Riff: One Scene, 42 Takes and 2 Hours in a Bathroom Stall

Scene 63. INT. BATHROOM. NIGHT.

Frances and Sophie inside a stall together.

FRANCES: I was lying. I don't love Patch.

SOPHIE: I do love him.

FRANCES: Since when? When did this happen?

SOPHIE: It's been happening.

FRANCES: That's [expletive] [expletive]. Sophie, COME ON!

SOPHIE: No, you're [expletive]. And you're making me feel really bad right now.

FRANCES: I want to love him if you love him, but you don't love him.

SOPHIE: I DO.

FRANCES: (tearing up) Sophie! I [expletive] held your head when you cried. I bought special milk for you. I know where you hide your pills. Do not treat me like a three-hour-brunch friend.

SOPHIE: I'm not talking to you while you're like this.

She turns away. Frances hits the wall close to Sophie's head. It's violent and kind of scary.

In the film "Frances Ha," Scene 63 is 28 seconds long. We did 42 takes in total, two hours of shooting in a bathroom with no breaks or pauses other than for direction and blocking. In 50 days of shooting, we averaged around 35 takes per scene. Most independent films shoot in 25 days with, at most, 10 takes per scene.

A take, in this case, refers to the entirety of the above printed text, acted from beginning to end. Meaning that Mickey Sumner, playing Sophie, and I, playing Frances, said those words and performed those actions 42 times in a row. The scene had to play "in one," a take in its entirety, with no edits. The take is the scene. Noah Baumbach, the director and my co-writer, was going to have to pick only one of those 42 takes for the final film.

To write this essay, I went back to the editing room and watched all 42 takes. I also read the script supervisor's notes, which include Noah's opinions of each performance. Using the footage, the notes and my memory of the day of shooting, I created the following take journal.

Take 1 (2:04 p.m.): The first one. Not great, but not bad. The first go-round always has an adrenaline to it that is thrilling and unwieldy. There is a pride in simply getting through it, saying everything pretty well correctly and not melting into the ground with embarrassment for all the acting that we are doing.

Take 2 (2:08 p.m.): Because the first take went fairly well, I immediately become cocky and start overplaying it. I'm acting too drunk. It's whiny and high-pitched, and for some reason I'm leaning over the sink in a way that makes me look like a hunchback.

Take 3 (2:13 p.m.): Now I swing too far in the other direction and pitch my voice a lot lower. It sounds fake, as if I'm trying to sound important. Frances' rhythms are more fleet and funny. I touch Mickey too much, it's too aggressive. She flinches, and she's right to, because what I'm doing is weird.

Take 4 (2:16 p.m.): I know I'm doing the scene badly, but I can't figure out how to do it well. Usually by Take 4 something has settled, but not this time. I do a weird line reading just to change it up. That surprises me midperformance, and then I mess up my next line — I say "three-hour-lunch friend" instead of "three-hour-brunch friend." I apologize immediately after Noah calls, "Cut!" Little words count.

Take 5 (2:20 p.m.): Still hunched over. Less angry, more sad. I'm probably just sad for myself, which is a terrible trap for an actor to fall into. I can tell that Noah is not thrilled with what we're getting. He hasn't said anything yet — no "Good take" or "Mark that one" to let me know that I'm on the right track.

Take 6 (2:22 p.m.): Slow. REALLY slow. I try to straighten up! Well done! The crazy-anger is all gone, which is good, but it doesn't have any energy. By the end of the scene, I'm back to hunching.

Take 7 (2:24 p.m.): For some reason I totally lose my lines. I trip over my tongue. I get very angry with myself and slam the wall next to Mickey's head too hard at the end of the scene. She lets out a gasp ­ — I'm frightening her.

Take 8 (2:27 p.m.): Because I am playing the scene angrier, Mickey is fighting back harder. A very strong "I DO" from her. I hit the wall quite violently. Mickey starts crying.

Take 9 (2:30 p.m.): I am upsetting Mickey too much — it's hard for her (or for anyone in that position) to come down from so much emotion and reset and do the scene again. Now she looks upset throughout the entire scene, not just at the end. Sophie is stronger than this, more justifiably angry with Frances than frightened by her. I'm not doing my job as a scene partner.

Take 10 (2:32 p.m.): We start, but then I immediately stop the scene. "Sorry, sorry for this," I say. I hate breaking a take. But I have a question. Writing a script does not necessarily mean you understand it as an actor. Noah and I talk about Frances' sincerity. Me: "When I say, 'Since when,' am I serious about that?" Noah: "Yes, but it's not like you really want to know." Me: "Right, right, let's go again."

Take 11 (2:36 p.m.): Calmer energy. Too calm. It's death for the scene. It's clearer though, less drunk. At the end, I get a "Want to run it again right away?" from Noah. Nothing else, just "Run it again." This angers me. I want praise. We do another one right away while the camera is rolling. It's better, less forced. He was right.

Take 12 (2:38 p.m.): Now I'm underacting deliberately. But it feels more specific. I'm building it from the inside out, trying to wait for it instead of flinging myself in one direction or another.

Take 13 (2:41 p.m.): I start and stop. It's a dud.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor: Faces in the Crowd, Printed in 3-D

Imagine someone collecting a strand of your hair from the subway floor. What would that person do with it? Frame you for a crime? Weave it into a wig?

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who describes herself as an "information artist," creates lifelike masks of people based on DNA that she extracts from hair, chewing gum or cigarette butts left behind in public places. Using a computer program she created that can decode gender, eye color and various facial traits from her DNA samples, Dewey-Hagborg creates life-size heads using a 3-D printer. This sculpture started with a cigarette butt left on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn in January:

One immediate question is, how accurate could these masks possibly be? Well, here is a pretty amazing portrait Dewey-Hagborg made of Kurt Andersen, who hosts the radio program "Studio 360," after getting his DNA anonymously. She also offers a side-by-side comparison of her work on the tech entrepreneur Manu Sporny, who posted his genetic data online.

Another question: "Creepy or cool"? That's how Collage of Arts and Sciences, a Smithsonian magazine blog, put it in an article about Dewey-Hagborg's work. Though we live in a time in which we are starting to fear genetic surveillance, her portraits do not disturb me. They are no more invasive than a picture surreptitiously taken of you in the subway, and as works of art they raise thought-provoking questions about the traces of ourselves that we leave behind..

Dewey-Hagborg, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in electronic arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., is showing her work this Sunday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the school's West Hall Art gallery.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?

Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Rhimes on the set of "Scandal" in Hollywood.

"I love that the gay White House chief of staff is threatening to pretend the first lady is a closeted lesbian," Shonda Rhimes said to a roomful of writers. "It is so wrong. In the best way." Ten of the writers — seven men, three women, five plaid button-down shirts and two pairs of outsize hipster glasses frames — were sitting in her bright Hollywood office, pens in hand, scripts in laps, going through notes for the 20th episode of "Scandal," Rhimes's gonzo political melodrama, which is about to finish its second season on ABC.

When "Scandal," which is based very, very loosely on the life of the Washington crisis manager Judy Smith, had its debut last spring, it appeared to be a standard soapy procedural with a fizzy twist: the main character, the fierce Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), was having a torrid interracial affair with the president of the United States, a Republican named Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). By the end of the first season, however, when the chief of staff was hiring an assassin to kill a former intern who slept with the president, the show had revealed itself to be much wilder than it initially seemed, a brash, addictive mixture of Douglas Sirk and realpolitik, and TV's most outrageous spectacle.

In the second season, there has been a waterboarding, an assassination attempt and a mail bomb. Three women, a gay man and a sleazy oil baron successfully stole a presidential election. The president personally murdered a Supreme Court justice. One of Olivia's staff members, a C.I.A.-trained assassin and torturer, sits in on A.A. meetings because he has an addiction to killing people.

As the audacity of "Scandal" has increased, so have its ratings. The series now averages an especially impassioned eight million viewers a week, making it the No. 1 drama at 10 p.m. on any night, on any network, among the most desired demographic, adults 18 to 49. It has also become a highly "social" show: on Thursday nights, Twitter becomes a giant "Scandal" chat room, fans of the show dispatching more than 190,000 tweets per episode, a good portion of which contain at least one "OMG."

The font of all this fervid storytelling is Rhimes, who, at 43, is often described as the most powerful African-American female show runner in television — which is too many adjectives. She is one of the most powerful show runners in the business, full stop. Rhimes is among the few remaining bona fide network hitmakers; her pull at ABC is matched only by Chuck Lorre, with his three sitcoms at CBS, or Seth MacFarlane, with his three animated shows at Fox. Before "Scandal," Rhimes created the hit medical drama "Grey's Anatomy" and, later, the sudsier "Grey's" spinoff, "Private Practice," which ended this past January after a six-year run. Channing Dungey, who oversees ABC's drama development, describes Rhimes as "incredibly important" to the network. "If she came in tomorrow and said, 'I have a great idea,' I would jump at it." Since 2009, ABC has given over its Thursday-night lineup to a solid two-hour Shonda Rhimes programming block.

Sitting behind her expansive desk, Rhimes continued to go through the script with her writers, finessing dialogue, addressing continuity errors and looking to sharpen the trademark "Scandal" tone. A writer noticed that the phrase "Cyrus is the mole" was repeated four times in an exchange. Rhimes told him not to worry. "It's the rhythm of the conversation," she said. "It's going to be sexy. Trust me."

As part of her Shondaland production company, Rhimes oversees some 550 actors, writers, crew members and producers, and her days are optimized to do so. In the morning, she gets her older daughter, Harper, who is 10, off to school and then contends with whatever is most urgent: writing, giving notes on a script and watching casting videos. The televisions in her office and home are connected to a system that allows her to watch real-time editing by her editors. Both of her daughters have rooms across the hall from her office at work. The younger, a perfectly chubby-cheeked 1-year-old named Emerson, comes in every day, clambering onto Rhimes's lap during meetings.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine

Photo illustration by Bobby Doherty

Michelle Crosby, an energetic 37-year-old lawyer in Boise, Idaho, applied for a loan last November from a local bank, Western Capital. She proposed to use the money, $10,000, to help start a new business, Wevorce, which could be described most reductively as an H&R Block for divorces. The bankers liked the idea, and Crosby was a strong candidate. They had even given her an earlier loan to open Wevorce's first office. But after four weeks, the bank was stalling and Crosby had yet to receive a cent. At the height of her frustration, she received an e-mail from a small group of private investors in Mountain View, Calif. They invited her to an interview and, after listening to her story, promised her $100,000 in exchange for a 7 percent stake in Wevorce. Crosby accepted on the spot. The next day, she found a condo for rent, at $2,500 a month, in Mountain View, and left Boise, and her boyfriend, behind.

Ian Allen for The New York Times

Michelle Crosby, of Wevorce, which mediates amicable and inexpensive divorces.

Haisha Chen is a 23-year-old Chinese-born University of Chicago graduate who goes by David so that Americans remember his name. With two friends, Teng Bao and Dafeng Guo, Chen created software that allows Internet users to build simple, elegant Web sites, designed with mobile devices in mind, in 15 minutes. They called their product Strikingly. Last July, to their parents' alarm, the men bought one-way tickets to San Francisco — Chen from Shanghai, Guo from Hong Kong, Bao from Chicago. They rented a single bedroom in a cramped apartment in San Francisco's Outer Richmond neighborhood, sleeping on two futons, one of which prevented the door from opening more than a few inches. They spent $1,600 a month on rent, food and all additional expenses combined. After four months, they got a call from Mountain View, offering $100,000 for a 7 percent stake. They moved immediately. "When I got here, I was very emotionally touched by all the great companies in this area," Guo told me in an outburst of passion. "These were all the companies I had heard of since I was a kid. I felt like I should be here. Like I belong."

Last year at Brown University, Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton created Teespring, a crowdfunding Web site that sold custom-made apparel — "Kickstarter for T-shirts." For six months they had mild success with fraternities and campus clubs but were only slightly profitable. Then something unexpected happened: a New Zealand man used Teespring to design a Sherlock Holmes T-shirt and sold it on a Facebook fan page with about 300,000 members; ultimately, 1,800 people bought the shirt. The man earned about $18,000; Teespring made $8,000. Soon other virtual communities — like the Twitter account for fans of the 1990s TV show "Boy Meets World," and a Facebook page called "I Big Trucks, Mudding, Bon Fires . . . Country BOYS! :)" — began selling shirts, with staggering success. In November, Teespring earned $133,336; in January, $489,029. But the founders felt they could do better. "We don't want this to be a $30-, $40-, $50 million business," Williams told me. "We're looking at the big picture here." I asked Williams and Stites-Clayton to define "big picture." They responded in unison: "A billion dollars." When the investors called with their offer of $100,000, Williams and Stites-Clayton also moved to Mountain View.

The Mountain View investors are the partners of Y Combinator, an organization that can be likened to a sleep-away camp for start-up companies. Y.C. holds two three-month sessions every year. During that time, campers, or founders, have regular meetings with each of Y.C.'s counselors, or partners, at which they receive technical advice, emotional support and, most critical, lessons on the art of the sale. There is no campus, only a nondescript office building in Mountain View — on Pioneer Way, around the corner from Easy Street. Founders are advised to rent apartments nearby, so that they can run to the office in minutes should an important investor pay a visit.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article erroneously included a peak value for Loopt, a company that produces location tracking apps.  Its peak value is not known; but it was not $500 million, an unconfirmed figure reported on several tech Web sites. (As the article noted, the company was sold for $43.4 million in March 2012.) The article also referred incorrectly to Sam Altman, who founded Loopt. He is Y Combinator's second youngest partner, not the youngest.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Marginalia, Added by the Author

Here at the magazine, you might say we have a thing about marginalia. So perhaps it's not a surprise that I'm mildly infatuated with Niemann Lab's Annotation Tuesday! (That's not an unwarranted exclamation mark.) It's a weekly series in which authors answer questions about their reporting and writing, which is obviously cool. (Who doesn't want to know how a reporter got a witness to talk? Or where that detail about the marigolds came from?) But Annotation Tuesday! serves up the answers in the body of the story itself — kind of like the obsessive highlights and notes I tend to make with my Kindle, but in this case with actual answers.

"The Innocent Man," a 28,000-word article that ran in Texas Monthly's November and December issues, won a National Magazine Award for feature writing last week. In her exchange with Niemann Storyboard, Pamela Colloff, the article's author, admits that she was afraid people were not going to read the (very, very) long piece, and she was surprised, gratified even, that readers wrote angry letters in protest when she ended the first installment with a huge cliffhanger. (In one annotation, she suggests a possible explanation for her skill in structuring a story: "Can you tell I watched a lot of soap operas as a kid?")

There's a lot to unpack from Colloff's reporting of the wrongful conviction of Michael Morton, who served 25 years in prison for his wife's murder. His story will probably always raise more questions for me than can be answered. But I devoured the revelation that a description of Morton's last meal with his wife came from an overlooked note in the case file, or the fact that even Colloff's mammoth word count didn't leave room for every bit of exculpatory evidence ignored by investigators.

Maybe best of all, Colloff's responses show how humbly she approached the material and how concerned she was with the reader's response. For those who spend their days thinking about how to make a reading experience better, it's a good reminder of what an asset vulnerability can be.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?

Peter Bohler for The New York Times

The Hawaiian monk seal has wiry whiskers and the deep, round eyes of an apologetic child. The animals will eat a variety of fish and shellfish, or turn over rocks for eel and octopus, then haul out on the beach and lie there most of the day, digesting. On the south side of Kauai one afternoon, I saw one sneeze in its sleep: its convex body shuddered, then spilled again over the sand the way a raw, boneless chicken breast will settle on a cutting board. The seals can grow to seven feet long and weigh 450 pounds. They are adorable, but also a little gross: the Zach Galifianakises of marine mammals.

Peter Bohler for The New York Times

Volunteers and tourists observe a monk seal (RK31) resting within a seal protection zone on Poipu Beach, in Kauai.

Monk seals are easy targets. After the Polynesians landed in Hawaii, about 1,500 years ago, the animals mostly vanished, slaughtered for meat or oil or scared off by the settlers' dogs. But the species quietly survived in the Leeward Islands, northwest of the main Hawaiian chain — a remote archipelago, including Laysan Island, Midway and French Frigate Shoals, which, for the most part, only Victorian guano barons and the military have seen fit to settle. There are now about 900 monk seals in the Leewards, and the population has been shrinking for 25 years, making the seal among the world's most imperiled marine mammals. The monk seal was designated an endangered species in 1976. Around that time, however, a few monk seals began trekking back into the main Hawaiian Islands — "the mains" — and started having pups. These pioneers came on their own, oblivious to the sprawling federal project just getting under way to help them. Even now, recovering the species is projected to cost $378 million and take 54 years.

As monk seals spread through the mains and flourished there, they became tourist attractions and entourage-encircled celebrities. Now when a seal appears on a busy beach, volunteers with the federal government's "Monk Seal Response Network" hustle out with stakes and fluorescent tape to erect an exclusionary "S.P.Z." around the snoozing animal — a "seal protection zone." Then they stand watch in the heat for hours to keep it from being disrupted while beachgoers gush and point.

But the seals' appearance has not been universally appreciated. The animals have been met by many islanders with a convoluted mix of resentment and spite. This fury has led to what the government is calling a string of "suspicious deaths." But spend a little time in Hawaii, and you come to recognize these deaths for what they are — something loaded and forbidding. A word that came to my mind was "assassination."

The most recent wave of Hawaiian-monk-seal murders began on the island of Molokai in November 2011. An 8-year-old male seal was found slain on a secluded beach. A month later, the body of a female, not yet 2 years old, turned up in the same area. Then, in early January, a third victim was found on Kauai. The government tries to keep the details of such killings secret, though it is known that some monk seals have been beaten to death and some have been shot. (In 2009, on Kauai, a man was charged with shooting a female seal twice with a .22; one round lodged in the fetus she was carrying.) In the incident on Kauai last January, the killer was said to have left a "suspicious object" lodged in the animal's head.

Killing an endangered species in Hawaii is both a state and federal offense. Quickly, the State of Hawaii and the Humane Society of the United States put up a reward for information. "We're all in agreement that somebody knows who did this," one Humane Society official told me. The islands are close-knit but also loyal, particularly the native Hawaiian communities. In January, when I met with the state wildlife agency's chief law-enforcement officer for Kauai — a man named Bully Mission — he confessed that, after a year, Kauai's tip line hadn't received a single call. In fact, there was still a reward out from a seal killing in 2009.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Abdication, Dutch-Style

For someone who makes a special trip to the Netherlands, nominally timed to the investiture of a new monarch; for someone who has always been a fan of regalia; for someone who enjoys a costumed parade of nations as much as the next person — you'd think I'd at least get to the Dam on time.

I did not. I missed it, if only by 30 seconds.

Last week I was in the Netherlands, visiting friends and hoping to take in some of the street theater and pageantry that went along with the abdication of Queen Beatrix and the elevation of her oldest son, the new King Willem-Alexander. But a late start from my hotel — not to mention streets clogged with thousands of orange-clad Dutch — left me 500 feet short of the sightline I traveled so far to see. The royals stopped their waving and left their balcony just before I fought my way through to Dam Square.

So I, like, millions of other fans of royal fanfare (I assume there are millions), was reduced to an online roundup of the festivities.

At first I dove into the official royal Web site, hoping to catch up — and hoping there were English translations. And there were, in places.

But when in the Netherlands, you really try to absorb at least some Dutch. Here, for those who do not subscribe to De Telegraaf, the best of what I missed, in a photo gallery (don't be intimidated by the Dutch text).

I feel as if I were there.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Abstract Sunday Blog: In Pursuit of Happiness

Abstract Sunday mirrors Christoph Niemann's illustrations for The Times Magazine and is an archive of Abstract City, his Opinion column, which ran from 2008 through early 2011.

Niemann's work has appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired and American Illustration and has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration.

He is the author of many books, among them "The Pet Dragon," which teaches Chinese characters to young readers, "I LEGO N.Y." and "Subway," which is based on "The Boys and the Subway," the first entry of the Abstract City blog. His most recent book, "Abstract City," includes the first 16 chapters of this blog, plus an essay on creativity.

After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa Zeitz, and their three sons. You can also find him on his Web site christophniemann.com or on Twitter @abstractsunday.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

It’s the Economy: The Food-Truck Business Stinks

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Stefan Nafziger seemed oddly downbeat for a guy watching a dozen or so hungry people line up to buy his falafels. Three years ago, when it seemed as if food trucks might take over Manhattan, he planned to have a fleet of his Taim trucks dispensing Middle Eastern fare throughout the city. He even got a Wall Street investor. Now, he says, his one truck barely justifies the cost.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. The food-truck business stinks.

2. The dirty-dog business is an oligopoly.

3. Street food is where New York City enters the third world.

It's the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

I was originally hoping that Nafziger would help me figure out a decidedly New York puzzle. As I was walking through Prospect Park recently, I wanted to find a healthful snack for my son and something for me. The only options, though, were the same sort of carts that my dad took me to in the '70s: Good Humor ice cream, overpriced cans of soda and overboiled hot dogs sitting in cloudy water. This seemed ridiculous. In the past few decades, food in New York City has gone through a complete transformation, but the street-vendor market, which should be more nimble, barely budges. Shouldn't there be four Wafels & Dinges trucks for every hot-dog cart?

David Weber, president of the New York City Food Truck Association, explained that the ratio is more like 25 to 1 the other way. That's because despite the inherent attractiveness of cute trucks and clever food options, the business stinks. There are numerous (and sometimes conflicting) regulations required by the departments of Health, Sanitation, Transportation and Consumer Affairs. These rules are enforced, with varying consistency, by the New York Police Department. As a result, according to City Councilman Dan Garodnick, it's nearly impossible (even if you fill out the right paperwork) to operate a truck without breaking some law. Trucks can't sell food if they're parked in a metered space . . . or if they're within 200 feet of a school . . . or within 500 feet of a public market . . . and so on.

Enforcement is erratic. Trucks in Chelsea are rarely bothered, Nafziger said. In Midtown South, where I work and can attest to the desperate need for more lunch options, the N.Y.P.D. has a dedicated team of vendor-busting cops. "One month, we get no tickets," Thomas DeGeest, the founder of Wafels & Dinges, a popular mobile-food businesses that sells waffles and things, told me. "The next month, we get tickets every day." DeGeest had two trucks and five carts when he decided he couldn't keep investing in a business that was so vulnerable to overzealous cops or city bureaucracy. Instead, DeGeest reluctantly decided to open a regular old stationary restaurant.

Nafziger also knows well the regulatory hassles of the business. After one of his employees spent eight hours in jail for selling falafel without a license, he strictly follows the rule insisting that every mobile-food employee has Health Department certification. The trouble is that he needs to employ four people, each with his own license; if one quits, it can take two months for a new worker to get the proper paperwork. Nafziger said he holds on to his truck only because it's basically a moving billboard for his two, more successful brick-and-mortar restaurants, in Greenwich Village and NoLIta. And stationary restaurants, by the way, require that only a single employee on duty have a Health Department certification.

Nafziger and DeGeest may have become experts in the rules and regulations, but many of the city's vendors are constantly flummoxed. I spent one recent morning in the offices of the Street Vendor Project, a worker-advocacy group. As I sat with Sean Basinski, the group's founder, a stream of vendors came in with pink tickets in their hands. One woman, an Ecuadorean immigrant who sells kebabs in Bushwick, Brooklyn, handed Basinski the six tickets that she and her husband received on a single afternoon. The total came to $2,850, which, she said, was much more than what she makes in a good week. She had a street-vendor's license, she said, but didn't understand that she also needed a separate permit for her cart.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy?

One night last winter, more than 120 parents filed into the black-box theater at Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough "worldly" snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

In the black-box theater, Avenues' chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids' diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented.

Everything in the black-box theater, like the Sol LeWitt line drawing on the wall, was researched and intentionally chosen, just like all the other details at the school. That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle; Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine; and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be "a new school of thought," unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents' association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues' case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. "There was nothing in place," says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, "and they empowered 700 parents."

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn't hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man's backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). "I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity," says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues' academic dean and head of the Upper School. "They would take over if they could. They are New York parents."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 5, 2013

An article on Page 46 this weekend about Avenues, a for-profit school in Chelsea, omits one of its founders. Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine, helped start the school; it was not founded just by H. Christopher Whittle, a media and education entrepreneur, and Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Take the Plunge With ‘Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia’

On Tuesday, a new episode of the Web series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" appeared. Hamilton Morris is a chemist and general expert in the field of psychedelics and all things mind-bending. In past episodes, he has investigated rare hallucinogenic tree frogs in the Amazon, an abandoned missile silo in Kansas that became the world's most productive LSD lab and a Haitian drug that supposedly turned people into zombies.

The latest episode is about sensory-deprivation tanks, a k a isolation tanks, in which you are immersed in salt water, in complete silence and darkness, and you just . . .  float. The complete lack of external stimuli is said to have various effects on the mind and body, ranging from stress relief to heightened states of consciousness.

Some people get really into the tank scene, especially in Boulder, Colo., where a place called the Cloud Nine Float Center houses "the Rolls-Royce of sensory-deprivation tanks." So that's where Hamilton goes.

The episode is in three parts. Part 1 provides the history and philosophy of sensory-deprivation tanks. Part 2, my favorite, begins with Morris's voiceover: "As I consume my last sip of water, I prepare for a long and grueling excursion into the terra incognita of the human mind." Soon, as he puts it, he is "reduced to nothing more than a kernel of pure awareness floating in the cosmos." He emerges from the tank not realizing that five hours have passed.

In Part 3, Morris comes up with a positive affirmation to focus on in the tank ("I will regard tasks I must complete with cheerful readiness"), drinks 10 kombuchas and then embarks on the longest float of his life, for which he is rewarded with powerful life revelations.

It's a fascinating (and hilarious) watch. Also, Morris's voice totally triggers an A.S.M.R. response, if you're into that sort of thing.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Adam Davidson on Dueling Economists

Adam Davidson, who writes the magazine's It's the Economy column, is the author of this week's cover article about the economists Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard. Davidson is a founder of NPR's Planet Money, a podcast and blog. His last cover article was about the area between Washington and New York along the Amtrak line.

What surprised you most in reporting on the two leading economic thinkers for the two political parties? That the two agreed to the proposition?

I think the most striking surprise was the passion that Larry Summers raises in people, positive and negative.

His friends were incredibly effusive. Tim Geithner, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Rubin and countless younger folks — staff members at the White House, graduate students at Harvard — told me he had been a generous, loyal mentor. Several people told me they love him. At least 20 people told me things like this. I haven't heard that kind of praise for anybody in a long time, and it was, frankly, out of keeping with the picture I had of Summers as, well, a jerk. And his friends did say he could be tough, that he demanded a high level of intellectual rigor in policy discussions. But they described a very different side, someone who was there for them at pivotal moments.

On the other hand, I heard such angry denouncements of him from some people on the left. One economist told me I shouldn't talk to him at all. He would poison my brain. Another academic told me that Summers should be barred from any role in public policy.

Glenn Hubbard, for his part, seemed to generate the same response from everyone who knows him: He's a nice guy. Some people see him as a real mentor, but didn't talk about him with the level of passion that Summers's folks did. Others disagree with him but still said they like him.

You write that you have had a fantasy of presiding over a grand bargain by the two sides. I think many people have a fantasy instead of strangling the opposite side. How do these two feel about political polarization?

We were making a strong choice by using these two guys as a vehicle for exploring the economic divide. I could have found two moderate economists who don't play a role in politics and, probably, have had a much easier time getting consensus. Summers and Hubbard are smart economists, and they are also savvy political figures. So when they debated in person and when they talked to me one on one, each seemed intensely aware of how his words could play in the political sphere. As a result, they had little interest in actually resolving political issues, since any solution they came up with would, immediately, be used to pressure their political allies.

I think these two men — probably more than any other economists of their generation — think of their roles both as truth-seeking academics and changing the world through the messy business of politics. Which is to say, they play a role in fighting for and against the polarization that drives us all nuts.

What was the social dynamic at the meeting?

Certainly polite and certainly not warm, I would say. They've known each other for decades and have spent much of their lives sitting in rooms not agreeing with other very smart people. They're pros at disagreeing. That's what I felt. It's really impressive watching two practiced minds go at it so openly. There wasn't much anger that I picked up on. It was, for the most part, workmanlike, straightforward and intellectually aggressive.

You highlight the similar training that both Summers and Hubbard received and the fact that they are often analyzing the same data. Does it seem that both of their (very different) analyses are academically defensible?

They are certainly academically defensible. They've both written many papers that have been academically defended through the peer-review process and are used as references in lots of subsequent papers. I believe Summers is one of the most highly cited economists alive and, I think, Hubbard is, as well, in the field of tax policy.

This has been a mini-obsession of mine for a long time: how can economists think such different things? I think partly it's the questions different economists ask. And partly it's the nature of economics. They can't run randomized trials or repeat studies. You can't do the Great Depression 20 different times to test different government policies. All you can do is look at the complicated mix of human behavior and try to piece out a story.

Unlike physics, economists don't settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the academy.

Some readers have suggested that the answer to the question posed by the article — which economist has better ideas — is "neither." Does it seem likely that any other star economists from the left or the right could take either of their places?

We are not defining Hubbard and Summers as the only two intellectually defensible options. We're not saying the truth lies in either one's story. We are saying — and I think it's demonstrably true — that they roughly define the politically realistic realm of policy outcomes.

I love talking to lots of economists with lots of provocative ideas. But we have a status-quo-biased system. Things don't change that quickly or radically. We're not going to a gold standard. We're not eliminating the Fed. We're not breaking up all the big banks, and we're not turning America into a European-style social democracy. However good or bad any of these ideas — and countless others proposed by other economists — none of them are going to happen.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence. Summers probably comes the closest.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Lives: My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants

When I was a kid and my mom bought me Levi's, they were stiff and uncomfortable for weeks. Then over time and multiple washings, they'd fade the way you wanted them to and start to contour themselves to your body. They became more than your pants. They were your skin. They grew with you. They saw what you saw, absorbed your pain, your mistakes, your spills and slides. They scarred and ripped with you. They seemed to last forever. Some part of me can't understand why I ever got rid of that pair of Levi's that I had in seventh grade. How did I lose track of those pants?

So I went to the Levi's store in San Francisco because I had heard that good jeans were back. That they were making them the way they used to. They may cost a lot more, but if you want some emotional time travel and believe that denim in its raw form can make you feel whole, it's going to be worth the purchase of that two-legged vessel to a simpler time.

The clerk helping me was a chubby fellow with a handlebar mustache. I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous. If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked as if he were interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly while being chased through a time tunnel.

The mustache asked me what I was looking for, and I told him I had heard that Levi's was making real jeans again. He said they've always made real jeans, but they had to be treated a very specific way. He told me that his jeans had never been washed.

"You never wash your pants?"

"Nope. I'm going on a year."

I stepped back from him. I didn't catch a wave of stink coming off him, but how could it not be there, waiting, a miasma circling his body, if he didn't wash his pants? I held up the pair of stiff jeans and said, "Well, what do I do with these?" The mustache got very serious.

"What I usually do is I buy them a size smaller than I wear." This is ridiculous, because they are supposed to shrink to fit, so you are supposed to buy a size bigger. He said: "You put the pants on, and you get into a bathtub with them. Then you get out of the bathtub, and you towel off, and then you wear them around, wet, for as long as it takes them to dry. That way they are contoured perfectly to your body. After that you don't wash them, ever. If they get skanky, you throw them in the freezer."

I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.

When I got home, I went online to do a little research. Sure enough, the consensus on the Internet was that to make these jeans perfect, you put them on, get into a bathtub full of water and then let them dry while you wear them around. I ran the water into the tub. I don't ever take baths. I couldn't remember the last time I did, and now there I was, taking one with my pants on.

As I was lying in the tub with my new gray Levi's shrink-to-fit pants on, my natural feelings of desperation and stupidity were mixed with another emotion: Hope. My life had narrowed in this moment to one small, attainable purpose, the pursuit of perfect jeans, and I felt excited. I also felt empty. Was this what my life had become? Didn't I have better things to do? I was a 48-year-old man in a bathtub wearing pants, thinking I would be a better person for owning a pair of highly personalized jeans. It was in that moment that it hit me: These pants were just pants. They weren't going to do anything special.

That guy with the fancy mustache at the Levi's store was a carnival barker at the Dunk the Clown game. The clown was me, who bought the pants and the baloney that came with them. The pitcher with the ball whom I was taunting was the me who knew better. I took the pants off and enjoyed the bath. In the tank, again.

Marc Maron is the host of the podcast "WTF With Marc Maron." His memoir, "Attempting Normal," from which this essay is adapted, was just published by Spiegel & Grau.

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission. 

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Take the Plunge With ‘Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia’

On Tuesday, a new episode of the Web series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" appeared. Hamilton Morris is a chemist and general expert in the field of psychedelics and all things mind-bending. In past episodes, he has investigated rare hallucinogenic tree frogs in the Amazon, an abandoned missile silo in Kansas that became the world's most productive LSD lab and a Haitian drug that supposedly turned people into zombies.

The latest episode is about sensory-deprivation tanks, a k a isolation tanks, in which you are immersed in salt water, in complete silence and darkness, and you just . . .  float. The complete lack of external stimuli is said to have various effects on the mind and body, ranging from stress relief to heightened states of consciousness.

Some people get really into the tank scene, especially in Boulder, Colo., where a place called the Cloud Nine Float Center houses "the Rolls-Royce of sensory-deprivation tanks." So that's where Hamilton goes.

The episode is in three parts. Part 1 provides the history and philosophy of sensory-deprivation tanks. Part 2, my favorite, begins with Morris's voiceover: "As I consume my last sip of water, I prepare for a long and grueling excursion into the terra incognita of the human mind." Soon, as he puts it, he is "reduced to nothing more than a kernel of pure awareness floating in the cosmos." He emerges from the tank not realizing that five hours have passed.

In Part 3, Morris comes up with a positive affirmation to focus on in the tank ("I will regard tasks I must complete with cheerful readiness"), drinks 10 kombuchas and then embarks on the longest float of his life, for which he is rewarded with powerful life revelations.

It's a fascinating (and hilarious) watch. Also, Morris's voice totally triggers an A.S.M.R. response, if you're into that sort of thing.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy?

One night last winter, more than 120 parents filed into the black-box theater at Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough "worldly" snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

In the black-box theater, Avenues' chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids' diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented.

Everything in the black-box theater, like the Sol LeWitt line drawing on the wall, was researched and intentionally chosen, just like all the other details at the school. That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle; Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine; and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be "a new school of thought," unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents' association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues' case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. "There was nothing in place," says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, "and they empowered 700 parents."

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn't hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man's backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). "I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity," says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues' academic dean and head of the Upper School. "They would take over if they could. They are New York parents."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 5, 2013

An article on Page 46 this weekend about Avenues, a for-profit school in Chelsea, omits one of its founders. Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine, helped start the school; it was not founded just by H. Christopher Whittle, a media and education entrepreneur, and Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Lives: My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants

When I was a kid and my mom bought me Levi's, they were stiff and uncomfortable for weeks. Then over time and multiple washings, they'd fade the way you wanted them to and start to contour themselves to your body. They became more than your pants. They were your skin. They grew with you. They saw what you saw, absorbed your pain, your mistakes, your spills and slides. They scarred and ripped with you. They seemed to last forever. Some part of me can't understand why I ever got rid of that pair of Levi's that I had in seventh grade. How did I lose track of those pants?

So I went to the Levi's store in San Francisco because I had heard that good jeans were back. That they were making them the way they used to. They may cost a lot more, but if you want some emotional time travel and believe that denim in its raw form can make you feel whole, it's going to be worth the purchase of that two-legged vessel to a simpler time.

The clerk helping me was a chubby fellow with a handlebar mustache. I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous. If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked as if he were interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly while being chased through a time tunnel.

The mustache asked me what I was looking for, and I told him I had heard that Levi's was making real jeans again. He said they've always made real jeans, but they had to be treated a very specific way. He told me that his jeans had never been washed.

"You never wash your pants?"

"Nope. I'm going on a year."

I stepped back from him. I didn't catch a wave of stink coming off him, but how could it not be there, waiting, a miasma circling his body, if he didn't wash his pants? I held up the pair of stiff jeans and said, "Well, what do I do with these?" The mustache got very serious.

"What I usually do is I buy them a size smaller than I wear." This is ridiculous, because they are supposed to shrink to fit, so you are supposed to buy a size bigger. He said: "You put the pants on, and you get into a bathtub with them. Then you get out of the bathtub, and you towel off, and then you wear them around, wet, for as long as it takes them to dry. That way they are contoured perfectly to your body. After that you don't wash them, ever. If they get skanky, you throw them in the freezer."

I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.

When I got home, I went online to do a little research. Sure enough, the consensus on the Internet was that to make these jeans perfect, you put them on, get into a bathtub full of water and then let them dry while you wear them around. I ran the water into the tub. I don't ever take baths. I couldn't remember the last time I did, and now there I was, taking one with my pants on.

As I was lying in the tub with my new gray Levi's shrink-to-fit pants on, my natural feelings of desperation and stupidity were mixed with another emotion: Hope. My life had narrowed in this moment to one small, attainable purpose, the pursuit of perfect jeans, and I felt excited. I also felt empty. Was this what my life had become? Didn't I have better things to do? I was a 48-year-old man in a bathtub wearing pants, thinking I would be a better person for owning a pair of highly personalized jeans. It was in that moment that it hit me: These pants were just pants. They weren't going to do anything special.

That guy with the fancy mustache at the Levi's store was a carnival barker at the Dunk the Clown game. The clown was me, who bought the pants and the baloney that came with them. The pitcher with the ball whom I was taunting was the me who knew better. I took the pants off and enjoyed the bath. In the tank, again.

Marc Maron is the host of the podcast "WTF With Marc Maron." His memoir, "Attempting Normal," from which this essay is adapted, was just published by Spiegel & Grau.

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission. 

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Take the Plunge With ‘Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia’

On Tuesday, a new episode of the Web series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" appeared. Hamilton Morris is a chemist and general expert in the field of psychedelics and all things mind-bending. In past episodes, he has investigated rare hallucinogenic tree frogs in the Amazon, an abandoned missile silo in Kansas that became the world's most productive LSD lab and a Haitian drug that supposedly turned people into zombies.

The latest episode is about sensory-deprivation tanks, a k a isolation tanks, in which you are immersed in salt water, in complete silence and darkness, and you just . . .  float. The complete lack of external stimuli is said to have various effects on the mind and body, ranging from stress relief to heightened states of consciousness.

Some people get really into the tank scene, especially in Boulder, Colo., where a place called the Cloud Nine Float Center houses "the Rolls-Royce of sensory-deprivation tanks." So that's where Hamilton goes.

The episode is in three parts. Part 1 provides the history and philosophy of sensory-deprivation tanks. Part 2, my favorite, begins with Morris's voiceover: "As I consume my last sip of water, I prepare for a long and grueling excursion into the terra incognita of the human mind." Soon, as he puts it, he is "reduced to nothing more than a kernel of pure awareness floating in the cosmos." He emerges from the tank not realizing that five hours have passed.

In Part 3, Morris comes up with a positive affirmation to focus on in the tank ("I will regard tasks I must complete with cheerful readiness"), drinks 10 kombuchas and then embarks on the longest float of his life, for which he is rewarded with powerful life revelations.

It's a fascinating (and hilarious) watch. Also, Morris's voice totally triggers an A.S.M.R. response, if you're into that sort of thing.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy?

One night last winter, more than 120 parents filed into the black-box theater at Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough "worldly" snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

In the black-box theater, Avenues' chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids' diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented.

Everything in the black-box theater, like the Sol LeWitt line drawing on the wall, was researched and intentionally chosen, just like all the other details at the school. That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle; Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine; and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be "a new school of thought," unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents' association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues' case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. "There was nothing in place," says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, "and they empowered 700 parents."

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn't hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man's backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). "I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity," says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues' academic dean and head of the Upper School. "They would take over if they could. They are New York parents."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 4, 2013

An article on Page 46 this weekend about Avenues, a for-profit school in Chelsea, omits one of its founders. Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine, helped start the school; it was not founded just by H. Christopher Whittle, a media and education entrepreneur, and Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale University.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy?

One night last winter, more than 120 parents filed into the black-box theater at Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough "worldly" snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

In the black-box theater, Avenues' chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids' diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented.

Everything in the black-box theater, like the Sol LeWitt line drawing on the wall, was researched and intentionally chosen, just like all the other details at the school. That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be "a new school of thought," unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents' association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues' case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. "There was nothing in place," says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, "and they empowered 700 parents."

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn't hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man's backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). "I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity," says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues' academic dean and head of the Upper School. "They would take over if they could. They are New York parents."

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: In Ikram Goldman’s Hands, I Became a Model Student

I didn't think for a moment that anything I wore to Ikram, one of the most prestigious boutiques in the country, would ever be considered chic by anyone who knows anything about what chic actually is. So I went for a look that I hoped appeared, at least, as if it was not trying too hard, a look suitable for midwinter in Chicago, where Ikram is located: a knee-length black skirt, suede black boots, a delicate black and beige top and a short, thick, green cardigan. It was an ensemble meant to announce its own modest aspirations. In retrospect, I wish I'd worn a black cardigan instead of the green one, but in the eyes of Ikram Goldman, the owner of the store, the details wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the very premise of my message, to her, would be considered absurd: for Ikram, the whole point of clothing is to broadcast something bold.

In reporting my article on Ikram for this weekend's Money Issue, my primary objective was to write about Goldman's power in the world of fashion and retail, but there, in her store, amid the exquisite patterns and materials, I couldn't help myself; I had to know how she would dress me, if she could. Goldman is famous for not just choosing well, but dressing her clients imaginatively, persuasively, beautifully. To be in Goldman's store and not ask her what to wear would be like meeting with the Dalai Lama and not trying to get some tips on enlightenment. So I did.

"Get naked," she told me, which I also did, for the most part, all the while wondering if I had officially crossed some bright-line rule of journalism. (Margaret Sullivan, feel free to weigh in.)

To start, she put me in a crisp white collared shirt, the kind that buttons down the front. I was unimpressed. She whisked back a moment later with a voluminous black taffeta dress by Lanvin; on my body, it was somewhat shapeless, with the exception of huge, puffy arms. Still not impressed. Then she came back with a thick, heavy and detailed belt — a statement belt, they call it. Suddenly I had a waist. I appeared as thin as I ever have in a piece of clothing, so small — and yet incredibly powerful. I looked adult. I looked like someone people would work for, and take orders from; I looked every bit of my 42 years, and yet like someone to whom the years had granted confidence and style. Goldman added a complicated white necklace, whose details peaked out from the top of the shirt. I would register as someone of means; most dresses at Ikram start at about $1,000. The person in that dress was someone I would be curious to meet and also someone of whom I might be slightly afraid. If I wore it to the office, I wondered, how would people react?

I never could wear it to my office, I quickly decided; it would be so out of the ordinary as to appear costume-y. I would have to slowly work my way up to such a style, gradually growing into a new wardrobe, the way women gradually grow out of a bad haircut and into a better one.

Goldman smiled at my image in the mirror encouragingly and explained all that to me. I saw that she was not just dressing me in an outfit I might consider chic, or flattering; she was trying to show me her greatest ambition for her who I could be, or maybe should work harder to become. I wondered if she was right.

I admired the outfit, and then suddenly, in a rush, could not wait to take it off. My image in the mirror was so unfamiliar as to be discomfiting, like hearing your voice distorted on tape. At the same time, I shuddered at the thought of putting back on that green cardigan, which now revealed itself to be impossibly tatty hanging on the rack in the dressing room beside the other, obviously luxurious garments she had pulled.

In a moment, she had me in a beautifully tailored, sleeveless black Narciso Rodriguez dress. The dress was like a distilled, idealized, impeccable version of what I usually wear — simple styles that, if they were of slightly better quality, could probably be described as classic. I felt younger, more stylish, more elegant, more trim — it would be a dress to buy, if I were ever to spend that kind of money on a single piece of apparel. I'm still thinking about both dresses, but when I recall the first one, there's a lot more to think about. That is what Goldman gives to the women she dresses, and the people who look at them — not just something beautiful, but something to think about.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: For Love of the Game

Last May, the Santa Fe Fuego, an expansion team in the lowly Pecos League, the minor leagues of the minor leagues, threw their first pitch into baseball ignominy. Their starting pitcher was 47-year-old Rodney Tofoya, a former has-been in various Mexican and Canadian leagues, and a V.P. at the Albuquerque branch of Bank of the West. He was supported by an active roster of 22 players, each of whom the team paid $54 per week and 15 of whom Tafoya put up in his own house. The Fuego somehow won their opener, 14-8. Though some people believed the score was 16-8. Whatever. There wouldn't be too many more wins to savor all year long.

I learned all this while reading Abe Streep's terrific article/minibook about the Fuego season, "The Legends of Last Place," in The Atavist. Some disclosures are necessary here. Abe and I are friends, and we share a history — baseball history. Abe played center field and I played third on a couple of great 1990s Fieldston School baseball teams. We also suffered through one endless summer of doubleheaders on forgotten fields all across the Bronx. (Our poor parents . . .) I'm sure that if you locked us in a room for a couple hours, we could recount most of the throwing errors, base hits, blown calls, hit batsmen and hits that were really reach-on-errors from those years. Or the time when our friend Will was robbed of a double by a sliding Dalton outfielder. I know that because we still talk about this stuff and don't really find it weird. I also recently recruited Abe as a ringer to the Times Magazine's recent walloping of New York magazine in our annual softball grudge match.

So now that that's out of the way . . . I'm not going to spoil the plot of "Legends," though the title isn't really holding its cards to the vest. Anyway, this article isn't really about suspense. "Legends" acknowledges the truth about sports: they are often sad, occasionally tragic, usually comic undertakings by people (including middle-aged men) who know they should be doing something else. Yet for some people (I among them), there are few sensations more fulfilling than watching a throw as it sails from the left fielder's hand into the catcher's glove or hearing the flat smack of a ball exploding off the sweet spot of a bat. And that's doubly true when you're doing it yourself, especially when your baseball days are supposed to be over. This quote from Tafoya has stayed with me for days: "I would love to get married, I would love to have a family. But the one thing I'm not willing to give up is baseball." I can only hope that my heat is still in the 80s when I hit 47.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: In Ikram Goldman’s Hands, I Became a Model Student

I didn't think for a moment that anything I wore to Ikram, one of the most prestigious boutiques in the country, would ever be considered chic by anyone who knows anything about what chic actually is. So I went for a look that I hoped appeared, at least, as if it was not trying too hard, a look suitable for midwinter in Chicago, where Ikram is located: a knee-length black skirt, suede black boots, a delicate black and beige top and a short, thick, green cardigan. It was an ensemble meant to announce its own modest aspirations. In retrospect, I wish I'd worn a black cardigan instead of the green one, but in the eyes of Ikram Goldman, the owner of the store, the details wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the very premise of my message, to her, would be considered absurd: for Ikram, the whole point of clothing is to broadcast something bold.

In reporting my article on Ikram for this weekend's Money Issue, my primary objective was to write about Goldman's power in the world of fashion and retail, but there, in her store, amid the exquisite patterns and materials, I couldn't help myself; I had to know how she would dress me, if she could. Goldman is famous for not just choosing well, but dressing her clients imaginatively, persuasively, beautifully. To be in Goldman's store and not ask her what to wear would be like meeting with the Dalai Lama and not trying to get some tips on enlightenment. So I did.

"Get naked," she told me, which I also did, for the most part, all the while wondering if I had officially crossed some bright-line rule of journalism. (Margaret Sullivan, feel free to weigh in.)

To start, she put me in a crisp white collared shirt, the kind that buttons down the front. I was unimpressed. She whisked back a moment later with a voluminous black taffeta dress by Lanvin; on my body, it was somewhat shapeless, with the exception of huge, puffy arms. Still not impressed. Then she came back with a thick, heavy and detailed belt — a statement belt, they call it. Suddenly I had a waist. I appeared as thin as I ever have in a piece of clothing, so small — and yet incredibly powerful. I looked adult. I looked like someone people would work for, and take orders from; I looked every bit of my 42 years, and yet like someone to whom the years had granted confidence and style. Goldman added a complicated white necklace, whose details peaked out from the top of the shirt. I would register as someone of means; most dresses at Ikram start at about $1,000. The person in that dress was someone I would be curious to meet and also someone of whom I might be slightly afraid. If I wore it to the office, I wondered, how would people react?

I never could wear it to my office, I quickly decided; it would be so out of the ordinary as to appear costume-y. I would have to slowly work my way up to such a style, gradually growing into a new wardrobe, the way women gradually grow out of a bad haircut and into a better one.

Goldman smiled at my image in the mirror encouragingly and explained all that to me. I saw that she was not just dressing me in an outfit I might consider chic, or flattering; she was trying to show me her greatest ambition for her who I could be, or maybe should work harder to become. I wondered if she was right.

I admired the outfit, and then suddenly, in a rush, could not wait to take it off. My image in the mirror was so unfamiliar as to be discomfiting, like hearing your voice distorted on tape. At the same time, I shuddered at the thought of putting back on that green cardigan, which now revealed itself to be impossibly tatty hanging on the rack in the dressing room beside the other, obviously luxurious garments she had pulled.

In a moment, she had me in a beautifully tailored, sleeveless black Narciso Rodriguez dress. The dress was like a distilled, idealized, impeccable version of what I usually wear — simple styles that, if they were of slightly better quality, could probably be described as classic. I felt younger, more stylish, more elegant, more trim — it would be a dress to buy, if I were ever to spend that kind of money on a single piece of apparel. I'm still thinking about both dresses, but when I recall the first one, there's a lot more to think about. That is what Goldman gives to the women she dresses, and the people who look at them — not just something beautiful, but something to think about.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy?

One night last winter, more than 120 parents filed into the black-box theater at Avenues: The World School in Chelsea, to learn about what their kids were eating. Ever since the $85 million for-profit start-up opened its doors in September, food had been a divisive issue. After the first week of classes, a group of parents sent a seven-page e-mail detailing concerns: there were not enough snacks, not enough "worldly" snacks like seaweed, zucchini bread with quinoa flour and bean quesadillas (so long as the beans came from BPA-free tin cans). Unlike other New York City private schools, with their decades of institutional wisdom, Avenues was founded on the premise that its parents were partners in building a new community. So it was ready to hear them out.

In the black-box theater, Avenues' chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids' diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was ready to answer questions about allergies. A 25-page PowerPoint was presented.

Everything in the black-box theater, like the Sol LeWitt line drawing on the wall, was researched and intentionally chosen, just like all the other details at the school. That was why many of the assembled parents applied in the first place. Avenues, which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle and the former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., was designed to be "a new school of thought," unencumbered by legacy. It hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents' association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues' case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. "There was nothing in place," says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, "and they empowered 700 parents."

A committee was created to manage events, like galas and book fairs and bake sales, even though, as a for-profit school, Avenues couldn't hold any events that raised money. (Did Avenues even want book fairs, some wondered? That was debated, too.) A task force was formed to investigate the safety of the neighborhood after at least one mother fretted that her child had seen the upper outlines of a homeless man's backside en route to a playground. The complaint became known as the butt-crack e-mail. Other debates waged over the classrooms (were there enough books?); pickup (it was mayhem); identification cards (the photos were too high-resolution); and the school uniforms (was anyone enforcing the policy?). "I think we underestimated the degree of their energy and creativity," says Gardner P. Dunnan, the former Dalton headmaster and Avenues' academic dean and head of the Upper School. "They would take over if they could. They are New York parents."

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard Square Off on Our Economic Future

Nigel Parry for The New York Times

Left to right: Larry Summers, Glenn Hubbard.

One cold late-winter afternoon, Larry Summers was standing by the free-throw line at Lavietes Pavilion, on the Harvard campus, somberly shooting a basketball. In the past couple of years, Summers has sworn off Diet Coke, gluten and junk food and lost a fair amount of weight. As a result, his gray White House T-shirt billowed over his loose gym shorts. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and celebrated economist, is well known for his cutting wit and laserlike focus; he is less well known for his jump shot. But Summers, who recalls with anguish being cut from his high-school basketball team, never let his gaze wander as he took, and missed, nearly every shot. Two Harvard players ran down his rebounds.

After practice, Tommy Amaker, the Harvard basketball coach, invited Summers into a lounge to address his team. Over pizza — his gluten-free pie sat off to the side — Summers delivered a 30-minute speech that was part motivational and mostly scholarly. (Imagine what Bobby Knight might sound like if he had an advanced degree in public economics.) The theme was adjustments. Summers began by recalling a recent Harvard game against Brown. The Crimson had blown a 22-point lead in the second half but came back and eked out a win in double overtime. "It's not that people who win never make mistakes," Summers said. Then he transitioned to his old boss, President Barack Obama, who botched his first debate against Mitt Romney before adjusting his plan and winning the next two. "Like the president," he said, "you finished strong!"

Summers segued to an explanation for how he chose a career in economics. The field, he said, provided tools that can be used to make the world, or a basketball team, better. The key is reading data and recognizing what it tells you. Then Summers paused and asked the assembled players a rhetorical question: Did they believe a shooter could get a "hot hand" and go on a streak in which he made shot after shot after shot? All the players nodded uniformly. Summers paused again, relishing the moment. "The answer is no," he said. "People apply patterns to random data." A statistical analysis of player performance reveals that streaks are random events. The players listened respectfully. They perked up when it was noted that Summers grew up in the same school district as Kobe Bryant.

A few days later, I witnessed an equally unusual discussion of basketball and economics. Before a crowded lecture hall at Columbia University, the economist and former adviser to both Bush presidents, Glenn Hubbard, wrote a series of words on the blackboard. Among them: Milton Friedman, Yeats, basketball. Hubbard, a mild and genial man, looks as if he entered the world fully formed, wearing a conservative suit with a side part in his hair and an accountant's pair of thick eyeglasses. Close your eyes and picture an economist — that's Hubbard. For the next hour, he maintained an oddly cheery tone as he laid out a dystopian vision of the United States' economic future. He ticked off a series of empires — Rome, medieval China, Spain, 19th-century Britain — and argued that they fell because their leadership ossified and squashed free trade, technological progress or other forces of economic growth.

Hubbard fears that the United States is also veering away from the forces that made it grow into the world's most powerful economy. Rather than corrupt Roman senators or courtly Spanish twits, he argued, our culprits are myopic politicians who are creating a middle-class entitlement state. If those politicians don't make fundamental changes to lower our debt — especially by changing the rules governing increasingly expensive Social Security and Medicare policies — the United States may collapse, too.

As he wrapped up, Hubbard pointed to the good news: results can change when the right adjustments are made. This is where he brought up basketball. By the 1940s, he said, the sport had become boring, dominated by extremely tall players who planted themselves next to the rim. Then a Columbia University graduate student who also coached basketball wrote a Ph.D. dissertation arguing that the game could be saved by innovations, like the 3-point shot, which created an incentive to move action away from the hoop. It took decades for the N.B.A. to adopt the 3-pointer, but since its implementation, it has helped make basketball one of the most popular and lucrative sports on earth.

The U.S. economy, in other words, desperately needs to find its own 3-point shot.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

It’s the Economy: Is It Crazy to Think We Can Eradicate Poverty?

At a news conference during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in late April, Jim Yong Kim held up a piece of paper with the year "2030" scribbled on it in pen. "This is it," said Kim, the genial American physician who took over as president of the World Bank last summer. "This is the global target to end poverty."

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Dire poverty might end soon.

2. China is leading the way.

3. Urbanization is key.

4. But it doesn't always look pretty.

It sounds like the sort of airy, ambitious goal that is greeted by standing ovations but is ultimately unlikely to ever materialize. Development experts don't see it that way, though. The end of extreme poverty might very well be within reach. "It's not by any means pie-in-the-sky," says Scott Morris, who formerly managed the Obama administration's relations with development institutions. When I asked Jeffrey Sachs, the development economist, if the target seemed feasible, he said, "I absolutely believe so." And Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, the powerful Washington policy group, told me, "In many ways, it's a very modest goal."

In part, this is because the bar is set very low. The World Bank aims to raise just about everyone on Earth above the $1.25-a-day income threshold. In Zambia, an average person living in such dire poverty might be able to afford, on a given day, two or three plates of cornmeal porridge, a tomato, a mango, a spoonful each of oil and sugar, a bit of chicken or fish, maybe a handful of nuts. But he would have just pocket change to spend on transportation, housing, education and everything else. The 1.2 billion people living in such extreme poverty, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, might own land, but they are not very likely to own durable goods or productive assets — things like bicycles — that might help them raise themselves out of poverty. In such families, about half or three-quarters of income goes toward food.

Fortunately, this deadly and cyclical form of poverty is already on its way toward obsolescence, and much faster than many development economists expected. The first Millennium Development Goal — to halve the proportion of the world population living in dire poverty by 2015 — was met five years early, as the rate fell to an estimated 21 percent in 2010, from 43 percent in 1990. Some economists had feared that the recession would arrest or even reverse the trend, given how interconnected the global economy is, but the improvement continued, unabated. Annual growth dipped for developing economies in 2009 but has since rebounded to about 5.3 percent a year, a figure dragged down by weaker peripheral European economies.

For much of the improvement, the world can thank one country: China, which alone accounts for about half of the decline in the extreme poverty rate worldwide. It has also driven significant gains across the region. In the early 1980s, East Asia had the highest extreme-poverty rate in the world, with more than three in four people living on less than $1.25 a day. By 2010, just one in eight were. But other middle-income countries, like Brazil, Nigeria and India, have experienced significant growth, too — in no small part because tens of millions of the very poor have moved from rural areas to cities, where they become richer, healthier and more productive for their economies.

Since 1980, the proportion of the developing world living in urban areas has grown to about 50 percent, from 30 percent, and according to the World Bank, that migration of hundreds of millions has been instrumental in pulling down poverty rates — and will be for a broader set of countries going forward. Cities bolster access to health services and public resources; infant-mortality rates, for instance, are 40 percent lower in urban Cambodia than in rural Cambodia. And workers themselves become more productive, often by making the switch from labor-intensive work like farming to capital-intensive work like manufacturing. Urban poverty is hardly attractive — slums are cramped, unplanned, unhygienic places — but it is, in many cases, less deadly. (Except when it's not. A recent factory collapse in Bangladesh killed dozens of workers — a reminder of the sometimes-catastrophic human costs associated with rapid, unchecked urbanization and industrialization.)

Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More