BBC News that he put his foot out to try to trip one of them up but failed.

Another, Hugo Palit, who was walking into Warren Street Tube station, said he saw “a guy coming out and people chasing him”.

He described him as “a bit confused, looking right and left”.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4705939.stm

Susan Stava for The New York Times

Modern-day emblem of chic bargain shoppers.

Susan Stava for The New York Times

Nathan Griffin, 9, perched outside the Target store in Mount Kisco, N.Y., where shoppers can find children’s sneakers for $3.74 and a venti Frappuccino for $4.90

July 21, 2005
Consumer Philosophy by Tar-zhay
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

WHEN Siddhartha Gautama, the young man who later became known as Buddha, attained enlightenment, he saw the path to fulfillment: keep earthly belongings to a minimum. Stuff – material possessions, goodies, thingamajigs – was spiritual dead weight.

So I wonder what Buddha would make of the Target store in Mount Kisco, N.Y., which opened in the spring.

On a recent visit, I counted no fewer than 10 Buddha items for sale. In the home furnishings section, a bust of Buddha was $17.99. I also found a framed sketch of Buddha; a Buddha T-shirt; a Buddha candleholder; a Buddha that looked as if it might have been a bar of soap; and a fake stone relief in a shadowbox frame in which Buddha, with a goofy smile on his face, looked just like Homer Simpson. D’om!

Buddha, of course, is an appropriate symbol for Target’s path to consumer enlightenment. I doubt you will find a Buddha anything at Wal-Mart, Kmart or Sears. But a crucial part of Target’s success is that it makes an effort to attract not just consumers who, by financial necessity, shop at discount superstores, but also those members of the middle- and upper-income brackets who view discount shopping as a socioeconomic field trip.

These are the people who pronounce the name of the store Tar-ZHAY, and one of their mascots is the very representation of faddish faux-bohemian kitsch, Mr. Buddha himself.

To get these upscale shoppers into the store to acquire earthly goods, Target has to convince them there is something inside worth acquiring and worthy of placement in their homes as discount objet: a Michael Graves teapot, for example, or a cashmere sweater by Isaac Mizrahi (coming to Target stores this fall).

The chain’s advertising and marketing campaigns are always of the moment. Sometimes it sponsors temporary boutiques in fashionable locations. One year it opened a summer store in the Hamptons; another time it docked a “holiday boat” at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. The company has also developed relationships with of-the-moment artists, sponsoring an installation at Rockefeller Center by the artist Takashi Murakami, who has collaborated with Louis Vuitton.

Target is the third largest discount retailer in the United States, after Wal-Mart and Costco, and its “class to mass” strategy has prompted changes at other discounters. Kmart has arrangements with the WB and E! Entertainment Television, in which network stars wear Kmart clothes. In 2002, Wal-Mart introduced George, an inexpensive designer clothing line it acquired in 1999. But the line has, thus far, failed to transform Wal-Mart’s image as the dowdy cousin of the discount bunch.

Sure, Target’s image is more sophisticated than Wal-Mart’s. But two things seriously bug me about the chain.

First, the affiliation with designers like Mr. Graves and Mr. Mizrahi strikes me as a bit of lip service. They certainly add a hip note to the store’s advertising campaigns, but at the Mount Kisco store, one of 1,351 nationwide, there was not much Graves merchandise on display. I couldn’t find a teapot, but I did find an ergonomic paper shredder in the Graves half-aisle beneath a picture of a woman who looked like the actress Felicity Huffman and the words “I like to coordinate my keyboard with my toaster.”

These are dark days for the middle classes if such ambitious, obsessive coordinating is actually taking place.

The Mizrahi clothes are well intentioned, but a cardigan sweater for $22.99 in an acrylic-nylon blend is shapeless and itchy. I did find an attractive faux-crocodile Mizrahi clutch purse for $16.99, but later the same day I found it on the Target Web site for $11.89. Why bother buying it in the store?

A spokeswoman for Target said that prices are not always consistent. She could not specify why there seemed to be a lack of Michael Graves merchandise but suggested that the store could have been transitioning between products.

The second thing that bothers me is the disconnect when mixing highbrow and lowbrow culture. At the front of the Mount Kisco store is a Starbucks, where shoppers can pause for a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino for $4.90 (for the venti), without tax. Three aisles into the store they can buy a pair of children’s sneakers for $3.74. In what other country on the planet would you find a store that sells a cup of coffee for more than a pair of children’s shoes?

This is the problem of the class-and-mass approach: There will always be rich people, and there will always be poor people, and they can happily mingle in economic anonymity in the aisles of Target. But at the end of the day you’ll be able to tell one from the other by who is sitting at the Starbucks counter drinking a $5 latte.

There is, however, a lot to like about Target. Many shoppers frequent stores whose corporate policies they admire, and though Target has not entirely avoided the kind of labor squabbles that have dogged Wal-Mart in recent years, it is better known for its contributions to civic and cultural causes. And it does keep bringing in new ideas and designs. At Mount Kisco, I found California Closets, Liz Lange maternity clothes, Eddie Bauer travel gear and a great line of casual clothing by Mossimo. I liked some of the Mizrahi home pieces – a table lamp in the shape of a ship’s light for $34.99, for instance.

In October, Target plans to introduce a “vintage modern” home furniture collection in collaboration with Aero Studios. Its in-store pharmacies now offer a design for prescription bottles that is meant to make taking drugs safer by identifying the right pills to take. And you have to admire a store that prompted Wal-Mart to start stocking 400-thread-count cotton sheets.

I piled my shopping cart high with earthly possessions. The dressing rooms were clean and bright, although service-free. (The bathroom was by far the cleanest one I have visited in any store, anywhere.)

I skipped the Buddha tea lights but burdened myself with many other items: a large mirror to hang on a guest bedroom wall and six other smaller ones for around the house; a leather lamp; a silk lampshade; two pairs of hiking shorts, a pair of Mossimo camouflage pants and three pairs of underwear for my stepson; seven pairs of underwear and a pair of Hello Kitty flip-flops for my stepdaughter; Mossimo blue jeans for me; 20 sturdy wooden hangers; a box of Ritz Bitz cheese crackers, half of which I ate in the parking lot and the rest of which I threw into the garbage before I could eat any more; a copy of People magazine; a bottle of water.

The bill was $234.42.

Target

195A North Bedford Road, Mount Kisco, N.Y.; (914) 602-0004

ATMOSPHERE Bright lights and the sound of screaming infants make for a less than serene experience. Take Excedrin.

SERVICE Hello. It’s a discount superstore.

KEY ITEMS Home furnishings in the Global section, including imported throws from Turkey and glassware from Sweden.

PRICES Inexpensive.

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

July 21, 2005
Trouble Spots Got You Down? Lighten Up
By SALLY WADYKA

IN a country that takes pride in its multiethnicity, a strange-sounding beauty trend is picking up steam. Suddenly, a torrent of new face creams and gels are promising “whiteness” or “lightness.”

Clinique makes Active White, Dior has DiorSnow and beginning in September, Shiseido’s White Lucent line will be in stores. In the past year and a half, at least 30 such products have come on the market, according to Mintel’s Global New Products Database, which tracks the cosmetics industry. Sephora stores have seen a 40 percent increase in sales of skin whitening and lightening products since the middle of last year, said Allison Slater, vice president of retail marketing for the beauty store chain.

Skin lightening may conjure images of geishas or Kabuki theater. In fact, the concept comes from Japan, where whiteners have long been top sellers. “Historically, Asian women have always been obsessed with wanting lily-white skin, which is associated with being of a higher class, as opposed to those who had to work in the field,” said Dr. Min-Wei Christine Lee, a dermatologist and the director of East Bay Laser and Skin Care Center in Walnut Creek, Calif.

But the new whitening products for skin, unlike those for teeth, are not designed to actually lighten. They are meant to merely even out skin color, mainly by diminishing darker spots and blotches, like freckles, age spots and melasma (the dusky mask that sometimes shows up on a woman’s forehead and cheeks during pregnancy or when she takes birth control pills). Some of the products also aim to disguise uneven coloring by making skin more luminous.

“The word ‘white’ is a bit of a misnomer,” said Jean Bellard, who is in charge of training beauty consultants for Shiseido.

For years, dermatologists have erased, or at least dimmed, dark spots on the skin by using prescription lightening creams, chemical peels or laser resurfacing. Such treatments still offer more dramatic results than the new over-the-counter whiteners do.

Dark spots and patches on the skin occur when hormones or long-term sun exposure affect cells called melanocytes, the ones that make pigment. “Once a melanocyte is damaged, it no longer produces an even amount of pigmentation,” said Elaine Linker, co-founder of Doctor’s Dermatologic Formula, which makes a lightening product called Fade Gel 4.

Such melanocytes tend to produce too much color, a condition that doctors refer to as hyperpigmentation. That translates into dark spots and patches on the skin.

Because women with relatively dark skin have more pigment, they see hyperpigmentation more often than lighter-skinned women do. “If I get a zit and pick at it, I end up with a mark that’s darker than the rest of my face,” said Terrie Clarke, a magazine editor in New York who is African-American. She said the new over-the-counter lotions had helped even out her skin tone.

How do the whiteners work? Some contain hydroquinone, the same active ingredient used in prescription-strength spot-removing creams, like Lustra, Tri-Luma and EpiQuin Micro. Hydroquinone works inside the melanocytes by suppressing tyrosinase, an enzyme that is needed for the creation of melanin. Over-the-counter products like DDF’s Fade Gel 4 and Philosophy’s Pigment of Your Imagination contain 2 percent hydroquinone solutions, half the concentration found in prescription brands.

Hydroquinone is known to irritate some skin and to make all skin more sensitive to sunlight, however. Consumers’ concerns over those side effects and over reports that the chemical may be connected to more serious health problems in laboratory animals have led many cosmetics companies to avoid using it in their whitening products.

Instead they use natural substances like licorice extract, azelaic acid, mulberry and bearberry extract, and new compounds that they say suppress melanin production without side effects. Shiseido White Lucent uses a proprietary ingredient called Spot Deacti-Complex, for example, while Dior’s latest products use an antisense oligonucleotide, a melanin-suppressing plant derivative.

But some doctors question whether those ingredients work as well as hydroquinone does. “Hydroquinone is still considered to be the gold standard of treatment for hyperpigmentation,” said Dr. Susan C. Taylor, a dermatologist in Philadelphia and the author of “Brown Skin: Dr. Susan Taylor’s Prescription for Flawless Skin, Hair and Nails.”

Secondary ingredients in whitening products include glycolic acid, retinol, lactic acids and fruit acids, which exfoliate the skin.

By making the skin sensitive to the sun, hydroquinone can render it more vulnerable to the very problems the chemicals are meant to get rid of. Doctors recommend vigilant use of sunscreen along with hydroquinone, but they also advise putting off the use of hydroquinone products until summer is over. Even then, the products should be used for only 30 to 60 days, no more than three times a year, said Ms. Linker of DDF. Products without hydroquinone are considered safe for long-term use.

“Women must be aware that any product, if used improperly, can irritate the skin and ultimately make the condition they are trying to treat worse,” Dr. Taylor said. She recommends stopping use of lightening cream if there is itching, redness or inflammation.

Dark-skinned women often seek stronger whitening solutions and may be tempted to overuse them, said Dr. Rebat M. Halder, a dermatologist and the director of the Ethnic Skin Research Institute at Howard University in Washington.

“In Africa there are lotions available with up to 20 percent hydroquinone that are causing devastating results,” Dr. Halder said. And these products sometimes find their way to the United States. “A rare side effect of hydroquinone is a condition called exogenous ochronosis, which is a permanent darkening of the skin. The higher the concentration, the greater the risk.”

Some laboratory studies have found evidence linking hydroquinone to cancer, liver problems and tumor production in rats and mice. “Hydroquinone moves very fast through the skin and into the blood, and it has been shown to cause damage to DNA,” said Tim Kropp, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, an organization that analyzes the risks of chemicals used in consumer products.

But Dr. Taylor said that studies in humans had shown that hydroquinone is safe. “As physicians,” she said, “we realize that there is often not a direct link between lab and animal studies and results in humans.”

Women who are pregnant or taking hormone supplements (birth control pills, for example, or hormone-replacement therapies) may find whitening creams futile.

“None of these things work if you’re on hormones,” Dr. Lee said. “The hormones may keep making the pigmentation worse and worse, so you risk more side effects by using the products for too long.”

Many doctors say the over-the-counter products are a poor substitute for medical treatments, especially for melasma, one of the most stubborn pigment problems.

Lasers, which can be used to mildly resurface the face or other areas with dark spots, have traditionally provided good results only for people with light skin. On darker skin, they can leave lines of demarcation around the areas treated. But the new Fraxel laser, which sends out a cluster of tiny beams rather than one solid beam of light, appears to work on all colors.

No matter which laser is used, doctors say it is important for women to find doctors who have worked on other patients with their skin color.

Sometimes even professional-strength lightening treatments are ineffective.

“I have fair skin and very stubborn melasma that I got from using Depo-Provera” birth control, said Caroline Di Giulio, 37, an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles. She tried laser treatments, but within a month the brown patches returned in exactly the same formation. Peels worked a little, as did Retin-A, which helps skin exfoliate. But now Ms. Di Giulio is pregnant, and her melasma is back with a vengeance.

“I tried everything and spent so much money,” she said. “After my pregnancy I plan to go back on Retin-A and just really stay out of the sun.”

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

Viktor Koen

July 21, 2005
My Voice Has Got to Go
By PETER JARET

WHEN the telecom bubble burst a few years back and David LaBerge, 45, found himself looking for work as an independent marketing consultant, he decided it was time to spiff up his act. New clothes. New haircut.

New voice.

“I was just not happy with the way I presented myself,” said Mr. LaBerge, who works in San Jose, Calif. “I’d hear myself on tapes of meetings or on my office answering machine and I had this monotonous delivery. The tone didn’t go up or down. Even when I was very enthusiastic I sounded dull. I would end statements with a rising pitch, which made it sound like a question, or like even I wasn’t convinced by what I was saying.”

The problem spilled over into his personal life. “You go to a party, and there’s always someone who can tell a story in this really engaging way. I’d tell a story and it always seemed to fall flat, even though I think I know some pretty good stories.”

Sounding dull wasn’t Cynthia Sam’s problem. “My voice is kind of unique,” said Ms. Sam, a respiratory therapist in New York, whose high-pitched little-girl’s voice sounds like a cartoon character’s. “When you talk like this, it’s sometimes hard to be taken seriously. People can be very cruel.”

Emily Schreiber, 25, a second-grade teacher in Manhattan who has to raise her voice above a roomful of 7-year-olds, suffered repeated bouts of laryngitis. “I was perfectly healthy but I couldn’t speak above a whisper,” Ms. Schreiber said.

A beautiful and commanding voice has always been important to actors and singers. But now many others want one. And why not? If gorgeous hair, sculptured torsos, flawless skin and sparkling white teeth are worthy of pursuit, why shouldn’t a richer, more sonorous voice be one more item on the checklist of perfection?

About a third of the members of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, an organization of professionals who originally focused on actors, now work with the public at large, said the association’s president, Lisa Wilson, a professor of theater at the University of Tulsa.

Speech pathologists, trained to treat speaking disorders, are also getting some of the business. “Fifteen years ago I rarely had people come to me because they simply didn’t like the sound of their voice,” said Thomas Murry, a speech pathologist at the Voice and Swallowing Center of Columbia University. His clients were people with medical conditions like polyps on their vocal cords. “Now about a third of the people simply want to sound better,” he said.

Dr. Murry estimated that of the 90,000 members of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, as many as 1,000 devote their practices to what he calls “voice styling,” helping people improve the sound of otherwise healthy voices.

With so much of our lives these days conducted on the phone, vocal quality is gaining attention as a factor in making friends and influencing people. “More and more of my work is done in conference calls,” said Grace Vandecruze, 37, an investment banker in New York who has worked with Lucille S. Rubin, a veteran voice coach. “The depth of your knowledge and the impact of your voice – the two are equally important.”

Voice quality matters in face-to-face meetings, too. “Studies show that in hiring situations, two things play a big role in who gets hired: what someone looks like and the sound of their voice,” Dr. Murry said.

Sometimes people don’t know that their voice gets in their way. Susan Berkley, a voice coach in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and the author of “Speak to Influence,” told the story of a friend who met a woman on an Internet dating site. “Her photo was drop-dead gorgeous. They finally set a time to talk on the phone. He’s convinced she’s going to bear his children, right? So he calls and she answers.” Here she produced a high-pitched nasal “Hello” that called to mind Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator. “It was over in five seconds. He couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of his life with that voice.”

To evaluate voices, speech therapists listen and look. Hoarseness can be assessed with a strobovideolaryngoscopy, which creates a moving image of vibrating vocal cords. Roughness, breathiness, weakness and strain are judged more subjectively using a 0 to 4 rating system.

How much can voice quality be altered? A lot, judging by how easily Carol Fleming, a San Francisco voice coach, made her own voice shift as she impersonated her typical clients. “You get people who talk way at the back of their throats, like this,” she demonstrated in her office, producing a strained, raspy voice that speech therapists call glottal fry. “Or people whose voices are way up here in their sinuses,” she said, speaking with a harsh nasal twang. “Or way down here in their chests.”

Her voice seemed to change location as she spoke.

“What you want is to teach people to place the voice here, at the front of the mouth, with a lot of resonance,” Dr. Fleming said, speaking with riveting authority. “That way, you literally sound like you stand behind what you say.”

Many coaches say they work to eliminate specific problems, not an entire accent. “The letter R is a problem in many dialects, for instance, so we’ll work on that,” said Susan Miller, a coach in Washington.

Kate Rice, 35, decided to change her voice when she was hired as a spokeswoman for a California retail firm. “I’m from Wisconsin, where people speak with a nasal quality,” Ms. Rice said. “Words get shortened. Swimming becomes swimmin’. Fishing becomes fishin’. You don’t even realize you’re doing it.”

Age can take its toll on how people sound, as voices become weak or shaky. Exercises can strengthen the vocal muscles. Dr. Miller demonstrated one, putting her lips together and blowing, making a sound in her throat while her lips fluttered. She also made a sound like a siren and then repeated a tongue-twister – “red leather, blue leather, yellow leather, red leather, blue leather, yellow leather” – at top speed. She recommended both exercises for anyone preparing to give a talk.

The ancient Greek orator Demosthenes is said to have overcome stammering speech by trying to speak distinctly with pebbles in his mouth and by reciting verses when out of breath from running uphill. None of the voice coaches interviewed mentioned pebbles. But Ms. Miller did say she runs in place to get her lungs pumping before a speech.

“Having a voice coach is like having a trainer at the gym; you work on intonation, breathing patterns, physical exercises,” said Jonathan Clemmer, 47, whose friends in the theater steered him to Dr. Rubin, who trains actors as well as doctors, lawyers and businessmen and women. Mr. Clemmer recently moved to San Francisco, where his job as a medical research consultant involves giving talks to scientists. “I find I have more power in my voice now and better inflection,” he said.

The cost of coaching ranges from $100 to $225 a session. Some people learn all they need in just three sessions. Others may require 12 or more. A typical “voice makeover” costs about $1,000, Dr. Miller said.

Working with Dr. Fleming, Mr. LaBerge read short stories aloud to give his voice variety and practiced ending his statements with a falling rather than rising pitch. “Now I’m learning how to put a lot more animation in my voice,” he said.

In her five sessions with Dr. Murry, Ms. Schreiber, the teacher, learned to breathe more from her stomach than her chest and to relax her jaw, which puts less strain on vocal cords.

People with weak voices are often counseled to stand straighter and to take a breath before starting a sentence. Simply hearing a good recording of their voices helps some people adjust for better pitch and variety, Dr. Murry said.

When clients first come to her office, Dr. Fleming begins by making small talk while a tape recorder spins silently on her desk. “After 10 or 15 minutes, I play people’s voices back to them so they can hear how they really sound,” she said.

It is a moment that can make them wince, often because they are not used to hearing themselves as others do. “We hear our own voices as sound waves conducted through bone, not through the air,” Professor Wilson explained.

The discovery is not always unpleasant. “People will come to me because they don’t like their voice on an answering machine,” Dr. Fleming said. “Well, who does? The recording quality makes everyone sound tinny. When people hear their voice on a high-quality recording, they often think, Hey, that’s not so bad.”

Not everyone who goes to a voice trainer decides to change the way he or she speaks. With the help of Ms. Berkley, Ms. Sam learned that she could deepen her voice. “I found that I do have more range, and that I can use it when I want to,” she said. But she also discovered that there’s gold in her little-girl voice. Since taking a voice-over class, she’s done the talking for several toys in an animated film and is now auditioning for more roles.

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

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

A strict regimen of light weights will build endurance but not muscle.

July 21, 2005
Weight-Loss Theory Is Losing Some of Its Strength
By MARTICA HEANER

BARBARA WOODWORTH, 35, a social worker in Seattle, wanted to drop 40 pounds. Alisa Rivera, 39, a college adviser at the University of California, Los Angeles, also wanted to lose weight. She also wanted to build long, lean muscle. So the two women routinely began to lift weights. But like many of the other 36 million women nationwide who each year pick up dumbbells hoping to lose pounds or develop a sculptured body, both Ms. Woodworth and Ms. Rivera ended up disappointed because the strategy is not as simple – or as effective – as it sounds.

Personal trainers, fitness instructors, magazines and books have sold a double-barreled promise that any strength training builds muscle and that having more muscle dramatically speeds metabolism, increasing the calories a person burns while at rest. With all that extra calorie burning, the story goes, excess weight comes off effortlessly.

The story is wrong in two ways, researchers say. First, muscle is not such an amazing calorie burner. “Even if weight training increases muscle and metabolism, there is little evidence showing that it is enough to cause weight loss,” said Joseph Donnelly, the director of the Energy Balance Laboratory at the University of Kansas, who has extensively reviewed studies on the link between resistance training and weight loss.

And second, many who try weight training – especially women – fail to do what it actually takes to build more muscle. They lift too light a weight, or they neglect to progress to heavier weights as they grow stronger. And often, women who take up weight lifting also diet. In fact, it is nearly impossible to increase muscle while cutting calories.

Regular resistance training, done correctly, has many benefits. It can prevent some of the muscle loss that occurs with weight loss. It can also lower body fat levels and even help preserve bone mass. But the idea that it can magically increase calorie-burning is “a very big stretch,” said Edward Melanson, an assistant professor in the division of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Claims that resistance training can send metabolism skyrocketing are easy to find. A Google search using the terms “metabolism” and “weights” produces thousands of Web sites, many of which say that anyone can lose weight and build muscle through strength training, even doing routines that aren’t particularly strenuous.

Books like Kathy Smith’s “Lift Weights to Lose Weight” also perpetuate the myth that building muscle supercharges metabolism and quickly leads to weight loss. In “Smart Girls Do Dumbbells,” Judith Sherman-Wolin claims that resistance-training can “melt away those stubborn pounds you’ve been trying to lose all your life.” And Jorge Cruise’s best seller, “8 Minutes in the Morning,” advises readers to forget aerobics or grueling workouts because doing his two strength-building exercises a day “will help you firm up five pounds of lean muscle within the first few weeks, allowing your body to burn an extra 250 calories per day.” Ms. Woodworth of Seattle said, “Practically every fitness book and magazine I ever read said strength training boosts metabolism so you lose weight easier and faster.”

Before taking up weight lifting, she had already lost 15 pounds in about three months by cutting calories and walking and running for an hour three times a week. With 40 pounds still to shed, she turned to what she had heard was the magic bullet.

Her trainer advised her to lift four times a week, cut her cardiovascular exercise to less than 30 minutes but still keep dieting. After six weeks, she was frustrated to find she had gained two pounds. That added weight probably wasn’t muscle. Decreasing her high-calorie-burning walks and runs was the more likely culprit. Lifting weights burns few calories – “at least the way the average nonathlete does it and certainly the way most women tend to do it, using relatively low weights and few sets,” Dr. Donnelly said. The same time spent an aerobic workout could double the calorie burn.

Once Ms. Woodworth increased her time on cardio, she lost the added weight.

Proponents of the theory that weight lifting leads to weight loss argue that it is the long-term effect of gaining more muscle, which burns more calories at rest, that causes weight loss. Still, that has never been proven in studies.

Studies show that even women who do what it takes to get stronger develop only two to four pounds of muscle after six months of progressive lifting. Given that one pound of muscle burns between 7 to 13 calories a day (as determined by studies that measured oxygen and blood flow to tissues), that means the average boost in metabolism is only 14 to 52 calories a day, said Dympna Gallagher, the director of the body composition unit at the New York Obesity Research Center in Manhattan.

The effect of weight lifting “on metabolism is minor and certainly not the savior of dieters,” said William Kraemer, a professor of physiology and neurobiology at the University of Connecticut.

A recent yearlong study of 59 sedentary women at the University of Pittsburgh demonstrated what little difference weight training can make in weight loss. About a third of the women lifted weights three times a week, another third did yoga three times a week, and the last third did neither. All the women followed a daily diet of 1,200 to 1,500 calories for the entire year and walked five days a week. In the end, those who had lifted weights or practiced yoga lost as much weight and fat – but no more – than those who only dieted and walked.

Surprisingly, many of the women became no stronger. “We were looking at whether women would stick to the routine, and if so, would they resistance train intensely enough,” explained Kara Gallagher, the lead researcher. “It appears that many did not.”

When people lift light weights and fail to progressively increase the load, they only increase endurance, Dr. Kraemer said.

After turning “doughy,” Ms. Rivera of Los Angeles followed a few workouts using five-pound weights that she’d seen in Glamour and Shape magazines. “After three months the scale hadn’t budged,” she said. “I didn’t see much of a difference in muscle tone.”

Eventually she realized that light weights were not enough. “When I progressed from a five-pound dumbbell and began to lift heavier, my arms and butt got firmer within three weeks, although I still did not lose weight,” she said.

For those looking to build a more sculptured body, dieting may be counterproductive. “To create new muscle tissue you need to eat enough, not cut calories, to fuel the process,” said Karen Reznik Dolins, the director of nutrition at Altheus, a sports center in Rye, N.Y., and a nutrition adviser to the New York Knicks.

Genetics can also help determine the impact that weight lifting can have on muscle development and metabolism.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst looked at almost 600 men and women who did a strenuous, progressive resistance routine for three months, according to a study in this month’s Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Three percent were “high responders,” some of whom doubled their strength. One percent were “low responders,” who became only 1 percent stronger than they were when they started. The majority of men and women increased muscle size 15 to 25 percent; and most men improved their muscle strength 40 percent while women increased theirs 65 percent.

Shannan Catlett, a fashion sales executive in Manhattan, said lifting heavy weights helped tone her slimmer body. After she lost 50 pounds by using the elliptical machine and treadmill and by following a healthier diet, she improved her muscle definition with weights.

“I never lost weight from strength training, but my butt got smaller and I got stronger and firmer all over,” Ms. Catlett, 41, said. “I still have to make sure that I’m always fit in regular cardio to maintain my weight.”

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

Plame’s Identity Marked As Secret
Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame’s identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame’s CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson’s wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife’s identity was revealed to retaliate against him for accusing the Bush administration of “twisting” intelligence to justify the Iraq war. In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times and in an interview with The Washington Post, he cited a secret mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson’s wife’s CIA connection in telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip, according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were questioning White House officials during the early days of the investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, has testified that he learned Plame’s name from Novak a few days before telling another reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband’s mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove’s account. Rove has also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo was when “people in the special prosecutor’s office” showed it to him, said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

“He had not seen it or heard about it before that time,” Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa, including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others. Bartlett’s attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel. Fleischer could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson’s wife with Cooper. Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from conversations with reporters.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear that information about Wilson’s wife was sensitive and should not be shared. Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The Post.

The material in the memo about Wilson’s wife was based on notes taken by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA where Wilson’s intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR’s opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson’s wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA was considered “a footnote” in a background paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson’s trip to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries, already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to explain Wilson’s statements for Powell, according to sources familiar with the events. He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the sources said. Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to his office.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Cirque du Soleil
Canada’s insane clown posse.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005, at 3:57 PM PT

Cirque du Soleil is one of the great artistic follies of our age and one of its most baffling success stories. Four productions populate the Las Vegas Strip, while others are preparing to invade Perth, Australia; Osaka, Japan; and Ostend, Belgium. Cirque du Soleil has spawned a feature film, a reality TV series, and a theater-cum-spa in Montreal. Since decamping Quebec in 1987 with a show titled Le Cirque Réinventé (“we reinvent the circus”), it has all but banished P.T. Barnum’s carnival from the imagination. Five years ago, in a desperate bid to reclaim their birthright, Barnum’s heirs even produced a knock-off of the classier Canuck show—sans midway and avec fatuousness. It flopped. Meanwhile, Cirque founder Guy Laliberté—such an inspiring name!—exudes French-Canadian benevolence. He does not say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He says, “I dream of filling the planet with creativity.”

Such rhapsodies, however, do no justice to the terrifying experience of Cirque du Soleil. Touring stateside these days is a show called Varekai, which in the Romany language means “wherever.” Cirque’s Web site describes its setting as “an extraordinary world … populated by fantastical creatures.” The tickets, however, directed us to the extraordinary hamlet of East Rutherford, N.J., where most of the fantastical creatures seem to have ridden the bus in from Port Authority. I arrived a few minutes late and found the stage occupied by a small goat-man with forest leaves protruding from his trousers and his hair gelled into a three-point salute. “Pfffft!” he said, to much laughter. A few moments later, an angel dressed in white descended from the heavens. The goat-man regarded the angel with mock fury until the angel rose and began to perform trapeze stunts with the aid of a hammock. This seemed to satisfy the goat-man and he departed at stage right. Then there were some earthbound stunts from a troupe of flame-colored acrobats; children dressed in puffy suits as if they were about to train attack dogs, performing with bolas; then empty-eyed ogres dressed as samurai warriors and rhythmically stomping their feet. That brought the first act to a close.

Varekai was so profoundly jarring, so uncertain in its narrative intentions, that when the lights came up nobody in the audience could think to move. At least at the end of similarly exotic occasions—like a Megadeth concert or a White House press conference—the crowd knows when to get up. A small boy sitting a few feet to my right and using a voice reserved for pre-adolescent terror turned to his mother and shrieked, “What’s going on?” He spoke for all of us.

Why does Cirque du Soleil endure? It is often claimed that Guy Laliberté created a revolutionary new art form from scratch. This ignores not only a few hundred years of European performances but the recent history of the American circus, which has over the last few decades divided into two opposing camps. The first, exemplified by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, consists of the robust sideshow that rumbles into town trailing clowns, tumblers, a menagerie, and a thriving community of midway creeps. Spread across three rings, the performances are hectic and diffuse; the goal is for nonstop wonders. In response, outfits like San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus had by the mid-1970s begun to experiment with a more artistically minded show. They freed the animals, reduced three rings to one, and highlighted the athletic and comic skills of the troupe. Channeling the intimacy of street performers and the Italian commedia dell’arte, the Pickles and others created more modest spectacles—a “New American Circus”—that forswore spectacle in favor of an emotional connection with the audience.

Viewed from this perspective, Cirque du Soleil looks less like a reinvention than a refinement—a New New American Circus, wedged between spectacle and shoestring. Cirque’s founders like to boast of humble origins: The show sprang from the mind of Laliberté, then a penniless 24-year-old fire-eater who pestered the Quebec government for grants to support his troupe. Today, Cirque du Soleil has only one ring, and the violin remains the background instrument of choice. Yet “humble” is not the first word one would choose to describe Laliberté’s shows, which have a Barnum-like mandate to mesmerize. Varekai’s set features dozens of bamboolike trees that performers shimmy up and down, half-visible in the Technicolor lights. Merciless New Age music plays wall-to-wall. When Cirque begins a Beatles-themed show in Las Vegas’ Mirage Hotel next year, its transformation from street performance to rock concert will be complete. This is the magic of Cirque: It’s artistically pure enough to please the aesthete, and yet crass enough to thrive on the Las Vegas Strip.

Crassness, of course, is one of the pleasures of the circus: You can marvel at the freaks more repulsive than yourself. Here, too, Cirque has taken Barnum’s dark, crowd-pleasing impulses and refined his approach. You will see all kinds of oddities in Varekai—bloated clowns, loose-limbed children—but by wrapping them in colorful costumes and setting their movements to music, Laliberté has given them a beauty rarely afforded by the sideshow. Joel Schechter, a historian at San Francisco State University, notes that Cirque du Soleil has even lent new majesty to the contortionist. In the original run of Varekai, Olga Pikhienko balanced on her hands and wrapped her legs behind her head like a pretzel. In any other setting, this would elicit sympathy pains in the anterior cruciate ligaments. And yet in her white bodysuit, Pikhienko had a pure, almost virginal beauty: She looked like a ballerina, a delicate Lladro statuette.

Finally, there’s the matter of exoticism. A great deal of Cirque du Soleil’s magic comes from its unapologetic Frenchness. Or, if you prefer, its Quebecoisity. By this, I mean that Cirque du Soleil’s shows make absolutely no sense at all. I studied the plot of Varekai for a solid hour before attending the performance, but by the end of the second act I was blubbering the same nonsense as the goat-man. But bafflement has its advantages. As with Blue Man Group and De La Guarda, audiences relish the idea of watching something queer and foreign—it gives the impression of highbrow culture, even if the underlying principle is nothing so much as bedlam. (Cirque motto: “Take comfort in the chaos.”) As Cirque grows into a global behemoth, queerness becomes a two-way street: It reflects the cultural displacement of audience member and performer alike. In a 1990 Cirque show called Nouvelle Expérience, a clown stands alone on stage, clutching a suitcase and peering at the crowd as if he’d just flown in from Mars. After departing Cirque du Soleil’s big top and blinking at the minivans rolling into the Jersey hinterlands, I recognized the feeling.

Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.