January 25, 2007

• Clinton Enters ’08 Field, Fueling Race for Money

  

  Evan Vucci/Associated Press

  Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, shown in July, are vying for favor from the same groups, including

  January 21, 2007

  Clinton Enters ’08 Field, Fueling Race for Money

  By PATRICK HEALY and JEFF ZELENY

  Corrections Appended

  Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday, immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party’s first primary, the competition for campaign donations.

  “I’m in,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday. “And I’m in to win.”

  If successful, Mrs. Clinton, 59, would be the first female nominee of a major American political party, and she would become the first spouse of a former president to seek a return to the White House.

  Her entrance into the race followed Mr. Obama’s by less than a week, and highlighted the urgency for her of not falling behind in the competition for money, especially in New York, her home turf, where the battle has already reached a fever pitch. It also set off rounds of e-mail messages and conference calls among both her allies and opponents.

  George Soros, the billionaire New York philanthropist, has made maximum donations in the past to both candidates, for instance, and last week he faced a choice: support Mr. Obama, who created his committee on Tuesday, or stay neutral and see what Mrs. Clinton and others had to say. In this case, Mr. Obama won.

  Mr. Soros sent the maximum contribution, $2,100, to Mr. Obama, the first-term senator from Illinois, just hours after he declared his plans to run.

  “Soros believes that Senator Obama brings a new energy to the political system and has the potential to be a transformational leader,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.

  Mrs. Clinton’s presidential operation is only one day old, but she already finds herself in a breakneck competition against Mr. Obama for fund-raising supremacy in two towns that she and her husband have mined heavily for political gold: New York and Hollywood. Mr. Obama’s entrance into the race has also put up for grabs other groups that are primary targets for Mrs. Clinton, including African-Americans and women.

  At this early stage in the nomination fight, securing donations and signing up fund-raisers are among the best ways of showing political strength in a crowded field (seven Democrats and counting). And Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are looking to raise at least $75 million this year alone.

  Advisers said yesterday that they had begun corralling donors to build quickly on the formidable $14 million that Mrs. Clinton already had in the bank. They predicted that they would outpace Mr. Obama, though they acknowledged that he is moving impressively to try to match Mrs. Clinton’s national fund-raising network, which has been in the making far longer than his.

  Mrs. Clinton faces some fatigue among donors after more than 15 years of Clinton fund-raising, Democratic contributors and strategists said, and some skepticism about whether she can win. Yet she has the Democrats’ most popular rainmaker at her full disposal, former President Bill Clinton, and she has influential friends like the lawyer and power broker Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to help keep African-American donors and others by her side.

  Notably, no prominent Clinton fund-raiser has moved to Mr. Obama’s camp (though his aides are working on it). Mrs. Clinton has also lined up a powerful roster of fund-raising and economic advisers in New York, including the financiers Roger Altman, Steven Rattner, Blair W. Effron, Alan Patricof and Mr. Rattner’s wife, Maureen White, a former finance chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

  “Maureen and I will happily do everything we can to help her,” Mr. Rattner said. “Based on our long relationship with her, we feel that she has demonstrated incontrovertibly that she would be an effective candidate and a terrific president.”

  For all of the attention swirling around Mr. Obama, meanwhile, he faces many obstacles as he seeks to become the nation’s first black president. His background, including a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, has elevated his appeal, but it does little to answer questions about whether he has the experience to serve in the White House.

  Picking off Clinton loyalists is no easy task, either. Hours after opening his fund-raising committee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama convened separate conference calls with donors in Chicago and on the East and West Coasts; in the East Coast phone call, according to participants, Mr. Obama asked them to keep an open mind about his candidacy even if they had been allies of Mrs. Clinton.

  James Torrey, chairman of the global hedge fund Torrey Funds, said he signed on with Mr. Obama not as a snub to Mrs. Clinton, but because he believed that the Illinois senator had the best chance of inspiring Democrats and other voters.

  “I know it’s perceived as an anti-Hillary thing,” Mr. Torrey said in an interview Friday. “I think she’s marvelous, I think she’s a great senator, but I’d rather see Barack Obama as president. I think the Republicans will make it their life’s work to bring her down.”

  Several New York and Hollywood donors offered a similar assessment: they liked Mrs. Clinton as a senator, but worried that her rating in a new Washington Post/ABC News Poll released Saturday was at 41 percent, despite having nearly 100 percent name recognition.

  Some of her veteran supporters in New York are now on the fence, including the business executives Orin S. Kramer and Robert Zimmerman, who are active in Democratic politics. Others say they plan to play it safe and contribute to both candidates. In Los Angeles, the producers David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg are working to plan a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama after he officially enters the race, which he is scheduled to do on Feb. 10. Mr. Geffen has signed on with Mr. Obama, while Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Spielberg have not decided which candidate to formally endorse.

  Yet hedging bets with a spread of donations could prove perilous with the Clinton camp, said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is president of the New School.

  “The Clintons value loyalty, and I don’t think they are going to risk offending her,” Mr. Kerrey said of Mrs. Clinton’s traditional supporters, noting that he spoke to several undecided Democrats last week. Referring to Mr. Obama, he added: “He’s got to reach out to Hillary’s supporters and hope he can persuade some of them. If he doesn’t, she’s the nominee.”

  Mr. Zimmerman said he was enthusiastic about Mrs. Clinton. Asked why he had not aligned with her yet, he said: “It’s appropriate and respectful to hear every candidate’s message.”

  Mr. Obama is putting together his own finance team to focus on New York. He has hired Julianna Smoot, who helped tap Wall Street money as part of a record-setting team at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. He has also dispatched a fund-raiser, Jenny Yeager, to run his New York operation, and he is calling on Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Americas, to raise money. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Wolf, who has donated to Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, confirmed that he planned to help Mr. Obama.)

  In New York, chief executives, lawyers, entertainers, gay men and lesbians, African-Americans and women have been prominent in political fund-raising for decades — though usually they are picking among outsiders, not hometown friends and allies. Yet the 2008 race will test personal and political loyalties, with Mrs. Clinton preparing to announce a run and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and perhaps former Gov. George E. Pataki moving to seek the Republican nomination. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is also being encouraged to run as an independent.

  The attention given to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama is making fund-raising that much more difficult for other Democrats. While former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina still hopes to tap into a network of supporters among trial lawyers, his former profession, and to build an army of grass-roots donors, strategists for other candidates conceded that raising money would be an uphill battle and said it was an open question whether there was room for more than one alternative to Mrs. Clinton.

  “I just got off the phone with someone who said, ‘It’s between Edwards and Obama,’ and with a little nudging I pushed him over to the Obama camp,” said Jeh Johnson, a partner at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York who has been making fund-raising calls on behalf of Mr. Obama.

  Mr. Johnson, who was general counsel for the Air Force in the Clinton administration, said younger Democrats and women — crucial parts of Mrs. Clinton’s base — were excited about Mr. Obama. “I haven’t encountered many New Yorkers who say, ‘No, I’m not interested, I’m a Hillary supporter,’ ” he said.

  The competition for supporters — and contributors — extends well beyond New York. And Mr. Obama could complicate Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising efforts in Chicago, another lucrative base for Democrats. In her Senate re-election bid last year, she raised nearly $700,000 from Illinois, her native state.

  One Democratic operative, who has knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising operation in the Midwest, called donors in Chicago last week after Mr. Obama’s announcement, asking whether it would be foolhardy to sign onto the Clinton campaign if he was in the race. While party officials say Mr. Obama will have an advantage in Chicago, they said Mrs. Clinton would still find considerable support there.

  While Mr. Obama has never run a national campaign, his political action committee, the Hopefund, has attracted a broad base of contributors from across the country.

  In the New York entertainment industry, too, Mr. Obama’s candidacy has received raves. Hours after his announcement Tuesday, the Broadway producer Margo Lion sent out an e-mail message urging her friends to donate to him — making clear that the theater community was not locked down by Mrs. Clinton.

  “Along with many others in the industry, I will be producing a fund-raiser at the St. James Theater later this spring” for Mr. Obama, Ms. Lion wrote. “We need to find a new direction for our country, and finally, we have the man to do it.”

  Patrick Healy reported from New York, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington. Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New York.

  Correction: January 23, 2007

  A news analysis article on Sunday about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential prospects misstated the results of a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll and erroneously attributed the incorrect number to a statement by her campaign. Mrs. Clinton led Senator Barack Obama in the preference poll of likely Democratic primary voters by 41 percent to 17 percent; she did not hold a 41 percentage point lead over Mr. Obama. The campaign’s statement correctly reflected the polling data; it did not contain the incorrect percentage.

  Correction: January 24, 2007

  Because of an editing error, a front-page article on Sunday about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential candidacy misstated the name of the university whose president, former Senator Bob Kerrey, commented on campaign donors. It is the New School, not the New School University.

  
  

  Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

   

  TV Family Bound by Blood and a Band

  January 25, 2007
  	Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Clockwise from rear left, the family behind “The Naked Brothers Band”: Michael Wolff, Polly Draper, Nat Wolff and Alex Wolff.

  January 25, 2007
  	Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times From left, Alex and Nat Wolff of “The Naked Brothers Band.”

  January 25, 2007

  A TV Family Bound by Blood and a Band

  By FELICIA R. LEE

  “The Naked Brothers Band,” an ebullient mock documentary about a kids’ rock band, is both a movie and a new series on Nickelodeon and a tween fantasy in which no one over 18 has much sense. The brothers have a classic bubble-gum sound, live in a very 21st-century video world and are the real-life offspring of entertainers from two television shows that had baby-boomer appeal.

  Polly Draper is the mother and Michael Wolff is the father of the telegenic team: the singer-songwriter Nat Wolff, 12 (“the girl magnet” is his shy character’s nickname), and Alex Wolff, 9, who plays a flamboyant drummer in a do-rag. The two play the stars of the six-member band. The film has its television premiere on Saturday, and the series begins Feb. 3.

  Ms. Draper, whose “Naked” movie and series credits include creator, executive producer, writer and director, will be forever etched in many memories as Ellyn Warren in the 1987-91 show “thirtysomething” on ABC, considered a ground-breaking look at yuppie angst. The boys’ real-life father and Ms. Draper’s husband, Mr. Wolff, is a musician and composer who was the bandleader and musical director for “The Arsenio Hall Show” from 1989 to 1994. In “Naked,” Mr. Wolff plays a geeky, accordion-playing TV father to his real-life sons. He is also the music supervisor and co-executive producer of the series.

  “This thing had a life of its own,” Ms. Draper said during an interview on the set of “Naked,” a cavernous studio in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. She was watching a scene in which the band makes a video. Nat and Alex were very young when they climbed out of the bath one day, Ms. Draper recalled, and both announced, “We’re the Naked Brothers Band!” as they danced around the apartment. In preschool, Nat formed a band with his best friends.

  “Nat decided he wanted to film his own sitcom, so we did a film called ‘Don’t Eat Off My Plate,’ ” Ms. Draper said. “I pretended to interview his friends and do a documentary.” And that was the beginning of the Naked Brothers movie, roughly a five-week adventure in 2004 using mostly friends and family members, with a budget under $1 million. (“We would sneak into locations and run,” Ms. Draper said.) The movie won a family feature film award at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005. It then came to the attention of Nickelodeon, which acquired it for broadcast with minor changes and developed the series.

  “At first we were intrigued by the idea, but we weren’t sure that kids would understand the vague tongue-and-cheek of it,” said Tom Ascheim, executive vice president and general manager of Nickelodeon. “Then a bunch of us took it home to our own children, and they loved it.”

  “Naked Brothers” also appeals to adult stargazers. Look for cameos by the “thirtysomething” cast in the film, as well as by Mr. Hall, Uma Thurman, Julianne Moore, Cyndi Lauper and other stars. Snoop Dogg pops up in the first episode of the series. After all, in “Naked Brothers,” the band is world-famous.

  That TV family lives in a colorful apartment in New York City, where the boys attend Amigos Elementary School and Alex eats peanut butter for breakfast — when they’re not hopping into limousines, having food fights and shaking it in front of screaming fans. The real-life family lives in Manhattan, where the boys attend private school and — so far — lead much quieter lives, despite a recent rash of attention as the publicity machine cranked up.

  “It’s got a lot of irreverence and a lot of reality,” Ms. Draper said of the family’s creative venture. While the “Naked” series and movie are her first shots at directing, her screenwriting debut was in 1999 with “The Tic Code,” a theatrical film starring Gregory Hines that was informed both by her husband’s childhood struggles with Tourette’s syndrome and by his passion for jazz.

  For the series, “I write him like a kid,” Ms. Draper said of Mr. Wolff, “and the kids like the adults. The adults make total fools of themselves, and the kids love it.”

  Nat, who has his mother’s enormous eyes and has been writing music since he was 5, is “his own man when it comes to music,” his father said. “It’s art, so we don’t interfere.”

  The film tells the story of the band’s origins and introduces most of the main characters. The series features Cooper (Cooper Pillot), a boy manager in a suit and big glasses; Rosalina (Allie DiMeco), the electric bassist and Nat’s crush; and their spacey, miniskirted baby sitter and tutor, Jesse (Jesse Draper, Polly Draper’s niece).

  Rounding out the band are the guitarist, Qaasim (Qaasim Middleton), who favors Jim Hendrix-like Afro wigs; the cellist, Thomas (Thomas Batuello); and the keyboardist, David (David Levi, who has known the Wolff brothers since preschool).

  Alex and Nat seem pretty much the same in real life as they are on television: chatty, guileless, fun-loving. In a giant room in the studio, they shot hoops with their friends after filming an episode in which Nat does not want to kiss his leading lady for a video because of Rosalina. Nat goofed during the shoot and kissed her, though, explaining to his mother that he thought he was following directions.

  “It’s good,” Alex said when asked how it was to work with his mother.

  “It’s better than working with anyone else,” he added. “She’s your mom; she’s not an authority. You don’t have to behave.” Alex aspires to be a professional skateboarder.

  For Nat, music is the big attraction. He has performed off Broadway in “Getting Into Heaven” and “The Heart of Baghdad” and was a regular at the Improv Comedy Club. He figures he has written about 150 songs. “I always loved it,” he said. “I love the Beatles. I know every Beatles song. I wanted to be like them.”

  “It’s all based on reality,” Nat said of the story lines. “It’s not like work. It’s things we might say or do or want to say or do. I like the feeling of creating something that wasn’t there. If we have another season, I’m totally getting ideas. Nat and I are going to get a camera and make a film.”

  “We have actually become way better friends working together,” Nat offered.

  “We have?” said Alex.

  Albie Hecht, the other executive producer of the series, said he thought the brothers would be big after he saw the enthusiastic audience reaction to the film at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

  “They’re just real: real brothers, real friends; it’s all the stuff kids do when they’re hanging out on the playground,” Mr. Hecht said. “The idea that you’re watching a documentary is so much fun. Then you put them into that fantasy of being a world-famous rock band, and that’s the sauce that makes it work.”

  
  

  Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

   

  You Are What You Expect

  January 16, 2007 January 21, 2007 You Are What You Expect By JIM HOLT Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Put so starkly, the question has a fatuous ring. Unless you are in the grip of a bipolar disorder, you are probably optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others. Optimism tends to reign when people are imagining how their own plans will turn out. Research shows that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing ourselves to be more competent and more in control than we actually are. Some 80 percent of drivers, for example, think they are better at the wheel than the typical motorist and thus less likely to have an accident. We live in a Lake Woebegon of the mind, it seems, where all the children are above average. Such “optimism bias,” as psychologists have labeled it, is hardly confined to our personal lives. In fact, as Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Jonathan Renshon argue in the current issue of Foreign Policy, it may help explain why hawkishness so often prevails at the national level. Wasn’t the Iraq war expected by proponents to be “fairly easy” (John McCain) or “a cakewalk” (Kenneth Adelman)? But when it comes to the still bigger picture — the fate of civilization, of the planet, of the cosmos — pessimism has historically been the rule. A sense that things are heading downhill is common to nearly every culture, as Arthur Herman observes in “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It’s not hard to find a psychological explanation for this big-picture gloominess. As we age, we become aware of our powers diminishing; we dwell on the happy episodes from our past and forget the wretched ones; moving toward the grave, we are consumed by nostalgia and foreboding. What could be more natural than to project this mixture of attitudes onto history at large? The very idea of progress, a novelty of the Enlightenment that has been in fashion only fitfully since, can grow wearisome. “Progress might have been all right once,” Ogden Nash said, “but it has gone on too long.” You might think scientists would be the optimistic exception here. Science, after all, furnishes the model for progress, based as it is on the gradual and irreversible growth of knowledge. At the end of last year, Edge.org, an influential scientific salon, posed the questions “What are you optimistic about? Why?” to a wide range of thinkers. Some 160 responses have now been posted at the Web site. As you might expect, there is a certain amount of agenda-battling, and more than a whiff of optimism bias. A mathematician is optimistic that we will finally get mathematics education right; a psychiatrist is optimistic that we will find more effective drugs to block pessimism (although he is pessimistic that we will use them wisely). But when the scientific thinkers look beyond their own specializations to the big picture, they continue to find cause for cheer — foreseeing an end to war, for example, or the simultaneous solution of our global-warming and energy problems. The most general grounds for optimism offered by these thinkers, though, is that big-picture pessimism so often proves to be unfounded. The perennial belief that our best days are behind us is, it seems, perennially wrong. Such reflections may or may not ease our tendency toward global pessimism. But what about our contrary tendency to be optimistic — indeed, excessively so — in our local outlook? Is that something we should, in the interests of cold reason, try to disabuse ourselves of? Optimism bias no doubt causes a good deal of mischief, leading us to underestimate the time and trouble of the projects we undertake. But the mere fact that it is so widespread in our species suggests it might have some adaptive value. Perhaps if we calculated our odds in a more cleareyed way, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. A couple of decades ago, the psychologist Shelley Taylor proposed that “positive illusions” like excessive optimism were critical to mental health. People who saw their abilities and chances realistically, she noted, tended to be in a state of depression. (Other psychologists, taking a closer look at the data, countered that depressives actually show more optimism bias than nondepressives: given the way things turn out for them, they are not pessimistic enough.) And there is new evidence that optimism may in some ways be self-fulfilling. In a recently published study, researchers in the Netherlands found that optimistic people — those who assented to statements like “I often feel that life is full of promises” — tend to live longer than pessimists. Perhaps, it has been speculated, optimism confers a survival advantage by helping people cope with adversity. But pessimism still appears to have its advantages. Another recently published paper observes that over the last three decades, the people of Denmark have consistently scored higher on life-satisfaction than any other Western nation. Why? Because, say the authors, the Danes are perennial pessimists, always reporting low expectations for the year to come. They then find themselves pleasantly surprised when things turn out rather better than expected. Americans, too, are lowering their expectations, at least in one respect. According to the Census Bureau‘s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, most college freshmen in 1970 said their primary goal was to develop a meaningful life philosophy. In 2005, by contrast, most freshmen said their primary goal was to be comfortably rich — a more modest one, it would seem, given the relative frequency of wealth and wisdom. As for the minority still seeking a philosophy of life, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus came up with a formula nearly a century ago that remains the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism: Things are hopeless but not serious. Jim Holt is a contributing writer for the magazine. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

   

  Looking for My Father in Las Vegas, Cosmetics

  Looking for My Father in Las Vegas Illustration by Craig Atkinson Illustration by Craig Atkinson January 21, 200 By PAT JORDAN They are all gone now. I don’t think about them much anymore, except, fleetingly, at this time of year, late January. They would have loved it, the buildup to the Super Bowl, an exhilarating time for men like themselves, those shadowy figures from my childhood. My uncles were not like the uncles of my childhood friends — tall, blond, smiling men who taught their nephews how to toss a baseball. My uncles were short, dour men in shimmering sharkskin suits. They smoked crooked Toscano cigars and taught me, from the time I was 6, how to palm the ace of spades, how to spot shaved dice and how to pray to God before I went to bed that the Bears would beat the Packers by at least a point and a half. They weren’t really my uncles; they were my father’s gambling cronies. Italian men with names like Schiama (the jabbering one), Freddy the Welch and Tommy the Blond (not really blond, just not as dark as his cronies). Their wives, my aunts, were big, peroxide blondes in the habit of saying “kinks” for kings, as in, “I got three kinks, doll.” My father never worked a day in his life. He was a gambler and a con man and a grifter for all of the 65 years that I knew him. He gambled on pool, cards, dice, horses, sports events, two pigeons sitting on a fence, anything — as long as he could find an edge. Shaved dice. Marked cards. A drugged horse. And when he couldn’t find an edge, when the game was fixed against him, he gambled anyway, because, he told me, “it was the only game in town.” When he was 89, he gambled on a triple-bypass heart operation because he liked the odds. His doctor told him that if he survived the operation, he had a 60-40 chance of living six more years, and he did. He spent those last years in an assisted-living facility, where he booked bets on the pay phone in the lobby. I can imagine him now, in the midst of the playoffs, getting the line on the San Diego Chargers or the Philadelphia Eagles, scribbling it on a piece of paper he held against the wall, studying it, then placing his bet. My father never knew his parents. He spent the first 15 years of his life in an orphanage, a good apprenticeship for a gambler and a swindler. He learned early how to con his custodians out of extra food and sometimes even affection. When he left the orphanage, he turned to gambling for his livelihood and his satisfactions. Gambling proved that he existed, that he was special, smarter than his marks, smarter even than God’s will. Here’s what it was like to grow up a gambler’s son. I couldn’t listen to “The Lone Ranger” on the radio because my father had to listen to horse-racing results. I could never root for the Yankees and our heroes (DiMaggio, Berra, Raschi, Crosetti) when they played the Red Sox if Uncle Freddy was “down” on the Red Sox. Matchbooks were strewn everywhere throughout our house, yet my father didn’t smoke. When I was 7, I burned up a matchbook and was punished — not for almost starting a fire but for destroying my father’s betting line, which he always wrote on the inside covers of matchbooks. Whenever he was sitting in the back seat of a police car, arrested for gambling, he’d ask the officer in front for a cigarette. He’d light the cigarette, then toss the matchbook with his betting line, the evidence, out the window. When I was 12, my father bought me an expensive Herb Score baseball glove; three days later, he pawned it. After one of his disastrous betting weekends, real estate agents wandered through our house asking my mother questions about heating costs. When my father was sick in bed with the flu, I would come home from high school to find my mother on the phone, scribbling numbers on a bunched-up napkin while my father shouted down from their bedroom, “Get the line on Frisco!” A brilliant, self-educated man, my father cited “The Gambler,” by Dostoyevsky, as proof that all gamblers, himself included, were “degenerate gamblers,” the phrase he always used. But it was obvious to me that he didn’t really think of himself as a degenerate gambler, because he always used to preach that no matter how much he gambled he always made sure that he was able to meet his “nut,” his family’s minimal living expenses. And he did. We lived in a leafy, WASP-y New England suburb, while my uncles still lived in the Italian neighborhood in the city. I went to a private Jesuit prep school and then to a Jesuit college because, my father told me, he wanted me to be “white.” To be Pat Jordan, not Pasquale Giordano, my father’s given name. My father had no interest in money. “It’s about the juice,” he said, the action. Money was just a means to keep score. He gave it away, to his friends, his wife, me. He paid for every dinner with his buddies, overtipped every bartender and waiter, bought my mother diamonds when he was flush, bought me expensive baseball shoes made of kangaroo leather and bought nothing for himself, except a new navy blazer with brass buttons every 20 years or so. He hated casinos because they were “dehumanizing institutions,” and he knew about institutions. “Besides,” he said, “you can’t beat the iron,” meaning the casinos’ winning percentage. He preferred illegal, private games because they were more exciting (the threat of cops breaking down the door) and more challenging. “It’s not how good you gamble — it’s about how many mistakes your opponent makes,” he said. “Casinos don’t make mistakes.” My father prided himself on his ability to “read” his opponents, find their weakness, exploit it, outsmart them (always the point of my father’s gambling) and, if necessary, outcheat them. When I was in my 20s, by then an ex-professional baseball pitcher, a schoolteacher, a husband, a father — a respectable burgher in a way that he never was — my father gave me a lecture on vice. “There are only three vices in this world,” he said. “Booze, broads and gambling. If you’re gonna do it right, pick one and stick to it.” I laughed, because at the time I had no room in my life for vice. Forty years later, shortly before he died, he repeated that lecture to me. By then I had more than a passing acquaintance with the first two vices, but not the last. I laughed again, and said, “Don’t worry, Pop, I never gamble.” He gave me a disgusted look and said: “You? A freelance writer 40 years?” Which was why, last fall, a couple of years after he died, I went to Las Vegas. To find out how far the apple had fallen from the tree, but even more important, to try to understand my father’s gambling, my father, in a way I never had when he was alive. “Gambling gives meaning to some people’s lives,” David Schwartz said over the ka-ching of the slot machines in the Mandalay Bay, where I was staying. The vast casino was almost deserted on this weekday afternoon, except for a few elderly women playing the slots. “Gambling is all about risk and reward,” Schwartz said. “It’s hard-wired into our brain since the dawn of man.” Schwartz, who is 33, grew up near Atlantic City and got his Ph.D. at U.C.L.A., where he wrote his dissertation on gambling. Today he is the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I don’t know if it’s a disease,” he said. “We have free will. We can walk away.” I told him about my father. “Gamblers always pay for dinner,” Schwartz said. “A lot of them lead ascetic lives. Money is just how they keep score.” Then he told me a story about Lem Banker, a gambling legend in Las Vegas. “I got married last Friday,” Schwartz said. “Before the ceremony, my wife to be discovered her wedding band didn’t fit. I told Lem. He said: ‘Go down to this jeweler I know and he’ll take care of it. Just tell him your Uncle Lem sent you.’ “ The following morning, I took a taxi to the Gambler’s Book Shop on 11th Street, just off Charleston Boulevard, to meet Uncle Lem. (Are all gamblers “Uncles,” with a sawbuck for the kid but never a trip to the circus?) I was supposed to meet Lem at noon. He was 79 and had a grumpy old man’s voice over the phone when I called to set up a meeting: “Whaddya want?” I explained myself. “Meet me at the bookstore,” he said. I asked how much the taxi fare would be. “Don’t worry about it, for Chrissakes!” he said. “I’ll pay it.” “Lem is a little late,” said Howard Schwartz (no relation to David), the owner of the Gambler’s Book Shop. “Let me show ya around.” Schwartz is a former New York newspaper reporter, slight, bald, Woody Allen in “Broadway Danny Rose.” He showed me his store devoted to all things gambling. Then he led me into his back room. A poster on the wall read “Area Patrolled by Attack Cat.” He pointed to a cardboard box on a sleeping cot. I peeked inside. There, on a bunched-up blanket, slept the smallest kitten I’d ever seen. “Four days old,” Schwartz said. “I’m feeding it with an eyedropper. The vet said at that age three out of four die. Not good odds.” Schwartz shrugged. “So I’ve been sleeping with it every night. Gamblers love cats and dogs.” For gamblers, a pet is a substitute for the human relationships they find troubling. A pet’s love is unconditional. Human love is demanding: Stop gambling! Schwartz produced a folder of articles about Uncle Lem and a copy of the book “Lem Banker’s Book of Sports Betting.” It was written in 1986, then went out of print until Schwartz reprinted it himself. I began to leaf through the articles and the book. Lem Banker is considered the greatest living sports bettor in the country. He bets more than 100 sports events a week, mostly baseball, basketball and football, college and pros. If he wins on 56 percent of those games, he makes his nut. If he hits 60 percent or higher, he gets rich. During one stretch, Lem picked 13 consecutive Super Bowl winners against the spread. Uncle Lem appeared. He is a big, muscular, vigorous man for his age. He wore a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, jogging shorts and sneakers. Before I could ask a question he began telling me stories. “I knew ‘em all,” Lem said in his gruff voice. “Lefty Rosenthal from the Chicago mob. Ice Pick Willie Alderman. Liver Lips Gordon. Louie the Butcher. … I knew all the fighters — Ali, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston, he was a friend of mine. Joe Louis was late for his funeral because he had to get down on some sports. … I knew everybody. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Kirk Kerkorian, the businessman.” I asked Lem when he started gambling. “I started booking bets in my father’s candy store in Union City, N.J., when I was 20,” he told me. “I never had a job since. My father said I’d always be a bum.” Lem bet mostly sports events because he loved sports. He was good enough at basketball to be offered scholarships to Long Island University and the University of Miami. He played against Bob Cousy and Easy Ed Macauley in the summers. “I went to Miami on a scholarship in 1949,” Lem said. “But I dropped out and started booking students’ bets. Only sports. No horses, no cards, no table games. I only bet people. I like the underdogs. I use a little psychology to see which underdog is ‘up’ for a game. It’s all instincts, kid.” (My old man called me kid until the day he died, when I was 65.) Lem was a still a wannabe major gambler and bookie in 1957 when the feds busted a gambling ring in Indiana and subpoenaed 300 people, among them actors, athletes, politicians and Lem Banker. Before he testified, one of the indicted gamblers told him: “You’re a young fellow. Don’t get yourself in trouble for me. Tell the truth.” Lem told him not to worry and took the Fifth. Some “people” in Las Vegas liked it that Lem Banker was a “stand-up guy,” so they invited him to town to set up his sports book. “Why not?” Lem said. It was in Las Vegas, in 1959, at the age of 31, that Lem married a beautiful model named Delores Vicario. She was naïve about his gambling. She asked him once why he always said Sandy Koufax, a fellow Jew, was the best pitcher in baseball and yet always bet against him. Lem said, “I’m a gambler, sweetheart, not a fan.” According to Lem, betting every day keeps him young: “Keeps my heart pumping. Some people take Plavix for their heart. I bet. Otherwise life would be boring.” He has two satellite dishes and eight television sets in his Spanish stucco mansion. He sits at his kitchen table and figures out his bets based on his instincts, his information and a simple philosophy: get the best odds and “don’t make high bets when you’re on a bad streak.” After he figures out his bets, he punches the boxing bag in his backyard, then starts to field calls from his cronies, which always begin the same way: “Lem, who do ya like?” “I tell them,” Lem said. “I never charged anyone for my picks, like some guys.” At one time, newspapers across the country, from The New York Post to The San Francisco Examiner, carried Lem’s picks. Today he has a weekly TV program on KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. Before dinner, and before he watches the night’s sports on TV, Lem lifts some weights. A few bicep curls, bench presses. He’s a health nut. He doesn’t drink or smoke. That’s one reason he doesn’t like casino games — sitting at a card table for hours, smoking and drinking: “It’s unhealthy. Booze and broads ruined more gamblers than sore-armed quarterbacks.” To reinforce his point, he stood and flashed me a bodybuilder’s double-bicep shot. Then he crunched his pecs, making them jump. When I got up to leave, I asked Howard Schwartz to call me a taxi. “I’ll drive ya,” Lem said. We walked through the bookstore, past a woman at the cash register. She came rushing out of the store toward Lem. “I thought it was you,” she said, grabbing his arm. I got into the car just as I heard her say, “So, Lem, who do ya like?” The following morning I took a taxi to Wayne Allyn Root’s house in a gated subdivision outside Las Vegas. His wife, Debra, an evangelical Christian and a former Miss Oklahoma, met me at the door. She showed me into their living room. “Wayne will be down in a minute,” she said, and left. I looked around. Wayne’s house was a shrine to Wayne. The walls were adorned with posters of him, photographs of him, newspaper and magazine articles about him. There were copies of his books, “Millionaire Republican” and “The King of Vegas’ Guide to Gambling,” everywhere. Wayne’s Web site is full of references to him as “the king of Vegas,” “the Warren Buffett” of gambling, “the oddsmaker of everything in the world,” the Tony Robbins of gambling. It lists all the TV shows he’s been on, which include “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Best Damned Sports Show Period,” and the publications that have profiled him. In one such profile, written by Wayne himself under the byline “Cool Hand Root,” he claims that sports betting is the new American pastime because fans can do it at home, in front of their favorite piece of furniture, the TV set. It appeals to Americans’ love of both money and sports, it allows the average fan to match wits with professional gamblers and it’s a pleasant and entertaining way to spend a Saturday with friends, eating pizza, drinking beer and watching sports on TV. Even if fans don’t win their bets, Wayne writes, they get their money’s worth in entertainment. Wayne may be the only sports handicapper in the world who sells his betting picks to people while reminding them that even when they lose their money, they shouldn’t complain because they had so much fun losing it. Wayne appeared, smiling, a small man dressed in a black shirt, black slacks and black dress shoes. Johnny Cash crossed with Liberace. Wayne sat down and began talking. He doesn’t like to waste time. Time is money. He said he grew up Jewish in a tough neighborhood in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and began gambling at 13, in imitation of his father, who played the stock market. “For 95 percent of gamblers,” he said, “it’s about the action. What do you think the N.F.L. is all about? Who’d watch a lousy game if they couldn’t bet?” According to Wayne, when fans bet they form an emotional relationship with the men and the team they’re betting on. That’s where they get their pleasure. The money won, or lost, is only incidental. That’s the way Wayne likes it. “For me, it’s all about the money,” he said. “I live for it.” Most of his customers are small-business men. “In charge of their own lives, decision makers,” Wayne said. “I want high rollers who can afford to lose.” (Wayne talks more about losing than any gambler I’ve met.) Wayne’s sports picks are packaged in a series of tiers. “It’s all about information,” he said. “The more they pay, the more information they get.” Bettors who pay $25,000 a year for Wayne’s picks get appreciably more information — including the opportunity to speak with Wayne directly — than bettors who pay $450 for a single week’s picks. Wayne jumped up. “Wanna go for lunch? Do you like Chinese?” We ate lunch at Chin Chin Café, inside the New York-New York casino. Wayne attacked his chicken as if it were his last meal, yet without interest, as if it were something to get out of the way before he went on to more important things. I asked him if he ever felt guilty about making his money by gambling. He looked up at me as if I had used a word in a language he didn’t understand and said: “Guilt? I don’t have any guilt. I think zero about why things are. I just accept what they are and find a way to take advantage of them.” When the check came, I reached for it. Wayne made a feeble pass at it, too. “I was gonna pay,” he said, but he didn’t. That night, Eric Drache picked me up in front of the Mandalay Bay and drove us to a small brightly lighted Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Las Vegas called Cafe Chloe. Besides playing poker himself, Eric has managed poker rooms at the Mirage and the Golden Nugget and been a director of the World Series of Poker for 16 years. Now he produces television shows of poker events. I asked him when he became a gambler. He drew a distinction between gambling and playing poker. When it comes to the latter, “I’m not a gambler,” he said. “A gambler is someone who wagers at unfavorable odds. I make sure the odds are in my favor.” He grinned. “Except once. Many years ago I was the sixth-rated poker player in the world.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, I spent the year playing against No. 1 to No. 5.” Eric told me that his father was a gambler: “A big-time loser on horses. Mob guys used to come to our house in New Jersey.” No doubt Eric started gambling in an attempt to prove to his father that he was a winner. “As a kid, I wasn’t good at anything,” he said. “I was looking for something to be good at. I liked poker because it was romantic. I wouldn’t have to work for anyone.” He grinned sheepishly. “I lost constantly as a kid before I figured it out.” When wagering on horses and sport, he said, “I couldn’t bet small.” Eric also did a little bookmaking in New Jersey, which led to legal trouble in 1968, when he was only a kid. “I went to jail,” he said. “I could have got off if I ratted out where I got my betting line. But I didn’t. To this day, as a felon, I can’t vote in Vegas. But I have had a gambling license.” When the check came, Eric grabbed it before I could even reach for it; he paid from a wad of bills. Then we got into his S.U.V. and drove down the Strip. When we arrived at the Mandalay Bay, he said: “Will you do me a favor? Call my ex-wife? Her name is Jane Lovelle. She knows a lot about gambling.” I called Jane Lovelle, a psychiatric site manager at a jail in the San Francisco area. I told her I had dinner with her ex-husband. “Of course he paid,” she said. “Gamblers always pay so they can be in control and as a way of demonstrating they’re successful. Eric’s an amazing tipper.” They were married for seven years, until, she said, his gambling affected their marriage. “His gratifications were in cards, not personal relationships,” she said. “I would make a nice dinner and he’d say: ‘Not now. I just lost 15 stoves.’ Gamblers don’t really have a true desire to have emotional relationships with others.” Vegas is the ultimate petri dish for gambling,” said Dr. Robert Hunter, who has been the director of the Problem Gambling Center for more than 20 years. According to Hunter, only about 5 percent of gamblers develop a problem. “Gambling addiction is more biology than psychology,” he said. “It has molecular similarities to drug and alcohol addiction.” The P.G.C. brochure describes gambling addicts as those who have lost “the ability to control their impulses to gamble.” Hunter told me that there are two types of gamblers: action seekers and escape seekers. Escape seekers are machine gamblers — video poker, slots. Action seekers are card players, craps shooters, sports bettors. Although both types gamble for immediate gratification, escape gamblers need it even more immediately than action gamblers. Push a button, win or lose. I’d put it this way: Escape gamblers lose themselves in a machine’s electronic glow in the same way that children are hypnotized by video games. It’s a way to disassociate themselves from an unpleasant reality. Action seekers gamble for the competition, the risk-reward. He introduced me to two of his staff members, Christine and Howie. Everyone on his staff is a recovering gambling addict. Howie used to be a pit boss on the Strip. Christine is a former C.P.A. who worked for the city. Howie is in his 60s, Christine in her 50s. Hunter urged them to tell me their stories. “I was an action gambler,” Howie said. “I wanted to be a big shot like Lem Banker.” In a barely audible voice, Christine said, “I was an escape gambler, video poker, to escape from my crummy life.” She was caught stealing money from work to pay off gambling debts. “I lost my job, my house,” she said. “I hit bottom. The only thing left was suicide.” Hunter said: “Christine isn’t a character out of Damon Runyon. She’s out of Ibsen.” Runyon’s characters are action gamblers, big, brassy, egocentric, self-assured to an extreme. Ibsen’s characters are escape gamblers, frustrated, neurotic, trapped, self-destructive. “Most of the gamblers in our group, or in G.A. in Las Vegas, are escape gamblers,” Hunter said. “Maybe 90 percent.” I attended a meeting of gambling addicts at the P.G.C.; Hunter introduced me to them. They talked mostly about themselves, their lives, in a therapeutic way of self-discovery. Compared with the Gamblers Anonymous approach, the P.G.C. program I saw in action is more about self-awareness than it is about emotional support. P.G.C. members could have been in any therapy group, coping with anger problems or divorce. Finally, Hunter asked me if I had any questions. I did. If risk and reward was such an essential part of their natures, how did they feel about the loss of it? They all responded in the same way, saying that they just channeled their risk-reward nature into being a better mother, father, employee. One woman raised her hand and said: “Yes, I feel I lost my alter ego. The person I wanted to be. That friend who guided me into risk. When you stop gambling, you have to find another you. But that evil, exciting friend pops up in other ways now. Like urging you to go sky diving.” A man said: “I felt like I lost part of my nature at first. I missed it a little bit. Nothing can replace the high of gambling. But now I’m a big shot as a reformed addict to other addicts.” I had one more question. If gambling is a physical addiction, why not treat it with medicine? Treating it with psychological self-awareness implies that it’s a problem of will. “Because there is no medicine,” Hunter said. “I don’t want anything to eat,” Jimmy V. said. “Just ask your questions.” We were sitting in a coffee shop near the Mandalay Bay. Jimmy Vaccaro, who is 61, was dressed in a white sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. He looked like an old-timey gambler, used to smoke-filled rooms, not fancy Las Vegas casinos. Yet Jimmy V., which is how everyone knows him, is one of the more powerful men in town. He has set the odds for casinos in Las Vegas and at the Atlantis in the Bahamas. Until Jimmy came to Las Vegas in 1974 and opened a sports book, he “never had a job in my life,” he said. “My parents were small-time gamblers in Pittsburgh. Italians ran most of the games. Mob guys. As a kid, I thought the gambling atmosphere was exciting. Like a family. Even if I blew my money, I felt I was part of something. I liked living on the sly” — an expression my old man used often — “anything you do on the sly is great. If you have to work at it it’s not fun. I liked the risk-reward. The hardship. The dark side of it. I enjoyed something with pain involved.” I laughed, but Jimmy didn’t even smile. He just went on in his flat, uninflected voice. “I was a teenager the first time I saw a juiced table. I got cheated in dice.” It was an education, “like I graduated from Harvard,” he said. “No one’s ever not been cheated. It’s part of the progression. I don’t know anyone whose closet doesn’t have something dark in it.” I was embarrassed to mention to Jimmy how my old man always cheated at cards or dice, but I did. For the first time, he smiled. “More power to him,” he said. “That’s the point, isn’t it? To outsmart the other guy any way you can.” Jimmy no longer shoots craps or plays much poker — he just bets on sports events. “I don’t have to gouge your eyeballs out anymore,” he said. He checked his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. I had one more question. What about Gamblers Anonymous and the Problem Gambling Center? “Problem gamblers are life’s losers,” he said. “They wanna go broke. They always find a reason why they lost. I lose, I go home. Reasons are part of the equation. Once I bet, I understand I have no control, so I understand loss.” He stood up to go. He added: “Everybody can’t be winners. That’s why we need born losers.” After Jimmy V. left, I checked out. But before leaving, I found a blackjack table with only one player. I sat down and gave the dealer a C-note. She handed me some chips. I placed a bet. She dealt the cards. I won. Then I won a few more hands. I was up $200. I liked that, the $200. But I was waiting for that gambler’s high. I played a few more hands. Nothing. I thought about my flight home. My wife. My dogs. I lost a few hands. Maybe I’ll go smoke a cigar outside before I get a taxi? I lost again. My $200 in winnings was gone now. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get it over with. I began to double up until I lost all of my original $100, except for a lone $5 chip. I tossed it to the dealer. She thanked me with a small nod. Outside, I watched the taxis and limos drop people off. They were smiling, excited, as they entered the casino. I stood there thinking about what I’d learned in Vegas. About gambling, gamblers, my old man, myself. My father decided at some point in his life that it was gambling that defined him. It didn’t matter whether that was true or not, it mattered only that to him it was true. Alea ludo ergo sum. I gamble, therefore I am. He told me once: “Find out who you are, kid. And be it.” A good lesson for a gambler’s son. A taxi pulled up to the curb. “The airport,” I said. The taxi pulled away from the hotel, turned left on the Strip and began moving past the Luxor, the Excalibur, New York-New York. The cabby looked in his rear-view mirror and asked, “So, did you have a good time in Vegas, buddy?” “O.K.,” I said. I looked out the window. “I wish my old man had been with me.” Pat Jordan, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is writing a book about his father and gambling. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Cosmetics Marketing Illustration by Leif Parsons January 21, 2007 Consumed Earth Cover By ROB WALKER Bare Escentuals For a glimpse of what cosmetics marketing used to look like, flip through the recent book “Hello Gorgeous!” a collection of beauty-product advertising images from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. “Glamour for You!” squeals one such ad for something called Stadium Girl Cake Makeup, featuring an apple-cheeked young woman and a promise to make the user’s complexion “more romantic than ever.” Elsewhere, a presumably satisfied cosmetics customer in a bridal gown is literally hauled off by a handsome man. Whether you see such images as being shot through with optimism or just naïvete, it seems a long way from the sort of pitch used by Bare Escentuals, a cosmetics brand whose revenues for 2006 topped $300 million — more than double the figure from 2004. The most overt selling point for its foundations, eye shadows and other products is not the imagined Future You but the nitty gritty of the stuff itself. Its bareMinerals line of foundations — $25 for 0.3 ounce at Sephora — are made with “crushed minerals from the earth,” with no oils or preservatives; it’s “so pure you can sleep in it.” The company’s “patent-pending Rare Minerals Skin Revival Treatment” is actually meant to be worn while sleeping, making your skin “more luminous” all the while, thanks to a formula that includes “all 72 organic macro- and microminerals that exist in nature.” That one is $60 for .15 ounce. An ingredients-based pitch seems a little crunchy for the mainstream, but then perhaps the mainstream has changed since the San Francisco company was founded some 30 years ago. (Back then it was basically a bath-and-body boutique.) Leslie Blodgett, the C.E.O., joined in 1994, starting bareMinerals the next year. She had been in the foundation division of Max Factor, where, she says, the focus was entirely on creating products that “would look great for three hours.” What happened after that, how uncomfortable it felt in the meantime or how much ended up “on your boyfriend’s shirt” wasn’t really important. She figured there was an audience for products that did address those issues — but didn’t expect that it would become one of the top-selling foundations. Back then “I couldn’t give this stuff away,” Blodgett says. What the company had to do, she continues, was “educate” people on the benefits, both practical and health-oriented, of the no-preservative approach. It probably helped that in the subsequent years, ideas about organic food started to catch on, but Blodgett says plenty of women who weren’t all-natural-lifestyle types started trying the brand. Thus its growth has been “all word of mouth,” she says. Oh, and one other thing: “We went on TV,” she adds. Specifically, Blodgett herself started showing up on QVC in 1997. In six minutes, she sold as much product as the company had been selling in a week. “It was shocking.” A few years later, the company made the next move — to infomercials. Neither of those settings immediately calls to mind education, healthful living or the faint air of prestige that goes along with the brand’s price points. But Blodgett had a personal reason for suspecting that the television tactics would work without undercutting the brand’s hoped-for image. “I felt that I was pretty savvy and sophisticated,” she says, “and the way I knew of QVC is that I was a customer.” The QVC and infomercial pitches are each built largely around enthusiastic Bare Escentuals users sharing — televised word of mouth? — testimonials, and Blodgett herself. (A focus group found her “fake” — and that was the last time the company used a focus group, she adds with a laugh.) Ultimately, of course, the Bare Escentuals education still culminates with a luminous promise or two. Rachel C. Weingarten, president of GTK Marketing Group and the author of “Hello Gorgeous!” figures that Bare Escentuals has indirectly benefited from the rise of science-y “cosmeceuticals,” which can be wildly expensive but which tend to have a compellingly rational back story — like the popular Crème De La Mer, created by an aerospace physicist. It’s not that glamour has gone out of style or that contemporary consumers are any less susceptible to it. “But now we really have to justify our spending,” she says. “To be able to say, ‘I bought it because. …” And these days, an answer that includes crushed minerals, pending patents and 72 organic ingredients just seems a little easier to swallow — optimistic but not naïve — than one involving a guy in a tuxedo. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

   

  Parenting

  This is Hillarious♥

  Wiki-Parenting
  How babies invented community-based collaborative authorship.
  By Dahlia Lithwick
  Posted Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007, at 4:49 PM E.T.

  With all due respect to Ward Cunningham, I’d like to take issue, for a moment, with the claim that he is the originator of the wiki. Because anyone who’s had a child can assure you that collective public authorship, collaborative editing, and anonymous generative correction—those wiki hallmarks—have been around since Mrs. Cain first brought Baby Cain over to Uncle Abel’s house dressed only in a too-thin fig-leaf onesie.

  I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably happens when one wants to show off one’s young, the smaller one’s face exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning. The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki.

  Now, my husband and I had more or less finalized our wiki entry on caring for babies with colds. We had agreed, for instance, about the germ theory over the outside-with-wet-heads theory. We were, in the main, for hot liquids, baby Tylenol, hand-washing, and humidifiers. But as our boys are increasingly exposed to a growing number of end users, the markups of their illness wiki began to proliferate.

  One of the great-aunts quickly submitted the milk markup. “No milk, no cheese, no yogurt,” she wrote definitively. I went back that afternoon and edited this out. “The pediatrician has assured us that there is absolutely no connection between dairy and mucous,” I wrote. My mom was spurred on to correct my error. “Absolutely no milk,” she marked up my markup. “Also, no baths!”

  When the baby started to smell funny that night, I checked his wiki for any Recent Changes. I noted the no-baths entry with some surprise and responded with a hasty edit: “Baths are okay,” I wrote. “He finds them very soothing, and they are better than a sandblaster for the welded-on green mucous.”

  By the morning, “definitely no baths” had been reinstated, and “warmer slippers and indoor hats” had been added in by the lady at the supermarket who heard him coughing in the checkout line. Beginning to doubt myself and the gurus from What to Expect the First Year, I found myself mulling over these modifications. “Should we really be overheating him if it isn’t cold out?” I typed into the comments section.

  “He needs to sweat it out,” responded a former law school classmate, who had also gone in and deleted the “baby Tylenol” entry, noting that suppressing a fever is a mistake, as is preventing the mucous from circulating freely. A visit to the local pediatrician that day prompted a similar entry, even as my big brother was editing the “slippers and hats” instructions and replacing it with “plenty of crisp fresh air.” Then suddenly, my house was divided against itself, as my husband abruptly changed course, finding himself in agreement with the sweatiness/free-range-mucous camp.

  I surreptitiously deleted these entries following the baby’s 3 a.m. coughing fit/antihistamine fix. When I awoke that morning, the patient was bundled in 13 alpaca throw rugs and the wiki entry had been marked up to reflect that “Both Tylenol and decongestants should be discouraged. The child must rid himself of his bodily flooids naturally.” I could tell from the spelling that my older son was the poster.

  “No wheat or refined sugars” had been added next to the “no dairy” section. “Only fresh fruit and vegetables and warmed broth.” But by that afternoon, “broth” had been deleted and “Glenfiddich” had been added. My brother again. Next to that was the “vitamin C and Echinacea” entry, and beneath it was something from a cousin’s homeopath about fashioning a tiny anklet out of chicken bones. The chicken bones were out by midafternoon, but the chicken soup was in. Handy hypertext recipe. Great-aunt again.

  In between checking the shifting wiki entries, I would poke my head in on the baby, who was now soaking outside in a tub of lukewarm Glenfiddich in a bonnet made of celery, with vitamin C tablets in his ear.

  Miraculously, the next morning he was cured.

  That morning, there was also a new entry in the wiki, and the telltale green snot on my keyboard suggested that the 20-month-old had proven the adage that one is never too young to wiki. “It may take a wiki to raise a child,” I read. “But could somebody please get in here and change my diaper?”

  Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

   

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