Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer

I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no particular risk factors for the disease.

So when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn't worried. After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to survive.

By coincidence, just a week after my diagnosis, a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health made headlines when it declined to recommend universal screening for women in their 40s; evidence simply didn't show it significantly decreased breast-cancer deaths in that age group. What's more, because of their denser breast tissue, younger women were subject to disproportionate false positives — leading to unnecessary biopsies and worry — as well as false negatives, in which cancer was missed entirely.

Those conclusions hit me like a sucker punch. "I am the person whose life is officially not worth saving," I wrote angrily. When the American Cancer Society as well as the newer Susan G. Komen foundation rejected the panel's findings, saying mammography was still the best tool to decrease breast-cancer mortality, friends across the country called to congratulate me as if I'd scored a personal victory. I considered myself a loud-and-proud example of the benefits of early detection.

Sixteen years later, my thinking has changed. As study after study revealed the limits of screening — and the dangers of overtreatment — a thought niggled at my consciousness. How much had my mammogram really mattered? Would the outcome have been the same had I bumped into the cancer on my own years later? It's hard to argue with a good result. After all, I am alive and grateful to be here. But I've watched friends whose breast cancers were detected "early" die anyway. I've sweated out what blessedly turned out to be false alarms with many others.

Recently, a survey of three decades of screening published in November in The New England Journal of Medicine found that mammography's impact is decidedly mixed: it does reduce, by a small percentage, the number of women who are told they have late-stage cancer, but it is far more likely to result in overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, including surgery, weeks of radiation and potentially toxic drugs. And yet, mammography remains an unquestioned pillar of the pink-ribbon awareness movement. Just about everywhere I go — the supermarket, the dry cleaner, the gym, the gas pump, the movie theater, the airport, the florist, the bank, the mall — I see posters proclaiming that "early detection is the best protection" and "mammograms save lives." But how many lives, exactly, are being "saved," under what circumstances and at what cost? Raising the public profile of breast cancer, a disease once spoken of only in whispers, was at one time critically important, as was emphasizing the benefits of screening. But there are unintended consequences to ever-greater "awareness" — and they, too, affect women's health.

Breast cancer in your breast doesn't kill you; the disease becomes deadly when it metastasizes, spreading to other organs or the bones. Early detection is based on the theory, dating back to the late 19th century, that the disease progresses consistently, beginning with a single rogue cell, growing sequentially and at some invariable point making a lethal leap. Curing it, then, was assumed to be a matter of finding and cutting out a tumor before that metastasis happens.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 28, 2013

An article on Page 36 this weekend about breast cancer awareness misidentifies the reduction in the chance that a woman in her 50s will die of breast cancer over the next 10 years if she undergoes screening. It is .07 percentage points, not .07 percent.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Peggy Orenstein on Rethinking Her Stance on Mammograms

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover article on the public-relations machine fueling breast-cancer awareness and what it means for patients' health. She is the author of several books, most recently "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture."

At what point did you start thinking about writing a follow-up to your article about your initial breast cancer diagnosis?

I had been thinking about it for a long time, because the article in 1997, where I wrote about how a mammogram saved my life, is one of the very few pieces that I regret writing. My thinking around cancer and the politics of cancer and mammography has changed, and I feel that that piece contributed to the very thing I'm pushing back against now. I've written about cancer a little bit over the years, and it's always emotionally difficult. Still, for a few years running I've said to my editor that I really want to do this piece, and she's agreed, but then I've made some self-protective excuse for not doing it. Since I got a diagnosis again last summer, I was forcibly re-immersed in it anyway. Still, even before that I've said to friends and even in public talks that I'm not happy that that old piece is out there on the Internet. These issues around breast cancer are so important to me personally and also in terms of women's health that I felt I had a moral obligation to correct it.

What kind of damage did you think your earlier article did?

I felt it contributed to a few trends that were emerging then but that I saw more strongly over time, like a personal narrative that focuses on early-stage cancer and then recovery, pushing the idea that women get cancer at a very young age more often than they actually do, and overstating the benefits and role of mammography in prognosis. Something I've seen with a lot of friends with cancer is that the diagnosis is so shocking and horrible, and you have to become an expert on something very quickly that you never wanted anything to do with. It's only when you are a little way down the path that you become more thoughtful, analytical and political about it. At first, you just want someone to tell you that it's going to be O.K., and you just want to do what you are told. I've had the opportunity — I guess you'd call it that — to think about this for 15 years and in between two cancer diagnoses and also to see how the mainstream breast-cancer movement has evolved in distressing ways during that time period.

Part of the mainstream breast-cancer-awareness movement is the very clear message: women should get mammograms.

I know, and I feel so negative to say, "Well, that's not true" and "That doesn't prevent it." But being lulled by a false sense of security is not going to help, either. This issue of D.C.I.S. (ductal carcinoma in situ, or ''Stage Zero'' cancer) that I bring up in my article really seems to me like the radical mastectomies of our generation. The reason that lumpectomies and radiation replaced mastectomies is that women advocated for ending the practice of radical mastectomies. This did not come from the medical community. A journalist, Rose Kushner, started that movement. I think that D.C.I.S. patients can sometimes be a casualty in early detection. We need a better way of distinguishing those who are truly at high risk of cancer from those who are not so that we're not maiming and poisoning women unnecessarily. Rather than feeling a false sense of security that mammograms will catch the problem, we need to feel a fresh sense of outrage about risks.

Did any doctor or specialist defend to you the current methods of diagnosing and treating D.C.I.S.?

No. They all said that you find it so you have to deal with it, so it's a conundrum. We need more choices. Laura Esserman, director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco, described the current practice as akin to doing heart surgery on someone who comes in with high cholesterol. (She explained that D.C.I.S. is not cancer, but a risk factor.) One thing that is clear is that the uptick in D.C.I.S. and early-stage cancer diagnoses has not significantly changed late-stage cancer statistics, so if the whole point is to affect the latter that's not happening.

Still, even if it's not all for the good, as your article suggests, breast-cancer advocacy has had an enormous impact.

Yes, and that is due in large part to the women's health movement. In the '70s, first-wave feminism was very serious about making strides in women's health. Before that, women weren't included in medical trials for heart disease; women didn't speak the words "breast cancer" out loud. There were a lot of different strands of the women's health movement that fell all along the political spectrum, but still it made for an organized group. Breast cancer was going up quickly in that period, and nobody knew why. And it was a blameless disease — you didn't get it because you smoked, for example — and it was happening to people's mothers, wives and sisters. Then it got tied in with corporations as a way for them to signal good will to women. All of this contributed to its visibility. I want to be careful in my critique of the current manifestation of this visibility, because I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that we should pay less attention to breast cancer.

You write that there is a precedent for patients effecting change in the way that breast cancer is treated.

Back when Betty Ford came out and said that she had breast cancer, which was a watershed moment in the history of the disease because she actually spoke the words, there was a journalist named Rose Kushner, whom I mentioned earlier and who also had breast cancer. And she questioned the establishment. Back then doctors did the "one-step procedure," which is that when they found a lump, doctors put you under and when you woke up either you had a breast or you didn't. And when you went under, you didn't even know if you had cancer. No biopsies, no discussion of treatment. The doctors made the decision for you. Eventually that treatment was phased out, but at the time, Rose Kushner begged Betty Ford not to do the "one-step procedure," to publicly stand up against it. But Betty Ford said, "The president has made his decision" and did it, because her husband said that's what she should do. And let's remember that Betty Ford had accomplished a lot in helping ease stigma. But already back then, you could see a tension in the breast-cancer-awareness movement that exists today among those who don't question the status quo and medical authority in the same way, and those who question treatments and wonder about toxicity.

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Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer

I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no particular risk factors for the disease.

So when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn't worried. After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to survive.

By coincidence, just a week after my diagnosis, a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health made headlines when it declined to recommend universal screening for women in their 40s; evidence simply didn't show it significantly decreased breast-cancer deaths in that age group. What's more, because of their denser breast tissue, younger women were subject to disproportionate false positives — leading to unnecessary biopsies and worry — as well as false negatives, in which cancer was missed entirely.

Those conclusions hit me like a sucker punch. "I am the person whose life is officially not worth saving," I wrote angrily. When the American Cancer Society as well as the newer Susan G. Komen foundation rejected the panel's findings, saying mammography was still the best tool to decrease breast-cancer mortality, friends across the country called to congratulate me as if I'd scored a personal victory. I considered myself a loud-and-proud example of the benefits of early detection.

Sixteen years later, my thinking has changed. As study after study revealed the limits of screening — and the dangers of overtreatment — a thought niggled at my consciousness. How much had my mammogram really mattered? Would the outcome have been the same had I bumped into the cancer on my own years later? It's hard to argue with a good result. After all, I am alive and grateful to be here. But I've watched friends whose breast cancers were detected "early" die anyway. I've sweated out what blessedly turned out to be false alarms with many others.

Recently, a survey of three decades of screening published in November in The New England Journal of Medicine found that mammography's impact is decidedly mixed: it does reduce, by a small percentage, the number of women who are told they have late-stage cancer, but it is far more likely to result in overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, including surgery, weeks of radiation and potentially toxic drugs. And yet, mammography remains an unquestioned pillar of the pink-ribbon awareness movement. Just about everywhere I go — the supermarket, the dry cleaner, the gym, the gas pump, the movie theater, the airport, the florist, the bank, the mall — I see posters proclaiming that "early detection is the best protection" and "mammograms save lives." But how many lives, exactly, are being "saved," under what circumstances and at what cost? Raising the public profile of breast cancer, a disease once spoken of only in whispers, was at one time critically important, as was emphasizing the benefits of screening. But there are unintended consequences to ever-greater "awareness" — and they, too, affect women's health.

Breast cancer in your breast doesn't kill you; the disease becomes deadly when it metastasizes, spreading to other organs or the bones. Early detection is based on the theory, dating back to the late 19th century, that the disease progresses consistently, beginning with a single rogue cell, growing sequentially and at some invariable point making a lethal leap. Curing it, then, was assumed to be a matter of finding and cutting out a tumor before that metastasis happens.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 27, 2013

An article on Page 36 this weekend about breast cancer awareness misidentifies the reduction in the chance that a woman in her 50s will die from breast cancer over the next 10 years if she undergoes screening.  Is it .07 percentage points, not .07 percent.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Eat: Mushroom Bruschetta That Can Carry a Meal

William Brinson for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

The waitress placed a steak knife on the table, and everyone's eyebrows went up. No one had ordered steak. There was an appetizer course coming. We didn't need a steak knife.

"It's for the mushrooms," she explained.

The restaurant was Balena in Chicago, a soaring room in Lincoln Park across the street from the Steppenwolf Theater. It serves the Italian food that is invariably called rustic but that is really refined: house-cured salumi, wood-fired pizzas, involved pastas and rotisserie meats.

The mushrooms arrived: a deep pile of creminis, roasted and cream-slicked, on top of a wide slab of grilled rye bread. Golden ribbons of caramelized onion peeked out from beneath them. The whole plate seemed to gleam.

Eyebrows went up around the table again. In New York, an appetizer like this would have been the size of an iPhone. Here it resembled a strip steak. Pair it with a watercress salad, and you have a meal in itself.

Which is just what the plan is now: Balena's bruschetta for dinner, as April's showers give way to the loamy scent of May and fresh, wildish mushrooms start popping up at markets courtesy of cultivators and foragers alike. It is a supersize take on a grand old French recipe, champignons à la crème, served on toast.

Balena's chef and one of its owners, Chris Pandel, a son of Chicago who served his apprenticeship in New York cooking for Andrew Carmellini at Café Boulud, gave me the recipe. Extensive experimentation in a Brooklyn home kitchen suggests the dish can be made almost as well as his cooks pull it off in Chicago, though if you have access to a wood-burning oven in which to roast the mushrooms, you may well match the original for smokiness.

Start by making the caramelized onions. These take a great deal of time. As Tom Scocca wrote in Slate some time ago, "Browning onions is a matter of patience." Scocca was sick of recipes that did not make this point. His article was a rant against recipe writers who do not tell the truth: "Soft, dark brown onions in five minutes. That is a lie. Fully caramelized onions in five minutes more. Also a lie." The onions here, barely slicked with neutral oil, surrounded by sweet wine, can take up to 30 minutes to achieve the excellence you are looking for. You stir and stir and stir.

"The simple things always take a lot of time," Pandel said. "But it's worth it for the nuttiness you get at the end, when the onions begin to turn toward dark."

Mushrooms next: Agaricus bisporus, the common mushrooms known at various points of their growth as white or button mushrooms, or champignons. These become creminis or baby bellas as they grow. Eventually they are portobellos. Handle them with care, whatever their name. "It's important to learn how to clean mushrooms without really getting them wet," Pandel said. You can get most of the dirt off them with your fingers, brushing their caps and stems softly. If water is necessary, make it ice-cold and use it sparingly, then dry the mushrooms quickly and gently with a paper towel.

Pan-roasting the mushrooms takes nearly as much time as the onions. The process is fascinating. The mushrooms absorb the cooking fats almost immediately, then exude it after their water has been evaporated by the heat. (Be careful not to overcrowd them in the pan.) Like the onions, they will eventually begin to caramelize and achieve a velvety texture. Shallots and thyme add depth to the mushrooms. Cream only adds to this effect. You want a loose mixture. It should look rich as sin.

For the toast, Pandel uses rye from a recipe by Balena's former bread maker, Peter Becker. It is substantial and sour, impressively dense, and holds up brilliantly to the fire in their grill. Its taste is a perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the onions, the mushrooms, the cream. Still, a store-bought version toasted beneath the broiler worked exceedingly well at home. Make sure that you slice it thick, so that the bread has bulk enough to hold up to its topping.

I served one or two pieces per person alongside a thatch of watercress dressed sparingly with vinaigrette, and you may wish to do the same — though smaller, New York-style portions would work as appetizers if you prefer. The steak knife is necessary in only the first case.

Endeavor, whatever you do, to cook the food for someone attractive. Champignons à la crème has magical powers, Jane Grigson intimates in her invaluable guide to fungi cookery, "The Mushroom Feast," published in 1975. Grigson recalls a grand old French film featuring Françoise Rosay as a wealthy, older woman conspiring with her maid to seduce a handsome, younger man. How? The maid cooks champignons à la crème for dinner. And that, Grigson wrote, was the end for him.

"I am not sure which was the major attraction," she writes. "Probably, being a French film, the mushrooms — together they were irresistible."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Playing With Light in the Darkness

Every other year, the Festival des Arts Visuels, which is devoted to photography and held in Vevey, Switzerland, selects an artist to receive $42,000 to fund a new project. As a member of the festival's jury last week, I helped review the work of 750 photographers from 63 countries. The winner was Augustin Rebetez, a young Swiss whose photos, videos and drawings can be frightening yet weirdly playful and touching. Awkward home scenes, with walls that come to life and beds that breathe, are filled with demented twists and creepy characters. The fairytale world of his videos is as unsettling as the early work of David Lynch and the claymation art of Nathalie Djurberg — but also tender in the way that Tim Burton's work can be.

Rebetez likes to work in Norway in the winter because of the long, dark days there. The video "The Dinner of the Lonely Man" was made in an empty house in the country's north that he has returned to several times over the years. He had been told that the owner of the house, whom he never met but who can be seen in the video's painting, lived by himself and was very lonely. That loneliness inspired the video's love story.

This morning I spoke with Rebetez about his work over the phone — he was in Lagos, Nigeria, to premiere a film, "Cowboy Noir," that he shot with collective he belongs to. "I always work at night," he told me. "I never take pictures during the day. If I have to work during the day, I will close the curtains and make it black. If you go to the theater, it won't be a white cube like in a gallery. It will be a black cube. Night has a power. I often use a flashlight. I always use my light."

Rebetez often works in abandoned spaces that happen to be rich with objects he can use in his videos and photographs. The phones below, for example, came from an old cupboard in an abandoned graphite mine in Norway. "They were like a treasure for me," he said, "these old phones, not able to communicate anymore." So he tried to make something "like a labyrinth, like a maze" out of them.

This picture is an example of Rebetez's recurring interest in dreams and home.

And these roller skates show how the objects in his photos often take on human characteristics.

"I am not able to take something as it exists," Rebetez said of his work. "I have to find a way to change something. When I draw people I do them with three hands or with the leg behind the head." That's why he plans to use his grant money to photograph circus performers. "I would like to bring acrobats into my work because they are people who can do things with their bodies that other people can't. I need people who can do some crazy things with their bodies. I will make crazy pictures. "

Here is an excerpt from a more recent video by Rebetez, called "Maison":

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Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer

I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no particular risk factors for the disease.

So when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn't worried. After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to survive.

By coincidence, just a week after my diagnosis, a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health made headlines when it declined to recommend universal screening for women in their 40s; evidence simply didn't show it significantly decreased breast-cancer deaths in that age group. What's more, because of their denser breast tissue, younger women were subject to disproportionate false positives — leading to unnecessary biopsies and worry — as well as false negatives, in which cancer was missed entirely.

Those conclusions hit me like a sucker punch. "I am the person whose life is officially not worth saving," I wrote angrily. When the American Cancer Society as well as the newer Susan G. Komen foundation rejected the panel's findings, saying mammography was still the best tool to decrease breast-cancer mortality, friends across the country called to congratulate me as if I'd scored a personal victory. I considered myself a loud-and-proud example of the benefits of early detection.

Sixteen years later, my thinking has changed. As study after study revealed the limits of screening — and the dangers of overtreatment — a thought niggled at my consciousness. How much had my mammogram really mattered? Would the outcome have been the same had I bumped into the cancer on my own years later? It's hard to argue with a good result. After all, I am alive and grateful to be here. But I've watched friends whose breast cancers were detected "early" die anyway. I've sweated out what blessedly turned out to be false alarms with many others.

Recently, a survey of three decades of screening published in November in The New England Journal of Medicine found that mammography's impact is decidedly mixed: it does reduce, by a small percentage, the number of women who are told they have late-stage cancer, but it is far more likely to result in overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, including surgery, weeks of radiation and potentially toxic drugs. And yet, mammography remains an unquestioned pillar of the pink-ribbon awareness movement. Just about everywhere I go — the supermarket, the dry cleaner, the gym, the gas pump, the movie theater, the airport, the florist, the bank, the mall — I see posters proclaiming that "early detection is the best protection" and "mammograms save lives." But how many lives, exactly, are being "saved," under what circumstances and at what cost? Raising the public profile of breast cancer, a disease once spoken of only in whispers, was at one time critically important, as was emphasizing the benefits of screening. But there are unintended consequences to ever-greater "awareness" — and they, too, affect women's health.

Breast cancer in your breast doesn't kill you; the disease becomes deadly when it metastasizes, spreading to other organs or the bones. Early detection is based on the theory, dating back to the late 19th century, that the disease progresses consistently, beginning with a single rogue cell, growing sequentially and at some invariable point making a lethal leap. Curing it, then, was assumed to be a matter of finding and cutting out a tumor before that metastasis happens.

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The 6th Floor Blog: The Exploding Floral Inevitable

It seemed like a never-ending winter this year in the Northeast. Every time warm weather emerged in the past few weeks, another blast of cold quickly followed, leaving us skeptical as to whether spring would ever really come. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why Fong Qi Wei's series "Exploded Flowers" seemed so apt when I came upon it on one one of my favorite art and design blogs, Colossal. Wei disassembled and photographed 20 varieties of flowers, arranging each blossom's pieces to emphasize its radial symmetry. It's a graphic and colorful way of looking at one of nature's most recognizable symbols of spring. Wei started the series in 2011 and finished last November; the images have been making the rounds on various design blogs recently because five of the pictures won second place as a series in the 2012 International Photography Awards. For more of Wei's images, check out the entire series.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Pop Relief From the Generationals

Innocence was regained for an hour or so last night during a late set by the New Orleans duo the Generationals at the Bowery Ballroom on
the Lower East Side. They've been roaming the indie circuit for a few years, and a couple of their songs — "When They Fight, They Fight" and "Ten-Twenty-Ten" — have been heard in movies or in TV shows or commercials. Even if they did leave out one of my favorite tracks, "Carrying the Torch," the reaction to last night's show proved that salvation can still be found in well-written three-minute pop songs with freshly showered hooks, delivered at full nozzle.

The duo's latest album, "Heza," came out earlier this month; they'll be playing again tonight at the Rock Shop in Brooklyn.

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Eat: Mushroom Bruschetta That Can Carry a Meal

William Brinson for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

The waitress placed a steak knife on the table, and everyone's eyebrows went up. No one had ordered steak. There was an appetizer course coming. We didn't need a steak knife.

"It's for the mushrooms," she explained.

The restaurant was Balena in Chicago, a soaring room in Lincoln Park across the street from the Steppenwolf Theater. It serves the Italian food that is invariably called rustic but that is really refined: house-cured salumi, wood-fired pizzas, involved pastas and rotisserie meats.

The mushrooms arrived: a deep pile of creminis, roasted and cream-slicked, on top of a wide slab of grilled rye bread. Golden ribbons of caramelized onion peeked out from beneath them. The whole plate seemed to gleam.

Eyebrows went up around the table again. In New York, an appetizer like this would have been the size of an iPhone. Here it resembled a strip steak. Pair it with a watercress salad, and you have a meal in itself.

Which is just what the plan is now: Balena's bruschetta for dinner, as April's showers give way to the loamy scent of May and fresh, wildish mushrooms start popping up at markets courtesy of cultivators and foragers alike. It is a supersize take on a grand old French recipe, champignons à la crème, served on toast.

Balena's chef and one of its owners, Chris Pandel, a son of Chicago who served his apprenticeship in New York cooking for Andrew Carmellini at Café Boulud, gave me the recipe. Extensive experimentation in a Brooklyn home kitchen suggests the dish can be made almost as well as his cooks pull it off in Chicago, though if you have access to a wood-burning oven in which to roast the mushrooms, you may well match the original for smokiness.

Start by making the caramelized onions. These take a great deal of time. As Tom Scocca wrote in Slate some time ago, "Browning onions is a matter of patience." Scocca was sick of recipes that did not make this point. His article was a rant against recipe writers who do not tell the truth: "Soft, dark brown onions in five minutes. That is a lie. Fully caramelized onions in five minutes more. Also a lie." The onions here, barely slicked with neutral oil, surrounded by sweet wine, can take up to 30 minutes to achieve the excellence you are looking for. You stir and stir and stir.

"The simple things always take a lot of time," Pandel said. "But it's worth it for the nuttiness you get at the end, when the onions begin to turn toward dark."

Mushrooms next: Agaricus bisporus, the common mushrooms known at various points of their growth as white or button mushrooms, or champignons. These become creminis or baby bellas as they grow. Eventually they are portobellos. Handle them with care, whatever their name. "It's important to learn how to clean mushrooms without really getting them wet," Pandel said. You can get most of the dirt off them with your fingers, brushing their caps and stems softly. If water is necessary, make it ice-cold and use it sparingly, then dry the mushrooms quickly and gently with a paper towel.

Pan-roasting the mushrooms takes nearly as much time as the onions. The process is fascinating. The mushrooms absorb the cooking fats almost immediately, then exude it after their water has been evaporated by the heat. (Be careful not to overcrowd them in the pan.) Like the onions, they will eventually begin to caramelize and achieve a velvety texture. Shallots and thyme add depth to the mushrooms. Cream only adds to this effect. You want a loose mixture. It should look rich as sin.

For the toast, Pandel uses rye from a recipe by Balena's former bread maker, Peter Becker. It is substantial and sour, impressively dense, and holds up brilliantly to the fire in their grill. Its taste is a perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the onions, the mushrooms, the cream. Still, a store-bought version toasted beneath the broiler worked exceedingly well at home. Make sure that you slice it thick, so that the bread has bulk enough to hold up to its topping.

I served one or two pieces per person alongside a thatch of watercress dressed sparingly with vinaigrette, and you may wish to do the same — though smaller, New York-style portions would work as appetizers if you prefer. The steak knife is necessary in only the first case.

Endeavor, whatever you do, to cook the food for someone attractive. Champignons à la crème has magical powers, Jane Grigson intimates in her invaluable guide to fungi cookery, "The Mushroom Feast," published in 1975. Grigson recalls a grand old French film featuring Françoise Rosay as a wealthy, older woman conspiring with her maid to seduce a handsome, younger man. How? The maid cooks champignons à la crème for dinner. And that, Grigson wrote, was the end for him.

"I am not sure which was the major attraction," she writes. "Probably, being a French film, the mushrooms — together they were irresistible."

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Brian Stelter on the Drama at the ‘Today’ Show

Brian Stelter, a media reporter for The Times, wrote this week's cover article about the struggle to save the "Today" show. His new book, "Top of the Morning," comes out tomorrow.

This article is adapted from your new book about morning television. Of all of the media reporting that you do, why did you choose to write a book on this in particular?

Morning shows set the television agenda for the day ahead, their advertising revenues basically subsidize the network news divisions that produce them and their attempts to balance news and entertainment are awfully hilarious to watch. Millions of Americans treat anchors like Matt Lauer and Robin Roberts like extended members of their families. But the shows haven't been subject to the same sort of scrutiny that network evening newscasts and cable news channels have. I saw an opening. As it turned out, "Top of the Morning" is really two books in one — the first is about the "Today" show, and the second is about "Good Morning America."

Why do the morning shows make such an enormous amount of money?

As the American television audience fractures into hundreds of pieces, the biggest pieces can charge advertisers a premium. That's what "Today" and "G.M.A." represent. Together they attract 10 million viewers every morning, including several million middle-aged women, precisely the demographic that morning advertisers will pay handsomely to talk to. They're not the only financial hope for NBC and ABC, but they're a bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture. Thus the "Today" show's fall to second place last year, after more than 16 years in first place, wasn't just a disappointment to the egos of NBC News — it was devastating.

You describe a somewhat troubling "boys' club" atmosphere at the "Today" show. How common is that at the networks?

It's more common than we'd like to think. I'm not aware of any bullying behavior at "G.M.A." or at other morning shows. But these shows are mostly run by men, even though there are a plethora of women behind the scenes. The chief executives of all the companies that own these shows (there are a dozen of them on broadcast and cable) are also men. In my reporting I was struck by something that Ann Curry said to her friends after being demoted. When TV critics said she lacked chemistry with Matt Lauer, she heard a euphemism being employed: she said "chemistry" is "an excuse generally used by men in positions of power to say, 'The woman doesn't work.'" And she rattled off historical examples, like CBS's pairing of Connie Chung and Dan Rather and ABC's pairing of Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner.

I wondered if the effort to replace Curry on the "Today" show was called "Operation Bambi" because she was so new or because she was seen as doelike and not tough enough?

"Doelike" is a great way to put it. The concern was that demoting Curry would be akin to "killing Bambi," meaning that it would upset millions of her fans. Looking back, I think there's a consensus view, at least at NBC, that replacing Curry with Savannah Guthrie was the right thing to do, but that the people in charge went about it the wrong way. I personally wonder whether the alternative propounded by Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, was the right way. He wanted to wait until the end of the year before making any changes on the show, but he was overruled. We'll never know if that was the right way to go.

On the one hand, Curry was aggressively self-promotional. On the other, she was perhaps too emotional on television. But all the fan letters make it sound as if she had legions of supporters. Did they tend to be women?

That's right. Two-thirds of "Today" show viewers are women, and Curry was beloved by many of those women. Now, to be fair, others could barely stand her. But her fans punished "Today" for pushing her out — they turned the channel en masse the day after she signed off. Your point about Curry seeming too emotional is right on. Her overreactions were a turnoff to many women and men alike. For what it's worth, I don't think she was acting; unfortunately, the more emotional she was, the less sincere her emotions seemed to the viewers at home.

"Good Morning America" was always on in my house as a kid. What accounts for what the industry calls "the streak," when "Today" began defeating "G.M.A." in the ratings every week starting in late 1995?

Picture "Today" and "Good Morning America" as if they're children on a seesaw. Every time one goes up, the other goes down. The reasons are almost always the same: one competitor makes some smart choices (hiring a new host, focusing on crime or celebrity news, etc.) while the other screws up for one reason or another. In the mid-1990s, the perceived screw-ups by "G.M.A." were numerous and enormous — there were cast shake-ups, there were ABC managers who didn't know what they were doing and there were internal critics who were undermining the show, to name a few. Crucially, at the same time "G.M.A." was getting stale, "Today" was doing everything right. NBC was featuring a new street-level studio, it was giving viewers what they wanted (daily coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, outdoor concerts) and it was playing up the popularity of its on-air family. Katie Couric was becoming America's Sweetheart. Matt Lauer was being named People magazine's "sexiest anchor." All of this gave "Today" a distinct advantage on the seesaw. But the choices made by "G.M.A." in 2011 — an emphasis on entertainment news, an ensemble of five co-hosts who genuinely liked one another — allowed it to get back on top after "Today" promoted and then demoted Ann Curry. The seesawing goes on and on.

If the networks are so concerned about what their audience thinks, why don't they just poll them? That way they could find out — for example — if Savannah Guthrie really is seen as "the replacement wife."

They do; NBC is actually the most data-driven of the three network news divisions. Executives bring up their focus groups and surveys in almost every private conversation I have with them. While some viewers rejected Guthrie after she replaced Curry, she wasn't grievously wounded the way some worried she would be. I think most viewers sensed that she hadn't set out to get Curry's job; in fact, she was downright reluctant to take the job when it was offered to her. The most recent data I've seen shows that Guthrie is well liked among people who know who she is — but many people barely recognize her, even nine months after her promotion. It's going to take a while before she's as well known as Lauer and Curry.

What do you think the odds are that "G.M.A" or "Today" would radically change the formula in pursuit of greater profits? Were any "nuclear" options discussed? Or will the tabloid approach remain?

Radical changes to "Today" and "G.M.A." are almost out of the question. Morning TV is all about consistency — that's partly why the only real morning innovation in the last few years has come from cable, specifically "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, which did away with some of the fake warm and fuzziness of the network shows. Lately CBS, the perennial also-ran of morning TV, has also tinkered with the formula, and what it has tried — hard news, intellectual interviews, very few viral videos or funny-looking animals — has shown some early signs of success. The network remains in third place though.

What has the reaction been like to your story so far? Have you heard from the networks?

When The Huffington Post asked NBC to comment on the article, the network responded, "We are focused on covering several major news stories this week and producing the best show we can for our viewers, not on year-old gossip." Smart answer, I thought. What they labeled "gossip" garnered a huge amount of attention on the Web, though, which I think gets to the core of the network's conundrum: it never really explained why Curry was removed or what Lauer's role was. Whenever there's an information vacuum, the Web will try to fill it.

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The 6th Floor Blog: When Is a Chimp Not a Chimp?

Up there on my totally mundane list of repeat New Year's resolutions each year, right after "drink more water," is "listen to more podcasts." I know there's great stuff happening out there in podcastland — I just haven't succeeded in carving out a regular place in my schedule for exploring it. The subway is too loud and my headphones are too weak for podcasts to join me on my commute, and if I took podcasts on my runs, they'd prevent me from enjoying shouted snippets of conversations from passing cyclists in fancy spandex.

So it took me many weeks to get around to listening to an episode of Radiolab that came up in conversation the other day — a mention either triggered by or triggering a heated discussion about whether, were you to inhabit an island with only one other creature, you'd rather that creature be a human or a chimp. (Human, obviously. But apparently not everyone agrees.)

In this episode, Charles Siebert, a contributing writer for the magazine, tells the story of Lucy, a chimpanzee who was raised by the psychologist Dr. Maurice K. Temerlin and his wife in their home and taught to be in many ways more human than chimp. There are powerful images (Temerlin's stumbling upon Lucy masturbating), creepy decisions (Temerlin's buying Lucy a Playgirl to look at while masturbating) and wrenching twists.

I had heard the portion of this episode that appeared on "This American Life" a couple of years ago, but it's worth listening to the whole hourlong version. If you weren't already inclined to share your deserted island with a human rather than a chimp (which, I mean, duh), this may sway you.

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It’s the Economy: Who Says New York Is Not Affordable?

One of the first things you learn when living in New York is that what qualifies as wealthy somewhere else seems barely middle-class here. On the Upper West Side, where I live, it's hard not to feel as if Manhattan is impossibly expensive for young professionals. The average nondoorman, one-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood rents for about $2,500 a month. Oatmeal-raisin cookies at Levain Bakery cost $4 each. A pair of sensible, unstylish walking flats from Harry's Shoes can set you back $480. I suppose, by comparison, that the $198 chef's menu at Jean-Georges doesn't sound so ridiculous.

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Deep thoughts this week:

1. New Yorkers don't shop like other Americans.

2. Which is good news for some and bad news for others.

3. Hello, Houston!

New Yorkers assume that we live in the most expensive city in the country, and cost-of-living indexes tend to back up that assertion. But those measures are built around the typical American's shopping habits, which don't really apply to the typical New Yorker — especially not college-educated New Yorkers with annual household incomes in the top income quintile, or around $100,000. According to a recent study by Jessie Handbury, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, people in different income classes do indeed have markedly different purchasing habits. That may not be surprising, but once you account for these different preferences, it turns out that living in New York is actually a relative bargain for the wealthy.

While compiling her research, Handbury looked at Nielsen shopping data for 40,000 American households, across more than 500 food categories, with details on everything from organic labeling to salt content. Remarkably, she found that for households earning above $100,000, grocery costs are 20 percent lower in cities with a high per-capita income (like New York) than in cities with a low per-capita income (like New Orleans). There's evidence that the same forces hold true for other products that cater to upper-income people, from high-end retail to beauty services. The average manicure, for example, is about $3 cheaper in New York City than in each of the rest of the top 10 biggest cities in the United States, according to Centzy, a company that collects data on the prices of services.

Part of the reason high-income residents get good deals, Handbury explains, results from a particular economic system. Highly educated, high-income New Yorkers are surrounded by equally well-educated and well-paid people with similar tastes. More vendors compete for their business, which effectively lowers prices and provides variety. There's also a high fixed cost to distributing a niche product to an area; if there's more demand for that product, then the fixed cost can be spread across more customers, which will justify bringing the product to the market in the first place. That's why companies go through the expensive hassle of distributing, say, St. Dalfour French fruit spreads in rich cities but not in poor ones and why New York can support institutions like the Metropolitan Opera.

Of course, not everything that wealthy New Yorkers spend money on is cheaper here. Housing, after all, is absurdly expensive, even for the rich. Complex zoning regulations and limited land make it all but impossible for supply to grow alongside demand. Still, it's somewhat unfair to compare housing costs here to those in a place like Buffalo, or even Atlanta, since perks like access to amenities and unusually lucrative jobs are baked into the cost of New York real estate. Yet those higher rents all but ensure that tenants will appreciate an amazing bakery or a fancy shoe store — and that retailers will have to lower prices to compete for their business. Regardless, the rent burden isn't actually as onerous as people assume: the typical resident here pays roughly the same share of her income in rent as does her counterpart in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston, according to N.Y.U.'s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Professional-class workers who like to moan about the cost of living in New York — and I'm including myself in this group — don't realize how spoiled we are by both variety and competitive pricing. Truthfully, things seem more expensive here because there's just way more high-end stuff around to tempt us, and we don't do the mental accounting to adjust sticker prices for the higher quality. We see a sensible shoe with a $480 price tag or an oatmeal cookie for $4 and sometimes don't register that these are luxury versions of normal items available from Payless or Entenmann's. The problem, in part, is that people tend to anchor their own expectations for what they should buy based on what their neighbors are buying, not what some abstract, median American buys. It's a phenomenon known by some as affluenza, and it partly explains the overborrowing by the lower and middle classes during the bubble years, when their incomes were flat but their high-income neighbors' incomes were growing phenomenally.

Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The Times. Adam Davidson is off this week.

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Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God

Dominic Bracco II/Prime, for The New York Times

The Rev. Robert Coogan waits to exit the prison in Saltillo, Mexico. More Photos »

Early on a December morning, Robert Coogan pulled his red Chevy hatchback into the parking lot of the state prison in Saltillo, Mexico. It was frigid outside, the sun had not yet cleared the reddish mountains, and Coogan lingered, staring at the tall black letters on the prison's high walls: "CERESO" — Centro de Reinserción Social, the place where criminals are supposed to be reformed. Coogan, who has served as chaplain at the prison for a decade, slowly pulled himself from the warm car. In dark jeans, brown boots and a thick gray sweater, he looked more like a factory foreman than a Brooklyn-born priest. He wore no clerical collar, just a necklace of pendants with images of the Virgin Mary and Christ on the cross.

Inside the prison's main building, Coogan tossed his keys onto the counter, and the guard on duty shook himself awake. "Buenos días, Padre," the guard said, placing the keys on a hook as Coogan, 60, walked through a metal detector that failed to register his large silver belt buckle. "Buenos días," Coogan said. He headed up a flight of stairs and down an empty hallway toward a thick steel door that opened into the general prison population. A heavyset guard let Coogan in, and with the morning chill aggravating an old running injury, he marched to the chapel just off the prison's central plaza. A few minutes later, he was at the altar for the 7:40 a.m. Mass.

As usual, only a dozen or so prisoners showed up. Most of the 700 inmates — murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers and the innocent among them — were heading to work in one of the prison's factories or carpentry shops. A crew of musclebound Zetas — Mexico's most feared criminal syndicate, which runs the Cereso from the inside — sat on red plastic chairs outside the chapel and watched the prisoners pass by, making sure they went where the Zetas' comandante wanted them to go.

As soon as the Mass was over, Coogan grabbed his portable priest kit — a red laundry basket with wrinkled vestments, hosts in Tupperware and holy water and wine in plastic soda bottles — and quickly made his way to the maximum-security unit, a separate building at the prison's southeastern corner, where a prisoner whom I'll refer to as M. stood waiting for him on the other side of a gate. There wasn't a guard to be seen. They rarely venture inside, Coogan explained, preferring to leave the job of discipline to the Zetas. A few minutes later, a prisoner working for the cartel, in dark sunglasses and cargo pants, showed up to let us into the unit.

M. had been in prison for about three years. He was normally a regular at morning Mass, skinny and skittish, with light eyes, and he had recently grown a scruffy beard. "You look like you belong on 'Lost,' " Coogan said when he greeted him. Unlike other prisoners, M. actually had a family of some means, and in a prison system without uniforms, his style often seemed more appropriate for an indie rock club. His sneakers were clean and hip; his jeans had designer labels.

Inside maximum, M. shared space not just with hard-core Zetas but also with inmates too insane to be kept anywhere else — including one who refused to wear clothes and spoke to angels. He slept little, like any prey encircled by predators, and that morning he anxiously greeted Coogan's arrival, signaling immediately with darting eyes that he needed to talk privately. Coogan followed him into the yard, where M. pulled out a Bible for cover and positioned himself near a faraway wall. There, he explained that the Zetas wanted him to pay them 2,000 pesos ($165), with the first half due at noon the next day. Coogan, brightening the dusty pen with his purple robes, nodded as M. spoke. He had paid small ransoms to keep M. safe from the Zetas twice already, but this latest demand was larger, more than a week's pay. He wasn't sure whether the Zetas were serious or if they were just toying with M. He also didn't know if M. could be trusted. M. claimed to be locked up because a friend stole a television and he was taking the rap, but other inmates doubted his story and said he was a schemer. Coogan considered his options. Paying the Zetas would encourage extortion, but ignoring the threat, or confronting the Zetas directly, could get M. beaten or killed.

"Why don't you talk to your parents?" Coogan asked.

"I don't get any support from my parents," M. said. His eyes widened with doubt; the priest wasn't going to help? He flipped through a few pages of the Old Testament. "I don't want any problems," he said. "They said, 'If you don't pay, you know what's going to happen.' I've seen them kill people."

Coogan gently pushed the dirt around with his boots, then bent down and picked up a piece of petrified wood, turning it over in his hands. On the wall behind him loomed a painting of a giant clown with blood-red shoes and a demented smile, the tag of the comandante. All over the Cereso, images of the demented clown appeared. The symbolism was obvious: the Zetas were always watching.

Mexico's federal ombudsman for human rights said last year that around 60 percent of the country's prisons were run by inmates. More than 1,000 prisoners have escaped since 2006, often dozens at a time, and hundreds more have been murdered along with an untold number of guards. When I asked the warden at the Saltillo Cereso about the power structure inside, even he did not deny it. Standing near his office, unshaven and exhausted, he emphasized that peace was the priority, not control. "Estamos tranquilo," he said. "We're calm."

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Look: Making Art With Tom Waits

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The 6th Floor Blog: Revisiting Chechnya

Like everyone else, I woke this morning to news of the shootout and the manhunt in Boston, which was soon followed by the revelation that the two suspects were Chechen — or born to Chechen parents — and that they were raised, before coming to the United States, in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya and was attacked in the late '90s by Chechen rebels bent on creating a single Islamist state. What I thought of almost immediately was an article that Elizabeth Rubin wrote for this magazine back in the summer of 2001, which I was lucky enough to edit. "Only You Can Save Your Sons" is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, as powerful and haunting as any magazine article I've ever read. It turned out that other editors here at the magazine were thinking about Elizabeth's story, too, and as the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the day turned to questions of whether the Tsarnaev brothers were influenced by the Chechen war — and as the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the root of the Tsarnaev's "evil" lay in America and not in Chechnya — it seemed like a good idea to reach out to Elizabeth and get her thoughts, which follow below, on the Chechnya she experienced then and its connection, or lack of connection, to the men thought to have bombed the Boston Marathon.

---

Elizabeth Rubin writes:

My first thought after I read that the Boston bombers were Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, from Chechnya was: Poor Chechnya. Do the Chechens really need another violent stain on their image? And what do all these people who they killed and maimed at the Boston Marathon have to do with their plight and rage? We don't know yet how the brothers, who have moved around quite a bit in their short lives, became infected with the idea that violence against unrelated innocents could possibly fix whatever personal and political wrongs they faced. Their uncle is telling reporters that the boys are losers, a shame on Chechnya. He does not want to dignify them with a cause, and maybe he is right.

I went to Chechnya in the winter and spring of 2001, during the second Chechen war, when Tamerlan would have been around 14 and Dzhokhar around 7. I lived with Chechen families, with mothers whose sons were missing, rounded up by Russian soldiers and dropped into fetid pits in the ground, left for months to howl in the dark.

Needless to say, it was a chaotic time. Chechen society was so crushed physically, emotionally, psychologically, that I remember a mother telling me: "Trust my sister? I don't even trust my own shadow." Few had money. And you could earn fast cash, enough money for a meal or some fuel to drive your car, by selling information to the Russians. There was almost no electricity or heat. The buildings were carcasses. And the Russians, too, were paranoid. One evening I heard that just that morning a girl living downstairs had poked her head out the window maybe to gaze on the view below or get some fresh air, and a Russian sniper, thinking she was a sniper scoping him out, shot her in the head. No one I met was sane.

Every day I met beautiful young Chechen boys who told me they were ready to blow themselves and the Russians up until every last Russian soldier left their soil. They had lost a brother, a sister, a parent, and they would never stop avenging those deaths. The Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary and can last a century or more. I remember a 46-year-old Chechen commander who was a professor of philology telling me: "This generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They'll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won't value their own or anyone else's lives." That was 2001.

We don't know if that was the journey of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and who knows if we'll ever fully know. But there is another Chechnya I remember, and want to leave you with it, lest we tarnish the whole nation. There was Hava, a 17-year-old girl, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She had learned English by memorizing five Dickens novels. She could recite them and knew what every word meant. She wanted to be a teacher of English literature. "I know if you have a goal you will reach it," she told me. "And mine is to be the best master of English in Chechnya!" There was the librarian in Grozny still attempting, amid unimaginable terror and chaos, to preserve shelves and shelves of Russian books. There is the image of my friend frying up chirimshala, wild garlic root greens that grow only in Chechnya under the snow. She was obsessed with their health properties and said they possessed the only nutrients that could stave off the poison from the bombs, the fires and the methane gas that was the Grozny air. And there was the rigor of Chechen tradition that has held families together through deportation and wars. These were people with a sense of shared cultural history who were doing everything the could to hang onto it even as it was breaking down.

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Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God

Dominic Bracco II/Prime, for The New York Times

The Rev. Robert Coogan waits to exit the prison in Saltillo, Mexico. More Photos »

Early on a December morning, Robert Coogan pulled his red Chevy hatchback into the parking lot of the state prison in Saltillo, Mexico. It was frigid outside, the sun had not yet cleared the reddish mountains, and Coogan lingered, staring at the tall black letters on the prison's high walls: "CERESO" — Centro de Reinserción Social, the place where criminals are supposed to be reformed. Coogan, who has served as chaplain at the prison for a decade, slowly pulled himself from the warm car. In dark jeans, brown boots and a thick gray sweater, he looked more like a factory foreman than a Brooklyn-born priest. He wore no clerical collar, just a necklace of pendants with images of the Virgin Mary and Christ on the cross.

Inside the prison's main building, Coogan tossed his keys onto the counter, and the guard on duty shook himself awake. "Buenos días, Padre," the guard said, placing the keys on a hook as Coogan, 60, walked through a metal detector that failed to register his large silver belt buckle. "Buenos días," Coogan said. He headed up a flight of stairs and down an empty hallway toward a thick steel door that opened into the general prison population. A heavyset guard let Coogan in, and with the morning chill aggravating an old running injury, he marched to the chapel just off the prison's central plaza. A few minutes later, he was at the altar for the 7:40 a.m. Mass.

As usual, only a dozen or so prisoners showed up. Most of the 700 inmates — murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers and the innocent among them — were heading to work in one of the prison's factories or carpentry shops. A crew of musclebound Zetas — Mexico's most feared criminal syndicate, which runs the Cereso from the inside — sat on red plastic chairs outside the chapel and watched the prisoners pass by, making sure they went where the Zetas' comandante wanted them to go.

As soon as the Mass was over, Coogan grabbed his portable priest kit — a red laundry basket with wrinkled vestments, hosts in Tupperware and holy water and wine in plastic soda bottles — and quickly made his way to the maximum-security unit, a separate building at the prison's southeastern corner, where a prisoner whom I'll refer to as M. stood waiting for him on the other side of a gate. There wasn't a guard to be seen. They rarely venture inside, Coogan explained, preferring to leave the job of discipline to the Zetas. A few minutes later, a prisoner working for the cartel, in dark sunglasses and cargo pants, showed up to let us into the unit.

M. had been in prison for about three years. He was normally a regular at morning Mass, skinny and skittish, with light eyes, and he had recently grown a scruffy beard. "You look like you belong on 'Lost,' " Coogan said when he greeted him. Unlike other prisoners, M. actually had a family of some means, and in a prison system without uniforms, his style often seemed more appropriate for an indie rock club. His sneakers were clean and hip; his jeans had designer labels.

Inside maximum, M. shared space not just with hard-core Zetas but also with inmates too insane to be kept anywhere else — including one who refused to wear clothes and spoke to angels. He slept little, like any prey encircled by predators, and that morning he anxiously greeted Coogan's arrival, signaling immediately with darting eyes that he needed to talk privately. Coogan followed him into the yard, where M. pulled out a Bible for cover and positioned himself near a faraway wall. There, he explained that the Zetas wanted him to pay them 2,000 pesos ($165), with the first half due at noon the next day. Coogan, brightening the dusty pen with his purple robes, nodded as M. spoke. He had paid small ransoms to keep M. safe from the Zetas twice already, but this latest demand was larger, more than a week's pay. He wasn't sure whether the Zetas were serious or if they were just toying with M. He also didn't know if M. could be trusted. M. claimed to be locked up because a friend stole a television and he was taking the rap, but other inmates doubted his story and said he was a schemer. Coogan considered his options. Paying the Zetas would encourage extortion, but ignoring the threat, or confronting the Zetas directly, could get M. beaten or killed.

"Why don't you talk to your parents?" Coogan asked.

"I don't get any support from my parents," M. said. His eyes widened with doubt; the priest wasn't going to help? He flipped through a few pages of the Old Testament. "I don't want any problems," he said. "They said, 'If you don't pay, you know what's going to happen.' I've seen them kill people."

Coogan gently pushed the dirt around with his boots, then bent down and picked up a piece of petrified wood, turning it over in his hands. On the wall behind him loomed a painting of a giant clown with blood-red shoes and a demented smile, the tag of the comandante. All over the Cereso, images of the demented clown appeared. The symbolism was obvious: the Zetas were always watching.

Mexico's federal ombudsman for human rights said last year that around 60 percent of the country's prisons were run by inmates. More than 1,000 prisoners have escaped since 2006, often dozens at a time, and hundreds more have been murdered along with an untold number of guards. When I asked the warden at the Saltillo Cereso about the power structure inside, even he did not deny it. Standing near his office, unshaven and exhausted, he emphasized that peace was the priority, not control. "Estamos tranquilo," he said. "We're calm."

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Look: Making Art With Tom Waits

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Revisiting Chechnya

Like everyone else, I woke this morning to news of the shootout and the manhunt in Boston, which was soon followed by the revelation that the two suspects were Chechen — or born to Chechen parents — and that they were raised, before coming to the United States, in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya and was attacked in the late '90s by Chechen rebels bent on creating a single Islamist state. What I thought of almost immediately was an article that Elizabeth Rubin wrote for this magazine back in the summer of 2001, which I was lucky enough to edit. "Only You Can Save Your Sons" is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, as powerful and haunting as any magazine article I've ever read. It turned out that other editors here at the magazine were thinking about Elizabeth's story, too, and as the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the day turned to questions of whether the Tsarnaev brothers were influenced by the Chechen war — and as the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the root of the Tsarnaev's "evil" lay in America and not in Chechnya — it seemed like a good idea to reach out to Elizabeth and get her thoughts, which follow below, on the Chechnya she experienced then and its connection, or lack of connection, to the men thought to have bombed the Boston Marathon.

---

Elizabeth Rubin writes:

My first thought after I read that the Boston bombers were Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, from Chechnya was: Poor Chechnya. Do the Chechens really need another violent stain on their image? And what do all these people who they killed and maimed at the Boston Marathon have to do with their plight and rage? We don't know yet how the brothers, who have moved around quite a bit in their short lives, became infected with the idea that violence against unrelated innocents could possibly fix whatever personal and political wrongs they faced. Their uncle is telling reporters that the boys are losers, a shame on Chechnya. He does not want to dignify them with a cause, and maybe he is right.

I went to Chechnya in the winter and spring of 2001, during the second Chechen war, when Tamerlan would have been around 14 and Dzhokhar around 7. I lived with Chechen families, with mothers whose sons were missing, rounded up by Russian soldiers and dropped into fetid pits in the ground, left for months to howl in the dark.

Needless to say, it was a chaotic time. Chechen society was so crushed physically, emotionally, psychologically, that I remember a mother telling me: "Trust my sister? I don't even trust my own shadow." Few had money. And you could earn fast cash, enough money for a meal or some fuel to drive your car, by selling information to the Russians. There was almost no electricity or heat. The buildings were carcasses. And the Russians, too, were paranoid. One evening I heard that just that morning a girl living downstairs had poked her head out the window maybe to gaze on the view below or get some fresh air, and a Russian sniper, thinking she was a sniper scoping him out, shot her in the head. No one I met was sane.

Every day I met beautiful young Chechen boys who told me they were ready to blow themselves and the Russians up until every last Russian soldier left their soil. They had lost a brother, a sister, a parent, and they would never stop avenging those deaths. The Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary and can last a century or more. I remember a 46-year-old Chechen commander who was a professor of philology telling me: "This generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They'll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won't value their own or anyone else's lives." That was 2001.

We don't know if that was the journey of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and who knows if we'll ever fully know. But there is another Chechnya I remember, and want to leave you with it, lest we tarnish the whole nation. There was Hava, a 17-year-old girl, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She had learned English by memorizing five Dickens novels. She could recite them and knew what every word meant. She wanted to be a teacher of English literature. "I know if you have a goal you will reach it," she told me. "And mine is to be the best master of English in Chechnya!" There was the librarian in Grozny still attempting, amid unimaginable terror and chaos, to preserve shelves and shelves of Russian books. There is the image of my friend frying up chirimshala, wild garlic root greens that grow only in Chechnya under the snow. She was obsessed with their health properties and said they possessed the only nutrients that could stave off the poison from the bombs, the fires and the methane gas that was the Grozny air. And there was the rigor of Chechen tradition that has held families together through deportation and wars. These were people with a sense of shared cultural history who were doing everything the could to hang onto it even as it was breaking down.

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Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God

Dominic Bracco II/Prime, for The New York Times

The Rev. Robert Coogan waits to exit the prison in Saltillo, Mexico. More Photos »

Early on a December morning, Robert Coogan pulled his red Chevy hatchback into the parking lot of the state prison in Saltillo, Mexico. It was frigid outside, the sun had not yet cleared the reddish mountains, and Coogan lingered, staring at the tall black letters on the prison's high walls: "CERESO" — Centro de Reinserción Social, the place where criminals are supposed to be reformed. Coogan, who has served as chaplain at the prison for a decade, slowly pulled himself from the warm car. In dark jeans, brown boots and a thick gray sweater, he looked more like a factory foreman than a Brooklyn-born priest. He wore no clerical collar, just a necklace of pendants with images of the Virgin Mary and Christ on the cross.

Inside the prison's main building, Coogan tossed his keys onto the counter, and the guard on duty shook himself awake. "Buenos días, Padre," the guard said, placing the keys on a hook as Coogan, 60, walked through a metal detector that failed to register his large silver belt buckle. "Buenos días," Coogan said. He headed up a flight of stairs and down an empty hallway toward a thick steel door that opened into the general prison population. A heavyset guard let Coogan in, and with the morning chill aggravating an old running injury, he marched to the chapel just off the prison's central plaza. A few minutes later, he was at the altar for the 7:40 a.m. Mass.

As usual, only a dozen or so prisoners showed up. Most of the 700 inmates — murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers and the innocent among them — were heading to work in one of the prison's factories or carpentry shops. A crew of musclebound Zetas — Mexico's most feared criminal syndicate, which runs the Cereso from the inside — sat on red plastic chairs outside the chapel and watched the prisoners pass by, making sure they went where the Zetas' comandante wanted them to go.

As soon as the Mass was over, Coogan grabbed his portable priest kit — a red laundry basket with wrinkled vestments, hosts in Tupperware and holy water and wine in plastic soda bottles — and quickly made his way to the maximum-security unit, a separate building at the prison's southeastern corner, where a prisoner whom I'll refer to as M. stood waiting for him on the other side of a gate. There wasn't a guard to be seen. They rarely venture inside, Coogan explained, preferring to leave the job of discipline to the Zetas. A few minutes later, a prisoner working for the cartel, in dark sunglasses and cargo pants, showed up to let us into the unit.

M. had been in prison for about three years. He was normally a regular at morning Mass, skinny and skittish, with light eyes, and he had recently grown a scruffy beard. "You look like you belong on 'Lost,' " Coogan said when he greeted him. Unlike other prisoners, M. actually had a family of some means, and in a prison system without uniforms, his style often seemed more appropriate for an indie rock club. His sneakers were clean and hip; his jeans had designer labels.

Inside maximum, M. shared space not just with hard-core Zetas but also with inmates too insane to be kept anywhere else — including one who refused to wear clothes and spoke to angels. He slept little, like any prey encircled by predators, and that morning he anxiously greeted Coogan's arrival, signaling immediately with darting eyes that he needed to talk privately. Coogan followed him into the yard, where M. pulled out a Bible for cover and positioned himself near a faraway wall. There, he explained that the Zetas wanted him to pay them 2,000 pesos ($165), with the first half due at noon the next day. Coogan, brightening the dusty pen with his purple robes, nodded as M. spoke. He had paid small ransoms to keep M. safe from the Zetas twice already, but this latest demand was larger, more than a week's pay. He wasn't sure whether the Zetas were serious or if they were just toying with M. He also didn't know if M. could be trusted. M. claimed to be locked up because a friend stole a television and he was taking the rap, but other inmates doubted his story and said he was a schemer. Coogan considered his options. Paying the Zetas would encourage extortion, but ignoring the threat, or confronting the Zetas directly, could get M. beaten or killed.

"Why don't you talk to your parents?" Coogan asked.

"I don't get any support from my parents," M. said. His eyes widened with doubt; the priest wasn't going to help? He flipped through a few pages of the Old Testament. "I don't want any problems," he said. "They said, 'If you don't pay, you know what's going to happen.' I've seen them kill people."

Coogan gently pushed the dirt around with his boots, then bent down and picked up a piece of petrified wood, turning it over in his hands. On the wall behind him loomed a painting of a giant clown with blood-red shoes and a demented smile, the tag of the comandante. All over the Cereso, images of the demented clown appeared. The symbolism was obvious: the Zetas were always watching.

Mexico's federal ombudsman for human rights said last year that around 60 percent of the country's prisons were run by inmates. More than 1,000 prisoners have escaped since 2006, often dozens at a time, and hundreds more have been murdered along with an untold number of guards. When I asked the warden at the Saltillo Cereso about the power structure inside, even he did not deny it. Standing near his office, unshaven and exhausted, he emphasized that peace was the priority, not control. "Estamos tranquilo," he said. "We're calm."

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Look: Making Art With Tom Waits

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The 6th Floor Blog: Revisiting Chechnya

Like everyone else, I woke this morning to news of the shootout and the manhunt in Boston, which was soon followed by the revelation that the two suspects were Chechen — or born to Chechen parents — and that they were raised, before coming to the United States, in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya and was attacked in the late '90s by Chechen rebels bent on creating a single Islamist state. What I thought of almost immediately was an article that Elizabeth Rubin wrote for this magazine back in the summer of 2001, which I was lucky enough to edit. "Only You Can Save Your Sons" is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, as powerful and haunting as any magazine article I've ever read. It turned out that other editors here at the magazine were thinking about Elizabeth's story, too, and as the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the day turned to questions of whether the Tsarnaev brothers were influenced by the Chechen war — and as the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the root of the Tsarnaev's "evil" lay in America and not in Chechnya — it seemed like a good idea to reach out to Elizabeth and get her thoughts, which follow below, on the Chechnya she experienced then and its connection, or lack of connection, to the men thought to have bombed the Boston Marathon.

---

Elizabeth Rubin writes:

My first thought after I read that the Boston bombers were Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, from Chechnya was: Poor Chechnya. Do the Chechens really need another violent stain on their image? And what do all these people who they killed and maimed at the Boston Marathon have to do with their plight and rage? We don't know yet how the brothers, who have moved around quite a bit in their short lives, became infected with the idea that violence against unrelated innocents could possibly fix whatever personal and political wrongs they faced. Their uncle is telling reporters that the boys are losers, a shame on Chechnya. He does not want to dignify them with a cause, and maybe he is right.

I went to Chechnya in the winter and spring of 2001, during the second Chechen war, when Tamerlan would have been around 14 and Dzhokhar around 7. I lived with Chechen families, with mothers whose sons were missing, rounded up by Russian soldiers and dropped into fetid pits in the ground, left for months to howl in the dark.

Needless to say, it was a chaotic time. Chechen society was so crushed physically, emotionally, psychologically, that I remember a mother telling me: "Trust my sister? I don't even trust my own shadow." Few had money. And you could earn fast cash, enough money for a meal or some fuel to drive your car, by selling information to the Russians. There was almost no electricity or heat. The buildings were carcasses. And the Russians, too, were paranoid. One evening I heard that just that morning a girl living downstairs had poked her head out the window maybe to gaze on the view below or get some fresh air, and a Russian sniper, thinking she was a sniper scoping him out, shot her in the head. No one I met was sane.

Every day I met beautiful young Chechen boys who told me they were ready to blow themselves and the Russians up until every last Russian soldier left their soil. They had lost a brother, a sister, a parent, and they would never stop avenging those deaths. The Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary and can last a century or more. I remember a 46-year-old Chechen commander who was a professor of philology telling me: "This generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They'll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won't value their own or anyone else's lives." That was 2001.

We don't know if that was the journey of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and who knows if we'll ever fully know. But there is another Chechnya I remember, and want to leave you with it, lest we tarnish the whole nation. There was Hava, a 17-year-old girl, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She had learned English by memorizing five Dickens novels. She could recite them and knew what every word meant. She wanted to be a teacher of English literature. "I know if you have a goal you will reach it," she told me. "And mine is to be the best master of English in Chechnya!" There was the librarian in Grozny still attempting, amid unimaginable terror and chaos, to preserve shelves and shelves of Russian books. There is the image of my friend frying up chirimshala, wild garlic root greens that grow only in Chechnya under the snow. She was obsessed with their health properties and said they possessed the only nutrients that could stave off the poison from the bombs, the fires and the methane gas that was the Grozny air. And there was the rigor of Chechen tradition that has held families together through deportation and wars. These were people with a sense of shared cultural history who were doing everything the could to hang onto it even as it was breaking down.

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The 6th Floor Blog: The Long Celebrity Profile: Endangered, Yes, but Not Yet Dead

Recently on the Arts Beat blog, Dwight Garner recommended three collections of classic celebrity profiles — all of which, he notes, were "written before the celebrity-industrial complex was fully formed, when a journalist could still push past an artist's P.R. phalanx and come back with a story that possessed real feeling and offbeat detail." (The books in question are Rex Reed's "People Are Crazy Here," published 1974; Kenneth Tynan's "The Sound of Two Hands Clapping," published 1975; and Michael Lydon's "Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock 'n' Roll Pantheon," published 1971.)

Garner is right, of course — while there are contemporary examples of great, insightful and intelligent celebrity profiles being written (Garner himself has one in this Sunday's issue, on John le Carré) — the era when a curious writer could tag along with a celebrity for weeks (or even months), "Almost Famous"-style, and count on unhindered access and up-close reportage have long since passed away. Most celebrity profiles now are, for better for for worse (mostly worse), highly stage-managed affairs during which a writer is granted a very limited window with which to interact with the subject during some mildly flattering but mostly anodyne circumstance. (Usually involving food.)

The best obituary for the old-style of profile writing has already been written: Tad Friend's fantastic, must read "Notes on the Death of the Celebrity Profile," published in SPIN magazine in 1998. The opening anecdote says it all. A publicist for Arnold Schwarzenegger asks Friend how much time he'd like to spend with Schwarzenegger — "Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?" And how did the flack respond when Friend plaintively requests "a few days"? " 'Oh, God,' she said disgustedly, 'this wouldn't be one of those profiles where you try to figure him out, would it?' "

(This might be a good time to point out that Friend, too, despite that obit of his, continues to write terrific celebrity profiles himself, including this all-time great on David Lynch and this more recent article on Ben Stiller, both for The New Yorker.)

But reader — I have come not to bury the celebrity profile but to praise it. Or, at least, one of it.

For while the above articles are definitely worth a bookmark on your reading-screen of choice, they all put me in mind of a long, rollicking, insightful, contemporary counter-example. A celebrity profile that's not 10, or 30, years old, but that came out just this year: Alex Pappademas on Dan Harmon in Grantland.

Now, I am not a Dan Harmon acolyte. Harmon, the creator of the cult-favorite-but-ratings-challenged sitcom "Community," has an especially fervent following (this is in part is what the profile is about), but I'm not part of it. I like "Community" fine. And I'm interested in Harmon, sure, but no more so than I'd be in any other self-destructive-TV-showrunner-fired-under-weird-circumstances-who-then-embarks-on-a-cross-country-speaking-tour-in-a-bus-while-frequently-drunk.

That said, the story is fantastic.

The subhead hints at what's to come: "Thirty-six hours on the road — and in the bar — with exiled TV genius Dan Harmon." Thirty-six hours being, of course, roughly thirty-four-and-a-half hours longer than most writers now reasonably expect to spend with their subjects.

Ultimately, it's an affectionate, intelligent, warts-and-more-warts-and-all profile of Harmon — an article that, in the tradition of great profiles, gets past the usual chin-stroking about Harmon and the future of TV and delivers a wrenching, visceral take on a live human being. (One with a fascinating relationship with his wife, for example. And alcohol.)

More than that, it's a journalistic throwback, in the very best sense of the term: a jump-on-the-bus, here-I-am-in-all-my-complictated-glory look at a subject who's both brave enough to grant this much access and interesting enough to deserve it. All delivered by a writer talented enough to, well, deliver it.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Introducing The Daily Dog-Ear

Starting today, The Daily Dog-Ear will appear weekdays on The 6th Floor. It will be a brief post and link from someone at the magazine about something excellent on the Internet — it won't always be a lengthy read, although it could be, because, naturally, we like things like that. But we also like quirky photographs, thoughtful radio interviews and collections of funny animated GIFs. The point is just to direct your attention to things we find notable, interesting, surprising, provocative or otherwise dog-ear-able.

---

Gary Taubes is a writer I've worked with a few times over the years, including his 2002 cover article for this magazine called "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" and he is also my personal science guru. Whenever I read something about science that I doubt or don't understand, I e-mail him with questions, and he unfailingly responds, sometimes at impressive length, with clear, incisive analyses of whatever I've asked about. At this point, I have enough of these e-mails for a book.

Recently I asked Gary for the best book he has ever read on dementia. His recommendation was "Another Name for Madness," by Marion Roach, which he said "probably did as much as any single book/article to get Alzheimer's noticed and focus medical and research attention on it."

As it happens, that book started as an article with the same title that ran in this magazine in 1983. The author was then a news assistant at The Times, and she wrote a harrowing, loving portrait of her mother, Allene, who suffered from Alzheimer's, a disease that few people knew much about:

My mother, a college graduate who used to say television "rots the mind," now spends most of her days watching it — literally watching, for she rarely turns on the sound — and smoking cigarettes. When I visit her on Sundays now, I always find her watching one of those disco dance shows. She stares at it and smokes. Until last fall, she had gone 13 years without a cigarette. She cannot remember how much she smokes — and so, she smokes about four and a half packs a day. It is one of the few things she still remembers how to do.

My mother is 54 years old. She has been a widow for almost five years. Soon, within several years, her brain will forget not only what day it is but how to perform what for most people are automatic functions: how to eat, how to walk — in short, how to live.

Marion's book was published in 1985. Her mother died in 1992.

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The 6th Floor Blog: If Only All Our Cover Stories Could Inspire Music Videos This Awesome

Ruth Padawer's cover article last August on cross-dressing children initiated an interesting conversation about parenting on blogs and in our comments section. It also led to a music video by the band Kingsley Flood, featuring 7-year-olds who manage to be both totally hard-core and totally adorable — a feat few full-grown actors could accomplish. (Jennifer Lawrence? John Goodman?)

Naseem Khuri, Kingsley Flood's frontman, was moved by Padawer's article when he read it last summer. "I got to thinking about a young family member of mine and how his wearing dresses was becoming less of a 'phase' and more of a reality," Khuri wrote in an e-mail to Padawer. "And like so many, I was totally supportive of whatever he wanted to do, while also being concerned about how he'd be treated at school." The video for Kingsley Flood's latest single, "Sun Gonna Lemme Shine," explores that topic with the angst of "Jeremy" and the glee of those little girls singing "Superbass."

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Who Can Save the ‘Today’ Show?

Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. Digital composite by Picturehouse. Video still from NBC.

Matt Lauer and Ann Curry on Curry's last day as co-host of the ''Today'' show.

One Wednesday last month, Ann Curry, camouflaged in a hat and trench coat, trudged into the art-deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It had been nine months since she was pushed out as co-host of the "Today" show. Curry was now NBC's "national and international correspondent" and the anchor at large for "Today," but these titles seemed honorary. Curry had appeared on "Today" only a handful of times since her ouster. She had no role in NBC's coverage of election night or Inauguration Day. She taped a few stories for "Rock Center," the prime-time newsmagazine show, but as she explained on Twitter, her bosses kept rescheduling them. Curry had moved to an office on the 27th floor of 30 Rock, far from her NBC News bosses on the third floor. On this morning, she was at work on a short "NBC Nightly News" segment about the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It would be only her sixth appearance on the network all year.

Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times. Digital composite by Picturehouse. Video stills from NBC.

Top to bottom: Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric, Savannah Guthrie.

For NBC, limiting Curry's exposure seemed wise. Her tear-stained departure from "Today" had become a public-relations debacle, deeply damaging the most lucrative franchise in television news. Just one day after Curry signed off, the advantage "Today" had over its top rival, ABC's "Good Morning America," turned into a 600,000-viewer deficit. Millions in advertising revenue vanished.

If the network was still reeling from her mismanaged departure, Curry, who spent much of the past year lying low at her home in New Canaan, Conn., had not yet recovered, either. She still often woke before dawn as if she were about to go on the air. Some mornings, she cried as she read e-mail and Twitter messages from fans. For weeks she couldn't bring herself to return to 30 Rock, where her closed office door bore a red Post-it note that read "Do Not Enter" in capital letters.

Many executives at the network never grasped how profoundly hurt and humiliated Curry remained — not just by her televised dismissal but by all the backstage machinations that led to that fateful morning. Curry felt that the boys' club atmosphere behind the scenes at "Today" undermined her from the start, and she told friends that her final months were a form of professional torture. The growing indifference of Matt Lauer, her co-host, had hurt the most, but there was also just a general meanness on set. At one point, the executive producer, Jim Bell, commissioned a blooper reel of Curry's worst on-air mistakes. Another time, according to a producer, Bell called staff members into his office to show a gaffe she made during a cross-talk with a local station. (Bell denies both incidents.) Then several boxes of Curry's belongings ended up in a coat closet, as if she had already been booted off the premises. One staff person recalled that "a lot of time in the control room was spent making fun of Ann's outfit choices or just generally messing with her." On one memorable spring morning, Curry wore a bright yellow dress that spawned snarky comparisons to Big Bird. The staff person said that others in the control room, which included 14 men and 3 women, according to my head count one morning, Photoshopped a picture of Big Bird next to Curry and asked co-workers to vote on "Who wore it best?"

Curry had spent 22 years, a majority of her professional life, in the hallways of the NBC headquarters. She knew 30 Rock's shortcuts: the side door out of Studio 1A that allowed her to dart across 49th Street and avoid the tourists; and the exit that ensured she would bump into autograph seekers in the concourse. But on this March morning, according to a colleague, she was standing in the lobby and was unable to find her employee badge. Instead of being waived through by a security guard or rescued by one of the legions of pages or young producers from "Today," Curry queued up at NBC's visitors' center, where the lunch-delivery guys and MSNBC guests announced themselves. Her attempts at being unnoticed, in her trench coat and hat, were backfiring. When it was her turn, Curry immediately apologized to the guard — gratuitous apologies were one of her on-air trademarks. The guard looked at her quizzically.

"Name?" he asked.

"Ann Curry," she said.

Then, after a moment. "A-N-N." Pause. "C-U-R-R-Y."

Brian Stelter, a media reporter for The Times, is author of "Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV," to be published next week.

Editor: Jon Kelly

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