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Surreal Rules

2006-08-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

The difficulties of fighting in an absurdly complicated region.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Prior to September 11, the general consensus was that conventional Middle East armies were paper tigers and that their terrorist alternatives were best dealt with by bombing them from a distance — as in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, east Africa, etc. — and then letting them sort out their own rubble.

Then following 9/11, the West adopted a necessary change in strategy that involved regime change and the need to win “hearts and minds” to ensure something better was established in place of the deposed dictator or theocrat. That necessitated close engagements with terrorists in their favored urban landscape. After the last four years, we have learned just how difficult that struggle can be, especially in light of the type of weapons $500 billion in Middle East windfall petroleum profits can buy, when oil went from $20 a barrel to almost $80 over the last few years. To best deal with certain difficulties we’ve encountered in these battles thus far, perhaps the United States should adopt the following set of surreal rules of war.

1. Any death — enemy or friendly, accidental or deliberate, civilian or soldier — favors the terrorists. The Islamists have no claim on morality; Westerners do and show it hourly. So, in a strange way, images of the dead and dying are attributed only to our failing. If ours are killed, it is because those in power were not careful (inadequate body armor, unarmored humvees, etc), most likely due to some supposed conspiracy (Halliburton profiteering, blood for oil, wars for Israel, etc.). When Muslim enemies are killed, whether by intent or accidentally, the whole arsenal of Western postmodern thought comes into play. For the United States to have such power over life and death, the enemy appears to the world as weak, sympathetic, and victimized; we as strong and oppressive. Terrorists are still “constructed” as “the other” and thus are seen as suffering — doctored photos or not — through the grim prism of Western colonialism, racism, and imperialism.

In short, it is not just that Western public opinion won’t tolerate many losses; it won’t tolerate for very long killing the enemy either — unless the belligerents are something akin to the white, Christian Europeans of Milosevic’s Serbia, who, fortunately for NATO war planners in the Balkans, could not seek refuge behind any politically correct paradigm and so were bombed with impunity. Remember, multiculturalism always trumps fascism: the worst homophobe, the intolerant theocrat, and the woman-hating bigot is always sympathetic if he wears some third-world garb, mouths anti-Americanism, and looks most un-European. To win these wars, our soldiers must not die or kill.

2. All media coverage of fighting in the Middle East is ultimately hostile — and for a variety of reasons. Since the 1960s too many reporters have seen their mission as more than disinterested news gathering, but rather as near missionary: they seek to counter the advantages of the Western capitalist power structure by preparing the news in such a way as to show us the victims of profit-making and an affluent elite. Second, most fighting is far from home and dangerous. Trash the U.S. military and you might suffer a bad look at a well-stocked PX as the downside for winning the Pulitzer; trash Hezbollah or Hamas, and you might end up headless on the side of the road. Third, while in a southern Lebanon or the Green Zone, it is always safer to outsource a story and photos to local stringers, whose sympathies are usually with the enemy. A doctored photo that exaggerates Israeli “war crimes” causes a mini-controversy for a day or two back in the States; a doctored photo that exaggerates Hezbollah atrocities wins an RPG in your hotel window. To win these wars, there must be no news of them.

3. The opposition — whether an establishment figure like Howard Dean or an activist such as Cindy Sheehan — ultimately prefers the enemy to win. In their way of thinking, there is such a reservoir of American strength that no enemy can ever really defeat us at home and so take away our Starbucks’ lattes, iPods, Reeboks, or 401Ks. But being checked in “optional” wars in Iraq, or seeing Israel falter in Lebanon, has its advantages: a George Bush and his conservatives are humiliated; the military-industrial complex learns to be a little bit more humble; and guilt over living in a prosperous Western suburb is assuaged. When a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton — unlike a Nixon, Reagan, or Bush — sends helicopters or bombs into the Middle East desert, it is always as a last resort and with reluctance, and so can be grudgingly supported. To win these wars, a liberal Democrat must wage them.

4. Europeans have shown little morality, but plenty of influence, abroad and here at home during Middle East wars. Europeans, who helped to bomb Belgrade, now easily condemn Israel in the skies over Beirut. They sold Saddam his bunkers and reactor, and won in exchange sweetheart oil concessions. Iran could not build a bomb without Russian and European machine tools. Iran is not on any serious European embargo list; much of the off-the-shelf weaponry so critical to Hezbollah was purchased through European arms merchants. And if they are consistent in their willingness to do business with any tyrant, the Europeans also know how to spread enough aid or money around to the Middle East, to ensure some protection and a prominent role in any postwar conference. Had we allowed eager Europeans to get in on the postbellum contracts in Iraq, they would have muted their criticism considerably. To win these wars, we must win over the Europeans by ensuring they can always earn a profit.

5. To fight in the Middle East, the United States and Israel must enlist China, Russia, Europe, or any nation in the Arab world to fight its wars. China has killed tens of thousands in Tibet in a ruthless war leading to occupation and annexation. Russia leveled Grozny and obliterated Chechnyans. Europeans helped to bomb Belgrade, where hundreds of civilians were lost to “collateral damage.” Egyptians gassed Yemenis; Iraqis gassed Kurds; Iraqis gassed Iranians; Syrians murdered thousands of men, women, and children in Hama; Jordanians slaughtered thousands of Palestinians. None received much lasting, if any, global condemnation. In the sick moral calculus of the world’s attention span, a terrorist who commits suicide in Guantanamo Bay always merits at least 500 dead Kurds, 1,000 Chechnyans, or 10,000 Tibetans. To win these wars, we need to outsource the job to those who can fight them with impunity.

6. Time is always an enemy. Most Westerners are oblivious to criticism if they wake up in the morning and learn their military has bombed a Saddam or sent a missile into Afghanistan — and the war was begun and then ended all while they were sleeping. In contrast, 6-8 weeks — about the length of the Balkan or Afghanistan war — is the limit of our patience. After that, Americans become so sensitive to global criticism that they begin to hate themselves as much as others do. To win these wars, they should be over in 24 hours — but at all cost no more than 8 weeks.

Silly, you say, are such fanciful rules? Of course — but not as absurd as the wars now going on in the Middle East.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

'Mass Murder' Foiled

2006-08-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

A terror plot is exposed by the policies many American liberals oppose.

Americans went to work yesterday to news of another astonishing terror plot against U.S. airlines, only this time the response was grateful relief. British authorities had busted the "very sophisticated" plan "to commit mass murder" and arrested 20-plus British-Pakistani suspects. As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11 without another major attack on U.S. soil, now is the right moment to consider the policies that have protected us--and those in public life who have fought those policies nearly every step of the way.

It's not as if the "Islamic fascists"--to borrow President Bush's description yesterday--haven't been trying to hit us. They took more than 50 lives last year in London with the "7/7" subway bombings. There was the catastrophic attack in Madrid the year before that left nearly 200 dead. But there have also been successes. Some have been publicized, such as a foiled plot to poison Britain's food supply with ricin. But undoubtedly many have not, because authorities don't want to compromise sources and methods, or because the would-be terrorists have been captured or killed before they could carry out their plans.

In this case the diabolical scheme was to smuggle innocent-looking liquid explosive components and detonators onto planes. They could then be assembled onboard and exploded, perhaps over cities for maximum horror. Multiply the passenger load of a 747 by, say, 10 airliners, and this attack could have killed more people than 9/11. We don't yet know how the plot was foiled, but surely part of the explanation was crack surveillance work by British authorities.

"This wasn't supposed to happen today," a U.S. official told the Washington Post of the arrests and terror alert. "It was supposed to happen several days from now. We hear the British lost track of one or two guys. They had to move." Meanwhile, British antiterrorism chief Peter Clarke said at a news conference that the plot was foiled because "a large number of people" had been under surveillance, with police monitoring "spending, travel and communications."

Let's emphasize that again: The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.

And almost on political cue yesterday, Members of the Congressional Democratic leadership were using the occasion to suggest that the U.S. is actually more vulnerable today despite this antiterror success. Harry Reid, who's bidding to run the Senate as Majority Leader, saw it as one more opportunity to insist that "the Iraq war has diverted our focus and more than $300 billion in resources from the war on terrorism and has created a rallying cry for international terrorists."

Ted Kennedy chimed in that "it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win." Mr. Kennedy somehow overlooked that the foiled plan was nearly identical to the "Bojinka" plot led by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean in 1995. Did the Clinton Administration's "misguided policies" invite that plot? And if the Iraq war is a diversion and provocation, just what policies would Senators Reid and Kennedy have us "focus" on?

Surveillance? Hmmm. Democrats and their media allies screamed bloody murder last year when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA wasn't designed for, nor does it forbid, the timely exploitation of what are often anonymous phone numbers, and the calls monitored had at least one overseas connection. But Mr. Reid labeled such surveillance "illegal" and an "NSA domestic spying program." Other Democrats are still saying they will censure, or even impeach, Mr. Bush over the FISA program if they win control of Congress.

This year the attempt to paint Bush Administration policies as a clear and present danger to civil liberties continued when USA Today hyped a story on how some U.S. phone companies were keeping call logs. The obvious reason for such logs is that the government might need them to trace the communications of a captured terror suspect. And then there was the recent brouhaha when the New York Times decided news of a secret, successful and entirely legal program to monitor bank transfers between bad guys was somehow in the "public interest" to expose.

For that matter, we don't recall most advocates of a narrowly "focused" war on terror having many kind words for the Patriot Act, which broke down what in the 1990s was a crippling "wall" of separation between our own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Senator Reid was "focused" enough on this issue to brag, prematurely as it turned out, that he had "killed" its reauthorization.

And what about interrogating terror suspects when we capture them? It is elite conventional wisdom these days that techniques no worse than psychological pressure and stress positions constitute "torture." There is also continued angst about the detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, even as Senators and self-styled civil libertarians fight Bush Administration attempts to process them through military tribunals that won't compromise sources and methods.

In short, Democrats who claim to want "focus" on the war on terror have wanted it fought without the intelligence, interrogation and detention tools necessary to win it. And if they cite "cooperation" with our allies as some kind of magical answer, they should be reminded that the British and other European legal systems generally permit far more intrusive surveillance and detention policies than the Bush Administration has ever contemplated. Does anyone think that when the British interrogate those 20 or so suspects this week that they will recoil at harsh or stressful questioning?

Another issue that should be front and center again is ethnic profiling. We'd be shocked if such profiling wasn't a factor in the selection of surveillance targets that resulted in yesterday's arrests. Here in the U.S., the arrests should be a reminder of the dangers posed by a politically correct system of searching 80-year-old airplane passengers with the same vigor as screeners search young men of Muslim origin. There is no civil right to board an airplane without extra hassle, any more than drivers in high-risk demographics have a right to the same insurance rates as a soccer mom.

The real lesson of yesterday's antiterror success in Britain is that the threat remains potent, and that the U.S. government needs to be using every legal tool to defeat it. At home, that includes intelligence and surveillance and data-mining, and abroad it means all of those as well as an aggressive military plan to disrupt and kill terrorists where they live so they are constantly on defense rather than plotting to blow up U.S.-bound airliners.

As the time since 9/11 has passed, many of America's elites have begun to portray U.S. government policies as a greater threat than the terrorists themselves. George Soros and others have said this explicitly, and their political allies in Congress and the media have staged a relentless campaign against the very practices that saved innocent lives this week. We doubt that many Americans who will soon board an airplane agree.

A Head Start on the Future of High-Def

2006-08-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

HIGH-TECH projects often take longer to complete than anticipated; just ask Microsoft’s Windows team.

But it seems as if we’ve been hearing about high-definition video since the Eisenhower administration. The Federal Communications Commission’s mandatory cutoff of old-fashioned analog TV broadcasts, now scheduled for 2009, has been delayed, what, 500 times?

Part of the holdup is the extent and expense of the switch to the new, better-looking format. To achieve HDTV nirvana, you have to replace every element of your video setup: the TV set, cable box, DVD player, DVD movie collection — and even your camcorder.

Next month, Canon will release the world’s smallest and least expensive high-definition tape camcorder, a one-handable beauty called the HV10. Its list price is $1,300. As any gadget freak can tell you, however, that’s an inflated, fanciful figure provided for — well, for no good reason. The online price, once the camcorder is on store shelves, will be lower.

The HV10 is not the first high-def consumer camcorder by any means; Sony began blazing this path at the beginning of 2005. In fact, Sony’s third HD camcorder, not counting pro models, has been available for months: the HC3 ($1,500 list price; under $1,200 online), the previous price and size champ.

As Canon rolls out its HV10, Sony’s HC3 seems to be squarely in its cross hairs. Both camcorders produce video in the 1080i format, which you can edit in Apple’s iMovie or many Windows programs (Premiere, Vegas, PowerDirector and so on). Both have built-in, automatic lens caps but lack headphone and microphone jacks.

Both are HDV camcorders, which means that they record onto standard, easy-to-find, inexpensive MiniDV cassettes. The eyepiece viewfinder is immobile and nonextendable on both. And both cameras are so compact, the other parents at the baseball game will have absolutely no clue that you’re filming in high definition.

OF course, they’ll also have no idea that you paid more than $1,000 for your camcorder, compared with as little as $300 for a standard-def model — at least until they see the result on a high-definition TV.

That’s when they’ll see what all the fuss is about. The clarity, color fidelity and detail of good high-def video is absolutely astonishing, and its wide-screen shape makes even home movies look like Hollywood movies. With four times the resolution of a standard TV picture, high-def movies look like the view out a window.

This image-quality business, as it turns out, is the new Canon’s specialty. Talk about being blown away the first time you play back your recordings — let’s hope you have a sturdy couch.

Several advances are responsible for the brilliant picture quality. First, Canon has paid extra attention to two of the most important aspects of HD recording: focus and stability. Because the high-def picture is so sharp and so wide, moments of blurriness or hand-held jitters are far more noticeable and disturbing than in regular video.

So the front of the HV10 bears a special external sensor that, when you change your aim, handles the bulk of the refocusing extremely rapidly. A standard through-the-lens focusing system does the fine tuning after that. Together, these two mechanisms nearly eliminate the awkward moment of blurry focus-hunting that mars other camcorders’ output. (Take care to avoid covering the focus sensor with your fingers as they wrap around this vertically oriented, chunky camera.)

The HV10 also aims to iron out camera shake with a true optical stabilizer. A gyroscope inside the lens mechanism sends real-time feedback to the sensor itself, resulting, Canon says, in a more stable picture than you’d get from electronic stabilizers like the one in Sony’s HC3.

In practice, the Canon’s stabilizer works fantastically when you’re zoomed out; if you use two hands, the picture is indistinguishable from a tripod shot. As you zoom in, however, camera shake becomes more noticeable; at the 10X maximum, keeping the video rock-solid requires either a tripod or nerves of steel.

Now, depending on where the Canon’s street price winds up, Sony’s HC3 may be slightly more expensive. But it offers some goodies that the Canon lacks: a minutes-remaining readout for the battery; a “nightshot” mode for filming in total blackness, infrared-style; and an accessory shoe for video lights and microphones (proprietary Sony accessories only).

The Sony model also has an HDMI jack. HDMI is a single cable that carries high-definition video and audio — a common, extremely convenient connector on high-def equipment. Connecting the Canon to a high-def TV, on the other hand, requires plugging in five connections: left and right audio, and three component-video jacks.

But the Canon offers some perks of its own. In addition to its superior stabilizer and focusing system, it does better in low light, with fewer of the dancing, grainy pixels that mar the HC3’s dim-setting work. It also has a built-in video light that’s a real help — at least within interview range — at nighttime parties, postconcert wrap-ups and “Blair Witch”-style memos to posterity.

Neither camera takes very good still photos. But for what it’s worth, the Canon’s photo-shutter button works even while you’re filming. When you consider how often you might want both stills and video in life — the wedding kiss, the baseball swing, the diploma handshake — this is a great feature.

The Canon even counts to 10 every time you begin filming — a small “1 sec, 2 sec” counter appears on the very bright, very sharp flip-out screen. It’s an ingenious idea because it alerts you, even more effectively than the red REC dot, to when you are, and are not, recording.

Finally, the HV10 can convert all your old analog video, like VHS and 8-millimeter tapes, into digital form (not high definition), for ease in computer editing and reassurance in longevity.

The HV10’s only serious drawback, in fact, is one that it shares with recent Sony models (including the HC3): a really pathetic wide-angle view. Even at the most zoomed-out setting, these camcorders are zoomed in, if that makes any sense; in camera terms, its zoom range is 43 to 436 millimeters. Fitting a whole six-foot person into the frame involves backing up 15 feet, which often puts you into the street, the sea or the restroom.

Now, you could argue that it’s too soon to be buying any high-def camcorder. How, for example, will you show off your finished high-definition masterpieces? High-def DVD recorders are still on the drawing boards, and high-def VCR’s are an expensive oddity. At the moment, the only way to play back your high-def work is to connect the camcorder to your TV.

But the world’s eventual switch to high definition is inevitable. Meanwhile, time is passing. If anything is worth filming, isn’t it worth filming in the best possible quality starting right now? (My infant son, for example, had the good sense to take his very first steps while I was rolling with a high-def camcorder. I’ll always be grateful for that piece of video.)

True, a high-def camcorder is still much more expensive than a standard-def one. But if that’s not an obstacle, remember that you’re actually buying two camcorders in one; you can film in either standard or high-definition video on the same tape. And you can play back either kind of video on either kind of TV set, too (standard or HDTV), which makes these camcorders exceptionally versatile.

In the meantime, by entering the high-def camcorder market a year and a half after its rivals, Canon has played the same conservative waiting game it once used with digital cameras and camcorders. Its goal, of course, is to watch and learn as the pioneers get all the arrows in their backs.

If the HV10 is any indication, the company is off to a very good start.

Red State Jews

2006-08-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

By THANE ROSENBAUM

This is a soul-searching moment for the Jewish left. Actually, for many Jewish liberals, navigating the gloomy politics of the Middle East is like walking with two left feet.

I would know. For six years I was the literary editor of Tikkun magazine, a leading voice for progressive Jewish politics that never avoided subjecting Israel to moral scrutiny. I also teach human rights at a Jesuit university, imparting the lessons of reciprocal grievances and the moral necessity to regard all people with dignity and mutual respect. And I am deeply sensitive to Palestinian pain, and mortified when innocent civilians are used as human shields and then cynically martyred as casualties of war.

Yet, since 9/11 and the second intifada, where suicide bombings and beheadings have become the calling cards of Arab diplomacy, and with Hamas and Hezbollah emerging as elected entities that, paradoxically, reject the first principles of liberal democracy, I feel a great deal of moral anguish. Perhaps I have been naïve all along.

And I am not alone. Many Jews are in my position -- the children and grandchildren of labor leaders, socialists, pacifists, humanitarians, antiwar protestors -- instinctively leaning left, rejecting war, unwilling to demonize, and insisting that violence only breeds more violence. Most of all we share the profound belief that killing, humiliation and the infliction of unnecessary pain are not Jewish attributes.

However, the world as we know it today -- post-Holocaust, post-9/11, post-sanity -- is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself -- with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn't want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society -- the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

Despite the deep cynicism, however, Israel knew that it must try. It would have to set aside nearly 60 years of hard-won experience, starting from the very first days of its independence, and believe that the Arab world had softened, would become more welcoming neighbors, and would stop chanting: "Not in our backyard -- the Middle East is for Arabs only."

It is true that Israel has entered into peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan that have brought some measure of historic stability to the region. But with Israel having withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza, and with Israeli public opinion virtually united in favor of near-total withdrawal from the West Bank, why are rockets being launched at Israel now, why are their soldiers being kidnapped if the aspirations of the Palestinian people, and the intentions of Hamas and Hezbollah, stand for something other than the total destruction of Israel? And if Palestinians and the Lebanese are electing terrorists and giving them the portfolio of statesmen, then what message is being sent to moderate voices, what incentives are there to negotiate, and how can any of this sobering news be recast in a more favorable light?

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness -- bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

Mr. Rosenbaum, a novelist and professor at Fordham Law School, is author, most recently, of "The Myth of Moral Justice" (HarperCollins, 2004).

Luscious, at last!

2006-08-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Cooks, rejoice: After all the crazy weather, the best of summer is here.

August 9, 2006

FOR most of us, this crazy summer weather has been an inconvenience, a matter of being a little uncomfortable. For farmers, it has wreaked havoc with their livelihoods.

It's easy to forget that, now that we're standing smack in summer's sweet spot, produce-wise. Walk through the farmers market and the bounty is astonishing: piles of peaches and nectarines, mounds of melons, tomatoes of every color, eggplants, squashes, cucumbers and all kinds of berries.

For cooks, this is one of the best times of the year, with ingredients so good you hardly have to do anything to make a delicious meal. But for the farmers who grew all of it, this summer has been one of the most challenging in memory.

"You know how it always is with farmers: It's too hot, then it's too cold; it's too wet, then it's too dry," says Maryann Carpenter of Santa Monica farmers market favorite Coastal Farms. "But I've never seen anything like this year."

Still, Carpenter can't resist popping open one of her few flats of heirloom tomatoes — mostly Cherokee Purples, with a few Evergreens and Pineapples as well. "But look how pretty these are," she says. "Aren't they beautiful?"

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger even asked for the federal government for disaster relief assistance.

Weather woes

THE year started with an unseasonably mild winter, which was followed by an unseasonably cool and rainy spring, which gave way almost immediately to scorching temperatures hotter than California has seen in many years.

In such heat, herbs and lettuces bolt from tender seedlings to tough, seed-producing adults within days. Plants stressed by the weather are even more susceptible to predation by pests and disease. Tender fruit like tomatoes and grapes and delicate greens and herbs get sunburned.

And though heat is necessary for ripening fruit, when there's too much, plants go into survival mode and shut down, dropping fruit and blossoms in some cases and slowing the ripening process to a crawl in others.

Of course, the heat also affects humans: Because of the scorching temperatures, many farms shortened work days so their crews were done by 2 p.m., slowing and in some cases reducing the harvest.

Many vegetables, including tomatoes and peppers, are at least two weeks behind schedule; some are much more. Fruit varieties we usually see earlier in summer, such as Elegant Lady peaches, are just now being picked.

"Where do I begin?" asks Molly Gean of Harry's Berries. "We drowned and then we baked."

The good news is that the worst of the weather seems to be behind us and that means the floodgates of the produce market are swinging wide open.

Quality has improved drastically, even in the last couple of weeks. Earlier in the year, produce like tomatoes, peaches and nectarines seemed a little short in flavor — they just hadn't gotten enough sun. Lack of heat certainly hasn't been a problem for a while.

Of course, you still need to shop carefully. Tender berries go soft in the heat — check the underside of the box for signs of leaking juice, and then be sure to use them within a day or two. Avoid lettuces that are browning at the tips or appear coarse and overly mature. Watch for tomatoes with soft shoulders.

Squash tends to grow like crazy during the heat; remember to pick the slimmest, which will have fewest seeds, and the ones with the most tender skin.

Stone fruit are so delicate that they are almost bound for mishap, especially with tricky growing conditions. Pass on any that show signs of brown rot, a serious problem in hot and humid weather.

On the other hand, a slightly bruised peach or nectarine can still be delicious, but it will need to be pared back. And sunburn or other cosmetic flaws rarely go more than skin deep.

One of the best things about summertime cooking is that with basic ingredients this good, you don't really need to fancy them up.

What do I love best about this time of year? It's hard to tell where to begin. I feel like a surprise Oscar winner who stands at the podium stammering, unable to start his thank-yous because he knows he'll leave out the most important one.

Let's start with the most obvious: Every fruit and vegetable has something going for it, but for me, the two with real grandeur are peaches and tomatoes. When great, both of them have not only perfectly balanced sweetness and acidity, but also a deep, savory quality that is almost indescribable.

Plums and melons are not far behind in stature, but on opposite ends of the flavor spectrum. To my taste, the best plums are those that are almost bracingly sour while the best melons are so sweetly floral and honeyed they almost make your teeth hurt.

When you've got stuff this good, simply slice it and serve it.

Culinary soul mates

EGGPLANTS and peppers are filling market stalls now. They may come from different continents, but they are so intertwined in my kitchen that I think of them as culinary soul mates. Both of them are spectacular off the grill, needing nothing but a little olive oil and garlic.

That's the way summer cooking goes. Got green beans? Blanch them and toss them with olive oil and lemon juice. Corn? It's at the peak of its season. Grill it in the husk and finish it with flavored butter (maybe whip in a little lime and cilantro, and then chill it into a solid log).

Berries are enjoying their last couple of weeks, and though they can be a little soft from the summer heat, they seem even more perfumed than before. Meanwhile, figs and grapes are beginning to come into their prime. By the time the berries are done, these will be in full swing and ready to take their place.

And wait, what about summer squash? Surely you don't need another way to cook zucchini, do you? How about this: Simmer it until tender, then purée it in a blender with a cooked potato, some garlic and a little cream. Finish it with a sprinkling of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

As you can see, none of these dishes call for any extravagant ingredients. In fact, given the quality of the produce we're getting, even the humblest of additions can seem delicious.

One thing that always seems to be in abundance in my kitchen during the summer is stale bread, and you can't get much humbler than that. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's the humidity, but a loaf left on the counter even overnight often seems to have gotten stiff and stale by dinner the next day. At that point it's not rock hard yet, but it's certainly not good enough for slicing and serving. Still, it does make a wonderful ingredient for summer dishes.

It's the kind of cooking that used to be called economical, not in the sense of being cheap, but in the way of making the most of everything that's available to you.

A secret ingredient

FOR something that we usually throw away, stale bread has many uses. In fact, it's the secret behind some of summer's best dishes. Use stale bread as a thickener for cold, raw vegetable soups such as gazpacho. This allows you to add some texture to the soup without cooking it or adding a lot of fat.

Soak the bread in water to soften it, then squeeze it well. Purée it in a blender with the rest of the ingredients, and the bread vanishes, leaving behind only a silky texture.

This is an old trick with tomatoes, but there's no reason it can't be used for other vegetables. Purée cucumbers with soaked bread and some yogurt and you get a lovely celadon-colored soup that captures the best flavors of a cucumber salad in a new form. Adding fresh sorrel leaves underlines the yogurt's tang.

You can also use stale bread to flesh out dishes, extending flavors and allowing them to mingle and become more complex. A tomato salad is delicious by itself, but when you add stale bread it takes on another dimension.

Again, soak the bread and squeeze it almost dry. While the bread is soaking, salt the chopped tomatoes, dress them and set them aside to macerate. The salt will draw the juices from the tomatoes and intensify the flavor. But rather than making the dish soupy, those juices will be captured by the bread, spreading the rich tomato flavor through the dish.

You can even use stale bread in place of pastry for fruit desserts. Line a bowl with slices of bread (I like to do this with brioche or another egg-enriched bread). Fill the center with peaches and berries that you have warmed in a pan, and then refrigerate overnight with a plate pressing down on the fruit.

The bread will absorb all of the sweet juice that has been squeezed from the fruit and will become saturated with flavor.

Serve this summer pudding cold, cut into slices that show the cross-section of the fruit, and accompany it with only lightly sweetened yogurt or whipped cream to set off the flavors.

These recipes should be considered more as outlines for dishes rather than specific prescriptions. Delicious as they are, they can still be altered to fit your taste and what you happen to have on hand.

Play around with the choice of vegetables in the bread salad — maybe use chopped cucumbers, maybe add some torn basil leaves or maybe mint.

Use the same free hand with the summer pudding — the original is wonderful made with different kinds of berries — but maybe plums would be good too?

Sure, it's been a tough summer so far, but the fun is just beginning.

*

Bread salad with tomatoes and arugula

Total time: 30 minutes

Servings: 6

Note: Use the best-tasting tomatoes you can find, whether they're heirlooms, cherry tomatoes or any other type.

1/3 pound stale ciabatta, or other artisan-style bread

1 pound tomatoes

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground black

pepper

3 tablespoons red wine

vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil

3/4 cup diced red onion

3 tablespoons toasted pine nuts

3 ounces arugula (about 5 or 6 good handfuls)

1. Tear the ciabatta into rough pieces and put it in a bowl with water to cover. Soak for at least 15 minutes.

2. Cut cherry tomatoes in halves or quarters, depending on their size. Cut heirloom or other large tomatoes into three-quarter-inch slices, then cut the slices into quarters. Place them in a bowl and season with the salt, pepper, red wine vinegar and olive oil. Set aside for at least 15 minutes to allow the salt to pull some of the juice from the tomatoes.

3. Pull the bread from the bowl a handful at a time and squeeze out as much water as you can. Crumble the bread into a serving bowl. Stir the tomato mixture into the bread, working the mixture to moisten as much of the bread as possible with the liquid from the tomatoes. Stir in the red onion. (The recipe can be prepared to this point up to 8 hours ahead and refrigerated, tightly covered.)

4. When ready to serve, remove the bread salad from the refrigerator and taste it. You may need to add more salt or more vinegar. Add the pine nuts and arugula to the bread salad and toss lightly to mix thoroughly. Serve immediately.

Each serving: 296 calories; 4 grams protein; 19 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 23 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 547 mg. sodium.

*

Cucumber gazpacho

Total time: 20 minutes, plus refrigeration time

Servings: 6

Note: Dark, thin-peel Persian cucumbers are best for this recipe. You can use other thin-peel cucumbers, but the color won't be as pretty. If you use regular slicing cucumbers, peel them and remove the seeds.

8 ( 1/2 -inch thick) slices stale

baguette

2 pounds cucumbers

1 1/2 ounces sorrel leaves, stems removed

1 1/2 teaspoons minced garlic

1 teaspoon salt

4 cups lowfat yogurt, plus more for garnish

1. Tear the baguette into rough pieces and put the pieces in a bowl with water to cover. Soak for at least 15 minutes.

2. Coarsely chop the cucumbers and place them in a blender in batches. Chop most of the sorrel leaves, reserving two for garnish. Add the sorrel leaves to the blender with the garlic, salt and yogurt, and purée until smooth.

3. Remove the bread from the water and squeeze dry. Add the bread to the blender and purée the mixture until perfectly smooth. Pour it through a strainer into a deep bowl, discarding any bits of bread caught in the strainer. The soup should be slightly thickened, about the texture of heavy cream. Cover the bowl tightly and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

4. To serve, season the soup to taste with more salt if necessary and ladle it into wide bowls. Use a large spoon to swirl in a streak of yogurt. Thinly slice the reserved sorrel leaves and scatter a few slices across the top of the soup.

Each serving: 171 calories; 11 grams protein; 24 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 3 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 10 mg. cholesterol; 620 mg. sodium.

*

California summer pudding

Total time: 25 minutes, plus 12 hours chilling time

Servings: 6 to 8

3/4 pound brioche, challah or egg bread

1 1/2 pounds peaches

3/4 pound blackberries

1/2 cup sugar

3 tablespoons brandy

1. Trim the crusts from the bread and if it has not been sliced, cut it in roughly one-third-inch slices. Stack the slices and cut them in half diagonally to make triangles.

2. Line a 6-cup mold or bowl with plastic wrap, fitting the wrap tightly into the corners. Make sure you have a plate small enough to fit just inside the rim of the bowl. If not, cut a stiff cardboard circle that will fit and wrap it in aluminum foil (to be used in Step 6).

3. Piece together the bread slices in a single layer so they completely line the bowl. There should be no gaps, but the fit doesn't have to be exact — wherever the bread overlaps, simply press the edges together tightly. Trim the bread where it comes over the top of the bowl.

4. Cut a shallow "X" in the base of each peach, and then dunk the peaches in rapidly boiling water until you see the peel start to come loose at the cut — about 20 seconds to 1 minute, depending on the ripeness of the fruit. Remove the peaches from the water and rinse under cold running water. The peels should slip off easily; if they don't, return the fruit briefly to the boiling water. Pit the peaches and cut them into chunks.

5. Combine the peaches, blackberries and sugar in a saucepan and warm over medium heat. Cook just until the fruit begins to soften and release its juice, 3 or 4 minutes. Stir in the brandy.

6. Spoon the fruit into the bowl; there should be enough that it mounds a little above the lip. Place a sheet of plastic wrap loosely across the top, then place the plate or cardboard circle on top. Press gently and stack a heavy can on top (tomatoes work great). Refrigerate at least 12 hours.

7. When ready to serve, remove the plate and the top layer of plastic wrap. Place a serving plate on top of the bowl or mold and invert the bowl so the pudding will unmold onto the serving plate. If the pudding resists unmolding, hold the plastic wrap and jiggle gently until it does unmold cleanly. Remove the plastic wrap lining.

8. Serve immediately with lightly sweetened whipped cream or yogurt.

Each serving: 276 calories; 5 grams protein; 39 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams fiber; 11 grams fat; 6 grams saturated fat; 68 mg. cholesterol; 49 mg. sodium.

Is Copying a Crime? Well…

2006-08-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Many young people say that duplicating CDs or DVDs they own is legal. The industries disagree.
By Charles Duhigg
Times Staff Writer

August 9, 2006

A few years ago, when a friend offered 15-year-old Evan Collins a compact disc of illegally downloaded music, Collins turned him down flat.

"Me and my parents used to download music for free," said Collins, who lives in Bloomington, Minn. "But we decided it was like stealing from musicians. So I don't take stolen music from friends, either."

But later that year, when Collins met a girl he liked, he made her a CD filled with songs by Linkin Park, Blue Man Group and Eiffel 65. Why was his CD OK, while his friends' were verboten? Because Collins paid for his music in the first place, he said.

"I think you're allowed to make, like, two or three copies of a CD you bought and give them to friends," said Collins. "It's only once you make five copies, or copy a CD of stolen music, that it's illegal."

Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.

But Collins' attitude — that copying purchased CDs or DVDs is legal, while copying stolen music or movies is a crime — is pervasive among young people ages 12 to 24, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.

Among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free. Similarly, 58% thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19% thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased.

Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers "schoolyard" piracy — copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates — a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.

Similarly, an MPAA spokesperson said that, in the U.S., copying and reproducing DVDs is a bigger problem than illegal downloading of movies.

"We've made substantial progress educating people that downloading copyrighted music for free is illegal," said RIAA Chairman Mitch Bainwol. "But we still confront a significant challenge educating kids that copying a CD for a friend is also a crime. This is a major focus for the entire industry."

Indeed, years of anti-downloading campaigns seem to be working: 80% of teens surveyed in the poll said downloading free music from unauthorized computer networks was a crime. Much of that might stem from highly publicized crackdowns on online music sharing. A 2004 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that close to 6 million Americans said they had stopped downloading unauthorized tunes because of lawsuits filed by the RIAA.

But when it comes to stopping people from copying physical CDs, high-profile lawsuits are much less likely to occur. Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped him or her a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship?

"It's pretty confusing," said Collins, who was interviewed after participating in the poll.

Even lawyers say the law is hard to understand. Distributing free copies of a purchased CD or DVD is only a federal copyright crime if the value of the copied discs exceeds $1,000, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Elena Duarte.

But giving away even one copied disc may be a civil violation or break a state law.

"A strict interpretation of the law says that if making a copy robs the marketplace of a sale, it is prohibited," said attorney Mark Radcliffe, a copyright expert at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary. "So anyone giving a copy to a friend could technically be sued. But there is some sentiment that as long as people are only giving copies to families and a few friends, it's probably OK. But how many friends should one person have?"

In the last decade, copyright activists and entertainment companies have battled over that very question. Courts have generally avoided commenting on the appropriateness of copying CDs for friends or how many friends constitutes a copyright violation. But music and film companies have argued that any sharing violates the copyright code.

However, free-speech advocates say the copyright laws were never intended to stop kids from giving mix-CDs to friends. In fact, some say, because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

"At my wedding I handed out about 150 mix-CDs," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor at New York University and author of "Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity."

"I was freeloading on songs by Louis Armstrong and others, but I think that's why they became musicians in the first place," Vaidhyanathan said. "Music has worth because it lets us communicate in ways we can't manage on our own. But to communicate, we have to be able to share."

Some of those polled agree. While 97% of teens and adults polled said they considered shoplifting an item worth less than $20 a crime, fewer of them (83% of teens, 76% of young adults) considered it a crime to buy a bootlegged CD. (In fact, according to Duarte, although selling a bootleg violates the law, purchasing it is not prohibited by the federal copyright code.)

"I rely on my instinct to determine what's right and wrong about sharing music," said Annette Cook, a 21-year-old senior at San Diego State University who participated in the poll. "If my friend makes me a copy of a CD they purchased, it's not really stealing, it's spreading interest in a band. That's how I learn about music I end up buying."

The RIAA and MPAA hopes that attitude will wane. To that end, the recording industry association is sponsoring school programs to convince students that any kind of copying — what they call "songlifting" — is a crime. "Songlifting is like shoplifting, and that means it's wrong," reads a lesson plan the group sent to middle school teachers. The motion picture industry's trade association is also sponsoring school programs to discourage piracy.

Their efforts may be working. Younger poll respondents were more likely than older peers to believe that copying CDs and DVDs breaks the law, and only 25% of teens said they had a friend who illegally downloaded music, compared with 33% of young adults.

"One of my friends always gives me a blank CD for my birthday, and then I go to her house and pick out songs to burn on it," said Charlie Letson, 14, a poll respondent in Hampton, Conn. "But we always download new copies of the songs, so that we're not breaking the law."

Even Evan Collins, the 15-year-old from Minnesota, is beginning to reconsider his position. After the mix-CD he made to woo a classmate failed to impress ("She said 'thanks,' but that was about it," he said), he started rethinking his attitude about copying CDs.

"I used to make two copies of each CD I bought for friends, but I think I'm going to stop doing that," said Collins, who was speaking within earshot of his mother. "I play the piano and the trumpet, so I understand what it's like to be a musician. I don't think it's right to gyp anyone out of making money."

That, says Collins' mother, is music to her ears.

"We've tried to use CD copying to teach bigger lessons about morality," said Jill Collins, 47. "Things are so different now. The Internet makes the world a lot more complicated. If we can get right and wrong down on small things like copying music, hopefully bigger things will be clearer down the road."

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Is it stealing?

Younger consumers see strong differences between copying and outright stealing.

Proportion of young people who thought the following would be committing a crime: (Combined minor and serious crime)
Ages12-14 15-17 18-20 21-24
Copying a CD from
a friend who paid for it 27% 35% 33% 38%
Copying a DVD/videotape
from friend who paid for it 39% 44% 40% 41%
Downloading free music
from an unauthorized
file-sharing server 79% 81% 70% 79%
Downloading free movies
from an unauthorized
file-sharing server 83% 83% 74% 79%
Buying a bootlegged CD 82% 84% 76% 76%
Buying a bootlegged
DVD/videotape 83% 84% 80% 77%
Shoplifting an item
worth less than $20 97% 97% 98% 96%
Shoplifting an item
worth more than $20 99% 99% 99% 97%
*

Q: Where or how did you first find out about the music you most

recently acquired? (Multiple answers allowed, selected answers shown.)
Ages 12-17 Ages 18-24
Heard a song or interview on
the radio 57% 57%
A friend recommended /
played it for me / lent it
to me 47% 40%
Saw a music video or
advertisement on TV 33% 30%
Music website: MTV, iTunes,
Yahoo Music, etc. 23% 13%
Brother or sister 20% 14%
My parents 15% 4%
Heard it on a TV show
(such as "The O.C.") 15% 8%
Heard about it on an online
social site, such as MySpace, etc. 12% 5%
Read a review in a magazine or
Newspaper 5% 6%
*

Q: How would you describe the type of music you are most passionate about? (One answer, selected answers shown.)

Male

Ages 12-14

Rock: 23%

Pop: 6%

Rap/hip-hop: 25%

Country: 3%

My music tastes range across genres: 27%

---

Male

Ages 15-17

Rock: 23%

Pop: 1%

Rap/hip-hop: 27%

Country: 6%

My music tastes range across genres: 29%

---

Male

Ages 18-20

Rock: 21%

Pop: 1%

Rap/hip-hop: 23%

Country: 12%

My music tastes range across genres: 34%

---

Male

Ages 21-24

Rock: 21%

Pop: 0%

Rap/hip-hop: 21%

Country: 11%

My music tastes range across genres: 31%

---

Female

Ages 12-14

Rock: 12%

Pop: 14%

Rap/hip-hop: 21%

Country: 4%

My music tastes range across genres: 31%

---

Female

Ages 15-17

Rock: 13%

Pop: 8%

Rap/hip-hop: 28%

Country: 6%

My music tastes range across genres: 33%

---

Female

Ages 18-20

Rock: 16%

Pop: 4%

Rap/hip-hop: 19%

Country: 7%

My music tastes range across genres: 42%

---

Female

Ages 21-24

Rock: 12%

Pop: 5%

Rap/hip-hop: 18%

Country: 10%

My music tastes range across genres: 39%

---

Note: More information on this poll can be found at: latimes.com/entertainmentpoll

---

How the poll was conducted

The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll was conducted from June 23 to July 3 using the Knowledge Networks' Web-enabled panel, which provides a representative nationwide sample of U.S. households. Of the 4,466 minors and young adults invited to participate in the survey, 1,904 (43%) responded to the survey, with 1,650 qualifying. The 1,650 qualified respondents included 839 minors (ages 12 to 17) and 811 young adults (ages 18 to 24). The margin of sampling error for both groups is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In order to provide as representative a sample as possible, the survey results were weighted to U.S. census figures for 12- to 24-year-olds in the United States in terms of age, race or ethnicity, gender and region, and for urban or rural residence and Internet access.

Source: Times/Bloomberg poll

*

The Entertainment Poll

Monday

A new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll finds that a large majority of 12- to 24-year-olds are bored with their entertainment choices. Their solution? Even more options. Plus: Busting myths about teens and young adults.

*

Tuesday

The old Hollywood movie model doesn't interest younger audiences. They want to see films as soon as they come out at home — whether on TV, computer or the next new gadget.

*

Today

Within the music industry, copied CDs are considered a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading. But young people are confused about where sharing ends and piracy begins in the era of iTunes.

*

Thursday

Is new technology the answer for TV and video? Teens and young adults — the generation most likely to be the early adopters of this new technology — have yet to fully embrace it.

*

Friday

A day in the life of a typical plugged-in tween. Plus: Does multi-tasking hurt homework?

*

The Rising Cost of Living Well

2006-08-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

Do long lines for Frappuccinos really explain Starbucks' disappointing results?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Aug. 7, 2006, at 4:40 PM ET

In the past few years, analysts have noted the phenomenon of Two Americas Shopping. Retailers that cater to the working class (Wal-Mart, Dollar General, Burger King) have seen sales grow below the pace of the economy at large while those that cater to yuppies, bobos, food snobs, extreme consumers, and dandies—in short, the better-off—have thrived.
But now, even as the ultrarich continue to shop as if money grows on trees, there's mounting evidence that rising inflation, slow wage growth, and higher energy prices are pinching the upper-middle class. In recent weeks, several of the publicly held companies that cater to the mass affluent have reported disappointing results.

Last Thursday, Starbucks announced its results for the most recent quarter and for July. The results were generally fine, but they failed to meet caffeinated expectations. Same-store sales, the ultimate metric for any retailer, rose only 4 percent in July—a rate significantly below what investors were expecting. Starbucks came up with a strange excuse: Because of the heat, lots of people ordered Frappuccinos. And because it takes a long time to whip up the blended drinks, the demand created long lines, which in turn forced jonesing professionals to seek their fix elsewhere. (Blogger/analyst/investor Barry Ritholtz has a graphical representation of this phenomenon here.) Starbucks' stock fell 8 percent on the day.

Intuitively, the excuse makes some sense. But Starbucks' disappointment was hardly an isolated event. Whole Foods, which is to groceries what Starbucks is to coffee—an expensive, upper-middlebrow global do-gooder—also reported earnings last week. At first glance, the results were impressive. Same-store sales growth was 9.9 percent in the quarter. But that was below last year's rate (15.2 percent) and below the average for the last five fiscal years (11.2 percent). And Wall Street was further disappointed that the company ratcheted down expectations for sales growth. Fretting that there may be some limit to the number of Americans willing to pay $7 for a head of organic broccoli, investors filleted, pounded, and sautéed the stock: It fell 11 percent last Monday.

Restaurants that cater to the type of people who take their coffee at Starbucks and shop at Whole Foods have also been feeling the pain. P.F. Chang's, which serves up tasty, deracinated Chinese food in shopping centers around the country, reported a dismal quarter in late July. Worse, the company projected that same-store sales at both its "dining concepts"—P.F. Chang's China Bistro and Pei Wei Asian Diner—would fall in the second half of 2006.

It could be, of course, that people are simply making more coffee and cooking more meals at home. But then they'd be buying lots more espresso machines and woks. Only they're not. Last month, Williams-Sonoma, the leading purveyor of yuppie kitchen utensils and accessories, lowered its earnings guidance, saying same-store growth in the second quarter would be between 1.5 percent and 3 percent.

What gives? For years, betting on the ability and willingness of high-end consumers to spend was a winning formula for both retailers and investors. The ranks of the mass affluent were growing, their wallets filled thanks to tax cuts and rising home values. And thanks to the phenomenon of trading up, plenty of people on the lower rungs of the income ladder were splurging on things they were passionate about: golf clubs or shoes, for example. Now the powerful trend seems to be going in the opposite direction. Well-off consumers are reining in spending, and there is likely to be a growing phenomenon of consumers trading in steaks at Morton's for Whoppers at Burger King. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Burger King Chief Executive John Chidsey told investors during a conference call that the Miami-based chain is benefiting from a slowdown in spending at sit-down restaurants that is prompting some consumers to trade down to fast-food chains." Investors are clearly worried that America is going downscale. Here's a three-month chart of Starbucks, Williams-Sonoma, P.F. Chang's, and Whole Foods against the S&P 500.

Clearly, the bite of inflation, rising interest rates, slow wage growth, low savings, and higher prices is starting to work its way up the income ladder. After all, people with higher incomes pretty much spend everything they make, too. In fact, there's a degree to which upper-crust consumers could be feeling the pinch disproportionately. Depending on where they live, how they work, and what they spend, consumers experience inflation differently. Someone who takes a subway to work won't feel the pain of rising gas prices, while someone who drives a pickup 70 miles to work each day certainly will. A person who takes a loan to buy a gas-guzzling power boat will find that the cost of buying and operating the boat has gone up dramatically; someone who buys a kayak made in China will find that the price of boating is falling.

Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg has examined the spending and consuming habits of his colleagues and clients on Wall Street and has created his own "Wall Street core inflation index," which tracks the rise in prices of the necessities of yuppie life: "jewelry, spas, lawn care, health care, sporting goods, housekeeping services, tuition, airlines, hotels, salons, legal/financial services, and dry cleaning." His conclusion: The price of spoiling yourself rotten is rising rapidly. "The Wall Street core CPI is running at 4%, nearly double what it is for Main Street," he wrote in a report on July 28.

In other words, forget about the heat and the Frappuccinos. Sales at Starbucks and its sister high-end retailers may be faltering because the cost of living well is rising more rapidly than the overall cost of living.

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

Alquileres: el Gobierno sigue creando problemas

2006-08-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

Roberto Cachanosky

Una vez más, el Poder Ejecutivo vuelve a interferir en el sistema económico con el objetivo de controlar los precios. El resultado, como en casos anteriores, dista mucho de ser una solución y genera múltiples distorsiones en la economía.

¿Por qué causa suben los alquileres si la construcción de edificios para vivienda crece en forma acelerada? ¿Cómo puede ser que, ante tantos nuevos edificios, la nueva oferta no alcance para contener la suba en los alquileres?

Dado que la tasa de crecimiento de la población sigue siendo tan baja como siempre y tampoco tenemos una ola inmigratoria gigante, es evidente que la respuesta no la vamos a encontrar por este lado.

El primer gran problema que se presenta es que casi todos los nuevos edificios que se construyen apuntan a sectores de ingresos medios-altos. Con precios promedio que no bajan de los U$S 1.200 por metro cuadrado e ingresos en dólares que, en el mejor de los casos, pueden estar en los U$S 300 a U$S 400 por mes, es evidente que no son tantas las familias que pueden convalidar esos precios por metro cuadrado construido, porque con esos U$s 300 o U$S 400 mensuales la gente tiene que comer, viajar, vestirse, pagar la educación de sus hijos, entre otras múltiples cuestiones. En definitiva, la gran disparidad entre el precio del metro cuadrado construido y los salarios en dólares no hace más que reflejar la brutal concentración del ingreso que produce este modelo económico. Queda en evidencia, entonces, que la Argentina no se limita a Puerto Madero, Palermo Soho o la Recoleta, donde se construye intensamente. En primer lugar, entonces, la nueva oferta de vivienda apunta a los sectores de ingresos altos porque el modelo económico en marcha se basa en salarios muy bajos. La oferta trabaja para los sectores que pueden demandar. Si hacía falta un ejemplo de lo regresivo de este modelo económico, el tema alquileres lo ha confirmado.

El segundo elemento a considerar es que en los 90 el crédito hipotecario era lo suficientemente abundante como para que la gente pudiera pagar una cuota hipotecaria que era equivalente al precio de un alquiler. La opción alquiler versus cuota hipotecaria era claramente favorable a esta última alternativa. Por lo tanto, en los 90 disminuyó la demanda de propiedades para alquilar y el precio de los alquileres era bajo y la oferta, amplia.

Hoy, la oferta de créditos hipotecarios es escasa. Además, son muy pocos los que califican para acceder a un crédito hipotecario, dado que la relación ingreso/cuota hace que muchos no estén en condiciones de pagar una cuota hipotecaria. El resultado es que gente que antes podía comprar ahora tiene que alquilar y, en consecuencia, el precio de los alquileres sube. La demanda de propiedades en alquiler subió en forma explosiva dada la imposibilidad de la mayoría de la gente de poder comprar. Y como la oferta sólo crece para abastecer la demanda de los sectores de ingresos altos, surge el problema que hoy lo tiene tan ocupado a Guillermo Moreno. El “modelo productivo” ha creado las condiciones para que la inmensa mayoría de la población quede marginada de tener su vivienda propia.

Tenemos también otra pregunta que responder: ¿por qué los créditos hipotecarios son tan inaccesibles? Poco tiempo atrás, algunos medios oficialistas destacaban que la tasa de interés de los créditos hipotecarios es hoy más baja que la tasa que regía en los 90. Lo que no se encargaban de aclarar esos medios oficialistas es que la mayoría de los créditos hipotecarios son a tasa variable. Esto significa que, en un contexto inflacionario como el que tenemos (por más que el Gobierno se esfuerce por dibujar un Índice de Precios al Consumidor –IPC- menor al real), la gente tiene pavor de endeudarse porque sabe qué cuota empieza pagando pero no qué cuota terminará pagando dadas las expectativas inflacionarias. Es decir que, en primer lugar, la mayoría de la gente no califica para acceder a un crédito y, segundo, los pocos que lo hacen no se animan a endeudarse a tasa variable, temor que es perfectamente comprensible porque basta ver la evolución de las tasas de interés para darse cuenta de que quienes creen que las tasas subirán no se equivocan. Aun suponiendo que las tasas fueran bajas, los precios en dólares por metro cuadrado son tan altos que la gente no puede juntar el adelanto y, si lo junta, después tiene que pedir una suma extraordinaria para pagar el saldo que quedaría a los valores vigentes.

¿Qué solución “brillante” encontró Moreno frente al problema de los alquileres? Sentarse a conversar con inmobiliarias, dueños de propiedades e inquilinos. Considerando que el mercado de alquileres está totalmente atomizado, ¿cuán representante de los inquilinos y de los dueños puede ser esa mesa convocada por Moreno?

Si los convocados no representan ni por casualidad a una parte razonable del universo de inquilinos y propietarios, lo que ha conseguido el señor Moreno no sólo es haber “conversado” al divino botón, sino que, lo que es peor, ha logrado espantar a la escasa oferta y perjudica todavía más a los inquilinos. En definitiva, Moreno ha logrado reducir más la oferta de viviendas metiéndose en un tema que ni por casualidad puede resolver, porque el problema se soluciona con mejores salarios, estabilidad en los precios, la reaparición del crédito hipotecario y abundante oferta de propiedades para alquilar. Y todo eso no se consigue con palabras, sino con políticas públicas de largo plazo. Eso de lo que tanto se habla y tan poco se respeta: respeto por las instituciones.

Mucho menos va a solucionarse el problema de los alquileres amenazando con obligar a los dueños de propiedades a informar a la AFIP sobre los contratos de alquileres que firmen. Es probable que con esta medida consigan blanquear unos pocos pesos, aunque es seguro es que nadie va a querer comprar una propiedad para alquilar y quedar atrapado en las manos de la AFIP.

Si el objetivo de Moreno es que desaparezca por completo la oferta de alquileres para que no exista precio y el INDEC ya no releve más incrementos en este rubro, el Secretario de Comercio está en camino de lograr el objetivo. Es decir, si lo que se busca es que el IPC no se mueve en este rubro al costo de dejar a la gente en la calle, el Gobierno va en la dirección correcta.

En definitiva, no debe sorprendernos el ruido que el Gobierno acaba de meterle al mercado de los alquileres dado que, como en muchos otros casos, las políticas que se aplican no apuntan a mejorar la calidad de vida de la población, sino a tratar de tener una evolución de los precios al consumidor que se adapte a las necesidades electorales.

Mientras el Gobierno se siga ufanando de los U$S 4.000 por metro cuadrado que se pagan en Puerto Madero como muestra de la pujanza y optimismo que hay en el país, millones de personas seguirán padeciendo el serio problema de la vivienda.

The New Gender Divide

2006-08-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife
By EDUARDO PORTER and MICHELLE O’DONNELL

Once, virtually all Americans had married by their mid-40’s. Now, many American men without college degrees find themselves still single as they approach middle age.

About 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.

At virtually every level of education, fewer Americans are marrying. But the decline is most pronounced among men with less education. Even marriage rates among female professionals over 40 have stabilized in recent years.

The decline in marriage can be traced to many factors, experts say, including the greater economic independence of women and the greater acceptance of couples living together outside of marriage.

For men without higher education, though, dwindling prospects in the labor market have made a growing percentage either unwilling to marry or unable to find someone to marry them.

Doug Thomas, 45, a computer technician with one year of college, has spent more of his adult life securing his financial footing than he has searching for a wife.

“I make enough where sure, I could get married, and sure, the girl would not have to work,” said Mr. Thomas, of Fort Collins, Colo.

But he worries what that would mean for the relationship and whether he and his wife would have time together. “Well, now you’re locked into working all those hours,” he said.

Jeff Enos, 40, a high school graduate and a construction foreman in Kenosha, Wis., said he dated several women at a time when he was younger, but having lived through his parents’ divorce, he wants to avoid a similar fate. That is one reason he has cautioned his girlfriend, with whom he lives, not to pressure him about marriage.

Perhaps most significant, many men without college degrees are not marrying because the pool of women in their social circles — those without college degrees — has shrunk. And the dwindling pool of women in this category often look for a mate with more education and hence better financial prospects.

“Men don’t marry because women like myself don’t need to rely on them,” said Shenia Rudolph, 42, a divorced mother from the Bronx.

In 1980, only 6 percent of men in their early 40’s at all levels of education and 5 percent of women in their early 40’s had never married. By 2004, this portion had increased to 16.5 percent of men and about 12.5 percent of women.

Of the men remaining single, the greatest number are high school dropouts, especially blacks and unemployed men. But marriage is also declining among white men and men with jobs who lack college degrees.

There is no conclusive evidence that marriage helps men. Still, some social scientists worry that not marrying may further marginalize men who are already struggling.

“It is a mistake to think of this as just happening to the underclass at the bottom,” said Christopher Jencks, a professor of sociology at Harvard. “It is also happening to people with high school diplomas or even some college. That is the group that has been most affected by the decline in real wages in the last 30 years.”

The course of Mr. Thomas’s life has been determined as much by his finances as by circumstance or his own character. He is a tall, athletic man with cropped, George Clooney-style hair who projects a kind and upbeat persona — surely a catch to some women in Fort Collins. Yet Mr. Thomas, who was laid off from Lockheed Martin as the electronics industry shifted jobs overseas, has experienced so much job insecurity that for most of his adult life, a stable economic foundation has eluded him.

It is only now, working for Hewlett-Packard, that he has been able to pay off debts and build a nest egg. The job, however, which pays about $56,000 a year, could end next year, leaving Mr. Thomas, who would like to begin a lower-paying career as a graphic designer, feeling a greater urgency to save.

One way he has cut costs is by giving up his expensive one-bedroom apartment. Two years ago, he rented a room in a town house from Anna Mahoney, a single woman four years his junior. They pool household purchases and buy in bulk. Their platonic friendship serves as a stand-in for their families, who live out of state.

Yet their domesticity has also bred a level of intimacy that can alienate romantic partners. Ms. Mahoney frequently refers to herself and Mr. Thomas as “we.” Mr. Thomas dutifully churns the oil in the jars of almond butter and takes out the garbage.

“She always says: ‘You’re going to be my roommate forever. Then when I get married, you’re going to live in my basement,’ ” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m like, ‘Pleeease. When you start dating, I’m going to be so out of there.’ ”

When Mr. Thomas fell in love last year and began bringing his girlfriend to the town house, Ms. Mahoney complained that his girlfriend, a 33-year-old dialysis technician, was sloppy. Meanwhile, his girlfriend objected to the time that he spent with Ms. Mahoney, Mr. Thomas said.

“It was a constant form of stress,” he said. The two had discussed moving in together, but the bickering made them wonder if it was a good idea. In February, after one year together, they broke up.

“I miss her horribly,” Mr. Thomas said quietly one recent Saturday after stopping at a health store to buy vitamins on Ms. Mahoney’s shopping list.

Pool of Potential Mates Shrinks

A quarter-century ago, when fewer women went to college, there was a plentiful supply of potential mates for men who had only a high school diploma. Even men who dropped out of high school could get blue-collar jobs paying decent wages and could expect to find, and support, a wife.

As women started climbing the educational ladder, first equaling and then surpassing men in college attendance and graduation rates, the pool of potential partners shrank.

At the same time, broad changes in the roles of men and women upended the traditional marriage contract in which the husband provided a paycheck in return for the wife’s housework and child care.

First, as more women joined the work force, they became less dependent on men’s earnings. More than 70 percent of women ages 25 to 54 are working today, up from about half of such women 30 years ago.

While women were gaining economic independence, wages were slumping in the blue-collar jobs that in the past allowed less-educated men to support a family. Women, largely employed in service industries more resilient than manufacturing, fared better.

Between 1979 and 2003, the earnings of men with a few years of college but no degree barely kept up with inflation, while those for women rose by 20 percent in real terms. For high school graduates with no college experience, men’s earnings declined 8 percent over the period, while women’s advanced 12 percent.

“In the past guys could drop out of school after finishing high school, or even without finishing, and go into a factory and get a steady job with benefits,” said Valerie K. Oppenheimer, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But there has been a deterioration in young men’s economic position, and women are hesitant to marry a man who is likely to be an economic dependent.”

Not all men have adjusted to the new dynamics of marriage and work, as women have gained greater clout and become more vocal about what they want from their mates. By 2001, wives earned more than husbands in almost one of four marriages in which both partners worked, compared with 16 percent in 1980.

“Changing women’s expectations about what married life should be like has put more tension into these relationships,” Mr. Jencks said. “Men who have graduated from college have been more responsive and ready to accommodate those changes than those who haven’t.”

Though many unmarried men and women do end up living together, cohabitation is a less stable arrangement. There is a 43 percent chance that a couple living together will split up within three years, compared with a 12 percent chance for a breakup of a first marriage in that time. “It’s more like a stopgap,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

In 2005 there were nearly 5 million households of unmarried partners of the opposite sex, according to census estimates, up from 1.6 million in 1980. In 2004, 36 percent of babies were born to unmarried women.

As a response to some of these trends, many women with limited education have turned theirs sights on “marrying up,” choosing men who may be older, more established and more educated.

“Why would you want to be in a stable relationship with somebody who is unstable?” asked Ketny Jean-Francois, a never-married 30-something from the Bronx who has supported her 3-year-old son on her unemployment check and food stamps since leaving her job as a security guard a year ago. “It’s a myth that all women want to marry.”

Ms. Rudolph has sworn off blue-collar men. For a man to be marriage material, “you have to have a job; you have to be educated; you have your own apartment and a car,” she said. “Both have to contribute something.”

She speaks from experience. She married her high school boyfriend right after graduation, a 2-week-old baby in arms. But her husband, who never graduated, was unemployed for most of their marriage, and the couple broke up after six years.

Determined to find a man who had better prospects, Ms. Rudolph entered a relationship with a basketball player and had three children with him. It ended when she learned he was married to someone else, a revelation that left her badly shaken. “I don’t trust men to marry them,” she said.

Tax policy does not encourage poor couples to marry. At the lower end of the income scale, couples with two incomes face higher marginal tax rates if they marry. Couples can also lose federal dollars when marriage increases their household earnings above the threshold for welfare payments.

According to C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother of two children who earns $15,000 a year gets an earned income tax credit of $4,100. If she marries a man making $10,000 a year, the benefit drops to $2,100.

David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers and a co-director of its National Marriage Project, argues that it is the men who are choosing to remain single. He says men do not marry because they do not want to. As unwilling to commit as ever, men have been let off the hook by more permissive social mores that have made it acceptable to live together and raise children out of wedlock.

Joe Callender, 47, a retired New York City corrections officer and a father of four, has had long-term relationships with two women but has never married. One obstacle, he admits, has been his own infidelity.

“Marriage, that’s sacred to me; I’m committed to you for the rest of my life, my last breath,” Mr. Callender said, describing his vision of the institution. “I’m not cheating, looking. Work, home, that’s it. It’s you and me against the world.”

Fears of Divorce

Relaxed mores have also encouraged more gay men to live openly homosexual lives. “I think this could be a minor factor but not a major one” in the decline of marriage, Professor Cherlin said. But it would not explain the gap between the educated and the less so. The percentage of college-educated men who marry has been relatively stable the last few years, while the marriage rate among college-educated women has actually ticked up.

For some men, living with a girlfriend is an attractive alternative given the possibility of a messy divorce. Many men fear that a former wife will take all their money. For blue-collar men, the divorce rate is twice that of men with college degrees.

“From the view of the male, there are pretty big reasons you would not marry,” Professor Popenoe said.

It was his parents’ divorce that showed Mr. Enos, the Wisconsin construction foreman, just how bitter a dissolution could be. Mr. Enos, a compact man with a shock of blond hair and a streak of independence who supported himself in high school by working on a pig farm, rarely saw his father after his parents’ split.

After high school, Mr. Enos joined the Marines. Once his service was complete, he moved back to Kenosha, only to witness another family dispute over his grandfather’s estate. Mr. Enos, who earns about $50,000 a year, lives in a small house bought with some money inherited from his grandfather, and keeps his distance from family.

He has vowed not to mix personal and legal affairs. He has worked too hard, he said, to lose his house and his savings if a marriage were to fail. “I told my girlfriend a long time ago: ‘Don’t pressure me. I don’t want to get married and then divorced,’ ” Mr. Enos said.

The same fear has lurked in Tom Ryan’s mind. Mr. Ryan, 54, an electronics specialist who lives outside Denver, bought his ranch house with a girlfriend over a decade ago. He had to buy out his girlfriend quickly when the relationship suddenly ended — or else lose his home.

His girlfriend, who had been with him for six years, had wanted to marry and have a child. But Mr. Ryan, who attended music college for a year and spent his 20’s singing in a local rock band, did not feel ready.

He loved her, he recalled one afternoon this summer, but was reluctant to settle down. After a decade of playing concerts (including a tour in Japan, a highlight), he had learned relatively late in life how to budget and save enough to pay a mortgage, a contributing factor.

Comfortable Being Alone

Mr. Ryan, who grew up without a father, learned how to be alone. A new girlfriend came along, but he was unwilling to let her move in as much as a toothbrush. They broke up. He went to a community college and got an associate’s degree in electronics. He renovated the basement. He built a soundproof recording room. He learned to enjoy the silence and the ability to be as fastidious at home as he pleased.

When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.

“Later in life, will I miss the fact that I don’t have a little son or daughter around?” Mr. Ryan asked. “I probably will. But it’s not totally out of the question.”

For every man who fits into one of the categories of unmarried men put forth by social scientists — men who cannot commit, men who are afraid of divorce, men who have been forced to the edges of the economy — there is a man like Chris Cunningham of Staten Island.

Mr. Cunningham, 41, a sanitation worker, seems to defy any theory about why he is single. He has, he said, simply not met the right woman.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, and now assigned to an office job in Manhattan with the Department of Sanitation, Mr. Cunningham said he was undeterred by his parents’ divorce and was ready for marriage, having just ended a decade-long relationship going nowhere.

He makes a comfortable living at about $80,000 a year. He appears self-deprecating and sweet, and is clean-shaven (his head, too). Eager to have children of his own, he bought Christmas presents last year for several children in Milltown, N.J., where he often spends weekends with his best friend and neighboring couples.

With most of his friends paired off, and few single women in the Milltown clique, his dating life has stalled. “It’s funny,” he said one Saturday as adults mingled and children scampered with water toys at a block party. “You feel kind of like they met someone and got their lives started, and you’re still waiting for it to happen to you.”

Some social scientists have found that married men are healthier and earn slightly more than unmarried men. But it is unclear whether marriage produces higher incomes and better health, or whether people who are richer and healthier in the first place more often choose to marry.

Beyond the questions of finances and health, there is the issue of how content these men are. All the men interviewed for this article looked younger than their age. All said they were happy with their lives, even Mr. Cunningham, with his clear longing for a family of his own, and Mr. Thomas, of Fort Collins, who said he might move to Denver to meet more women.

Mr. Ryan, too, said he enjoyed being single. He stood talking in his kitchen on a Saturday when he had no plans other than a solo bike ride. It was a slow weekend day — his birthday, in fact — and though the phone never rang, he was free for dinner.

Wikipedia

2006-08-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Hive

Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge

by Marshall Poe

Several months ago, I discovered that I was being “considered for deletion.” Or rather, the entry on me in the Internet behemoth that is Wikipedia was.

For those of you who are (as uncharitableWikipedians sometimes say) “clueless newbies,” Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. But it is like no encyclopedia Diderot could have imagined. Instead of relying on experts to write articles according to their expertise, Wikipedia lets anyone write about anything. You, I, and any wired-up fool can add entries, change entries, even propose that entries be deleted. For reasons I’d rather not share outside of therapy, I created a one-line biographical entry on “Marshall Poe.” It didn’t take long for my tiny article to come to the attention of Wikipedia’s self-appointed guardians. Within a week, a very active—and by most accounts responsible—Scottish Wikipedian named “Alai” decided that … well, that I wasn’t worth knowing about. Why? “No real evidence of notability,” Alai cruelly but accurately wrote, “beyond the proverbial average college professor.”

Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind. The English-language version alone has more than a million entries. It is consistently ranked among the most visited Web sites in the world. A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers, the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger knew all this when they began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later, everyone knows different.

The Moderator

Jimmy Wales does not fit the profile of an Internet revolutionary. He was born in 1966 and raised in modest circumstances in Huntsville, Alabama. Wales majored in finance at Auburn, and after completing his degree enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Alabama. It was there that he developed a passion for the Internet. His entry point was typical for the nerdy set of his generation: fantasy games.

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two gamers who had obviously read The Lord of the Rings, invented the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The game spread largely through networks of teenage boys, and by 1979, the year the classic Dungeon Master’s Guide was published, it seemed that every youth who couldn’t get a date was rolling the storied twenty-sided die in a shag-carpeted den. Meanwhile, a more electronically inclined crowd at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was experimenting with moving fantasy play from the basement to a computer network. The fruit of their labors was the unfortunately named MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). Allowing masses of players to create virtual fantasy worlds, MUDs garnered a large audience in the 1980s and 1990s under names like Zork, Myst, and Scepter of Goth. (MUDs came to be known as “Multi-Undergraduate Destroyers” for their tendency to divert college students from their studies.)

Wales began to play MUDs at Alabama in the late 1980s. It was in this context that he first encountered the power of networked computers to facilitate voluntary cooperation on a large scale. He did not, however, set up house in these fantasy worlds, nor did he show any evidence of wanting to begin a career in high tech. He completed a degree in finance at Auburn, received a master’s in finance at the University of Alabama, and then pursued a Ph.D. in finance at Indiana University. He was interested, it would seem, in finance. In 1994, he quit his doctoral program and moved to Chicago to take a job as an options trader. There he made (as he has repeatedly said) “enough.”

Wales is of a thoughtful cast of mind. He was a frequent contributor to the philosophical “discussion lists” (the first popular online discussion forums) that emerged in the late ’80s as e-mail spread through the humanities. His particular passion was objectivism, the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand. In 1989, he initiated the Ayn Rand Philosophy Discussion List and served as moderator—the person who invites and edits e-mails from subscribers. Though discussion lists were not new among the technorati in the 1980s, they were unfamiliar territory for most academics. In the oak-paneled seminar room, everyone had always been careful to behave properly—the chairman sat at the head of the table, and everyone spoke in turn and stuck to the topic. E-mail lists were something altogether different. Unrestrained by convention and cloaked by anonymity, participants could behave very badly without fear of real consequences. The term for such poor comportment—flaming—became one of the first bits of net jargon to enter common usage.

Wales had a careful moderation style:

First, I will frown—very much—on any flaming of any kind whatsoever … Second, I impose no restrictions on membership based on my own idea of what objectivism really is … Third, I hope that the list will be more “academic” than some of the others, and tend toward discussions of technical details of epistemology … Fourth, I have chosen a “middle-ground” method of moderation, a sort of behind-the-scenes prodding.

Wales was an advocate of what is generically termed “openness” online. An “open” online community is one with few restrictions on membership or posting—everyone is welcome, and anyone can say anything as long as it’s generally on point and doesn’t include gratuitous ad hominem attacks. Openness fit not only Wales’s idea of objectivism, with its emphasis on reason and rejection of force, but also his mild personality. He doesn’t like to fight. He would rather suffer fools in silence, waiting for them to talk themselves out, than confront them. This patience would serve Wales well in the years to come.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

I n the mid-1990s, the great dream of Internet entrepreneurs was to create the entry point on the Web. “Portals,” as they were called, would provide everything: e-mail, news, entertainment, and, most important, the tools to help users find what they wanted on the Web. As Google later showed, if you build the best “finding aid,” you’ll be a dominant player. In 1996, the smart money was on “Web directories,” man-made guides to the Internet. Both Netscape and Yahoo relied on Web directories as their primary finding aids, and their IPOs in the mid-1990s suggested a bright future. In 1996, Wales and two partners founded a Web directory called Bomis.

I nitially, the idea was to build a universal directory, like Yahoo’s. The question was how to build it. At the time, there were two dominant models: top-down and bottom-up. The former is best exemplified by Yahoo, which began as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Jerry—in this case Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s cofounder—set up a system of categories and began to classify Web sites accordingly. Web surfers flocked to the site because no one could find anything on the Web in the early 1990s. So Yang and his partner, David Filo, spent a mountain of venture capital to hire a team of surfers to classify the Web. Yahoo (“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”) was born.

Other would-be classifiers approached the problem of Web chaos more democratically. Beginning from the sound premise that it’s good to share, a seventeen-year-old Oregonian named Sage Weil created the first “Web ring” at about the time Yang and Filo were assembling their army of paid Web librarians. A Web ring is nothing more than a set of topically related Web sites that have been linked together for ease of surfing. Rings are easy to find, easy to join, and easy to create; by 1997, they numbered 10,000.

Wales focused on the bottom-up strategy using Web rings, and it worked. Bomis users built hundreds of rings—on cars, computers, sports, and especially “babes” (e.g., the Anna Kournikova Web ring), effectively creating an index of the “laddie” Web. Instead of helping all users find all content, Bomis found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet, helping guys find guy stuff. Wales’s experience with Web rings reinforced the lesson he had learned with MUDs: given the right technology, large groups of self-interested individuals will unite to create something they could not produce by themselves, be it a sword-and-sorcery world or an index of Web sites on Pamela Anderson. He saw the power of what we now call “peer-to-peer,” or “distributed,” content production.

Wales was not alone: Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel, two programmers at Sun Microsystems, saw it too. In June 1998, along with three partners, they launched GnuHoo, an all- volunteer alternative to the Yahoo Directory. (GNU, a recursive acronym for “GNUs Not Unix,” is a free operating system created by the über-hacker Richard Stallman.) The project was an immediate success, and it quickly drew the attention of Netscape, which was eager to find a directory capable of competing with Yahoo’s index. In November 1998, Netscape acquired GnuHoo (then called NewHoo), promising to both develop it and release it under an “open content” license, which meant anyone could use it. At the date of Netscape’s acquisition, the directory had indexed some 100,000 URLs; a year later, it included about a million.

Wales clearly had the open-content movement in mind when, in the fall of 1999, he began thinking about a “volunteer-built” online encyclopedia. The idea—explored most prominently in Stallman’s 1999 essay “The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource”—had been around for some time. Wales says he had no direct knowledge of Stallman’s essay when he embarked on his encyclopedia project, but two bits of evidence suggest that he was thinking of Stallman’s GNU free documentation license. First, the name Wales adopted for his encyclopedia—Nupedia.org—strongly suggested a Stallman-esque venture. Second, he took the trouble of leasing a related domain name, GNUpedia.org. By January 2000, his encyclopedia project had acquired funding from Bomis and hired its first employee: Larry Sanger.

The Philosopher

Sanger was born in 1968 in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. When he was seven, his father, a marine biologist, moved the family to Anchorage, Alaska, where Sanger spent his youth. He excelled in high school, and in 1986 he enrolled at Reed College. Reed is the sort of school you attend if you are intelligent, are not interested in investment banking, and wonder a lot about truth. There Sanger found a question that fired his imagination: What is knowledge? He embarked on that most unremunerative of careers, epistemology, and entered a doctoral program in philosophy at Ohio State.

Sanger fits the profile of almost every Internet early adopter: he’d been a good student, played Dungeons & Dragons, and tinkered with PCs as a youth—going so far as to code a text-based adventure game in BASIC, the first popular programming language. He was drawn into the world of philosophy discussion lists and, in the early 1990s, was an active participant in Wales’s objectivism forum. Sanger also hosted a mailing list as part of his own online philosophy project (eventually named the Association for Systematic Philosophy). The mission and mien of Sanger’s list stood in stark contrast to Wales’s Rand forum. Sanger was far more programmatic. As he wrote in his opening manifesto, dated March 22, 1994:

The history of philosophy is full of disagreement and confusion. One reaction by philosophers to this state of things is to doubt whether the truth about philosophy can ever be known, or whether there is any such thing as the truth about philosophy. But there is another reaction: one may set out to think more carefully and methodically than one’s intellectual forebears.

Wales’s Rand forum was generally serious, but it was also a place for philosophically inclined laypeople to shoot the breeze: Wales permitted discussion of “objectivism in the movies” or “objectivism in Rush lyrics.” Sanger’s list was more disciplined, but he soon began to feel it, too, was of limited philosophical worth. He resigned after little more than a year. “I think that my time could really be better spent in the real world,” Sanger wrote in his resignation letter, “as opposed to cyberspace, and in thinking to myself, rather than out loud to a bunch of other people.” Sanger was seriously considering abandoning his academic career.

As the decade and the century came to a close, another opportunity arose, one that would let Sanger make a living away from academia, using the acumen he had developed on the Internet. In 1998, Sanger created a digest of news reports relating to the “Y2K problem.” Sanger’s Review of Y2K News Reports became a staple of IT managers across the globe. It also set him to thinking about how he might make a living in the new millennium. In January 2000, he sent Wales a business proposal for what was in essence a cultural news blog. Sanger’s timing was excellent.

The Cathedral

Wales was looking for someone with good academic credentials to organize Nupedia, and Sanger fit the bill. Wales pitched the project to Sanger in terms of Eric S. Raymond’s essay (and later book) “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond sketched two models of software development. Under the “cathedral model,” source code was guarded by a core group of developers; under the “bazaar model,” it was released on the Internet for anyone to tinker with. Raymond argued that the latter model was better, and he coined a now-famous hacker aphorism to capture its superiority: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” His point was simply that the speed with which a complex project is perfected is directly proportional to the number of informed people working on it. Wales was enthusiastic about Raymond’s thesis. His experience with MUDs and Web rings had demonstrated to him the power of the bazaar. Sanger, the philosopher, was charier about the wisdom-of-crowds scheme but drawn to the idea of creating an open online encyclopedia that would break all the molds. Sanger signed on and moved to San Diego.

According to Sanger, Wales was very “hands-off.” He gave Sanger only the loosest sketch of an open encyclopedia. “Open” meant two things: First, anyone, in principle, could contribute. Second, all of the content would be made freely available. Sanger proceeded to create, in effect, an online academic journal. There was simply no question in his mind that Nupedia would be guided by a board of experts, that submissions would be largely written by experts, and that articles would be published only after extensive peer review. Sanger set about recruiting academics to work on Nupedia. In early March 2000, he and Wales deemed the project ready to go public, and the Nupedia Web site was launched with the following words:

Suppose scholars the world over were to learn of a serious online encyclopedia effort in which the results were not proprietary to the encyclopedists, but were freely distributable under an open content license in virtually any desired medium. How quickly would the encyclopedia grow?

The answer, as Wales and Sanger found out, was “not very.” Over the first several months little was actually accomplished in terms of article assignment, writing, and publication. First, there was the competition. Wales and Sanger had the bad luck to launch Nupedia around the same time as Encyclopedia Britannica was made available for free on the Internet. Then there was the real problem: production. Sanger and the Nupedia board had worked out a multistage editorial system that could have been borrowed from any scholarly journal. In a sense, it worked: assignments were made, articles were submitted and evaluated, and copyediting was done. But, to both Wales and Sanger, it was all much too slow. They had built a cathedral.

The Bazaar

I n the mid-1980s, a programmer named Ward Cunningham began trying to create a “pattern language” for software design. A pattern language is in essence a common vocabulary used in solving engineering problems—think of it as best practices for designers. Cunningham believed that software development should have a pattern language, and he proposed to find a way for software developers to create it.

Apple’s Hypercard offered inspiration. Hypercard was a very flexible database application. It allowed users to create records (“cards”), add data fields to them, and link them in sets. Cunningham created a Hypercard “stack” of software patterns and shared it with colleagues. His stack was well liked but difficult to share, since it existed only on Cunningham’s computer. In the 1990s, Cunningham found himself looking for a problem-solving technique that would allow software developers to fine-tune and accumulate their knowledge collaboratively. A variation on Hypercard seemed like an obvious option.

Cunningham coded and, in the spring of 1995, launched the first “wiki,” calling it the “WikiWikiWeb.” (Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick,” which Cunningham chose to indicate the ease with which a user could edit the pages.) A wiki is a Web site that allows multiple users to create, edit, and hyperlink pages. As users work, a wiki can keep track of all changes; users can compare versions as they edit and, if necessary, revert to earlier states. Nothing is lost, and everything is transparent.

The wiki quickly gained a devoted following within the software community. And there it remained until January 2001, when Sanger had dinner with an old friend named Ben Kovitz. Kovitz was a fan of “extreme programming.” Standard software engineering is very methodical—first you plan, then you plan and plan and plan, then you code. The premise is that you must correctly anticipate what the program will need to do in order to avoid drastic changes late in the coding process. In contrast, extreme programmers advocate going live with the earliest possible version of new software and letting many people work simultaneously to rapidly refine it.

Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia’s lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. As Nupedia was then structured, no stage of the editorial process could proceed before the previous stage was completed. Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out “wiki magic,” the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project. With Kovitz in tow, Sanger rushed back to his apartment and called Wales to share the idea. Over the next few days he wrote a formal proposal for Wales and started a page on Cunningham’s wiki called “WikiPedia.”

Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be “fed into the Nupedia process” of authorization. Most of Nupedia’s expert volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger decided to launch a separate site called “Wikipedia.” Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of the project. At the end of January, Wikipedia had seventeen “real” articles (entries with more than 200 characters). By the end of February, it had 150; March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 “Wikipedians.”

Setting the Rules

W ikipedia’s growth caught Wales and Sanger off guard. It forced them to make quick decisions about what Wikipedia would be, how to foster cooperation, and how to manage it. In the beginning it was by no means clear what an “open” encyclopedia should include. People posted all manner of things: dictionary definitions, autobiographies, position papers, historical documents, and original research. In response, Sanger created a “What Wikipedia Is Not” page. There he and the community defined Wikipedia by exclusion—not a dictionary, not a scientific journal, not a source collection, and so on. For everything else, they reasoned that if an article could conceivably have gone in Britannica, it was “encyclopedic” and permitted; if not, it was “not encyclopedic” and deleted.

Sanger and Wales knew that online collaborative ventures can easily slide into a morass of unproductive invective. They had already worked out a solution for Nupedia, called the “lack of bias” policy. On Wikipedia it became NPOV, or the “neutral point of view,” and it brilliantly encouraged the work of the community. Under NPOV, authors were enjoined to present the conventionally acknowledged “facts” in an unbiased way, and, where arguments occurred, to accord space to both sides. The concept of neutrality, though philosophically unsatisfying, had a kind of everybody-lay-down-your-arms ring to it. Debates about what to include in the article were encouraged on the “discussion” page that attends every Wikipedia article.

The most important initial question, however, concerned governance. When Wikipedia was created, wikis were synonymous with creative anarchy. Both Wales and Sanger thought that the software might be useful, but that it was no way to build a trusted encyclopedia. Some sort of authority was assumed to be essential. Wales’s part in it was clear: he owned Wikipedia. Sanger’s role was murkier.

Citing the communal nature of the project, Sanger refused the title of “editor in chief,” a position he held at Nupedia, opting instead to be “chief organizer.” He governed the day-to-day operations of the project in close consultation with the “community,” the roughly two dozen committed Wikipedians (most of them Nupedia converts) who were really designing the software and adding content to the site. Though the division of powers between Sanger and the community remained to be worked out, an important precedent had been set: Wikipedia would have an owner, but no leader.

The Cunctator

B y October 2001, the number of Wikipedians was growing by about fifty a month. There were a lot of new voices, among them a user known as “The Cunctator” (Latin for “procrastinator” or “delayer”). “Cunc,” as he was called, advocated a combination of anarchy (no hierarchy within the project) and radical openness (few or no limitations on contributions). Sanger was not favorably disposed to either of these positions, though he had not had much of a chance to air his opposition. Cunc offered such an opportunity by launching a prolonged “edit war” with Sanger in mid-October of that year. In an edit war, two or more parties cyclically cancel each other’s work on an article with no attempt to find the NPOV. It’s the wiki equivalent of “No, your mother wears combat boots.”

With Cunc clearly in mind, Sanger curtly defended his role before the community on November 1, 2001:

I need to be granted fairly broad authority by the community—by you, dear reader—if I am going to do my job effectively. Until fairly recently, I was granted such authority by Wikipedians. I was indeed not infrequently called to justify decisions I made, but not constantly and nearly always respectfully and helpfully. This place in the community did not make me an all-powerful editor who must be obeyed on pain of ousting; but it did make me a leader. That’s what I want, again. This is my job.

Seen from the trenches, this was a striking statement. Sanger had so far said he was primus inter pares; now he seemed to be saying that he was just primus. Upon reading this post, one Wikipedian wrote: “Am I the only person who detects a change in [Sanger’s] view of his own position? Am I the only person who fears this is a change for the worse?”

On November 4, the Sanger-Cunc contretemps exploded. Simon Kissane, a respected Wikipedian, accused Sanger of capriciously deleting pages, including some of Cunc’s work. Sanger denied the allegation but implied that the excised material was no great loss. He then launched a defense of his position in words that bled resentment:

I do reserve the right to permanently delete things—particularly when they have little merit and when they are posted by people whose main motive is evidently to undermine my authority and therefore, as far as I’m concerned, damage the project. Now suppose that, in my experience, if I make an attempt to justify this or other sorts of decisions, the people in question will simply co-opt huge amounts of my time and will never simply say, “Larry, you win; we realize that this decision is up to you, and we’ll have to respect it.” Then, in order to preserve my time and sanity, I have to act like an autocrat. In a way, I am being trained to act like an autocrat. It’s rather clever in a way—if you think college-level stunts are clever. Frankly, it’s hurting the project, guys—so stop it, already. Just write articles—please!

The blowup disturbed Wales to no end. As a list moderator, he had tried hard to keep his discussants out of flame wars. He weighed in with an unusually forceful posting that warned against a “culture of conflict.” Wikipedia, he implied, was about building an encyclopedia, not about debating how to build or govern an encyclopedia. Echoing Sanger, he argued that the primary duty of community members was to contribute—by writing code, adding content, and editing. Enough talk, he seemed to be saying: we know what to do, now let’s get to work. Yet he also seemed to take a quiet stand against Sanger’s positions on openness and on his own authority:

Just speaking off the top of my head, I think that total deletions seldom make sense. They should be reserved primarily for pages that are just completely mistaken (typos, unlikely misspellings), or for pages that are nothing more than insults.

Wales also made a strong case that anyone deleting pages should record his or her identity, explain his or her reasons, and archive the entire affair.

Within several weeks, Sanger and Cunc were at each other’s throats again. Sanger had proposed creating a “Wikipedia Militia” that would deal with issues arising from sudden massive influxes of new visitors. It was hardly a bad idea: such surges did occur (they’re commonly called “slash-dottings”). But Cunc saw in Sanger’s reasonable proposition a very slippery slope toward “central authority.” “You start deputizing groups of people to do necessary and difficult tasks,” he wrote, “fast-forward two/three years, and you have pernicious cabals.”

Given the structure of Wikipedia there was little Sanger could do to defend himself. The principles of the project denied him real punitive authority: he couldn’t ban “trolls”—users like Cunc who baited others for sport—and deleting posts was evidence of tyranny in the eyes of Sanger’s detractors. A defensive strategy wouldn’t work either, as the skilled moderator’s tactic for fighting bad behavior—ignoring it—was blunted by the wiki. On e-mail lists, unanswered inflammatory posts quickly vanish under layers of new discussion; on a wiki, they remain visible to all, often near the tops of pages. Sanger was trapped by his own creation.

The “God-King”

W ales saw that Sanger was having trouble managing the project. Indeed, he seems to have sensed that Wikipedia really needed no manager. In mid-December 2001, citing financial shortfalls, he told Sanger that Bomis would be cutting its staff and that he should look for a new job. To that point, Wales and his partners had supported both Nupedia and Wikipedia. But with Bomis suffering in the Internet bust, there was financial pressure. Early on, Wales had said that advertising was a possibility, but the community was now set against any commercialization. In January 2002, Sanger loaded up his possessions and returned to Ohio.

Cunc responded to Sanger’s departure with apparent appreciation:

I know that we’ve hardly been on the best of terms, but I want you to know that I’ll always consider you one of the most important Wikipedians, and I hope that you’ll always think of yourself as a Wikipedian, even if you don’t have much time to contribute. Herding cats ain’t easy; you did a good job, all things considered.

Characteristically, Sanger took this as nothing more than provocation: “Oh, how nice and gracious this was. Oh, thank you SO much, Cunctator. I’m sure glad I won’t have to deal with you anymore, Cunctator. You’re a friggin’ piece of work.” The next post on the list is from Wales, who showed a business- as-usual sangfroid: “With the resignation of Larry, there is a much less pressing need for funds.”

Sanger made two great contributions to Wikipedia: he built it, and he left it. After forging a revolutionary mode of knowledge building, he came to realize—albeit dimly at first—that it was not to his liking. He found that he was not heading a disciplined crew of qualified writers and editors collaborating on authoritative statements (the Nupedia ideal), but trying to control an ill-disciplined crowd of volunteers fighting over ever-shifting articles. From Sanger’s point of view, both the behavior of the participants and the quality of the scholarship were wanting. Even after seeing Wikipedia’s explosive growth, Sanger continued to argue that Wikipedia should engage experts and that Nupedia should be saved.

Wales, though, was a businessman. He wanted to build a free encyclopedia, and Wikipedia offered a very rapid and economically efficient means to that end. The articles flooded in, many were good, and they cost him almost nothing. Why interfere? Moreover, Wales was not really the meddling kind. Early on, Wikipedians took to calling him the “God-King.” The appellation is purely ironic. Over the past four years, Wales has repeatedly demonstrated an astounding reluctance to use his power, even when the community has begged him to. He wouldn’t exile trolls or erase offensive material, much less settle on rules for how things should or should not be done. In 2003, Wales diminished his own authority by transferring Wikipedia and all of its assets to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, whose sole purpose is to set general policy for Wikipedia and its allied projects. (He is one of five members of the foundation’s board.)

Wales’s benign rule has allowed Wikipedia to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering. The English-language Wikipedia alone has well more than a million articles and expands by about 1,700 a day. (Britannica’s online version, by comparison, has about 100,000 articles.) As of mid-February 2006, more than 65,000 Wikipedians—registered users who have made at least ten edits since joining—had contributed to the English-language Wikipedia. The number of registered contributors is increasing by more than 6,000 a month; the number of unregistered contributors is presumably much larger. Then there are the 200-odd non-English-language Wikipedias. Nine of them already have more than 100,000 entries each, and nearly all of the major-language versions are growing on pace with the English version.

What is Wikipedia?

T he Internet did not create the desire to collect human knowledge. For most of history, however, standardizing and gathering knowledge was hard to do very effectively. The main problem was rampant equivocation. Can we all agree on what an apple is exactly, or the shades of the color green? Not easily. The wiki offered a way for people to actually decide in common. On Wikipedia, an apple is what the contributors say it is right now. You can try to change the definition by throwing in your own two cents, but the community—the voices actually negotiating and renegotiating the definition—decides in the end. Wikipedia grew out of a natural impluse (communication) facilitated by a new technology (the wiki).

The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

Early detractors commonly made two criticisms of Wikipedia. First, unless experts were writing and vetting the material, the articles were inevitably going to be inaccurate. Second, since anyone could edit, vandals would have their way with even the best articles, making them suspect. No encyclopedia produced in this way could be trusted. Last year, however, a study in the journal Nature compared Britannica and Wikipedia science articles and suggested that the former are usually only marginally more accurate than the latter. Britannica demonstrated that Nature's analysis was seriously flawed (“Fatally Flawed” was the fair title of the response), and no one has produced a more authoritative study of Wikipedia’s accuracy. Yet it is a widely accepted view that Wikipedia is comparable to Britannica. Vandalism also has proved much less of an issue than originally feared. A study by IBM suggests that although vandalism does occur (particularly on high-profile entries like “George W. Bush”), watchful members of the huge Wikipedia community usually swoop down to stop the malfeasance shortly after it begins.

There are, of course, exceptions, as in the case of the journalist John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia biography long contained a libel about his supposed complicity in the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy. But even this example shows that the system is, if not perfect, at least responsive. When Seigenthaler became aware of the error, he contacted Wikipedia. The community (led in this instance by Wales) purged the entry of erroneous material, expanded it, and began to monitor it closely. Even though the Seigenthaler entry is often attacked by vandals, and is occasionally locked to block them, the page is more reliable precisely because it is now under “enough eyeballs.” The same could be said about many controversial entries on Wikipedia: the quality of articles generally increases with the number of eyeballs. Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow.

Common Knowledge

I n June 2001, only six months after Wikipedia was founded, a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz made an arresting and remarkably forward-looking observation. The Internet, he mused, was nothing but a “global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility.” The contents of the Internet—its pages—are created by a loose community of users, namely those on the Web. The contents of Wikipedia—its entries—are also created by a loose community of users, namely Wikipedians. On the Internet, contributors own their own pages, and only they can edit them. They can also create new pages as they see fit. On Wikipedia, contributors own all of the pages collectively, and each can edit nearly every page. Page creation is ultimately subject to community approval. The private-property regime that governs the Internet allows it to grow freely, but it makes organization and improvement very difficult. In contrast, Wikipedia’s communal regime permits growth plus organization and improvement. The result of this difference is there for all to see: much of the Internet is a chaotic mess and therefore useless, whereas Wikipedia is well ordered and hence very useful.

Having seen all of this in prospect, Jasiutowicz asked a logical question: “Can someone please tell me what’s the end point/goal of Wikipedia?” Wales responded, only half jokingly, “The goal of Wikipedia is fun for the contributors.” He had a point. Editing Wikipedia is fun, and even rewarding. The site is huge, so somewhere on it there is probably something you know quite a bit about. Imagine that you happen upon your pet subject, or perhaps even look it up to see how it’s being treated. And what do you find? Well, this date is wrong, that characterization is poor, and a word is mispelled. You click the “edit” tab and make the corrections, and you’ve just contributed to the progress of human knowledge. All in under five minutes, and at no cost.

Yet Wikipedia has a value that goes far beyond the enjoyment of its contributors. For all intents and purposes, the project is laying claim to a vast region of the Internet, a territory we might call “common knowledge.” It is the place where all nominal information about objects of widely shared experience will be negotiated, stored, and renegotiated. When you want to find out what something is, you will go to Wikipedia, for that is where common knowledge will, by convention, be archived and updated and made freely available. And while you are there, you may just add or change a little something, and thereby feel the pride of authorship shared by the tens of thousands of Wikipedians.

Keeper

O ne of the objects of common knowledge in Wikipedia, I’m relieved to report, is “Marshall Poe.” Recall that the Scottish Wikipedian Alai said that I had no “notability” and therefore couldn’t really be considered encyclopedic. On the same day that Alai suggested my entry be deleted, a rather vigorous discussion took place on the “discussion” page that attended the Marshall Poe entry. A Wikipedian who goes by “Dlyons493” discovered that I had indeed written an obscure dissertation on an obscure topic at a not-so-obscure university. He gave the article a “Weak Keep.” Someone with the handle “Splash” searched Amazon and verified that I had indeed written books on Russian history, so my claim to be a historian was true. He gave me a “Keep.” And finally, my champion and hero, a Wikipedian called “Tupsharru,” dismissed my detractors with this:

Keep. Obvious notability. Several books published with prestigious academic publishers. One of his books has even been translated into Swedish. I don’t know why I have to repeat this again and again in these deletion discussions on academics, but don’t just use Amazon when the Library of Congress catalogue is no farther than a couple of mouse clicks away.

Bear in mind that I knew none of these people, and they had, as far as I know, no interest other than truth in doing all of this work. Yet they didn’t stop with verifying my claims and approving my article. They also searched the Web for material they could use to expand my one-line biography. After they were done, the Marshall Poe entry was two paragraphs long and included a good bibliography. Now that’s wiki magic.

Hive photograph by Ralph A. Clevenger/Corbis

2006-08-03T17:27:00.000-07:00

Living in Tehrangeles: L.A.'s Iranian Community

Perhaps nowhere is the standoff over Iran's nuclear enrichment program followed more closely than in Los Angeles' Iranian-American community. Known as Tehrangeles, it's the biggest community of Iranians outside Iran.

And if there's a downtown Tehrangeles, it's a stretch of Westwood Boulevard, on the edge of the UCLA campus next door to Beverly Hills. Pop into any shop and you'll hear Farsi. The business signs are all in Persian.

The popular Ketab Bookshop features Persian books and CDs. The TV at the back of this and other stores is tuned to an Iranian program. There are 20 Farsi-language channels to choose from on satellite television. More than a dozen are based in Southern California and beamed back to Iran.

Delaram, a young clerk in the bookstore, came here three years ago. She figured rightly that she could find a job in this Persian community. Her father was a general under the former Shah, protected after the revolution by family members connected to the new Islamic government.

"I had been brought up in a system that I was told to walk on American flag," she says. But she became curious about America and started practicing her English as a little girl, long before she had ever heard of Tehrangeles.

But because so many people in the community speak Persian, she hardly ever gets to speak English.

Community estimates put the Iranian population in Southern California at 500,000. In Beverly Hills, Iranians now account for 20 percent of the population and 40 percent of the students in the schools.

Iranian-born Jimmy Delshad is the vice mayor of Beverly Hills, who came to the area in 1959 and later built a computer hardware company. By his calculations, Delshad is now the top elected Iranian-American official in the United States. Like most Iranians, he has thrived in America. The per capita income of Iranian-Americans is 50 percent higher than the national average. Just under 40 percent have a college degree.

And about the most contentious political problem faced by Iranians in Beverly Hills was when the city council passed an ordinance prohibiting the building of extravagant white-pillared McMansions, known here as Persian Palaces.

In his office in City Hall, Delshad proudly displays campaign buttons and election brochures written in Farsi, something the city did for the first time when he ran for office.

When he ran for city council, Delshad had to persuade the city's Iranians to register.

"In Iran, if you were on a list it was generally not good. It doesn't matter what the list was, because somebody would misuse that list. There was that fear."

Here is where a small dark cloud seems to form over Tehrangeles. Even for those who have been here for decades, there is the sense of the watchful eye of a distant regime.

No one seems shy to criticize the Iranian regime. One man cheerfully called President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "monkey" and another called him a dictator on tape. But then both men insisted their names not be used.

Rumors of danger are whispered about on Westwood Boulevard. It's true that for more than a decade after the revolution, hit squads roamed Europe, sent by the regime to silence opposition leaders. One assassination even took place on American soil.

The subterfuge goes both ways. The Council on Foreign Relations released a report last month citing Tehrangeles as a place the CIA sees as a potential source of intelligence.

In the end, the exiles of Tehrangeles have many different vision of how Iran fits into their future. Even with vivid memories of their home country pulling them back, most aren't optimistic about political change.

Like Jamie, the owner of a printing shop in Westwood: "Of course, I would like to go and visit there again if possible. I would like to see a free Iran, but it doesn't seem to happen soon, even though I wish it would happen soon."

Max Boot: Messed Up Are the Peacemakers

2006-08-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

Nowhere is the dismal record of peace processes clearer than in Israel's case.
Max Boot

August 2, 2006

I HAPPENED TO BE in London last week when the Independent newspaper ran a front-page petition calling for "a cease-fire now," signed by a cross-section of the smoked-salmon socialist set — various retired ambassadors, human rights lawyers and creative geniuses such as Peter Gabriel and Harold Pinter. Which conflict were they trying to end? Not the one in Iraq, where fighting among sectarian militias is killing 100 people a day. Nor the one in Darfur, which continues to claim countless victims notwithstanding the signing of a peace accord. Nor any of the many other bloodlettings going on around this unhappy planet.

The war they're exercised about is the one that Israel is waging after suffering unprovoked attacks on its northern and southern frontiers. Their petition calls on Prime Minister Tony Blair to force Israel "to end its disproportionate and counterproductive response to Hezbollah's aggression." The petition also calls for bringing "all pressure possible on Hezbollah to end its attacks on Israel," but of course the result of a cease-fire now would be to end all pressure on the terrorists. The signatories are smart enough to know that, but they don't care.

Some of those hellbent on a cease-fire are no doubt animated by sheer animus against Israel, a nation that is held to a standard different from anyone else. (Note the "disproportionate" outrage over Israel's bombing of a building in Qana, Lebanon, that accidentally and tragically may have killed nearly 60 civilians, compared to the relative lack of outcry over the deliberate bombings by Muslim terrorists that killed more than 200 commuters in Mumbai.)

But there's more at work here than a Mel Gibson-esque bias ("Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world"). There is also a palpable sense of self-satisfaction among those who advocate peace at any price. It is all too easy to bask in your own virtue while castigating someone else as a warmonger, even though few peace treaties have achieved much unless preceded by decisive military action. The greatest peacemakers in modern history were generals like the Duke of Wellington, William Tecumseh Sherman, Curtis LeMay, George S. Patton and Ariel Sharon, who ruthlessly waged war on behalf of Western democracies.

However, such "militarists" win no Nobel Peace Prizes. Those accolades sometimes go to brave dissidents such as Lech Walesa and Aung San Suu Kyi, but more often they go to ineffectual peace activists such as Pugwash-founder Joseph Rotblat and U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, author of a 1928 treaty that purported to outlaw war. On two occasions, the prize was even granted to cynical aggressors — the PLO's Yasser Arafat and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho — for whom a peace treaty was merely a tactical step on the way to achieving their ultimate aims by force.

Architects of unsuccessful wars are rightly held responsible for their actions, as Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara were for the Vietnam War and as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld may be for the Iraq war, but there is no comparable settling of accounts for those responsible for failed peace pacts. Former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung still has his 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, notwithstanding North Korea's continuing development of nuclear weapons and missiles. Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres still has his 1994 prize despite the collapse of the Oslo accords. And United Nations peacekeeping forces still have their 1988 prize even though they have become better known for committing sex crimes than for keeping the peace. (The current fighting has exposed the ineffectuality of yet another set of blue helmets — those deployed in southern Lebanon.)

Nowhere is the dismal record of peace processes clearer than in Israel's case. Over the years, the "international community" repeatedly has stepped in to prevent Israel from finishing off its enemies — for instance, following its 1982, 1993 and 1996 incursions into Lebanon. Unrelenting pressure even led Israel in 2000 to leave Lebanon altogether. The result? Not peace, but a stronger, more dangerous adversary on Israel's border. The only real peace that Israel got, as a result of the 1978 Camp David accords, came after it had decisively defeated Egypt in two wars.

You would think that some lessons might be learned from this history. But no. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, architect of the 1993 and 1996 Israeli pullouts, is demanding yet another cease-fire that will allow Hezbollah to keep holding Lebanon and Israel hostage. And he is joined in this demand by the great and the good across the world.

Samuel Johnson's famous epigram needs to be amended. In the 18th century, patriotism may have been the last refuge of the scoundrel. Today, it's peace activism.

Iran Hangs in Suspense as War Offers New Strength, and Sudden Weakness

2006-08-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN, July 29 — These should be heady days for Iran’s leaders. Hezbollah, widely regarded as its proxy force in Lebanon, continues to rain down rockets on Israel despite 17 days of punishing airstrikes. Hezbollah’s leader is a hero of the Arab world, and Iran is basking in the reflected glory.

Yet this capital is unusually tense. Officials, former officials and analysts say that it is too dangerous even to discuss the crisis. In newspapers, the slightest questioning of support for Hezbollah has been attacked as unpatriotic, pro-Zionist and anti-Islamic.

As the war in Lebanon grinds on, Iranian officials cannot seem to decide whether Iran will emerge stronger — or unexpectedly weakened.

They are increasingly confident of an ideological triumph. But they also believe the war itself has already harmed Hezbollah’s strength as a military deterrent for Iran on the Israeli border.

And foreign policy experts and former government officials said that Iran had come to view Israel’s attack on Lebanon as a proxy offensive. They now view the war as the new front line in the decades-old conflict with Washington.

“They are worried that what’s happened in Lebanon to Hezbollah is the United States’ revenge against Iran,” said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a sociologist and former government official. “The way they are attacking them and fighting against them is like waging a war against Iran.”

Iran’s relationship to Hezbollah is both strategic and ideological. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 was viewed by its clerical leaders as a part of a pan-Muslim movement. Linking up with the Shiite Muslims of southern Lebanon was part of Iran’s efforts to spread its ideological influence. But in building up Hezbollah, the ideological motivation fused with a practical desire to put a force on Israel’s northern border.

No matter how this conflict is resolved, Iranian officials already see their strategic military strength diminished, said the policy experts, former officials and one official with close ties to the highest levels of government. Even if a cease-fire takes hold, and Hezbollah retains some military ability, a Lebanese public eager for peace may act as a serious check.

In the past, Iran believed that Israel might pause before attacking it because they would assume Hezbollah would assault the northern border. If Hezbollah emerges weaker, or restrained militarily because of domestic politics, Iran feels it may be more vulnerable.

“This was God’s gift to Israel,” said Nasser Hadian, a political science professor at Tehran University and an expert in Iranian foreign policy. “Hezbollah gave them the golden opportunity to attack.”

He said that Iran does not have the military ability at home to fight an aggressive offensive war against Israel from so far away. He said its only offensive tool would be a missile, which he said would be of limited effect and accuracy.

“If Israel attacked us tomorrow, what are we going to do?” he said.

Analysts and former government officials said Iran has focused on trying to preserve Hezbollah’s influence and deterrence capability. They said Iran has counseled Hezbollah not to show its full military ability to preserve Israeli uncertainty. That may prove difficult for Hezbollah to agree to, given that it is in the midst of a war, and may lead to a divergence of agendas, analysts and former government officials said.

Iran has also worked hard to convince the Lebanese, and Muslims around the world, that Hezbollah is not to blame for the destruction in Lebanon and that it is a legitimate resistance force. That is viewed here as essential to preserve Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon after the war, and with it Iran’s in the region.

Even as Iranian officials fret about the potential risks, they are savoring the ideological boost. If Hezbollah emerges as the primary political force in Lebanon, Arab governments, which have not pressed hard for a cease-fire, may find that in order to deal with Hezbollah they will have to work through Iran.

One foreign policy expert who is a sometime consultant to the government said that if Hezbollah continued to lob missiles into Israel for another six months to a year, the resulting turmoil in the region could make Iran a power to reckon with in Lebanon as it is in Iraq.

The expert, a professor of international relations at a university in Tehran who is an occasional consultant to the foreign ministry, spoke on the condition he not be identified because he was afraid of retribution.

On the domestic front, the war has promoted officials here to begin to assess how the outcome might require that they retool policies and strategies involving everything from the nuclear issue to diplomatic relations with Arab countries.

Power in Iran is not concentrated in any one hand, not even that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but is spread out among many levels. Major decisions, like the nuclear policy, are often a result of consultation and compromise among many forces among Iran’s clerical and political elite.

Confidence in Iran’s ideological gains since the war broke out has buoyed Iran’s hard-liners, and has influenced an internal debate that has been running since the revolution, over whether Iran should focus on domestic economic and political development or on its role as a pan-Islamic leader hoping to spread its revolutionary ideas, political analysts here said.

Even before the war, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was trying to position Iran as the leader of the pan-Muslim world, to unite all Muslims, whether Arabs or Indonesians or Indians, behind the leadership of Tehran. The analysts said that Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was elected on a populist economic message, is the most ideologically driven of Iran’s presidents since the revolution.

“Iran is now playing to its strength,” said a foreign policy expert affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who like many people here said he was afraid to be identified for fear of retribution.

Iran is the only nation in the Muslim world controlled by members of the Shiite sect of Islam, and its push to be a regional leader had raised concerns among the area’s Sunni leadership.

Iran has used the war in Lebanon to try to prove that talk of a Shiite threat is a fiction created by Arab leaders and Americans seeking to maintain power in the hands of American friends in Cairo, Amman and Riyadh.

It has pointed to Israel’s destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure to promote the idea that this war is not against Hezbollah but against all Muslims. And Iran’s leaders have sought to burnish their own image, at the expense of their Sunni rivals.

“It is inconceivable for anyone who calls himself a Muslim and who heads an Islamic state to maintain relations under the table with the regime that occupied Jerusalem,” said President Ahmadinejad in an interview on Iranian television this week, in a clear dig against governments like Egypt’s. “He cannot take pleasure in the killing of Muslims yet present himself as a Muslim. This is inconceivable, and must be exposed. Allah willing, it will.”

He posed an even more direct challenge in comments broadcast last week on Iranian television: “A bunch of people with no honor rule some countries in the region. People are being killed before their eyes, while they play games, giving compliments to one another. They think they can let time go by until this issue is forgotten, and then return to the scene. No, they are mistaken.”

The moment Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, the United States and Israel complained that Iran and its ally, Syria, played a role in sparking the crisis.

Both have denied any advance knowledge of Hezbollah’s raid on July 12. It is hard to know here if analysts and former officials say they accept that notion because they believe it — or because they are afraid to contradict the government.

Only one influential person, Muhammad Atrianfar, publisher of the newspaper Shargh, said in an interview that Hezbollah would never stage such a significant operation without at least notifying Tehran.

“Officially, Iran is not aware of what Hezbollah does,” he said. “Logically and unofficially Iran is always aware. The reason is clear, because of all that Iran has done for Hezbollah. Hezbollah is Iran in Lebanon. When Iran looks at Hezbollah, it sees Iran.”

In fact, the accepted wisdom here is that the Israeli assault was pre-planned, and that the capture of the two soldiers was simply its excuse. Further, people here believe that the true target was Tehran, and that Israel, the United States and Arab governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are hoping to roll back Iran’s influence in the region.

“They want to cut one of Iran’s arms,” said the Iranian official with close personal ties to the highest levels of government.

“Israel and the U.S. knew that as long as Hamas and Hezbollah were there, confronting Iran would be costly,” said Mohsen Rezai, former head of the Revolutionary Guards, said in an interview with the Baztab website. “So, to deal with Iran, they first want to eliminate forces close to Iran that are in Lebanon and Palestine.”

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting for this article.

2006-07-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Don't even try to resist
Bartenders muddle and blend, and the results couldn't be more delicious.
By Susan LaTempa
Times Staff Writer

July 26, 2006

SO you've netted that perfect patio table overlooking the marina or found yourself a Saturday-afternoon stool at a sunny al fresco bar, and the cocktails sailing past on serving trays look classy and fun: tall, icy drinks sporting cucumber garnishes; elegant frosty flutes filled with pretty pastel bubbles; a cool-looking berry-colored something in a martini glass.

Tempting, but can you chance it? You want refreshment and flavor, something to celebrate the meal ahead but you don't want to be under the table before your dinner date shows up, and you don't want to deaden your palate.

This summer, you're in luck. Order a Cranberry Delicious — a tall, cool, almost shockingly tangy combination of cranberry, mint and bitters — at the new Bin 8945 Wine Bar & Bistro in West Hollywood. Or sip a Fresh Thyme Bellini as you ponder the sushi offerings at the recently opened Katsuya in Brentwood. It's an edgy, herbaceous variation on the classic summer sparkler.

Meeting friends after an afternoon of sailing? At St. Regis Resort, Monarch Beach, in Dana Point, try the Pom-Secco, an irresistibly festive drink that begins with freshly muddled grapes and pomegranate seeds and comes to the table in a frosty, sugar-rimmed martini glass.

In a salutary example of unintended consequences, it turns out that top bartenders, enthusiastically experimenting with highly muddled, fruit-forward concoctions, are finding that sometimes using less alcohol creates the most balanced, delicious drink. This doesn't mean they're making weaker drinks, pouring less gin, vodka or rum.

Instead, seeking complexity and body that won't overpower the fresh fruit and herb flavors, mixologists are using lower-proof bases such as wine, sparkling wine, soju (the Korean or Japanese distilled spirit, usually about 20% alcohol or 40 proof), aperitifs such as vermouth (16% alcohol) and Pimm's (25%), some sakes and some liqueurs, which can be as low as 20% alcohol depending on the variety and brand (Chambord, Midori, Kahlúa and Amaretto are among the low-proof liqueurs).

Typically, this results in a drink with about half the amount of alcohol as in a standard cocktail.

The upside? Order one of these and an appetizer and you can drive yourself home.

The downside? More research is needed to determine. Another round, please.

Ryan Magarian, a beverage and spirits consultant who developed the drinks for Katsuya, says he didn't have a low-alcohol agenda when he created such drinks as the Fresh Thyme Bellini for the restaurant.

"The intention was to create drinks that are light and lively and really dance on your palate," he says. "When you think about sushi, you think about what to drink with it — sake, maybe a light wine."

The Bellini was famously created at Harry's Bar in Venice, but, less famously, was originally served for just a few months each year when peaches were in season. The vibrant flavors of peaches attracted Magarian, but he says adding a sprig of bruised thyme was the significant step in evolving his new Prosecco-based cocktail. As with the creations of the sushi chef, small touches make all the difference.

"A sprig of thyme to change the nose; a dash of peach bitters to change the palate," he says. "The bitters open up the flavors and add another layer. They're like the salt and pepper of cocktails. Just a smidge of peach bitters makes this drink a little livelier, a little more unforgettable."

A challenge met

ALCOHOL gives body and structure to a drink, and it might seem challenging to create a balanced, low-alcohol drink that also has complexity. But area bartenders seem to be rising to the challenge — even if they hardly knew it was there. One technique they're using is muddling.

A low-alcohol version of Magarian's quaffable, wonderfully refreshing Cucumber Watermelon Mojito begins with a mad muddling session: watermelon triangles, cucumber slices and fresh mint are hand-pressed with a muddler, the bartender's long-handled pestle designed for smashing up ingredients in the bottom of a glass rather than in a mortar. Soju, fresh lime juice and ginger ale each contributes a needed note to balance the drink; the flavor is very fruity, but with an intriguing edge.

Saurav Biswas, assistant food and beverage director at St. Regis, created his pomegranate-Prosecco drink around the seeds as well as the juice of the pomegranate. What makes the drink so delicious, he says, is that the seeds and grapes are muddled before being mixed with alcohol to release their flavors. "When you muddle the fruit it opens up and you get a really different flavor, then you put just a little into the drink right away," Biswas says.

At St. Regis, the Pom-Secco is served with ceremony. A server brings the cocktail shaker with the muddled fruit, lemon juice, simple syrup, Prosecco and ice to the table, gives it a gentle shake and strains the drink into a frosted glass. A splash of Prosecco is added for extra fizz.

"The white wine spritzer days are gone," says Karen Hatfield, pastry chef and general manager of the recently opened Hatfield's in Los Angeles, but as for low-alcohol cocktails she says, "I'm all about it. There's a right time for everything." Sometimes you need a hard-hitting drink, she says, and sometimes you're looking for an alternative. Her pomegranate fizz uses fresh pomegranate juice when available, often from the Hollywood farmers market, and Prosecco.

When top bartenders insist on the purest juices, finest fruits, intoxicatingly fragrant herbs and other fresh ingredients, they're participating in a decade-old revolution that tossed aside prepackaged drink mixes and brought back classic 19th and early 20th century pre-Prohibition recipes and techniques.

Pioneer mixologists including Dale DeGroff ("The Craft of the Cocktail") have trained a new generation of bartenders and written books espousing a philosophy that's comparable to that of many of today's chefs, emphasizing the primacy of quality ingredients.

Mashing's roots

A century ago, before fruit brandies and syrups became widely available, for example, it was common for bartenders to mash fresh fruits with sugars and syrups. Fresh seasonal fruits were shaken with wine or spirits to make a tall drink served over ice called a cobbler, seldom seen now but once so popular it was the reason the cocktail shaker was invented.

As the revival and adaptation of classic cocktails and techniques continues to interest bartenders, look for more low-alcohol drinks on specialty menus.

A version of Pimm's Cup — a British afternoon refresher that can be garnished with not only cucumber but also herbs such as mint or borage and fruit such as apple or lemon — is on the list at Hungry Cat in Hollywood this summer as well as at the new Social Hollywood.

Social's sommelier and beverage manager Franklin Ferguson says the restaurant's spin on Pimm's Cup is a popular before-dinner order. Hungry Cat bar manager Tim Staehling says his daytime customers gravitate toward the Pimm's Cup or the classic Campari and orange juice, made, of course, with fresh-squeezed juice. "It's nice in the afternoon."

At 48 proof (24% alcohol), Campari is a low-alcohol bitter traditionally used not only in combination with spirits but also solo. Other bitters are increasingly used in drinks where once bartenders might have boosted flavor with a sweet liqueur.

A few lower-alcohol drinks recipes call for bitters alone, used so sparingly that even if the bitters are higher proof, the overall drink is just a few dashes away from a virgin cocktail. The Cranberry Delicious made by Damian Windsor for Bin 8945 started out as a digestif, but it's so refreshingly good, with bits of muddled mint and that ineffable something — the gentian and other (secret) ingredients in Angostura bitters — that it's worked its way onto the specialty cocktails menu. It's as satisfying as a higher-proof drink and though fruit-forward, it doesn't shut down the taste buds with sweetness but rather sets you up nicely for dinner.

In other words, no regrets.

*

Pom-Secco

Total time: 5 minutes

Servings: 1

Note: From Saurav Biswas at the St. Regis Resort, Monarch Beach, in Dana Point. Make a simple syrup by boiling granulated sugar in an equal amount of water until the sugar dissolves; allow to cool.

4 seedless red grapes

1 ounce simple syrup

2 ounces pomegranate juice

3 ounces chilled Prosecco wine

Splash ( 1/2 teaspoon) fresh lemon juice

5 to 6 pomegranate seeds, plus several for garnish

Orange peel, about 1/4 inch wide and 1 to 1 1/2 inches long

1. In a cocktail shaker, muddle the grapes and simple syrup. Add the pomegranate juice, Prosecco, lemon juice, pomegranate seeds and ice. Shake gently.

2. Strain into a sugar-rimmed martini glass. To garnish, twist the orange peel over the cocktail and drop it in. Add the pomegranate seeds.

Each serving: 132 calories; 0 protein; 19 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 0 fat; 0 saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 12 mg. sodium.

*

Fresh Thyme Bellini

Total time: 10 minutes

Servings: 1

Note: From Ryan Magarian for Katsuya. Make a simple syrup by boiling granulated sugar in an equal amount of water until the sugar dissolves; allow to cool. One peach makes enough purée for four drinks.

1 white peach

3 sprigs fresh thyme

1/4 ounce simple syrup

4 ounces chilled

Prosecco

1 dash peach bitters

1. In a blender, purée the peeled, seeded peach. Set aside.

2. In a pint glass, hand press 2 thyme sprigs with a muddler. Add 1 ounce of the peach purée, the simple syrup, the Prosecco and the bitters.

3. Fill the glass with ice. Stir swiftly for 30 seconds.

4. Strain into a flute. Garnish with the remaining thyme sprig.

Each serving: 99 calories; 0 protein; 6 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 0 fat; 0 saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 6 mg. sodium.

*

Cranberry Delicious

Total time: 5 minutes

Servings: 1

Note: From Damian Windsor at Bin 8945 Wine Bar & Bistro

1/2 lime, cut into wedges for muddle

2 cubes sugar

6 mint leaves

3 dashes Angostura bitters

6 ounces cranberry juice

1. In a shaker, muddle the lime with the sugar cubes and mint leaves.

2. After muddling, fill the shaker with ice and add 3 dashes of Angostura bitters and the cranberry juice. Shake well and pour over ice into a 10-ounce highball glass.

Each serving: 139 calories; 0 protein; 35 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 0 fat; 0 saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 4 mg. sodium.

*

Cucumber Watermelon Mojito

Total time: 5 minutes

Servings: 1

Note: Adapted by Ryan Magarian from a drink developed for Katsuya. Make a simple syrup by boiling granulated sugar in an equal amount of water until the sugar dissolves; allow to cool.

4 triangles seedless watermelon, about 3 inches high and 1 inch thick, divided

7 cucumber slices, divided (6 of them seeded, 1 for garnish)

3 large sprigs mint, divided

1 1/2 ounces soju

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

3/4 ounce simple syrup

1/2 ounce ginger ale

1. In a shaker, add 3 watermelon triangles, 6 slices of cucumber, 2 sprigs of mint, the lime juice and the syrup. Hand press with a muddler.

2. Add the soju and fill the shaker with ice. Shake vigorously for 6 seconds.

3. Strain over fresh ice into a tall glass and top with the ginger ale.

4. Place a watermelon triangle and a cucumber slice on a toothpick and place in glass for garnish along with a sprig of mint.

Each serving: 97 calories; 0 protein; 13 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 0 fat; 0 saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 2 mg. sodium.

The Virtue of Riches

2006-07-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

The Virtue of Riches
How wealth makes us more moral.
Megan McArdle

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman, New York: Knopf, 592 pages, $35

For many Americans, riches are so disreputable that taking them away is a goal in itself. The left used to offer the misery of the poor as a reason for redistribution, but these days an increase in inequality is just as likely to be the rallying cry for higher taxation. In a savage New York Times column this past March, the economist Paul Krugman turned rising inequality—a trend that has persisted for decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents—into a frontal assault on the hated Bush tax cuts. More generally, the chief plaint of Democrats about those cuts has been not that they are economically inefficient, or even that they are leaving wonderful programs starved for funds, but that they primarily went to “the rich.”

That same suspicion is often applied to the vast wealth we enjoy as a society. Spend time at an anti-globalization rally, and you’ll inevitably hear someone complain that Americans are less than 5 percent of the global population yet consume 25 percent of its output, as if we were somehow stealing the difference from the world’s poor. Such critics also cite the social, economic, and environmental dislocations caused by a vibrant free market. We’re too rich, the activists are basically saying, and our wealth has too high a cost; it’s time to stop thinking about making money and start thinking about all the suffering in the world.

Even those who think wealth is good (or at least harmless) often implicitly suggest that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of moral goals are separate questions. They would do well to read Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The author, a professor of political economy at Harvard, has written an economic tome that is accessible to the average reader without failing to offer something new to specialists as well: a compelling argument that rising incomes make us not just richer people, but better ones.

Friedman’s definition of better will irritate libertarian-minded readers, who will quarrel with his decision to count support for generous government expenditures among the “moral consequences” of economic growth—or, at least, with his implication that such support is among the positive effects. But most of the consequences he discusses would impress nearly everyone. When earnings are growing, Friedman says, people are more tolerant of minorities, more welcoming to immigrants, more solicitous of their fellow citizens, more supportive of democratic institutions, and just plain better specimens of humanity.

This result is not surprising to anyone who has been around normally rapacious Wall Street bankers at bonus time, but Friedman provides historical evidence for the intuition. In painstaking detail, he outlines the economic history of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany since the industrial revolution. Over and over, he shows that during periods of economic stagnation, societies become more xenophobic, less tolerant of dissent, and more willing to embrace anti-democratic government actions. It is no accident, he argues, that communism and fascism were embraced by countries in economic crisis—or that the Palmer raids and the PATRIOT Act arrived during periods of rising financial insecurity for America’s vast bourgeoisie.

Economists have long known that what they call the “wealth effect” can stimulate spending: If people feel richer because the value of their home or stock portfolio has gone up, or because they think their income is likely to rise in the future, they will loosen up and spend more. Friedman suggests that people don’t merely become more willing to treat themselves to home entertainment systems and $4 cups of coffee as their wealth grows; they also become more generous to others. “With rising incomes,” he says, “more people become willing to donate time and money. And among those who do so, rising incomes also allow people to feel able to do more.”

But direct charity is only one of the ways we become more generous. Even more important is the tolerance that growing wealth brings for competition from others. There is a growing recognition that trade is a vastly more effective way to reduce global poverty than foreign aid; even Oxfam, a reliably left-wing nongovernmental organization, has jumped on the free trade bandwagon with a campaign against agricultural subsidies. Better still, trade benefits domestic consumers. Yet progress on that front is nearly impossible unless economic prosperity is rising fast enough to ease the fears of those who are threatened by a more open market.

The current global economic climate —economic stagnation in much of Europe and an economic recovery in America that has bypassed much of the middle class—gives us one way to test Friedman’s hypothesis. If he’s right, global trade should be much more threatened now than it was in the 1990s. Sure enough, the Bush administration has struggled to pass even a minor trade pact with Central America, while the European Union seems perfectly willing to scuttle the Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations rather than expose its farmers to competition. That doesn’t prove Friedman is correct, of course, but it’s certainly suggestive.

Disturbingly, if Friedman is right, unless median incomes start rising soon, it won’t be long before Americans start taking a long, skeptical look at our neighbors. (Given the current uproar over immigration, it’s possible that we’ve already reached that point.) Nativist and racist movements are at least partly about the economic insecurity of their members; as August Bebel said, “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.”

Friedman musters an array of empirical evidence to connect the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the growing economic anxieties of its members, who were frequently “farmers, skilled craftsmen, small business proprietors, blue collar workers…and low-end white collar workers of all kinds.” Those Klansmen faced new competition from Catholics and blacks at a time when economic advancement was already becoming more difficult thanks to structural changes in the economy: troubles in the farm sector, population shifts from the country to the city, increasing industrial consolidation, and structural shifts away from certain industries and regions. Friedman quotes historian Nancy McLean’s observation that those economic changes “cut short the climb of men on the make and defied their dreams of being their own bosses.…Class standing and economic insecurity created a potential among white men for openness to the Klan’s message.” If we can all agree that forestalling movements like the KKK is a worthy social goal, it suddenly becomes terribly important to make people feel wealthier.

This is not as simple as it sounds. People judge how well they are doing in two ways: against how well they think other people are doing and against their own (and their family’s) recent earnings. That’s why an American postal worker might not be particularly happy with his income, even though in terms of transportation, health care, and personal comfort he has a better standard of living than Cornelius Vanderbilt and other past plutocrats. Ironically, globalization therefore has made ordinary citizens in many countries unhappier with their lot, even as it has made them objectively better off. The more information people have about higher living standards elsewhere, the less content they are with their own lifestyles.

Unless we try to bring back communism, something vanishingly few crusaders against inequality would support, any social income distribution will always leave some on the top and some on the bottom. But nations can and do increase the size of the economic pie, allowing everyone to get a bigger piece even if their proportions stay the same, or even shrink. Friedman argues that governments everywhere should focus policy on creating the broad prosperity that will allow their societies to become more open, tolerant, and generous.

Friedman’s argument for what wealthy nations ought to be doing is the weakest part of the book. Translating analysis into policy is where many otherwise brilliant works on popular economics fall down: Economists know lots of ways an economy can go wrong, but they’re not completely clear on what makes one go right. The World Bank spends pretty much all its time analyzing developing economies, and yet in a recent Foreign Policy essay, Moisés Naím quotes François Bourguignon, the bank’s chief economist, as saying “We do not really know what causes economic growth…[w]e do have a good sense of what are the main obstacles to growth and what are the conditions without which an economy can’t grow. But we are far less sure about what are the other ingredients needed to create and sustain growth.” Even in those happy moments when economists have a pretty good idea of what should be done, they are generally at a loss to prescribe programs that can survive a political process that is usually controlled by the same group of people who are causing the problems.

So Friedman trots out some tired old standbys: Increase investment! Boost education! He might as well declare that we should all try harder to love one another. Investment and education are fine things; sometimes they even boost economic output. But those cases are limited, and government policy has proven incredibly inept at targeting those specific areas.

It is an economic truism that incentives matter, but people are often highly resistant to government programs waving carrots and sticks. Witness America’s appalling household savings—briefly: we don’t save—despite all the marvelous opportunities the government has afforded us to sock away cash for retirement. Compounding the problem, politicians are often attracted by things that sound like they work, rather than those that actually do, which is why we get job training programs instead of radical education reform.

Even things that we theoretically know how to do and are sure would improve economic performance—say, boosting basic reading and math skills—have proved devilishly hard to implement. Programs like Success for All, a highly structured reading curriculum, are showing that it is possible to teach disadvantaged children the skills they need. But putting those programs in place in a world full of intransigent teachers unions, inert administrations, and children whose homes and neighborhoods are scenes of indescribable chaos is very difficult.

But this book’s lackluster discussion of policy does not undermine its importance. The recovery from the 2001 recession has been disappointing in many ways; labor markets remain softer than we would expect at this point, and middle-class income growth has been stagnant. With all this economic anxiety, it seems likely that the 2008 election will feature more economic protectionism, more attacks on immigration, and probably more proposals for aggressive social programs that will have negative effects on economic growth. Whether or not he intended to do it, Friedman has provided powerful empirical evidence against any program aimed not at increasing the country’s wealth but at cutting wealth down to size.

Megan McArdle is the economics correspondent for The Economist’s Global Agenda section.

Tacos

2006-07-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Taco Joint in Your Kitchen
By MARK BITTMAN

YOU may never have had a really terrific taco, especially if you live on the East Coast. There are a lot of tacos around, certainly, and many of them can be satisfying enough. But the genuine article is often hard to come by — except in Mexico, on the West Coast and in the Southwest, where taco passion runs deep. And when the Westerners travel east, they frequently fall into despair.

They sit around over coffee or tequila, complaining, sharing tips on where they heard there might be a good taco hiding.

Just about anything can be called a taco, which essentially means “sandwich.” You take a tortilla and you put some stuff in it and you eat it; that’s a taco. (If you roll the tortilla, it’s a burrito, which appears to have been created in the American Southwest; if you layer food on top of it, it’s an enchilada; if you crisp it up and use it as a kind of plate, it’s a tostada; if you cut it into pieces and bake or fry it, it’s a chip; and so on.) But taco aficionados have a particular taste, a particular feel in mind. It’s about the ingredients, as high quality and as fresh as possible.

The good news is that without too much effort you can, believe it or not, create an admirable taco at home. What that means is not crisp-fried tortillas loaded with some weird ground beef mixture, lettuce and rice, but corn tortillas with some spicy slivered pork, grilled beef or maybe fish or chicken.

Turkey would probably be most traditional; the native Americans of what is now Mexico not only hybridized corn as we know it but also raised turkeys.

The best tacos start with corn tortillas; flour is a recent adaptation and, while it is not always inappropriate or scorned, there is nothing like a corn tortilla. These are made from the same base as tamales, a slurry of kernels that have been treated with lime (calcium hydroxide, not the fruit) and then cooked and ground into a dough. At that point they are pressed into tortillas of many sizes, at one time by hand and now usually by machine. (Quite popular in both Mexico and Southern California are those that are just three inches across; you can eat 10 of these at a sitting.)

Machine or no, a good taco starts with a good tortilla.

Your best bet is not the supermarket but a Mexican grocery store, or if you’re lucky, a bakery. In any case, it should be fresh and have that particular flinty aroma that all corn-lime products have.

One common approach, starting with ground meat and “taco seasoning mix,” is a bad idea. Just think about a taco as having a number of components, and take it from there. My favorite, easy to find at taco trucks in Los Angeles or small shops in Mexico, is difficult to make at home. This is the taco al pastor, closer to what we think of as a gyro, with shaved spit-roasted pork or goat. (This was probably introduced by the Spaniards or, even more likely, the Lebanese, who emigrated to Mexico in significant enough numbers beginning in the late 19th century so that there are Lebanese neighborhoods in most major cities.) It doesn’t really contain anything more than that meat and perhaps a little salsa, and often, a bit of grilled pineapple on top.

More commonly, a good taco is loaded with several components: something crunchy (lettuce or cabbage usually, but chopped onion or salted radish are also good); the protein; some moisture — crema, sour cream or guacamole will do nicely; and maybe cheese. Many people add salsa for brightness as well.

To make tacos for a crowd, you can’t do better than to begin with slow-roasted pork, called carnitas. If you start with a piece of shoulder (especially from a well-raised pig), you won’t go wrong; the high fat content makes it self-basting, and almost any combination of spices and heat will produce something delicious. Slow, indirect grilling is ideal, but you don’t lose much by cooking the pork in the oven, using moderate heat.

Chicken thighs — again, from a good chicken rather than a super-mass-produced one — are another good option, and can be quickly simmered in a flavorful braising liquid that will turn them super-tender and leave them quite moist. Here again, the seasonings can be varied as you like. I see the spice mixtures here as suggestions rather than ironclad recipes to follow.

Then there is carne asada, which means “grilled meat,” which in turn means pretty much anything. But skirt steak is what you most often see made into carne asada (and in many Los Angeles supermarkets, skirt steak is actually called carne asada). Because of its high fat content, it’s perfect here. Rub it with a few spices, grill it for a few minutes and pile it into tortillas with a couple of other ingredients to make a legitimate and near-perfect taco.

Taco Technique, Bottom to Top

TACO building is a free-form exercise; what follows isn’t meant to be some unvarying procedure but simply my own preference.

Briefly warm the tortilla on both sides in a dry pan. It will take on just a little color.

Then, be sure not to overload. If you put too much in there, the stuff will fall right out. Start with the protein, not only because it’s the foundation but because as the heaviest component it belongs at the bottom; no more than one-third cup or so for an average four- or five-inch taco. I like to put the crunchy stuff, like lettuce, on next, for contrast; a small handful, as much as you can grab with your fingers, not your fist. Then the spoonable ingredients, or the sprinkles: salsa or crema, guacamole or crumbled cheese — whatever you like, but we’re only talking a tablespoon or two here.

At this point you have less than a cup of stuff in your tortilla, which is about all it can handle.

Like pizza, pasta or dumplings, the filling is the flavor and the starch the real substance. You’re supposed to eat a few of these, and if they fall apart in the process, don’t worry about it. Use the tortilla to pick up whatever fell out.

Recipe: Slow-Roasted Pork for Tacos

Time: at least 2½ hours, longer if you have time

10 cloves garlic, peeled
2 pounds pork shoulder, preferably boneless and in one piece
½ teaspoon peppercorns
1 teaspoon fresh oregano (or use dried Mexican oregano)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 inch cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon coriander seed
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice.

1. Sliver 4 cloves of the garlic and use a thin-bladed knife to poke holes all over the pork; insert garlic slivers in holes.

2. Combine the peppercorns, oregano, cumin, cinnamon and coriander in a small skillet and turn the heat to medium. Toast, shaking the pan occasionally, until the mixture is fragrant, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

3. Combine the toasted spices, salt and remaining garlic in the container of a small food processor or blender. Turn on the machine and gradually add the orange and lemon juice until you have a smooth purée. Rub all over the pork; let the pork sit at room temperature for up to 2 hours or in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

4. At least 2 hours before you plan to eat, turn the oven to 300 degrees or prepare a charcoal or gas grill to cook over low indirect heat. Put the pork in a roasting pan in the oven or directly on the grill rack; if you’re grilling, cover the grill. Cook, checking occasionally and basting with the pan juices if you’re roasting (add water to bottom of pan if mixture dries out), until pork is brown and very, very tender, at least 2 hours. Shred or slice pork and use hot or at room temperature (pork can be refrigerated for up to 2 days).

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Recipe: Grilled Carne Asada for Tacos

Time: about 45 minutes

1 clove garlic
2 pounds skirt steak
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground oregano
½teaspoon cayenne
Salt and freshly ground black pepper.

1. Start a charcoal or gas grill. Crush garlic and rub steak with it. Combine remaining ingredients and rub into steak. Let steak sit until you’re ready to grill.

2. Grill steak 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium-rare. Cut into slices and use as soon as possible (hot is best, but warm or room temperature is fine).

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Recipe: Shredded Chicken for Tacos

Time: about 1 hour

2 pounds boneless chicken thighs
1 large white onion, peeled and quartered
5 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 ancho or other mild dried chili, optional
Salt and pepper to taste.

1. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and add water to cover. Turn heat to high, bring to a boil, and skim any foam that comes to the surface. Partially cover and adjust heat so mixture simmers steadily. Cook until meat is very tender, about 30 minutes. Remove from liquid and cool.

2. Shred meat with fingers. Taste and adjust seasonings; use within a couple of days.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

Recipe: Salsa Fresca

Time: 10 minutes

2 large fresh ripe tomatoes, chopped
½ large white onion, peeled and minced
¼ teaspoon minced raw garlic, or to taste
1 habanero or jalapeño pepper, stemmed, seeded and minced, or to taste
¼ cup chopped cilantro leaves
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice or 1 teaspoon red-wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground pepper.

1. Combine all ingredients, taste and adjust seasoning as necessary.

2. Let the flavors marry for 15 minutes or so before serving, but serve within a couple of hours.

Yield: about 2 cups.

Hot? Yes. Global Warming? Maybe.

2006-07-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Causes of the current heat wave are complex. Drought, high pressure and sprawl all play roles.
By Robert Lee Hotz and Erin Cline

The heat was unreal — so blistering that a windowsill thermometer overlooking Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles blew its top when the mercury hit 130 degrees. People consumed so much water that parts of the city briefly ran dry. Four people died. Dozens were hospitalized.

It was still 89 degrees at 1 a.m.

The record hot spell did not occur in 2006, but 1955, long before scientists raised the prospect of global warming and climate change.

The extreme temperatures of this year's heat wave have been so intense that they have created a sense of fundamental change — that somehow Los Angeles is on the verge of a searing future.

But few events occur with such regularity or are so quickly forgotten as Southland heat waves, with extremes of temperature rising and falling in a regular rhythm like rolling curls of surf.

Climate experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla cautioned Tuesday that no single event — no matter how unusual — could be directly attributed to global warming and the effects of pollution.

There is such natural variability in temperature that even a record scorcher is just one data point in a long temperature timeline.

"To call it global warming would be overdoing it," said climatologist Daniel R. Cayan of Scripps and the U.S. Geological Survey. "This is largely natural variability."

But the current heat wave, which has been brewing since May, has nonetheless raised alarms. It is simmering with sustained intensity, echoing record high temperatures now wilting Europe and Asia.

"There may be some exacerbating climate change ingredient," Cayan said. "In fact, it is almost certain."

The current high temperatures fit with extremes that have been on an upward arc for the last century and are in line with computer projections for more records in the future.

"What we now call extreme events are becoming run-of-the-mill happenings," said Scripps climatologist Tim Barnett.

The first six months of 2006 were the warmest in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990, a trend that a majority of scientists say is in large part attributable to human production of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere.

All told, the planet has been slowly warming for a century, with Earth's average temperature rising by 1.6 degrees. In Los Angeles, the average daytime temperature has increased 3 degrees over the last century, while nighttime temperatures have increased 7 degrees, records show.

In 1939, a high of 107 degrees broke all records. By 1955, the record high was 108 degrees; it crept to 109 degrees by 1963, and in 1990 reached 112 degrees.

Such temperature extremes arise from a cat's cradle of causes, experts said. The current weather is affected by an extended regional drought and broader, long-term climate trends that encompass much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The effects of urban development also play a major role, as thousands of square miles of dry chaparral are transformed into highways, housing tracts and strip malls — all of which retain heat.

The immediate cause of the current heat is a lingering high-pressure system centered over the Four Corners region of the Southwest, said JPL climatologist William Patzert.

As it slowly turns clockwise at about 15 mph, that immense wheel of air also sweeps the ocean's warm surface water against the Southern California coast, eliminating the cooling marine breeze that tempers the local climate, he said.

An extended drought in the Western states has strengthened the high-pressure system, while the jet stream, which in a normal year would help cool the West, has kept north of the Canadian border.

"This heat wave is coast to coast, border to border," Patzert said. "It has been going on for six weeks now where temperatures have been abnormally high. Now they are off the scale."

The patterns have come and gone in the past.

In July 1931, sweltering Angelenos bemoaned the 37th straight day of extreme high temperatures — at that point the longest stretch of hot, humid local weather in the history of the National Weather Service.

Few recalled that, a generation earlier, as temperature records shattered in July 1891, perspiring businessmen sought shelter in the cool of the Grand Opera House and worried that such searing temperatures might mar efforts to market California's perfect climate to Easterners.

No one then would have blamed global warming — a concept that did not gain scientific currency until the 1980s.

Since then, scientific understanding has progressed in lock step with a contentious political debate.

The debate eludes resolution because of the difficulty of separating normal temperature swings from longer trends. In the effort to understand climate, certainty comes only with the hindsight of centuries.

The severity of the current heat wave, in which temperatures this month have reached 100 degrees or more for at least 10 straight days, marks the first time in 57 years that both Northern and Southern California have experienced simultaneous, extended high temperatures, California's Undersecretary for Energy Affairs, Joe Desmond, said Tuesday.

"This is a historic heat wave," Desmond said.

Still, Patzert said of California's weather: "Is that a part of global warming? I don't know."

Some scientists, however, believe it a harbinger of more extreme summers in decades to come.

"People talk about tipping points," said Scripps' Barnett. "We have gone past it. There is nothing we can do to stop it now. The only question is how big a hit we are going to take."

Whatever the ultimate scientific truth, this month's weather has been for many Southern Californians a perceptual tipping point that brought home the possibility of global warming, just as the fury of Hurricane Katrina did for the people of New Orleans.

Inside the air-conditioned darkness of the Majestic Crest Theatre in Westwood, Max Furstenau, 18, was cleaning up after Tuesday's 3 p.m. showing of "An Inconvenient Truth," in which former Vice President Al Gore made the case for global warming.

Outside, the weather had finally cooled to the comfortable mid-80s. The day before had hit 110 degrees, breaking the record of 107 set in 1954.

"I know it's happening," Furstenau said.

The Formula Follies

2006-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

By JENNIFER GRAHAM

The Merchants of Death in Christopher Buckley's novel "Thank You for Smoking" are spokesmen for the most vilified industries in Washington: alcohol, tobacco and firearms. A lobbyist for baby formula may have to join them in a sequel. Proponents of breast-feeding, emboldened by studies that trumpet human milk's superiority to its supermarket substitutes, are abandoning platitudes like "Breast Is Best" in favor of aggressive campaigns designed to portray formula feeding as not merely inferior but dangerous.

A startling television ad in a government breast-feeding campaign likened feeding an infant formula to being thrown from a mechanical bull while heavily pregnant. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has proposed mandatory warning labels for formula cans. Breast-feeding advocates are pushing legislation to stop hospitals from giving free formula to new mothers. A new book calls formula feeding "deviant behavior" that should occur only as an "emergency nutrition intervention to prevent starvation and death." "There's not so much talk now about the benefits of breast-feeding," says Katy Lebbing of La Leche League International, "but the risks of not breast-feeding."

Formula, its critics say, makes children sicker, fatter and dumber. Its inability to match the antibodies of breast milk is implicated in a range of maladies, including ear infections and diabetes. It is not yet the new cigarette; few suggest that formula actually kills babies, except in rare cases when powdered formula is mixed with tainted water, for example.

But formula, once seen as the perfectly engineered health food, has become the TV dinner of infant feeding: seductively easy, nutritionally challenged and oh-so-1950s. And the campaign against it has made strange cribfellows: liberals who demand accommodation in the workplace and open-shirt nursing in the public square and conservatives who believe that young children are best cared for in their homes by mothers free to nurse on demand. Pity the bewildered new mother who wants to nurse but can't because of physical problems or her job. She is offered an astonishing array of high-tech, vitamin-rich formula but lives in a nation that exhorts choice and free will except in the baby-food aisle.

The resurgence of breast-feeding follows a buildup of research confirming benefits to mother and child that formula manufacturers have been unable to duplicate. It also closely parallels the rise of La Leche, an organization formed in 1956 by seven Chicago-area women who wanted a network of nursing mothers to support one another in what was then considered radical behavior. At that time, less than 29% of mothers were nursing their week-old infants. The percentage would eventually dip to 25% in 1971 before climbing to 70% today.

La Leche, which promotes breast-feeding through meetings and telephone support, originally appealed to "young hippies," says spokeswoman Mary Lofton. "There had been this love affair with technology, thinking if something was made in a lab, it was better. But when the back-to-nature movement came along, we were there." And, Mrs. Lofton maintains, "all of the ideas we promoted -- to breast-feed right after delivery, to do it frequently...these were revolutionary ideas at the time, but every single one of those things is accepted pediatric practice today."

La Leche's influence is such that when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a breast-feeding campaign in June 2004, La Leche trained the counselors who answered the government's hotlines. The goal of that continuing campaign is to get 75% of American mothers to breast-feed initially and 50% to breast-feed exclusively for at least six months. Using the catch phrase "babies are born to be breast-fed," the campaign distributes ads for television, radio and the print media. The mechanical-bull ad drew some complaints but was effective, claims Christina Pearson, an HHS spokeswoman.

While one government agency is promoting breast-feeding, however, another is handing out formula. The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, administered by the Department of Agriculture, gives states grants to provide free formula, food and breast-feeding support to low-income women. Nearly half of all infants in the U.S. are enrolled, and 54% of infant formula in the U.S. is distributed through WIC.

Since the late 1980s, states have negotiated contracts with formula manufacturers, who returned rebates to the states totaling $1.64 billion in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29% of WIC recipients are breast-feeding at six months, compared with 46% of women who are eligible for WIC but don't receive the aid and 47% of ineligible women.

The result, says James Akre, the author of "The Problem With Breastfeeding" (a new book that takes issue with some of the popular aversion to breast-feeding) is that, by handing out more formula than breast pumps, the government is encouraging "deviant behavior" and "billions of dollars are going to provide poor children with food based on an alien food source" -- the alien being a cow.

Mr. Akre, a resident of Geneva, Switzerland, and a retired official of the World Health Organization, believes that, as in the case of seatbelts and tobacco, a society's attitude toward breast-feeding can change in a generation. "It's not women who breast-feed, after all. It's cultures and societies as a whole," he says.

Until the late 1800s, women had little choice but to breast-feed. The only question was whether the child's mother would do it or someone else -- a paid wet nurse or a slave. Every culture tried substitutes (sugared water or cow's or goat's milk early on, evaporated milk and Karo syrup more recently), but experimentation sometimes killed babies. Swiss pharmacist Henri Nestlé produced the first formula in the 1860s, saving the life of an orphaned baby and launching an $8 billion world-wide market in which Nestlé is still the leader.

The marketing of baby formula is tricky for manufacturers, which must admit on their labels that breast-milk is superior. To compensate, they rely heavily on coupons and formula samples offered through hospitals. New mothers typically leave American hospitals with a gift bag supplied by a formula manufacturer. Breast-feeding advocates want to end the practice.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts enacted the first ban on the gift bags, but it was killed by Gov. Mitt Romney, who cited the need for choice. The debate over breast-feeding simmers with political tension because it encapsulates the larger question of personal freedom versus social good. In likening formula to current public-health pariahs, breast-feeding advocates hope to send formula down a similar dark path.

The Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition announced plans for a nationwide "Ban the Bags" campaign at the International Lactation Consultant Association meeting in Philadelphia last week. Dr. Melissa Bartick, the coalition's chairwoman, has promised that formula marketing in hospitals won't last. She adds: "We'd never tolerate the thought of hospitals giving out coupons for Big Macs on the cardiac unit." So baby formula is not yet the new cigarette. But it's already the new Big Mac.

Ms. Graham is a writer and editor in the suburbs of Boston.

iRegulation

2006-07-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

By ELISABETH EAVES

PARIS -- French efforts to force Apple to share its iPod software secrets ended with the passage of a loophole-riddled law last month, giving the California company reason for cautious optimism after months of legislative debate. That doesn't mean, though, that the heat is off Apple in Europe. Even as a range of competitors nip at iPod's heels, other governments on the Continent are considering jumping in headlong to regulate the digital music market.

At issue in France was the proprietary software used by online music stores -- Apple's iTunes being by far the largest -- to encrypt files so that they can be played on some devices but not others. Music purchased on iTunes can be played only on the company's iPod players, and music bought on other sites, mostly encrypted using a Microsoft-owned format, can be played only on non-iPods. This can be annoying for consumers. If, for example, you want to switch from an iPod to another brand's player, you would have to either re-purchase songs bought on iTunes, or use a time-consuming workaround to copy the music onto the new gadget. Here's where the European regulators come into the picture.

The recording industry, consumer groups and zealots opposed to digital rights management in any form have lobbied governments across Europe to force interoperability, and they're making political inroads. Britain's parliament recently held hearings in which the head of the country's recording industry trade association, BPI, said that Apple's dominance of the market was "not particularly healthy" and called on the company to make iTunes-purchased music operable on all players. The recording industry doesn't want to do away with digital rights management, which keeps people buying rather than sharing. But BPI resents Apple's hefty market share, which the company uses to negotiate song prices lower than the labels would like.

Meanwhile in Norway and Sweden, government consumer protection ombudsmen have threatened to impose fines on Apple if it does not make interoperability possible. Legislatures in Poland and Switzerland will likely take up the subject this year when they review copyright laws. The new French law, which awaits Jacques Chirac's signature, does demand interoperability, but with a major exception: If iTunes can get the OK from a work's copyright owners, it can keep encryption in place. Many artists and labels are likely to give permission, because more protection can mean more sales and iTunes is such a big vendor. So in a classic case of pointless government meddling, the law may amount to a massive increase in paperwork for companies with no discernible effect on the consumer.

In any case, calls for French-style legal "remedies" miss an important point, which is that the bugs still involved in digital music buying -- and the fast-evolving world of digital video -- are ones that the market is likely to take care of best on its own.

To start with, the limited use of songs bought on iTunes is no secret. If customers don't like it, they can simply steer clear. Apple's detractors will quickly counter that the iTunes-iPod bond has already skewed the playing field in ways that need redress. The iPod is in massive use, accounting for more than 70% of the global market for digital music players. And the more songs you buy on iTunes, the more securely you are locked into terminal iPod-ownership, or so the theory goes, putting Apple on an upward spiral to total market control.

But no one is forced into buying an iPod, and even an iPod owner doesn't have to buy music on iTunes. Much of the music played on iPods today was ripped from CDs bought the old-fashioned way, or stolen through file-sharing. And while most online music stores do encrypt their files, a few do not: Emusic, while it doesn't have a catalog the size of iTunes, sells songs in the unprotected MP3 format, playable on any device.

The point isn't that the iPod or iTunes are perfect products; clearly they're not. But neither one has a monopoly. And before paternalistic authorities swoop in to save the consumer from himself, they would do well to remember just how short-lived market dominance can be in the fast-moving world of personal technology.

There are other players on the market that might make Steve Jobs sweat. The chunky black Gremlin, launched last month by MusicGremlin, is the first player that allows users to download songs wirelessly. South Korea's Reigncom makes the Clix and the iRiver, which, like the newest iPods, play video as well as sound. (Apple won't say what the "i" in iPod stands for, but apparently it's not trademarked.) Singapore's Creative Technologies, which makes the Zen player, is embroiled in a legal battle with Apple in the U.S. over patent rights. (Both companies have filed suits with the U.S. International Trade Commission asking to halt imports of the other's player; the companies have also sued each other.)

Those are only some of the more popular handhelds; Sony, Samsung, Gateway and Toshiba are all in the market as well, and Microsoft has just confirmed that it will launch its Zune player this year. And that's just the hardware. Urge, Rhapsody and Napster are a few of the many sites selling songs online.

Apple is on top now, but in the end its exclusivity could do it in. Remember the Betamax? Sony's home video recorder had a two-year market lead with virtually no competition before being wiped out by the VHS made by JVC -- which in turn, a decade or so later, was made obsolete by the DVD. Among other smart moves in its time, JVC licensed multiple manufacturers to make VHS machines. And goodness knows Windows didn't become ubiquitous because it is the most user-friendly of operating systems. Rather, Microsoft licensed it far and wide. Today it's doing the same with its Windows Media Player, used by many of iTunes' competitors.

This is a churning market, with new devices, services, technologies and content added to the mix day by day. Apple may not be on top forever, and consumers are capable of deciding what they want without the long arm of the law. The "help" being offered by European governments is the kind we can all do without.

Ms. Eaves is a Robert L. Bartley fellow at the Journal's editorial page.

PANFRIED CHICKEN BREASTS WITH OREGANO GARLIC BUTTER

2006-07-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

Cooking chicken breasts on the bone keeps them exceptionally juicy.

Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 30 min

1 garlic clove
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano
1/4 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
4 chicken breast halves with skin and bones (2 to 2 1/4 lb)
1 tablespoon olive oil

Mince garlic and mash to a paste with salt using a large heavy knife.

Mash together butter, oregano, red pepper flakes, and garlic paste with a fork until well blended.

Pat chicken dry. Cut a 2-inch-long pocket horizontally in side of each chicken breast half and fill each pocket with 2 teaspoons oregano garlic butter. Season chicken with salt and pepper.

Heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then cook chicken, skin sides down, uncovered, until well browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Turn chicken over and cover skillet, then cook until chicken is just cooked through, about 10 minutes more. Spread remaining oregano garlic butter over skin of chicken.

Makes 4 servings.

Insólito tributo a un dictador

2006-07-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Cuesta entender que el Mercosur, que tiene una cláusula que impide que países ajenos a la democracia participen del bloque regional, reciba casi con honores a quien encabeza un gobierno dictatorial que viola elementales derechos humanos desde hace más de cuarenta años.

"¿Cómo es posible que un país democrático reciba a un dictador?" Esta pregunta se la hizo Hilda Molina, la neurocirujana cubana de 62 años imposibilitada de visitar a sus dos nietos argentinos, de 5 y 11 años, porque el régimen de Fidel Castro no la deja salir de Cuba. "Me retienen como rehén. Dicen que soy una científica importante y que mi cerebro es patrimonio del país", expresó.

Frente a una circunstancia como la descripta, que no es más que un ejemplo de las tantas atrocidades del régimen castrista, es difícil entender que haya argentinos que le rindan un tributo al dictador cubano. No menos difícil resulta comprender el motivo por el cual organizaciones de derechos humanos de nuestro país le dispensan honores a Castro, como si en Cuba se respetaran los derechos humanos y las libertades de expresión y de prensa, como si allí no se hubiera fusilado a numerosos opositores al régimen y como si éste no hubiese bloqueado, en 1979, una condena de la Comisión de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas al gobierno militar argentino.

Mucho menos sencillo es entender los motivos de los gobernantes democráticos de América del Sur, reunidos en la ciudad de Córdoba por la XXX Cumbre del Mercosur, para acoger al dictador caribeño. Sorprende que ninguna de las autoridades de la comunidad democrática sudamericana haya cuestionado públicamente las violaciones a las libertades individuales que a diario se suceden en Cuba. Por el contrario, la sola participación de Castro en la reciente cumbre puede considerarse como un implícito respaldo a sus tropelías por parte de los países de la región.

Una de las razones por las cuales en Cuba, desde hace décadas, se multiplican los presos por motivos políticos y no se respetan elementales libertades guarda relación, precisamente, con la falta de una condena al régimen por parte de las naciones libres de América latina.

Y, lamentablemente, el dictador cubano se hizo notar durante su visita a la Argentina. Cuando un periodista cubano le preguntó si iba a dejar salir de su país a la médica Hilda Molina, el longevo gobernante le respondió: "¿Y a ti quién te paga para preguntar esas cosas?". Posteriormente, cuando un periodista de un medio argentino le formuló una pregunta similar, aclarándole que nadie le pagó dinero por hacérsela, Castro volvió a eludir una respuesta.

La doctora Molina agradeció el gesto del presidente Néstor Kirchner de entregarle a Castro una carta solicitando que deje a la médica cubana visitar a sus parientes en la Argentina por razones humanitarias. La actitud del primer mandatario argentino, sin embargo, es lo menos que puede esperarse de un gobernante que está obligado a defender los intereses y derechos de los habitantes de su país. Lamentablemente, el presidente de nuestro país desperdició una excelente oportunidad para demostrar su compromiso con los derechos humanos, reclamándole al dictador de Cuba, delante de los restantes jefes de Estado latinoamericanos, que respete las libertades propias de una democracia.

La visita de Castro a la Argentina, en síntesis, sólo dejó interrogantes sin respuesta y profundas dudas sobre la verdadera vocación democrática de quienes lo apañaron o le rindieron honores más que inmerecidos. Sólo cabe esperar que las naciones democráticas del Mercosur no repitan el error que cometieron cuando decidieron incorporar a Venezuela como miembro pleno, pese a los rasgos autoritarios de su gobierno.

Come Back, Bashar . . .

2006-07-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
July 25, 2006

Last year, the U.S. followed France in applying maximum pressure to force Syria to withdraw its troops and intelligence units from Lebanon. As part of that effort, the French, the Americans and the British persuaded China and Russia to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which ordered Syria to leave Lebanon and Hezbollah to disarm.

The theory was that, once liberated from Syrian oppression, the Lebanese would unite and their parties -- Sunni, Christian, Druze and moderate Shiite -- would compete or even quarrel, but within a national framework. That, in turn, would allow the Lebanese armed forces to control the totality of the national territory. Hezbollah, for its part, would enter the political process by disarming and disbanding its armed forces.

Instead, many Lebanese political leaders put other priorities ahead of national unity. President Emile Lahoud, a Christian who has much influence over the armed forces, chose to remain an obedient servant of President Bashar Assad of Syria and his regime. Former President Michel Aoun, a Maronite and previously the hero of many Christians for his resistance to Syrian domination, also chose to ally himself with the Syrians and with Hezbollah, even supporting its refusal to disarm. Other politicians simply preferred to maneuver for personal advantage, instead of forming coalitions to pursue broader interests.

The result was the worst possible outcome. Syria was pushed out of Lebanon and, therefore, no longer has any responsibility over the country. But it continues to have much power in Lebanon, through Mr. Lahoud, among others, and of course through Hezbollah, which Syria supplies with its own weapons and those sent from Iran. Meanwhile, because the Lebanese state does not control its own territory, no responsible party is in control of Lebanon.
* * *

There is talk now of sending a multinational force to southern Lebanon. If so, it would have to be very different from the existing U.N. force (Unifil), whose 1,990 troops under a French general do nothing except take shelter from the fighting and collect generous U.N. salaries. At no point did Unifil even try to prevent Hezbollah from launching attacks, let alone take any action to implement Resolution 1559 by disarming them.

In the past, the Israelis were able to contain Hezbollah through Syria by announcing, from time to time, that if Hezbollah crossed specific "red lines" -- notably by launching rockets into Israel -- they would attack Syrian military installations. The regime in Damascus paid attention and Hezbollah followed the rules, confining its military action to mostly symbolic attacks within the very small territory of the "Shebaa farms" (which Hezbollah claims belongs to Lebanon, contrary to the U.N.'s yard-by-yard demarcation, and all the maps). No such threat could work against a Lebanese government which could not control Hezbollah.

Lebanon could still be bombed -- as is now the case -- but mostly to achieve logistic rather than political aims, specifically to close airports, ports and roads from Syria to prevent the resupply of Hezbollah. In addition, there were specifically Hezbollah targets: various headquarters, the residence of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and hundreds of weapon depots.

This left only two options to the Israelis if Hezbollah did start a conflict. The first is the one they chose -- the systematic attack of known or suspected Hezbollah storage sites for rockets and missiles in basements, garages, caves, etc., by artillery fire, bombardment, commando raids and small-scale armored incursions. Because the inventory was huge (more than 12,000 rockets and 100 guided missiles) and very dispersed, its cumulative destruction would be a slow process, lasting weeks rather than days.

The second is an invasion of Lebanon as in 1982, in the hope of clashes with Hezbollah to reduce its numbers in direct combat, but mainly to find and destroy weapons-storage sites. That would require the Israelis to stay in Lebanon until Hezbollah were disarmed and disbanded, i.e., indefinitely.

While the Israelis pursue their options, outside powers also have two options. The military option would be to send a powerful multinational force well supplied with ammunition to disarm Hezbollah by force if necessary -- and with orders to be ready for guerilla fighting. At the G-8 meeting, for example, Vladimir Putin offered to send troops. But there are almost no other suitable forces. The Americans and British are insufficiently neutral; and while there are always countries willing to supply units to the U.N. if only for the financial rewards, they are invariably forbidden to fight in earnest, and most could not fight anyway. Another and larger Unifil, which would do nothing effective against Hezbollah while freezing the Israeli army in its tracks, would be much worse than useless.

Then there is the horrible-to-contemplate but irresistibly seductive diplomatic option: to invite the Syrians to disarm Hezbollah and persuade it to follow the political path. Hezbollah already has two ministers in the Lebanese cabinet and might claim more.

Naturally that would imply the recognition of Syrian suzerainty over Lebanon, and of course the thoroughly unworthy Bashar Assad would have to be treated as a leader of regional importance. Only that could tempt Mr. Assad to abandon his alliance with Iran -- along with the important rewards that would come his way more or less spontaneously. These rewards would include gifts from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all three of which now fear Iran as the most dangerous threat they face; they would also include the approval -- or at least the diminished hostility -- of Syria's Sunni majority, which vehemently dislikes the alliance with Shiite Iran, especially now that the Iranians are supporting Iraq's Shiites in their bloody fight with the Sunnis.

For France, the U.S. and the U.K., it would, of course, be tremendously embarrassing to recognize that they made a gigantic error in expelling Syria without having put anything its place, thus leaving a vacuum of power in Lebanon that Hezbollah has exploited. (A new principle of statecraft thus emerges: It is a mistake to follow the French even when they are right.) But unlike the military option, which is simply impossible, the diplomatic option is merely humiliating. Having massacred their own Islamists very efficiently, the Syrians can do the job again, if sufficiently rewarded.

Mr. Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is author of "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace"

2006-07-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

The bloom is still on
Zucchini has taken over the world, but L.A. is where it first took root.
By Russ Parsons
Times Staff Writer

July 19, 2006

FROM all over the globe they come to Los Angeles, unknown or overlooked at home and hoping to make it big. And so it was for the zucchini. But while it seems that almost everyone else who has come to Southern California and wound up famous has been memorialized by a statue, a star in the sidewalk or even been elected governor, nowhere is there a monument to the zucchini and the region's role in its meteoric rise to fame.

Yet it's safe to say that without us Southern Californians — enthusiastic food adventurers even in the 1920s — zucchini, one of the most popular vegetables in the world, might be nothing more than just another obscure summer squash.

Today zucchini is so ubiquitous it's like vegetable wallpaper — seen everywhere but noticed never. That's true in this country, where it is so plentiful it has become the butt of jokes, and even globally, where one squash expert says there is probably as much zucchini harvested around the world as all other members of the squash family put together.

Though it seems impossible to imagine today, 100 years ago zucchini was a brand-new vegetable. According to Harry S. Paris, the preeminent squash historian, the first recorded mention of a squash from the zucchini family was a regional Milanese variety in 1901 in an Italian seed pamphlet.

The records are foggy — at the turn of the century no one seems to have deemed the introduction of a new squash much worth writing about — but the best evidence shows that zucchini was brought to the United States by Italian immigrants around World War I.

And despite the fact that the first academic reference to zucchini in this country didn't come until 1937, in Southern California it was well-known much earlier than that, thanks to a local seed supplier and a couple of downtown Los Angeles restaurants.

Throughout the 1920s, according to The Times archives, Southern Californians were slicing, sautéing, frying and stuffing zucchini with happy abandon.

Paris, who got his start helping his dad grow melons in his backyard in Brooklyn, is now a senior research scientist at Newe Ya'ar Research Center in Israel, specializing in the breeding, cultivation, history and genetics of squashes. He says the first zucchini was probably a spontaneously occurring genetic mutation that was recognized by its grower as having better flavor, color and shape than its parents and so its seeds were saved and replanted.

Historic seed catalog

SQUASH maven Amy Goldman, while researching "The Compleat Squash" (a gorgeous coffee table book), turned up what is to this point the first American mention of zucchini in the 1919 catalog of Los Angeles' Germain Seed and Plant Co. — making it likely that the company introduced the vegetable commercially in this country.

This was the golden age of Southern California nurseries and the zucchini was only one of the important introductions at the turn of the 20th century. Local seedsmen also pioneered the Hass avocado (discovered in Whittier) and the Washington navel orange.

The zucchini evidently caught on quickly here. The next year, less than 20 years after its discovery in Italy, the Germain catalog had an entire page devoted to the squash, including pictures and recipes from a downtown restaurant called Café Marcell, run by Joe Marcell Annechini at 215 W. 4th St.

In a 1921 story in The Los Angeles Times extolling the treasures to be found in local ethnic restaurants, the writer enthuses: "Wise is he who waives his customary steak and potatoes, and instead scans the menu for real fare of sunny Italia. Zucchini, for instance, that Italian squash which Signor Marcel— and others — import especially. It may be served in different styles, but the favorite is when, cut into small succulent squares it is breaded and fried in olive oil. Ah!"

That squash at Marcell was almost certainly not imported — can you imagine what a zucchini would look like after a several-weeks ocean voyage? But the fact that it was described as such is testimony to the cachet of the new vegetable. As is the fact that later in that same year, the Thanksgiving menu of the Victor Hugo restaurant, at 623 S. Hill St., gave zucchini prominent billing alongside ravioli "genoise" and Imperial Valley Tom Turkey.

Chef A.L. Wyman, who wrote a weekly Times column called "Practical Recipes: Hints for Epicures and All Who Appreciate Good Cooking," was an early champion of the zucchini as well, pushing his curious readers to try all sorts of preparations, including stuffing them with bread crumbs and almonds.

Of course the road to adoption was not entirely smooth. Though Germain recommended picking zucchini at the quite sensible length of 5 1/2 inches, photographs from the period clearly show that this was often ignored.

Looking at faxed photographs from The Times database of "Italian squash," Paris e-mailed that these appeared to be very mature zucchini, but it was hard to tell.

"But it also occurs to me," he wrote, "why are all of the pictures of such mature fruits? They are certainly not very good in the kitchen at that size. Perhaps the gardening public was not as yet familiar with this stuff to know that the fruits had to be picked when very young."

These are not the only early references that are ambiguous. For example, in an 1898 article, someone who called himself the "Country Gentleman" touted California as "The Italy of America" (some things never change), and told of being served an entree he describes as "a sort of chowder formed by baking slices of Italian squash, tomato, onion and giblets of fowls with plenty of sweet butter."

All of these squashes could have been zucchini, but possibly not. Why the confusion? How hard can it be to spot a zucchini? Pretty darned difficult, it turns out. In fact, many of the squashes we now call zucchini really aren't zucchini at all.

This is just another part of the long and tangled history of the squash family. Squash as we now know it was introduced to Europe by Columbus at the end of the 15th century. But that is somewhat misleading because the words now used for squash in France and Italy — courge and zucca — were actually in common use well before Columbus' voyage.

They were used to describe what today are called gourds (though they were cooked at the time, they rarely are today).

Courgette and zucchini are the diminutives of these words — literally "little squashes." Curiously, zucchini underwent a gender transformation somewhere along the line. The grammatical plural of zucca is zucchine — a feminine noun. It is still called that in many places in Italy, but for reasons no one can fully explain, in other parts of Italy and in the U.S., the squash is called zucchini — the masculine plural.

Squash is part of the large and widely varied cucurbit family, which includes cucumbers and most melons. From a cook's point of view, squash can be divided into two main categories: winter varieties, which are allowed to mature fully and develop a hard shell; and summer, which are picked immature while their skins are still tender.

Zucchini is a summer squash, of course, but hardly the only one. There are several main groups, categorized mainly by shape. There are scalloped squashes that are somewhat flattened with decorated edges. And there are crooknecks and straight necks, with bulbous shapes where the neck is much slimmer than the body. Those are obvious enough.

But from there it gets confusing. There are three different families of squash that resemble the zucchini (and today are sold as zucchini). They are all roughly cylindrical in shape and green in color. The differences are in the details.

The first is called a vegetable marrow. These are somewhat dumpy looking, tapering from flower end to neck and are typically gray-green. They are the ones frequently seen in Mexican markets. Then there is the family called cocozelle, which is very long, frequently curving, sometimes slightly bulbous and usually darker green with lighter stripes running their length.

According to Paris, who has a hobby of identifying the squash varieties in old paintings, cocozelle are the zucchini-looking things pictured in Vincenzo Campi's familiar 1580 painting "Fruttivendola (The Fruit Seller)."

Paris has also identified the squashes pictured in early 16th century frescoes in Rome's Villa Farnesina and in a prayer book commissioned by Anne de Bretagne, painted between 1503 and 1508, little more than a decade after Columbus' return.

True to form

TRUE zucchini are of moderate length, straight and have very little, if any, taper. They are usually very dark green, almost black (in fact, one of the first commercial varieties sold in the U.S. was called 'Black Zucchini').

There are also gold zucchini varieties, but these are of very recent vintage. The first, and still one of the most popular, gold zucchini was released in 1973 and was developed by a breeder named Oved Shifriss (he also developed the 'Big Boy' tomato).

Though there are round, green summer squashes that are called zucchini such as 'Ronde de Nice' and 'Tondo di Nizza' (probably the same variety from different areas), these are actually a kind of summer pumpkin that is picked very young.

The differences among all these squashes are more than cosmetic. They have different flavors and textures. Marrow squashes, which are especially popular in the Middle East and Mexico, are firm but somewhat bland. Cocozelle, which are very popular in Italy, have a rich flavor, but because they are so thin they can be delicate in texture.

Zucchini, of which there are now more than 100 varieties available, range somewhere in between (indeed, many of the summer squash now sold as zucchini are actually cocozelle or marrows or hybrid crosses between the various families).

Still, these differences in color and shape can give you a hint as to the flavor and texture of squash you find in the market. If, for example, it has a distinct taper and a grayish color (such as the ones sold in Mexican markets for making cocido), odds are it will be firm but not very distinctive in taste. Generally, the deeper the color, the richer the flavor.

What's that, you say? Flavorful zucchini? Though widely regarded as bland, their taste really can be rich, though subtle.

To get the best sense of what zucchini tastes like, cook them most simply. Cut up some zucchini (long wedges work best because they'll keep their texture) and put them in a skillet with a peeled whole clove of garlic, 2 or 3 tablespoons of water and a healthy glug-glug of olive oil. Cover the pan and cook over medium heat just until the squash begins to become tender, about 5 minutes.

Remove the lid, turn up the heat to high and reduce the liquid to a syrupy glaze. Cook until the zucchini begin to sizzle and brown, 3 or 4 minutes. Season with salt and serve.

Cooked through, crisply

THE most common mistake people make when preparing zucchini is cooking it until it turns limp and watery. To be at its best, the squash should be thoroughly cooked, but still offer a bit of crispness, or at least resistance to the bite. You can manage this by cooking it for a short time, of course, or by varying the size of the pieces you're cooking.

Zucchini that will be cooked quickly can be cut in small pieces, even shredded. If you're going to cook the squash for a while, leave it in large chunks.

In a salad with pine nuts, for example, the zucchini is cut in small pieces and then salted to draw out some of the moisture, "cooking" it without heat and revealing the squash's sweet, nutty heart.

Dress the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice and flavor it with red onion and basil, but the pine nuts will really set up the flavor of the squash.

You get a completely different picture of zucchini by cutting it a little bigger and cooking it in agrodolce, the Italian version of sweet and sour. Made this way, zucchini becomes a bracing dish that is perfect for serving alongside grilled meat on a hot summer evening.

Or you can make zucchini meaty enough to serve as a main dish on its own by cutting it in thick quarters and stewing it gently with sweet long-cooked onions and a roasted poblano chile in Mexican cream. Sprinkle it with some crumbled cotija cheese to make it more substantial.

But however you choose to cook zucchini, do it with care. After all, it is practically one of our own, and that dish may be the only monument it will ever get.

*

Zucchini and pine nut salad

Total time: 15 minutes, plus 30 minutes standing time

Servings: 4 to 6

Note: Toasted pine nuts are available at Trader Joe's. If you can't find them, place the raw nuts in a small pan and toast them in the oven at 325 degrees until they are fragrant, about 5 minutes.

2 pounds zucchini

3 tablespoons kosher salt

6 tablespoons minced red onion (about 1 small onion)

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice

3 tablespoons toasted pine nuts

1/4 cup shredded basil leaves (about 6 large leaves)

1. Rinse and cut the ends from the zucchini. Cut the zucchini in lengthwise quarters and then crosswise into one-third- to one-half-inch slices. Do not slice thinner or the zucchini will turn mushy during salting.

2. In a mixing bowl, toss the zucchini slices with the salt to coat well. Turn the zucchini into a strainer and position it over the bowl to catch the liquid that drains. Set aside for 30 minutes. You'll see when the zucchini is ready because the sharp cut corners will soften.

3. After 30 minutes, discard the liquid that has collected in the bowl and wipe the bowl dry. Rinse the zucchini well under cold running water until it tastes only slightly salty. Pat the zucchini dry in a kitchen towel and return it to the mixing bowl.

4. Add the red onion, olive oil, lemon juice and pine nuts and stir to combine well. Stir in the shredded basil; taste and adjust the seasoning before serving.

Each of 6 servings: 129 calories; 3 grams protein; 6 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 11 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 319 mg. sodium.

*

Zucchini in agrodolce

Total time: 25 minutes

Servings: 4 to 6

1/3 cup golden raisins

2 pounds zucchini

1/4 cup olive oil

1 whole clove garlic, peeled

Salt

1/3 cup distilled white vinegar

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

1 salted anchovy fillet, rinsed and chopped

2 tablespoons torn mint leaves

Black pepper

1. Cover the raisins in warm water, and soak for at least 20 minutes. Trim both ends from each zucchini. Cut each zucchini in half lengthwise, then cut each half in thirds lengthwise. Cut each slab in thirds across, giving you fairly thick pieces between 1 1/2 and 2 inches long.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add the whole garlic clove and cook until the garlic browns slightly, about 3 to 4 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high, add the cut zucchini and 1 teaspoon salt, and cook until it is lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

3. Reduce the heat to medium, and add the vinegar, sugar, drained raisins, pine nuts and anchovy. Cook until the liquid is reduced to a syrup, about 3 to 5 minutes. Acid from the vinegar will turn the zucchini olive-drab; there is nothing to be done about it.

4. Once the zucchini mixture has been removed from the heat, stir in the mint and season to taste with pepper and more salt, if necessary. Discard the garlic. This dish can be served either warm or cold. If serving it cold, season with more salt and vinegar.

Each of 6 servings: 208 calories; 4 grams protein; 24 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 12 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 1 mg. cholesterol; 428 mg. sodium.

*

Calabacitas con crema

Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Servings: 4 to 6

1 onion

2 tablespoons oil

Kosher salt

2 pounds zucchini

1 poblano chile

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1/2 cup Mexican crema

1/4 cup chopped cilantro,

divided

1. Cut the onion in half and then cut it into one-fourth-inch crosswise slices. Place it in a heavy-bottomed skillet with the oil and a sprinkling of salt. Cover tightly and cook over very low heat until the onion has thoroughly wilted and begun to turn golden, about 30 minutes.

2. In the meantime, cut the ends from each zucchini, slice in lengthwise quarters and then cut the quarters in half crosswise. Roast the poblano chile under a broiler or on a grill until the skin is blackened and blistered, about 10 to 15 minutes. Set aside to cool, and then peel. Discard the core and seeds, and tear the flesh into shreds.

3. When the onions have turned golden, add the sliced garlic and cook 5 minutes more. Add the poblano and the zucchini and stir to combine well. Season with three-fourths teaspoon salt. Cover and continue to cook over low heat until the squash has begun to soften, but is still crisp at the center, about 20 minutes.

4. When the zucchini is ready, pour the crema over the top and raise the heat to medium-high. Cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the cream has thickened, about 7 to 10 minutes. If the cream begins to brown and stick on the bottom of the pan, scrape it free with a spatula; it will dissolve and enrich the sauce.

5. Just before serving, taste and adjust the seasoning and stir in all but 2 tablespoons of the cilantro. Spoon into a serving bowl and sprinkle with the remaining cilantro. Serve immediately.

Each of 6 servings: 119 calories; 3 grams protein; 9 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 9 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 8 mg. cholesterol; 253 mg. sodium.

Patience is Wearing Thin

2006-07-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

By Victor Davis Hanson

The conventional wisdom is that the United States is so tied down that it can't do much about the rocket attacks on Israel, the blatant sponsorship of terrorists by Iran and Syria, or the Iranian nuclear program.

Oil prices are already sky-high. Any unilateral American action might disrupt tight global supplies. That would derail the economies of our Western allies and only further enrich enemies with windfall profits.

Trying to win hearts and minds for the fragile democracy in Iraq also means we can't afford to offend Arab sensitivities elsewhere. And a lame-duck George Bush, low in the polls and facing uncertain congressional elections this fall, certainly doesn't want to involve the American taxpayer with more costly commitments abroad.

But despite that sound conventional wisdom, an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East.

For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East. The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.

But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Now Israel's reasoned diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.

Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land -- but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.

For its part, the United States has spent thousands of lives and billions in treasure trying to birth democracy in Iraq. We wished to end our old cynical support for Middle East dictators that earned us such scorn and instead give liberated Iraqis a choice other than either theocracy or autocracy.

In multilateral fashion, America has also welcomed the help of the European Union, the United Nations, China and Russia in convincing the Iranians of the folly of producing nuclear weapons. But like Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran does not wish to parley -- just as the beheaders and kidnappers in Iraq don't, either.

The two most liberal societies in Europe -- Denmark and the Netherlands -- welcomed almost anyone to their shores from the Middle East. Their multicultural hospitality was supposed to have led to a utopian "diverse" nation of various races, nationalities and religions.

Instead, such liberality has earned both small nations pariah status in the Muslim world for the supposed indiscretions of a few freewheeling filmmakers and cartoonists.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation -- but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation -- in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank -- would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war -- not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel -- more for all their sakes than ours.

Paxil

2006-07-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Extroverted Like Me
How a month and a half on Paxil taught me to love being shy.
By Seth Stevenson

I dread public speaking. I get nervous on first dates. I hate to be called on in classes or meetings. In short, I'm shy. Not debilitatingly so. I'm guessing many of you are no different.

I've often wondered what it's like to be outgoing—a social butterfly, an extrovert. That's why TV ads for Paxil caught my eye. You've seen them: They promise ease in a pill. An end to social anxiety. Does my degree of shyness warrant medication? It was enough to make me want to see what life was like without being shy. I wondered what Paxil could do for me. Was a smoother, suaver Seth just 20 milligrams away?

Skimming my insurance company's list, I found a nearby general practitioner and made an appointment.

I. The Transformation

Day 1: After taking my blood pressure, the doc sits me down and asks a few questions. Am I shy? Yes, I'm uncomfortable speaking in groups. Have I suffered from depression? I've been blue but nothing serious. I tell him I've taken the self-test at Paxil.com (example: "I avoid having to give speeches—Not at all, A little bit, Somewhat, Very much, or Extremely") and it said, "Your score suggests that you may be experiencing the symptoms of social anxiety disorder." Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if it always said that.

He lists Paxil's side effects—headache, nausea, tremor, etc. "The most universal side effect," he says, "is delayed orgasm. For some people, that's a good thing." I nod. He explains a little about the drug itself (it's a Prozac-type antidepressant that later got approved for social anxiety treatment) but concludes, "No matter what anyone says, we basically have no clue how this works." And that's that. He writes out the prescription, for 20 milligrams a day. "If you'd like, we've got some counselors upstairs you can talk to, but it sounds like you just want the drug," he says, and hands over the slip. "It could take a couple of weeks to kick in. Be patient."

I walk around the corner to CVS. Boom: Fifteen minutes with a doctor, $15 at the pharmacy, and I've scored a month's supply of a powerful, mood-altering substance. Back home, I pop my first pill and wait.

Day 2: I'm lying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the wall. My head is buzzing. My eyes won't focus. My stomach hurts and I'm shaking. I feel like a slo-mo version of Dr. Jeckyll's violent transformation.

I do not feel outgoing.

Day 3: Ditto.

Day 4: No longer confined to the couch, but head still buzzing. Feeling totally detached from my surroundings. There's a constant lump in my throat (apparently a common side effect), and the shaking is getting worse. Eating cereal, I spill milk from the spoon before it reaches my mouth. When the doc said tremor, I thought it could be cool—give me a little Katharine Hepburn style. Turns out tremors are not so cool.

Day 8: Delayed orgasm, beyond a reasonable point, is not a good thing. I will say nothing further about this.

Day 11: Side effects have mostly faded out, save for the orgasm thing, which is in for the long haul. I'm not seeing any personality changes, though. At a party a few nights ago (among good friends, so not a worthy testing ground), I did notice one thing: After a few drinks, I began to discourse freely on my Paxil experience.

Generally, talking about myself, even with close friends, is my least favorite thing to do (writing about myself is clearly a different [2,000-word] story). So this was odd. But was it the Paxil? The alcohol? Or just that, for a change, I had something to talk about?

II. The Unexamined Life

Day 16: Still no visible change. However, I can't get a lick of work done. Unfinished articles are lying around, waiting for my attention. Motivation has dried up. Coincidence?

Day 25: A pattern is emerging. Since starting on Paxil, I've been drinking like a fish. For some reason, vitamin P combines incredibly well with alcohol. It's more fun to drink than it was before. I want to be drunk every night. I don't get hung over now, and I remain pretty lucid even when sloshed.

Day 27: Paxil is messing with my livelihood. I'm still not getting any work done. Could it be Paxil's antidepressant effects? Perhaps I'm too content to be motivated. Do I require bile and unhappiness to write? I could clearly go the rest of my life on this stuff and never feel down again.

Another scary part: Before Paxil, while working on stories, turns of phrase would pop into my head, fully formed. Lying awake at night, or riding on the subway, poof—a neat arrangement of words would appear from nowhere. And would often show up in the article. It's part of what makes writing fun and surprising. On Paxil, it's gone. The words just aren't coming.

Also, the last few days I've considered cutting down on free-lancing and getting a regular job—consulting or something. Previously, I couldn't imagine a job like this. Regular hours and no creative outlet sounded like a nightmare. All wrong for me. But now, stability, routine, and boredom sounds A-OK. Pleasant, even. An easy way to make a buck and just live my life.

Day 29: A literati book party. My first real test, and it's basically a failure. Upon meeting a gaggle of strangers, I still sprout flop sweat all over my torso, just like before. I still can't introduce myself to people I'd like to meet. I still don't know how to talk in big groups.

But then something magical happens. After deciding Paxil is worthless and downing three glasses of wine, I find I want to talk to people. No, it wasn't the alcohol. I drink at parties all the time—and go from standing alone in the corner to standing drunk and alone in the corner. This time, I'm craving conversation. In fact, I want to talk about myself. And in the midst of a lively monologue delivered to a group of four people (previously unimaginable for me), I recognize the feeling: It's like being on ecstasy! Relaxed, exceedingly comfortable with strangers, completely open. It makes some sense—both drugs noodle with your serotonin. Paxil, like Prozac and Zoloft, is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. SSRIs block reabsorption of serotonin—a neurotransmitter—by your nerve endings, boosting serotonin levels in your brain. Ecstasy tweaks up your serotonin, too. But instead of paying $20 for a night on E, I paid $15 for a month on P. The catch: I seem to require alcohol as a trigger. Not sure why, and I doubt my doc could explain it.

Day 35: Drinking a lot, several nights a week. Liquor + Paxil = Wow!
Pre-Paxil, I was a social drinker. Now I'm walking a mile in someone else's brain chemistry. I can see why some of you like to drink so much, maybe even need to drink so much. It's fun for me now, in a way it just wasn't before. On liquor and Paxil, strangers mean novelty, not fear. Group conversations are a chance to play raconteur, not a chance to smile weakly and shut up.

And it's so much better than sobriety. Sober for me these days means extreme detachment. Movies, once a favorite hobby, do nothing for me now. Likewise books—I just don't connect with the plots or characters. I can't recall laughing (while sober) in the past couple of weeks. I'm never sad, but never happy. Why wouldn't I drink?

Day 38: I spent the first semester of my freshman year of college in a haze. During the Southern California evenings, I often played tennis, pulling bong hits between games. I distilled homemade rum in my dorm room, using Sterno cans and plastic tubing. My roommate grew six ounces of weed in our closet. It was more fun than I'd ever had in my life. The day after I got home for Christmas break, I decided to transfer.

It occurs to me that the past month has been a bit like that semester. I'm living the unexamined life. It's fantastic. I'm about ready to transfer.

Day 45: I stop my treatment. I had planned elaborate tests for myself—crashing formal parties, giving a dinner toast to a full restaurant, singing jazz standards in subway stations—but I decide these will prove nothing. Also, my lack of engagement with life is freaking out my girlfriend. And my seismic personality shift when drunk is freaking out me.

My day-to-day, sober interactions with people are unchanged by Paxil. A crisis along the lines of a public speaking engagement would still send sweat coursing down my spine (unless I downed a few scotch-and-sodas first). As best I can tell, Paxil works by creating massive detachment from your own emotions. If your social anxiety verges on looniness, detachment from those emotions is a good thing. For me, a milder case, hard-core detachment is just spooky. So, no more pills.

III. The Withdrawal

Day 46: At dinner, I feel the onset of mutation. While staring at a plate of artichoke hearts, my focus suddenly shifts, like the track-out/zoom-in camera trick in Vertigo. My brain is shifting out of Paxil gear and back to normal. It's like coming down off a hallucinogen. Later in the evening, it happens a few more times.

Day 47: Cannot get out of bed. Pounding headache. Extreme intestinal unhappiness. Dizzy all day.

Day 48: More of the same. I'm exhibiting classic withdrawal, which I've read about on some anti-Paxil Web sites. The dizziness and lightheadedness are overwhelming and far scarier than mere stomach distress. I leave the house but have to sit down every 10 minutes for fear of keeling over.

Day 49: Not much better. I can't describe how awful it is to be lightheaded for 72 straight hours. I try to lift my blood sugar by eating, but it makes no difference. Nothing helps. More alarmingly, the dreaded "zaps" have arrived. I'd read about these on the Paxil Database, a site for self-proclaimed Paxil victims, but I thought they were made up—there are so many hypochondriacs on the Web.

Turns out the zaps are for real. They're hard to describe. Imagine low level electrical shocks all over your head, as though someone removed the top of your skull and dragged a staticky blanket across your brain. Zaps come in waves that last about 15 minutes then go away for a few hours. They do not hurt but are unnerving, to say the least.

Day 50: Zap waves all day. Have now been dizzy and burping for four days.

Day 51: Intestines happier. Dizziness comes and goes. Zaps still there.

Day 52: It's mercifully over. But a new phenomenon has taken hold. When I get teary-eyed watching a horrid chick-flick on a cross-country flight, I recognize it: feelings. On Paxil, I barely noticed they were gone. Now that they're back, even overcompensating, I never want to lose them again. Bitterness, anger, jealousy, sadness: They all make me happy.

IV. Epilogue

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to screw with my brain chemistry and possibly inflict lifelong damage just for the sake of experiment. I would not do something like this again. At the height of my withdrawal I was seriously terrified, thought it might never end, and repeatedly cursed my own stupidity. The fact that I considered a wholesale career change under the drug's effects, and couldn't complete any work, is alarming. Also, the zaps are for real. Fear them.

At the same time, I admit it was fascinating to try out a different personality. He only came out when I drank, but I caught a glimpse of an alternate me, and he wasn't such a bad guy—if a little gabby. I think I gained some empathy for other types of folk, and maybe got an idea of how alcohol can mean different things to different people. I also sort of discovered what emotions are for and decided being shy isn't so bad after all. Thanks, Paxil!
Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.

Arithmetic of Pain

2006-07-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks. The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable." The answer, according to the laws of war, is that it is reasonable to attack military targets, so long as every effort is made to reduce civilian casualties. If the objectives cannot be achieved without some civilian casualties, these must be "proportional" to the civilian casualties that would be prevented by the military action.

This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population. Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.

While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties -- not always with success -- Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides. Islamic terrorists, a diplomat commented years ago, "have mastered the harsh arithmetic of pain. . . . Palestinian casualties play in their favor and Israeli casualties play in their favor." These are groups that send children to die as suicide bombers, sometimes without the child knowing that he is being sacrificed. Two years ago, an 11-year-old was paid to take a parcel through Israeli security. Unbeknownst to him, it contained a bomb that was to be detonated remotely. (Fortunately the plot was foiled.)

This misuse of civilians as shields and swords requires a reassessment of the laws of war. The distinction between combatants and civilians -- easy when combatants were uniformed members of armies that fought on battlefields distant from civilian centers -- is more difficult in the present context. Now, there is a continuum of "civilianality": Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents -- babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.

The laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these realities. An analogy to domestic criminal law is instructive: A bank robber who takes a teller hostage and fires at police from behind his human shield is guilty of murder if they, in an effort to stop the robber from shooting, accidentally kill the hostage. The same should be true of terrorists who use civilians as shields from behind whom they fire their rockets. The terrorists must be held legally and morally responsible for the deaths of the civilians, even if the direct physical cause was an Israeli rocket aimed at those targeting Israeli citizens.

Israel must be allowed to finish the fight that Hamas and Hezbollah started, even if that means civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. A democracy is entitled to prefer the lives of its own innocents over the lives of the civilians of an aggressor, especially if the latter group contains many who are complicit in terrorism. Israel will -- and should -- take every precaution to minimize civilian casualties on the other side. On July 16, Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, announced there will be new "surprises," and the Aska Martyrs Brigade said that it had developed chemical and biological weapons that could be added to its rockets. Should Israel not be allowed to pre-empt their use?

Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. These are not "occupied" territories. Yet they serve as launching pads for attacks on Israeli civilians. Occupation does not cause terrorism, then, but terrorism seems to cause occupation. If Israel is not to reoccupy to prevent terrorism, the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority must ensure that these regions cease to be terrorist safe havens.

Mr. Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard.

States of Terror

2006-07-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Israel's military invasion and naval blockade of Lebanon is being denounced in European capitals and at the United Nations as a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping this week of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah. Israel's decision late last month to invade Gaza in retaliation for the kidnapping of another soldier by Hamas was also condemned as lacking in proportion. So here's a question for our global solons: Since hostage-taking is universally regarded as an act of war, what "proportionate" action do they propose for Israel?

In the case of Hamas, perhaps Israel could rain indiscriminate artillery fire on Gaza City, surely a proportionate response to the 800 rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli towns in the last year alone. In the case of Hezbollah, it might mean carpet bombing a section of south Beirut, another equally proportionate response to Hezbollah's attacks on civilian Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.

We aren't being serious, but neither is a feckless international community that refuses to proportionately denounce the outrages to which Israel is being subjected. That goes also for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who says "all sides must act with restraint." But Israel's current problems result in part from an excess of restraint in responding to previous Hamas and Hezbollah provocations.

Now Israel is confronted with a war on two fronts with proxy terrorists armed and financed by Syria and Iran. Yesterday, medium-range Hezbollah rockets hit civilian targets across northern Israel. Any of those rockets might easily hit the port city of Haifa's oil refineries and chemical plants, causing horrific damage that would give Israel cause, and perhaps the self-preservation necessity, to strike Damascus and Tehran.

So far, Israel is limiting its military activities to Lebanon alone, out of the same abundance of restraint that has governed its behavior throughout the crisis. The democratic Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora bears its share of the blame, since it has failed to police its side of the border with Israel and failed to disarm Hezbollah, as required by Security Council Resolution 1559 and the 1989 Taif Accords that ended the Lebanese civil war. Senior Israeli military sources also claim that Lebanon tolerates the presence of hundreds of Iranian military personnel in Lebanon, again in violation of U.N. resolutions.

But Mr. Siniora's failings owe to weakness, not malfeasance, particularly in the face of Syria's continued meddling in Lebanese affairs following the departure of its army last year. A larger problem has been the failure of the Bush Administration to press Damascus harder when it had the opportunity to do so in the wake of last year's Cedar Revolution. The U.N. investigation into the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in which all evidence points to the involvement of senior associates and relatives of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, seems to have disappeared in a black hole. Nor has the U.S. exacted any price for Syria's ongoing support for the insurgents in Iraq.

Critics of the Bush Administration will surely find a way to blame it for the current crisis, on the theory that this is what happens when you push for change in the Middle East. But the real problem is the growing perception among Arab regimes and terrorist frontmen that the U.S. is so bogged down in Iraq, and so suddenly deferential to the wishes of the "international community," that it has lost its appetite for serious reform. This has created openings for the kind of terror assaults on American allies we are now witnessing.

Israel can and will handle the immediate military threats on its two borders. But ultimately there will be no resolution in Lebanon and Gaza until the regimes in Syria and Iran believe they will pay a price for the wars they are waging through their proxies. The referral this week of Iran's nuclear file to the U.N. Security Council is a start, although we have little confidence it will lead anywhere. The White House has cited Syria and Iran as the culprits behind this week's events, but more forceful words and action are called for. The Middle East stands on the cusp of its worst crisis in a generation, and this is no time for formulaic statements calling for "restraint from both sides."

Fuel for Thought

2006-07-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

By LUIZ INACIO LULA DA SILVA
July 14, 2006

The sharp rise in international oil prices, political instability in producing regions and the environmental impact of fossil fuels have combined to evoke a growing interest in alternative energy sources. In this context, the Brazilian experience with ethanol fuel has been a noteworthy success story over the last 30 years. And the success is now expanding to biodiesel and H-Bio. I expect that our experience will be of interest during the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg.

With the continual increases in oil prices, ethanol has become even more important for our country. We now add at least 20% ethanol to all gasoline sold in Brazil. In addition, E100 fuel (i.e., pure ethanol) is sold at all of the more than 30,000 service stations. Annual production is in the range of four billion gallons, of which around 690 million gallons are exported. Ethanol accounts for about 40% of the fuel consumed by passenger vehicles. The introduction of "flex-fuel" cars in 2003 was an extraordinary success: Today roughly 80% of all new cars sold in Brazil can be fueled with any mixture of ethanol and gasoline, or simply pure ethanol.

Moreover, Brazil has just achieved oil self-sufficiency. Here, ethanol has played a decisive role, along with increased oil production. Since the 1970s, ethanol has replaced about 800 million barrels of oil, the equivalent of almost two years of current Brazilian oil production.

Naturally, we are well aware that ethanol is not the only solution to oil supply problems. But, surely, it can become a key part of the solution. A substantial increase in ethanol consumption may even extend the timeframe of the world's oil supplies, postponing the date when the reserves run out.

Last November, I was greatly pleased to host George W. Bush in Brasília. During his visit, we were able to speak at length about our respective experiences with ethanol. Brazil and the U.S. together account for about 70% of world's ethanol production. I am delighted to see that President Bush has actively promoted expansion of U.S. ethanol production and consumption.

Both Brazil and the U.S. have a lot to gain if we can work together to promote a global market for ethanol, with other countries involved in its production, especially in Latin America and in Africa. In poor countries, production of ethanol and biodiesel can have an extremely positive impact. It assists in dealing with the energy deficit, influencing internal consumption and exports. It can also generate a vast number of jobs, redistributing the population more harmoniously between urban and rural areas.

Although Brazil is often seen as a model in the ethanol sector, it does not wish to achieve a dominant global position, nor would that even be feasible. Actually, it is important we have as many countries as possible producing ethanol. Otherwise it will be difficult to achieve our goal of creating a global market, with ethanol being traded as any other commodity. In this spirit, Brazil is proposing the creation of a forum gathering the most significant ethanol producer and consumer countries.

Brazil and the U.S., for their part, can already begin to work toward shared goals with regard to technical and regulatory frameworks, research cooperation and the support of ethanol production and consumption in other countries. Expanding the international ethanol market will benefit both Brazilian and U.S. producers.

Naturally, Brazil hopes to see the day when the secondary tariff on U.S. ethanol imports (now 54 cents per gallon) is eliminated, as that would foster the goal of globalization of the ethanol market and enhance bilateral trade. Nevertheless, the goal of an ethanol partnership stands on its own merits and should be pursued regardless of any such bilateral trade considerations. As the world's ethanol consumption increases, the primary challenge will not be to compete for markets, but rather to expand ethanol production quickly enough to meet surging demand. Everyone has a lot to gain.

Consensus on Contentious Claims

2006-07-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

Consensus on Contentious Claims
by John A. Baden, Ph.D.

Three decades ago, it was rare to get three summer cuttings of hay at our ranch -- now this is the norm. Global warming is a plausible explanation. Barbra Streisand, Al Gore, and many scientists have proclaimed consensus: global warming is occurring, we are causing it, and the consequences are significant. But the question remains: If this consensus is justified, how should we act?

Wide consensus on unimportant matters is of little ethical consequence: Coke is better than Pepsi and plaid clashes with stripes. This is also true of important phenomena beyond our influence: the sun rises in the East, liquid boils when its vapor pressure reaches atmospheric pressure, and hairy caterpillars harbinger a cold winter.

But when issues have serious implications for the well-being of others, enforced consensus often signals a paucity of critical thinking and a wealth of cowardice. When consequences affect innocent others, it’s ethically and intellectually irresponsible to stifle opposing viewpoints. Under forced consensus, opportunistic pretense trumps honest reflection.

This posturing is, alas, contagious. No wonder. Global warming represents the mother lode of externalities. Efforts to combat climate change enable hectoring and hypocrisy. Barbra Streisand jets into Washington to warn Bill Clinton about global warming, and jets out. Prince Charles has bricks put in his toilets’ reservoirs to save water while his four-score servants maintain his lifestyle. It must be fun to wallow in sanctimony while deaf to counterarguments and insulated from consequences.

Reality is what persists when illusions are tested and found wanting. Here it comes: The world has far more problems than funds available to address them.

Let’s ignore those challenges that primarily afflict the wealthy (such as socializing children who have never known material deprivation) and focus instead on the least well off. Nearly three billion people subsist on less than $2.00 per day. How can we best allocate resources to improve the lives of the poor, their children, and their grandchildren?

This is not an idle exercise; it has substantial implications for billions. Two years ago, a group of the world’s most respected economists, including Nobel Laureate and FREE’s 2003 Summer Scholar Thomas Schelling, were posed with a question: Given significant but finite resources, what are the best investments for improving our world? They chose clean water, public health, primary education (especially of girls), and inexpensive dietary improvements.

Addressing global warming didn’t make the cut. Why not? It could consume all the funds while producing uncertain rewards in the far distant future. Instead, these funds could be invested in developing economies. By attracting foreign capital, poor nations could gain economic resiliency, the surest route to a better future.

The experiment with economists was recently replicated by John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Not one to shrink from controversy, he empanelled UN diplomats from seven emerging nations, including India and China, to prioritize the issues. After hearing from experts in the problem areas, they ranked global crises ranging from climate change to migration. The top four were again health care, water and sanitation, education, and child nutrition. Climate change was, of course, dead last. No honest policy analyst would be surprised by these rankings.

While most agree that climate change is occurring, many proposed “solutions” are monumentally expensive, uncertain, and distant. They are, in sum, the sorriest of investments. Providing vitamin A, on the other hand, costs less than $1 per person per year, saves lives, and prevents childhood blindness. Encouraging breast feeding cheaply and effectively promotes infant health. These nutritional initiatives do not, however, offer a stage for pretense and drama. No matter how skilled the movie director, it’s hard to make public health reform a sexy issue.

One could argue that polar bears are more important than Pakistanis. The bears are indeed threatened by the melting of Arctic ice floes. Should we then invest to retard global warming, even if that investment could instead save millions of Pakistanis from easily preventable disease? An analogous argument would apply to Whitebark pine and grizzly bears. Would Streisand, Gore, and Prince Charles deem grizzly bears more deserving of funds than the developing world? Although implicitly misanthropic, this would at least be logically consistent and honest: traits rare among myopic global warming alarmists.

Why do they hate us?

2006-07-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

Thomas Sowell

March 17, 2004

The idea that what goes around comes around applies not only to individuals but to nations and whole civilizations. It was just a few centuries ago -- not long, as history is measured -- that China had the highest standard of living in the world and the Dutch were the world's largest exporters, while North Africans were enslaving a million Europeans.

Nowhere have whole peoples seen their situation reversed more visibly or more painfully than the peoples of the Islamic world. In medieval times, Europe lagged far behind the Islamic world in science, mathematics, scholarship, and military power.

Even such ancient European thinkers as Plato and Aristotle became known to Europeans of the Middle Ages only after their writings, which had been translated into Arabic, were translated back into European languages.

Today that is all reversed. The number of books per person in Europe is more than ten times that in Africa and the Middle East. The number of books translated into Arabic over the past thousand years is about the same as the number translated into Spanish in one year.

There are only 18 computers per thousand persons in the Arab world, compared to 78 per thousand persons worldwide. Fewer than 400 industrial patents were issued to people in the Arab countries during the last two decades of the 20th century, while 15,000 industrial patents were issued to South Koreans alone.

Human beings do not always take reversals of fortune gracefully. Still less can those who were once on top quietly accept seeing others leaving them far behind economically, intellectually, and militarily.

Those in the Islamic world have for centuries been taught to regard themselves as far superior to the "infidels" of the West, while everything they see with their own eyes now tells them otherwise. Worse yet, what the whole world sees with their own eyes tells them that the Middle East has made few contributions to human advancement in our times.

Even Middle Eastern oil was largely discovered and processed by people from the West. After oil, the Middle East's most prominent export has been terrorism.

Those who look at the world in rationalistic terms may say that the Middle East can use some of its vast oil wealth to expand its own educated classes and move back to the forefront of human achievement. They did it once, why not do it again?

All sorts of things can be done in the long run, but you have to live through the short run to get there. Moreover, even the short run, as history is measured, can be pretty long in terms of the human lifespan.

Even if the Islamic world set such goals and committed the material resources and individual efforts required, they could not expect to pull abreast of the West for generations, even if the West stood still. More realistically, it would take centuries, as it took the West centuries to catch up to them.

What will happen in the meantime? Are millions of proud human beings supposed to quietly accept inferiority for themselves and their children, and perhaps their children's children?

Or are they more likely to listen to demagogues, whether political or religious, who tell them that their lowly place in the world is due to the evils of others -- the West, the Americans, the Jews?

If the peoples of the Islamic world disregarded such demagogues, they would be the exceptions, rather than the rule, among people who lag painfully far behind others. Even in the West, there have been powerful political movements based on the notion that the rich have gotten rich by keeping others poor -- and that things need to be set right "by all means necessary."

These means seldom include concentration on self-improvement, with 19th-century Japan being one of the rare exceptions. Lashing out at others is far more immediately satisfying -- and modern communications, transportation, and weaponry make it far easier to lash out destructively across great distances.

Against this background, we may want to consider the question asked by hand-wringers in the West: Why do they hate us? Maybe it is because the alternative to hating us is to hate themselves.

The Overseas Class

2006-07-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Overseas Class
Millions working abroad help their nation get by, but not prosper. It's a life of lonely, risky sacrifice.
By Richard C. Paddock
Times Staff Writer

April 20, 2006

They nurse the sick in California, drive fuel trucks in Iraq, sail cargo ships through the Panama Canal and cruise ships through the Gulf of Alaska. They pour sake for Japanese salarymen and raise the children of Saudi businessmen.

They are the Philippines' most successful export: its workers.

Three decades ago, seeking sources of hard currency and an outlet for a fast-growing population, then-President Ferdinand Marcos encouraged Filipinos to find jobs in other countries. Over time, the overseas worker has become a pillar of the economy. Nine million Filipinos, more than one out of every 10, are working abroad. Every day, more than 3,100 leave the country.

Philippine workers sent home more than $10.7 billion last year, equal to about 12% of the gross domestic product.

The current president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, calls them "the backbone of the new global workforce" and "our greatest export."

Worldwide, these workers have earned a reputation for enterprise and hard work. They include some of the Philippines' most talented people, well educated and multilingual.

But as a third generation leaves to work abroad, it is clear the system has not led to prosperity. Policymakers have focused on easing the flow of workers rather than harnessing their earnings for economic development.

Dependence on the export of people has become a formula for stagnation. Once one of the strongest in Asia, the Philippine economy now ranks near the bottom. The government invests little money in manufacturing, education or healthcare. The economy can't create even the 1.5 million jobs a year needed to keep up with population growth.

"We have a middle class, but they don't live in the Philippines," said Doris Magsaysay Ho, head of a company that dispatches 18,000 workers a year to serve on ships around the world.

Filipinos work in every country except North Korea, said Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas, whose brother is a doctor in Orange County. More than 2.5 million work in the United States and nearly a million in Saudi Arabia.

The money they earn trickles into towns and villages, helping build houses, open restaurants and send children to school. But the absence of so many industrious and skilled people — mothers and fathers, engineers and entrepreneurs — exacts a heavy toll.

Across the Philippines, children are being raised by their grandparents. "Now children can buy a lot of computer games, but they don't have a mother or father, or both," Santo Tomas said.

For the sake of supporting their families, the overseas workers endure years of loneliness. Some, especially maids in the Middle East, suffer beatings and sexual abuse. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, they are jailed for running away. Yet the Philippines has grown so dependent on remittances that the thought of doing without them is frightening.

"Money from abroad is the only thing that keeps the economy in motion," said Ding Lichauco, former head of the country's economic planning office. "If you don't encourage the employees to go overseas, you will have revolution."

Providing sailors, maids, entertainers and other workers for a growing world market is a big business.

In this competitive arena, the Philippines has an advantage. Many Filipinos speak English. They are generally better educated than workers from countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Indonesia. And they have a reputation for being good-natured.

An entire bureaucracy has been created around them. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration helps find jobs in other countries, encourages workers to go abroad and processes some job applications.

The Technical Education and Skills Development Agency offers free training in welding, driving heavy trucks and other skills. The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration stations diplomats around the world to look after the Philippines' foreign workers.

Those who bring or send their earnings home pay no income taxes. And the government offers returning workers low-cost equipment and tools to help them start small businesses.

With that level of encouragement, an industry has developed to match workers and jobs.

There are more than 1,500 licensed recruiting agencies. Some provide training — six months for dancers, four months for seafarers, two weeks for housekeepers — in return for a cut of the worker's earnings.

A cook on a cargo ship can make more than Arroyo's official salary of $1,000 a month. A bar singer in Japan can earn more than a Philippine senator. But the fees can run into the thousands of dollars; the better the job, the greater the cost.

Dozens of agencies in Manila's Ermita district attract job seekers from all over the country. Applicants line up on the streets, luggage in hand, ready to go anywhere.

Notaries sit at small wooden desks on the sidewalk. Using manual typewriters, they help workers fill out the 14 documents they are required to submit. Large copy machines on the sidewalk crank out duplicates.

Laboratories conduct blood, tuberculosis and drug tests to certify the workers' health. Nearby are cellphone shops, money changers, cheap hotels and restaurants.

Many Arab countries, with their vast oil wealth and relatively small populations, are hungry for workers.

The CDK International Manpower Services posted notices in its window seeking domestic workers and midwives in the Middle East, a gift wrapper in Dubai and a "magician balloon decorator" elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates. The agency was also recruiting workers for Burger King and Starbucks outlets in the Middle East. ("Must have fashion for coffee," the ad for Starbucks said.)

Another company operating in the Middle East wanted diesel mechanics, flower arrangers, structural engineers, wedding card designers, massage therapists, website designers, accountants and nannies.

In another neighborhood, three blocks from the U.S. Embassy, a crowded sidewalk serves as an informal hiring hall for sailors. The Philippines produces nearly 25% of the world's seafaring workers, more than any other nation.

Hundreds of would-be sailors were hanging around in the shade of the leafy narra trees as agents wandered by, holding up signs offering jobs on ships sailing from Germany, Argentina, Los Angeles or Greece. Some sought engineers and first mates for cargo ships. Others needed chefs and waiters for cruises.

A salesman offered small vials of python oil, guaranteed to cure back pain, heart disease, joint dislocation, rheumatism, cough, arthritis and skin disease.

Merchants offered CDs providing instruction on how to moor a ship, plan a voyage, speak "maritime English" and handle hazardous materials.

Freddie Vicedo spent three decades at sea, earning enough to build a house 20 miles south of Manila and send his children to school. Now past the mandatory retirement age of 50, he was seeking one last job.

"It's OK to be away if it provides you with a home and a future," he said. "It's better than living all together in poverty."

The teeming neighborhood of Antipolo in central Manila is one of the city's poorest. Thousands of families live along the railroad tracks in shanties of scrap wood and metal built one on top of the other, three stories high. Families sleep seven or eight to a room and cook over open fires between the tracks. Every month or so, someone is hit by a train.

Children play in garbage. Old women play mah-jongg on a rickety table. A woman patiently picks lice from a girl's hair.

It is not uncommon for families to hold a wake in the middle of the sweltering streets, as Danilo Paredes did for his 18-year-old daughter, Raquel. Lying in an open coffin placed on a table, she looked small for her age, but at peace amid the chaos. Paredes said he didn't know what killed her, only that he didn't have the $25 for the medicine the doctor prescribed.

Residents look for any way out.

"I hate this place," said Mary Grace Libao, 13. She and her friend, Clarivel de los Santos, also 13, said they wanted to be singers in Japan.

"In Japan I will make enough money to buy a house for my family," Clarivel said.

Thousands of Philippine musicians and singers perform at resorts and hotels from Bali, Indonesia; to Phuket, Thailand; to Tokyo. Many young women who go abroad as entertainers end up working in the sex trade.

All over Japan, salarymen come to Philippine pubs to escape the tedium and stress of their jobs. They drink sake and sing karaoke with "japayuki," beautiful, scantily clad young women.

In Osaka, the Philippine clubs are concentrated in the crowded Dotonburi district. Many are controlled by Japanese organized crime. Customers spend as much as $500 an evening in one of the better establishments.

Large clubs typically stage a brief show in which the women sing a few songs and dance. The rest of the time, they flirt with the customers, pouring sake, feeding them and lighting their cigarettes. They can make more in tips in an evening than they could working for a month as a salesclerk back home. They can make even more if they agree to have sex.

"The customers make offers," said Estrella Pumar, 31, who was heading from Manila to Osaka for her second tour. "It's up to the girls to decide what kind of life to live."

The women live six or seven to a room provided by their employers. If they are lucky, they get a day off every two weeks. Many aspire to marry a Japanese man and secure a residency permit. Having a child in Japan ensures residency status after a divorce, which is how 80% of these marriages end.

Wendy, 37, followed her mother to Japan in the 1990s. A brother and sister moved to Los Angeles. She spent 10 years working in pubs before marrying a Japanese man, having a son and opening her own club in Osaka, the Twin Angels.

"It's better to be here than in the Philippines," said Wendy, who declined to give her full name. But someday she'd like to return home and perhaps open a McDonald's. In the meantime, she said, "we have to survive."

The wards are overflowing at Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital, and dozens of patients lie on cots in the corridors. Some have just given birth. Others have just had surgery. Some will die in the hallway.

The hospital in Dumaguete, about 400 miles south of Manila, was built for 250 patients but usually has more than 350. Newborns stay in the same bed as their mothers; some have suffocated when their mothers rolled over in their sleep.

Patients who come here have no choice. It's the only hospital in the region they can afford. But for the doctors there is a way out: Study nursing and leave for the United States or Europe, where qualified nurses are in short supply.

Medical regulations in the U.S. and European countries typically make it very difficult for foreign doctors to work there as physicians. But nurses are in such demand that some recruiters offer bonuses of $15,000, the equivalent of three years' pay for a doctor in Dumaguete.

Of 207 doctors in Negros Oriental province, 79 have become nurses and more than 30 are in nursing school. This hospital is supposed to have 72 doctors, but only 43 remain. The Dumaguete district has closed two of its six rural hospitals and may soon have to close a third, said Dr. Ely Villapando, the province's chief health officer.

"We are worried sick about medical doctors taking up nursing and leaving," said Villapando, 63, who also runs the hospital. "We are losing the most skilled doctors. This is a crisis in healthcare."

An aid agency gave the hospital new cardiology equipment, but it sits unused. The hospital's only cardiologist left to become an emergency-room nurse in Chicago. What she earned in a month here, she can now make before lunch.

Here, patients are so poor that some pay in produce or livestock. X-rays cost a chicken. A bunch of bananas covers consultation. Delivering a baby costs one goat.

Villapando makes the equivalent of $437 a month. Two of his children have become nurses in the United States, one in Bakersfield and one in Texas. They send him money.

"My son already has a house of his own," he said. "He has two cars. My daughter is building a house and has two cars. They could not hope to achieve that here."

To become nurses, the doctors attend classes on weekends for a year and spend 2,200 hours as volunteer nurses at the hospital. Sometimes they do both jobs the same day.

"Some of the patients get confused," said Dr. Joyce Maningo, an internist studying to be a nurse. "They say, 'Weren't you a doctor this morning?' "

An ophthalmologist with her own practice, Dr. Eileen Marie Macia is near the top of her profession. Her father was a surgeon and a congressman. He was instrumental in building a new wing of the Dumaguete hospital. But she, too, is giving up. She is in nursing school and weighing whether it would be better to live in Tennessee or Los Angeles.

"If I go to the States, I will have to forget I am a doctor," she said as she made her nursing rounds. "I love the Philippines, but it will always be a Third World country."

Runaway maids arrive at the Philippine Embassy in Kuwait desperate, bruised, hungry and penniless. They slip out of their employers' homes in the dead of night through a window, over a wall or by walking out a door accidentally left unlocked.

They break the law simply by leaving without permission.

Some spend more than a year in the embassy compound, waiting for their passports, back pay or the resolution of their legal cases. If they step outside, they can be arrested.

At times, more than 500 women live at the offices of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration next to the embassy. The building gets so crowded that the women cannot all lie down to sleep at the same time.

"It's like a prison," said Annabelle Abing, who lived there for three months.

More than 750,000 Philippine maids work in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, where they often face legalized discrimination, beatings and sexual abuse.

The women frequently live in isolation, forbidden even to telephone their families. If they file a legal claim against their employer, they can be deported or imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

"They are treated like modern slaves," said Maita Santiago, secretary-general of Migrante International, a rights group for Philippine workers. "When workers are in distress, the government doesn't stand up for their rights for fear of the markets of foreign countries closing to Filipino workers."

Perhaps the toughest country for domestic workers is Saudi Arabia.

Sheila Marie Macatiag, 28, was earning $12 a month at a car stereo factory in the Philippines when she decided to take a job in Saudi Arabia to support her parents and six younger siblings.

Macatiag said she was forced to work from 5 a.m. to midnight, verbally abused for the smallest mistake and never given enough to eat. During her first six months, her employers paid her a total of $200; she had paid $300 to an employment agency in the Philippines to get the job.

Fed up, she ran away to the employment agency's local office. But by the time she got there, her employers had already complained that she had stolen money and watches from their vault. Police came and arrested her.

Despite the absence of evidence or witnesses, she spent 13 months in jail, Macatiag said.

"They told me they were going to cut off my hand or I would be sentenced to 108 years or I would die in prison," she said. "Even during trial they told me my hand would be cut off unless I admitted to the allegations."

She maintained that she was innocent, but a Saudi court convicted her and she received five lashes on the hand with a cane. She has returned to the Philippines but doesn't expect to find a job.

"There are so many people here and so few jobs," Macatiag said. She is hoping to leave the country again: "Anywhere but the Middle East," she said.

Even if there is no abuse, the emotional toll of being away from home can be heavy.

In Hong Kong, Philippine maids gather by the thousands in the city center every Sunday to spend their day off together. They fill the parks and sidewalks and overflow into the streets. Sitting on cardboard or sheets of plastic, they hold prayer meetings, play cards and have picnics.

Beneath the festivity is a sense of melancholy. These women spend the best years of their lives serving others.

Many leave their children behind so they can earn enough to pay for their schooling. Others forgo the chance to marry in order to provide for parents and siblings. Most make the equivalent of $420 a month and send more than half of it home.

Editha Ycon, 37, has worked 13 of the last 17 years in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and now Hong Kong. She has a degree in computer programming but could not find work in the Philippines. She has left her son twice to go overseas, first when he was 6 months old and again when he was 4 years old. He is now 10.

"I want to stay with my son," she said. "I want to prepare his breakfast before he goes to school. I want to pack his things. I am a mother, but not really. I haven't been a mother yet."

The people of Santa Rosa, a village two hours south of Manila, once made a living processing coconuts. But the men who worked in the drying sheds left the country long ago.

Now the village is known as Little Italy. It depends almost entirely on remittances from abroad. Of its 8,000 people, 3,000 work overseas, mainly in Italy and Spain. Left behind are children, the elderly and the disabled.

Overseas workers contributed money to build the two-story village office. A worker in Spain donated the village computer. Others helped buy an ambulance. But the village is distinguished by the more than 600 large Italian-style houses built with money sent home from overseas.

Village head Benito Alvarez, who wears a USA T-shirt given to him by cousins in America, said the owners were unlikely ever to live in them. "They build the house to prove to the people they grew up with that they are a big success," he said.

But what Alvarez sees as evidence of waste and opulence gives another villager a deep sense of satisfaction.

Carlito Villanueva, 67, began sending his children to Spain and Italy in 1985. Now all nine of them live in Europe, along with their spouses and his 14 grandchildren.

"If they had not gone, I could only see hardship for them, because life here is very difficult," he said. "I'm not sad at all. I'm very happy. As a parent, my major goal is to secure a good life for them."

Each of the children is sending money to build a house in the family compound. Four have been built, and a fifth is planned. All are unoccupied, except on the rare occasion when one of the children comes home for a visit.

"This is their home," he said. "Wherever they are in the world, even though they are scattered, they will come home to me."

Another neighbor, Digna Escueta, 28, hadn't been home since she left to work as a maid in Padua, Italy, six years earlier. She came back for two weeks to try to straighten out a domestic nightmare: Her husband was in prison for drug use, and her daughter was out of control.

Her parents worked overseas when she was growing up, starting with her mother when Escueta was 11. A brother and sister followed. Altogether, more than 50 relatives found work in Italy.

Escueta married as a teenager and soon had a baby. Her husband became addicted to methamphetamine.

"We grew up making our own decisions, and because of that we married young," she said. "Some children of overseas workers in this barrio fall into vice and lose direction in life."

When Escueta turned 22, she also went overseas, leaving her 1-year-old daughter, Yvonne, with a cousin.

Seeing her daughter for the first time in six years was not the reunion she was hoping for. Yvonne had become the terror of the neighborhood.

She slugged the boys when her mother's back was turned, making them cry. She killed kittens by hugging them to death, stepping on them or locking them in a closet, Escueta said. She killed a puppy by tying a string around its neck and letting it fall off a high bed.

"She loves them to death," her mother said.

Escueta acknowledged that the absence of so many parents meant troubles for the next generation of Filipinos.

"Going abroad has two sides," she said. "The bad side is the separation of the family. The children grow up without a mother's supervision. Sometimes they go astray. The good side is not just the income but the possibility the whole family could go overseas, which is my dream."

Angelo de la Cruz, a father of eight, was desperate. He needed to pay medical bills for a son who lost an eye in an accident and care for another who has Down syndrome.

He decided to leave his one-room bamboo hut two hours north of Manila and return to Saudi Arabia, where he'd worked three times. He left as a truck driver. He returned as a national symbol.

In July 2004, De la Cruz was ordered to deliver gasoline to U.S. troops in Iraq. He became separated from other trucks in the convoy and was abducted four hours after crossing the border.

His kidnappers demanded that the Philippines withdraw its contingent of 51 troops from the U.S.-led coalition. He expected to be beheaded. But with a narrow election victory behind her, President Arroyo could not risk offending the huge constituency of overseas workers and their families. She withdrew the Philippine troops a month ahead of schedule.

De la Cruz was freed after two weeks.

On his return home, he was showered with gifts: a new three-room house, a new motorcycle, a new job, a glass eye for his son and scholarships for his children.

"They kept saying I was a hero," he said. "I felt like I was just an ordinary person. Many say that I am a symbol of the Philippines. To this day, I keep wondering what it is I have become."

*

Paddock reported from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Singapore and Thailand.

*

About this series

Four articles examining the worldwide flow of remittances.

{ Saturday }

Kenya: Benta Wauna worked abroad to give her sister alternatives to arranged marriage and extreme poverty.

*

On the Web: To read previous articles, see an interactive photo gallery or participate in a discussion forum, go to latimes.com/ foreignaid.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Statistical snapshot of the Philippines

Key facts, based on the most recent figures available.

Population estimate: 88 million

GDP, per person: $5,100

Percent living in poverty: 30%

Remittance income annually: $10.7 billion

*

Sources: CIA World Factbook, World Bank, Philippine Department of Labor, Times reporting. Compiled by John L. Jackson

The Benefactor

2006-07-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Benefactor
Dieuseul Lundi's native land is an economic shambles, sustained by emigre donors like him. With earnings from two jobs in Miami he supports dozens of friends and relatives, paying for food, funerals a
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

April 18, 2006

An aging propeller plane skittered to a halt on a dirt runway. Nearby, an ambivalent greeting party had gathered to collect Dieuseul Lundi for the last bone-jarring hour of his journey home.

A nephew, Johnson Paul, had brought Lundi's four-wheel-drive Nissan with the cracked windshield. He resented his uncle's quarterly visits because otherwise he could use the vehicle as a taxi and earn a few dollars.

A cousin, Asemedi Alexis, a voodoo healer and avid gambler, had come to hit Lundi up for money to bet on the afternoon cockfights.

Jean Edner, a friend and business partner, wanted help reopening the idle cinder-block factory that Lundi helped pay for.

Since he left for the U.S. 33 years ago, Lundi has pumped tens of thousands of dollars back into Haiti through an extended family of at least three dozen people. On trips home, he resembles a one-man foreign aid program.

Alexis put an arm around Lundi's neck and patted his breast pocket, half in jest, looking for his cash. The wad of dollars was actually stuffed in Lundi's tan silk trousers, and the faces of his entourage shone in anticipation of getting their share.

There aren't many other ways to make money in Haiti, an economic basket case held together by remittances. Whereas some countries try to use money sent home by workers to create jobs and build a future, Haitians spend almost all of it on immediate needs. Its long-term effect is as negligible as a drop of water on a hot stone.

Handouts from 1.5 million Haitian emigres in the U.S., half of them in Florida, are estimated at $1 billion a year — five times more than all foreign aid to Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. These payments amount to 2 1/2 times the national budget and at least 20% of Haiti's gross domestic product.

"For every single person who gets remittances from someone abroad, we estimate that at least 10 more benefit in the redistribution," Finance Minister Henri Bazin said.

"The money is mostly used for food, but also for rent, weddings, baptisms, funerals."

Lundi, 50, does not really expect gratitude. His relationships are built on a sense of obligation and the understanding that new demands will await him on every trip. On one of his visits, he gave half sister Saintilia Jean money for food. On a subsequent trip, he spent thousands of dollars on her funeral.

On this trip, he would be introduced to his newest child, 3-month-old Woodson, conceived on a previous visit. Lundi, a man of few words, would examine the child with a look that suggested more dread than affection.

"I don't know if Dieuseul will be able to help me much," confided the mother, Marie Claude Lully. "He told me he has 16 children. That's a lot to take care of."

Lundi's journey, like those of many who have fled Haiti in the last four decades, began in an overcrowded wooden boat at the port of Saint-Louis du Nord. He made his way to the Bahamas and then Florida. He settled in Miami, became a U.S. citizen and has earned a living working in fish markets and selling frozen seafood from the back of a battered Ford van.

Like many emigres, Lundi nurtures close ties to Haiti and says he would return for good if there were the faintest hope of national recovery. Instead, he stays abroad and sends home at least half his earnings to support an ailing mother, half a dozen siblings, children he has fathered by nearly a dozen women, and a coterie of cousins, friends and former neighbors.

"God blessed me with good fortune, and I have to give it back to Haiti," he said in English still heavily accented by Creole. "If I have two dollars, I have to give Haiti one of them. I have a lot of friends who are always saying, 'Lundi, I need this' and 'Lundi, I need that.' And I give it to them if I can because I know God will give it back to me."

The road Lundi and his greeting party took from the airstrip in Port-de-Paix to their hometown, Saint-Louis du Nord, is a canvas for those needs.

A ribbon-candy surface of mud mounds and sewage-filled craters, the road disappears altogether where it crosses the wide, gravelly mouth of the Rivieres des Negres.

Goats grazed at the base of desiccated banana trees. Pigs rooted in the muck for fallen fruit. Naked children stood in the doorways of houses built of mud, sticks, cinder block and corrugated metal, watching a procession of women with head bundles, laden donkeys, brightly painted buses and a few sturdy automobiles, all weighed down by staggering quantities of cargo and people.

A boy cycled past with dead chickens hanging from his handlebars, headed for the riverside market.

Saint-Louis du Nord has grown tenfold, to 70,000, since Lundi left, but it is just as poor.

"If it wasn't for the people who left, there wouldn't be any life here at all," said the mayor, Wilber Lafrance. Dependent on help from seven siblings in the U.S. to keep his small food store and kindergarten running, he brandished a wad of yellow transfer invoices attesting to the monthly $50 and $100 handouts.

Along the crowded main drag, small shops offered canned goods, rice, cooking oil and cosmetics. Shop owners use money sent by relatives to buy goods in Cap-Haitien, a five-hour drive to the east. Often, customers shop with money sent by their relatives in the U.S.

At his first stop, Lundi was already getting an earful. His sister, Livania Paul, complained about how difficult it was to make ends meet as a seamstress.

Her four children, including Johnson, can go to school only because Lundi sends money for tuition and the obligatory uniforms of yellow gingham and sky-blue serge.

"So he sends $100 every now and then," she harrumphed from a battered wooden chair on the veranda of her shop. "What does $100 buy these days?"

Johnson, who had gotten a little pocket money from Lundi on the way here, was only a teenager, but already discouraged by his prospects.

"I would like to get more education, but there are no jobs anyway," he said with a shrug, kicking a loose chunk of concrete from the veranda stairs.

The story was the same a mile away at the small family farm, tended by Lundi's mother and cousin Alexis, where Lundi grew up in a two-room shack.

His 23-year-old daughter, Priscile, who studies in Port-au-Prince, the capital, because he pays her tuition, turned away as Lundi tried to kiss her cheek in greeting.

"She's angry because I don't like her boyfriend," he explained. "He drinks. He smokes. He already has three children by other women. I know I've done the same, but I want different for my daughter."

Other relatives — half sisters, nieces and nephews — stirred from midday siestas to welcome the man with the cash and a gym bag full of shoes and sandals.

They sorted through the jumble of footwear from a Miami discount store with more enthusiasm than they had displayed for Lundi himself, measuring each pair against their weathered soles.

The few that didn't fit anyone landed in a wheelbarrow of used clothes that the women bought from a trader's scow that morning. Like most of the town's residents, Lundi's relatives made their living buying in bulk and selling in pieces.

Less than an hour after arriving at the farm, Lundi was so irritated with his kin that he left to spend the night with a girlfriend.

At the Breeze Marina Motel, with a woman young enough to be his daughter at his side, he relaxed over a plate of chicken and rice, at ease for the first time since running the gantlet of griping relatives and outstretched hands.

Lundi usually brings his handouts in cash. But for emergencies and for emigres unable to go home, there is a thriving network of money-transfer offices. However it gets to Haiti, the money provides regular transfusions to an economy on life support. Additional services such as changing the currency or delivering it offer many people a chance to make a living.

Jusleine Vilesaint, pregnant with her second child, waited outside a transfer office in Saint-Louis du Nord to collect $50 sent by an aunt in New York.

"I don't rely entirely on her," Vilesaint said. "But with the money she sends every two or three months, I can do a little extra for myself, like buy a pair of shoes or something for the baby."

Money changers fanned the midday heat with wads of Haitian gourdes, ready to buy the dollars for a tiny profit.

Vilesaint and other recipients spend the local currency at a phalanx of shops and roadside stands. Most of what is for sale comes from the United States.

As many as 700 transfers a day arrive at the Port-de-Paix office of CAM, which controls more than half the regional market, said Antonio Jacotin, director of the service. Most of the cash is collected in person; the rest is delivered by motorcycle couriers who routinely carry $3,000 or $4,000, 10 years' income for the average Haitian.

"People are always glad to see us," said Fritz Guerrier, a father of five dressed in tan trousers and a silk shirt who dodges mud slicks and potholes to deliver cash. "People invite me in for a glass of water and ask about the latest gossip."

Theft is not a problem, taxi driver Louis Jeune Elira said: "Thieves know if they steal from the couriers that they'll die."

Better-developed countries are trying to pool remittances to finance public works projects, housing or export industries. A few such projects have been attempted in Haiti: a school in Bas Limbe and some orchards near Jacmel in the south. But those are the exception.

"Haiti has such a subsistence economy that most of the money has to go straight to consumption and education," said David Adams, former head of the Haiti office of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"What Haiti has to aspire to," he said, "is an arrangement like you have in Mexico or El Salvador, where people have confidence in the state and engage in co-financing projects."

For the foreseeable future, Haitians will depend on handouts. Bazin, the finance minister, disagrees with analysts who say this fosters sloth.

"Whatever you hear to the contrary, Haitians are hard-working people," he said, pointing to the men and women pushing overloaded wooden carts with crooked wheels through the streets in hopes of selling a few cents' worth of food or trinkets. "There is nothing more demeaning for Haitians than to have nothing to do."

From Lundi's perspective, the current U.S. policy of deporting Haitian boat people is self-defeating. Remittances from Haitians working in the U.S. are far more effective than governmental aid, he said.

"When I landed in Miami, they took me to a doctor and gave me food stamps," he recalled. "Now they take you to jail and throw you back as soon as they can."

Stefan Previlon, a neighbor of one of Lundi's cousins, said he'd like to stay in Haiti but can't make a living. The 48-year-old father of six has been caught trying to enter the Bahamas seven times in the last four years.

For Edner, Lundi's friend who made cinder blocks, being with his wife and three children is more important, so he stays in Haiti.

Edner borrowed $3,000 from Lundi a decade ago, and sales of cinder blocks perked along until the economy took a nose dive and political strife paralyzed the country. He ran out of money for supplies, and electrical service became more erratic than usual.

He sank all his remaining money into a four-wheel-drive vehicle, which Lundi purchased on his behalf in Miami. Edner planned to resell it at a profit in Haiti and pour the money into his business.

"He hasn't found a ship yet to bring the car, but as soon as I get it and sell it, I can restart the brick factory," Edner said. In the meantime, he makes a little money using an open pickup truck as a bus.

After two weeks with friends and relatives, Lundi got on another prop plane at Port-de-Paix for the bumpy, 40-minute hop to Port-au-Prince, followed by a two-hour flight to Miami. He was exhausted and thousands of dollars poorer.

Back home, Edner's 6-year-old Mitsubishi Montero was parked outside Lundi's Miami apartment, a constant reminder of his obligations. So were all the people milling around.

Lundi needed to sleep before heading to the fish market, where his 11-hour shift would begin at 1 a.m. But every place where he could doze was already taken.

Six people were loitering in his tiny living room, occasionally checking the progress of a fish stew bubbling in the kitchen. Two of them had come to discuss how to get Edner's vehicle onto a freighter docked in Miami.

A third visitor had come to catch up on the latest goings-on in Saint-Louis du Nord. The friend of a cousin was staying over en route from Port-au-Prince to an appointment in Miami. A stepdaughter had dropped by to remind Lundi that her community college tuition was overdue.

An uncle seeking immigration papers was sound asleep on a cream-colored sofa still covered in showroom plastic.

Lundi watched him with a mixture of fatigue and envy.

When he arrived from Haiti, the uncle planned to stay for a few days. That was six months ago.

*

About this series

Four articles examining the worldwide flow of remittances.

{ Sunday }

Mexico: Catalina Sanchez plowed her husband's earnings from California into a project to provide jobs at home.

{ Today }

Haiti: When Dieuseul Lundi comes home for a visit, dozens of outstretched hands await him.

{ Thursday }

Philippines: Money from expatriates props up the economy, but many doubt the country is any better off.

{ Saturday }

Kenya: Benta Wauna worked abroad to give her sister alternatives to arranged marriage and extreme poverty.

On the Web: To see an interactive photo gallery, participate in a discussion forum or read Sunday's article, go to latimes.com/ foreignaid.

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Haiti by numbers

Facts based on most recent figures available.

Populationestimate 8 million
GDP, per person $1,600
Percent livingin poverty 80%
Remittance income annually $1 billion

Sources: CIA World Factbook, World Bank, Times reporting. Compiled by John L. Jackson

The Seeds of Promise

2006-07-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Seeds of Promise

The world's immigrant workers send home billions of dollars a year, eclipsing all government aid. The funds, arriving in trickles, ease poverty and drive growth. Wages earned in the lettuce fields of
By Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writer

April 16, 2006

The prickly plants started in Catalina Sanchez's garden and now stretch across her neighbors' fields as far as the eye can see. They pop up on acre after acre as word gets around: This village of dirt floors and outdoor toilets expects to get rich exporting cactus.

The seed money comes from men who couldn't make a living here and left for California, the idea from one of the women they left behind.

As their corn crops failed in thinning soil, a generation of men migrated to pick lettuce in the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys. The cash they wired home bought food, but little hope for a better life.

Then Sanchez got busy in her backyard. She started plowing her husband's wire transfers into a waist-high patch of nopal. The paddle-like cactus leaf has a succulent taste and, she suspected, a market far beyond impoverished Oaxaca state. Soon other peasant women joined her, investing cash from their men in California.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, Erasmo Alonzo imagined that the wages of his back-breaking labor were buying a TV, a washing machine and indoor plumbing. On his first visit home, "he did not find any of those things," Sanchez recalled. "Look outside," she told him, proudly pointing to her rows of nopal. "That is our future."

With additional financing from migrants in California and the Mexican government, Sanchez's co-op is building a food-processing plant that will employ dozens of this Zapotec Indian community's 5,750 inhabitants. Starting this summer, the co-op's 134 growers plan to supply 10,000 1-pound jars of organically grown, pickled cactus each week to an expanding specialty-food market in the United States.

The venture is a village-level display of the power of remittances, the billions of dollars that migrants earn in rich countries and send home to sustain their kin. It is part of a search by struggling communities, international aid agencies and governments for ways to harness this flow to alleviate the poverty that drives people to migrate in the first place.

Migrants have been sending money home, in one form or another, for centuries. But only recently have economists recognized its significance. Today, remittances are the largest, fastest-growing and most reliable source of income for developing countries. Poor nations reported $167 billion in receipts from overseas workers last year, according to the World Bank, more than all foreign aid. Including unrecorded transactions, the bank estimates that the total exceeded $250 billion.

This giant transfer of wealth crisscrosses the Earth in millions of trickles, a few hundred dollars at a time, sent by workers who have assumed much of the burden of Third World development. Their remittances — private aid from the poor to the poorer — offer a rare chance to accumulate savings; invest in schooling, housing or a small business; and rise into the middle class.

At least $39 billion flowed out of the United States last year, wired home by legal immigrants as well as many of the estimated 12 million people whose undocumented status and growing numbers have provoked a furious debate over immigration policy.

According to the World Bank, the number of international migrants swelled from 120 million to 175 million during the 1990s, and the sums they send home each year have more than tripled in this decade.

"Close to a billion people, one in every six on Earth, may receive some support from this lifeline," said Dilip Ratha, a senior World Bank economist. "The scale is huge, maybe bigger than we think, and potentially transforming."

One end of the lifeline is the field near Salinas where Erasmo Alonzo started work before dawn one morning.

A wiry man with a bushy mustache and gnarled fingers, Alonzo stood out among the 15-member Latino work crew as they stepped off a white bus, stretched their muscles and spread out across the furrows. He was by far the oldest. The others called him tio, or uncle.

For eight years, he had been stooping over those fields for up to 10 hours a day, reaping a chronic back pain that felt "like an ugly wound." But on that July morning, he moved as nimbly as his youthful co-workers as they extracted row after row of romaine lettuce from the soil with 12-inch knives, whittled away the dirty outer leaves and tossed the heads onto a conveyer belt at a rate of 17 per minute, a precision ballet that left their white plastic aprons splattered green and two 400-pound tractor-borne boxes filled with produce.

Alonzo had been off the day before, a Sunday, and devoted part of the day to the ritual that defined his purpose in America: wiring money home to Mexico.

"It is a struggle to get a decent amount together, but I send $500 every two or three months," he said. On this Sunday, he had wired home $200 and paid 10% in commission to a licensed agent of AFEX, a worldwide transfer company based in Chile. From the strip mall jewelry counter where the transaction took place, he had called his wife in Ayoquezco by cellphone to tell her she could pick up the money the next day.

Fed by millions of such transactions, Mexico's annual remittance inflow has doubled since 2002 and reached $20 billion last year, second only to petroleum as a generator of wealth for the country.

Other developing nations also depend heavily on their migrants' money. Brazilian laborers in Japan send home more than $2 billion a year, out-earning their country's coffee exports. Remittances bring in more than tea exports do in Sri Lanka and tourism does in Morocco. In Jordan, Lesotho, Nicaragua, Tonga and Tajikistan, they provide more than a quarter of the gross national product.

Remittance income is growing fastest in Eastern Europe, a trend that quickened as Britain and Ireland eased curbs on the entry of migrant laborers from the 10 countries embraced in the European Union's eastward expansion in 2004.

Britain has absorbed more than 205,000 workers from Poland alone. They arrive hourly at London's Victoria Coach Station and on budget airlines to work as builders, plumbers, electricians, factory hands, housekeepers, gardeners, ship assistants, dishwashers and bus drivers.

India received $21.7 billion and China $21.3 billion last year from its workers abroad. Like Pakistan and the Philippines, which also rank among the top five remittance-receiving countries, India benefits from a large number of skilled, English-speaking expatriates who earn decent salaries.

Unlike foreign investment, most of which goes to a few big emerging markets, remittance flows are more evenly distributed and far more stable.

"They tend to increase at difficult times — during an economic downturn or after a natural disaster in the migrants' home countries — when other private capital flows tend to decrease," said Ratha, the World Bank economist.

In failing states such as Haiti and Somalia, remittances sustain the economy. Dollars from the diaspora have helped Armenia and Cuba survive economic blockade and financial collapse.

Remittance growth has been fueled in part by a relaxation of foreign exchange restrictions that benefit undocumented and legal immigrants alike. That trend has sharply reduced hidden transfers, such as cash carried physically across borders, and encouraged the spread of companies that wire money to nearly every corner of the planet.

Competition has driven down fees by roughly half since the late 1990s, allowing billions more dollars to cross borders.

President Vicente Fox, hailing Mexico's expatriate laborers as heroes, has expanded a program called Three for One, in which federal, state and local governments each match every dollar contributed by migrants for community projects.

Mexican consulates in the United States issue identification cards that help legal and illegal Mexican immigrants open U.S. bank accounts, giving them cheaper options for sending money home. Guatemala issues a similar card, and several other developing countries are preparing to do so.

Rich countries also are beginning to recognize that lowly migrant workers can help their native countries alleviate poverty. President Bush and leaders of other industrialized nations last year backed a World Bank appeal for lower fees on cash transfers and better investment strategies.

Remittances are getting more attention "because of the failure of previous development mantras," said Devesh Kapur, a University of Texas professor, formerly of Harvard. Unlike development loans or private capital, they come without strings. Because no costly bureaucracy is needed to manage them, bureaucrats cannot squander them.

"The general feeling," Kapur said, "is that this 'private' foreign aid is much more likely to go to the people who really need it."

At a rate of more than $1,000 a day, remittances reach Ayoquezco in stacks of pesos, delivered by armored trucks that dodge cows on rutted dirt streets. The money is doled out at four collection points set up by wire transfer companies — a bank, the telephone office, the general store and Remedios Cruz's shoe shop.

Recipients spend most of the money on food and the barest household necessities. The income also eases pressure on children to drop out of school and provides a safety net for the sick and elderly. Sums left over go to build homes, buy cattle or pay travel expenses and fees for smuggling yet another family member abroad to work.

The village is so poor that the shoes, fake flowers, yarn and hair bands on Cruz's shelves are considered luxuries. He rarely sells any. Instead, he lives on $1,100 in monthly retainers from two money-transfer firms, plus what he earns selling bus and plane tickets to migrants headed for the United States.

"Everything here, the entire economy, depends on remittances," Cruz said.

And so it does, for better or worse, in migrant-exporting communities worldwide. Household surveys sponsored by the World Bank show that remittances have reduced the number of people who live below the poverty line in Uganda, Bangladesh and Ghana. But in many places, the money also breeds wasteful consumption, inflated real estate prices and a widening income gap between those who receive it and those who do not.

Economists say remittances have brought uneven and sometimes fleeting benefits because many governments fail to apply well-known fundamentals of development: delivering more public services, schools and hospitals to poor regions; strengthening the legal system to encourage private investment; making banking services and credit more widely available.

"So far, the success stories about remittances are individual, not collective," said Manuel Orozco, a Georgetown University economist who tracks the flow of migrant money to Latin America. "They can keep a lot of people from falling deeper into poverty, but unless a government does the right things, they won't lift many into the middle class."

A few leaders are starting to worry about the cycle of dependence.

"The big challenge is to turn our workers abroad into partners in the country's progress, so that their remittances leave a legacy of productive investment at home," President Tony Saca of El Salvador, one of the world's most remittance-dependent countries, said in an interview.

Saca's family sent two of his older brothers to work illegally in California after their father's cotton business failed in the 1970s. About one-third of his country's 6.7 million people now live abroad. Having once lived off remittances, Saca said he was determined to create enough wealth from migrants' money so that "our people will stop leaving to look for the American dream."

But how?

Two strategies have emerged in Latin America, which has taken the lead in quantifying its remittance income and exploring ways to stretch the money. One is to coax recipients to open savings accounts so that some of the money can be recycled into small-business loans.

Most of Latin America's remittance income, $55 billion last year, flows as cash through wire transfer companies, not banks. A recent survey by the Inter-American Development Bank found that 19 of every 20 Latin American households that received this money either don't trust or don't have access to financial institutions.

"Our job is to give people more options for using these billions of dollars, including ways that might have a bigger economic impact," said Donald F. Terry, who is leading the bank's initiative. "But to do that we have to bring them into the banking system, and that's easier said than done."

Terry's institution has helped micro-banks, which specialize in small loans to the poor, enter the remittance business in 10 Latin American countries.

Banco Solidario, a participant in the pilot program, handled $85 million of the wage transfers that Ecuador received from Spain last year. More than $5 million of it went into savings accounts, the bank reported, generating loans to 2,504 small enterprises and 470 families buying homes in Ecuador.

Caja La Monarca serves three poor Mexican states, and the cash it transfers from migrants in the United States has enabled it to more than double its loan portfolio to $4.3 million in three years.

The extra liquidity, though minuscule by the standards of the developed world, has improved the lives of the nine women and one man who gathered at Rosa Barra's sewing shop for their weekly meeting with a traveling Monarca loan officer. None of these entrepreneurs in the town of Tenancingo in Mexico state receive money from abroad, and their earnings are too meager to qualify them for regular commercial loans.

Before Monarca came to the rescue, Barra was desperate. She had lost $800 when a member of her private lending circle, the sewing shop's only source of capital, skipped town with the group's money.

"When a business deal goes bad here, the first thing that comes to mind is, 'I'm going to the United States to work off my debt,' " the 47-year-old seamstress said. "I told my husband I could easily find work up there. But he threatened to tie me to a tree."

With a new source of credit, Barra has purchased four Toyama sewing machines. Her husband, Donaciano Velasquez, has bought a 1992 Dodge Caravan to haul his eight-piece mariachi band to gigs. Maria del Carmen Velasquez, who works in a pharmacy, is opening one of her own. Margarita Pichardo has purchased the beauty salon where she started as an employee.

But the effort to expand financial services is set back by legal and regulatory hurdles in some countries and by the reluctance of major banks to court low-income savers. Lacking an alliance with a larger financial institution, Monarca can serve only a fraction of its potential clientele, said Jorge Pineda, its chief of operations.

A second strategy for harnessing remittances is to encourage recipients to invest the money directly in community-wide businesses. With backing from governments and aid agencies, the thinking goes, such ventures can attract outside capital and become engines of prosperity.

Families in Ayoquezco have grown and eaten the nopal cactus since pre-Columbian times. It sprouts quickly and abundantly, producing up to four harvests a year. Its fiber-rich leaves, which taste like okra when pickled, enhance the flavor of traditional dishes. Some swear it can cure diabetes.

Every Tuesday and Friday, women haul sacks of freshly harvested nopal leaves by bus from Ayoquezco to market in the city of Oaxaca, 30 miles north.

Arriving well before dawn, they flick away the spiny skin with box cutters and seal slices in plastic bags for restaurant cooks and other buyers. The 16-hour ritual earns each grower about $90 a week.

That was the best they ever hoped for, until Catalina Sanchez came home with an idea.

Sanchez, 47, is a petite dynamo whose brisk forays through her field leave her cotton blouses speckled with cactus juice. Co-workers describe her as a natural leader with infectious energy and a wisdom that belies her first-grade education.

She has scraped for a living all her life, earning just enough from selling nopal to supplement her husband's remittances. When he was injured, she joined him in California in 1998 and worked the next three lettuce seasons.

One by one, the couple's two sons and two daughters joined the seasonal clandestine treks to California, picking lettuce for $7.29 an hour and contributing to the family's $800-a-month apartment in Salinas.

The potential of her garden back home dawned on Sanchez one day in Salinas when she noticed a jar of pickled California nopal on a supermarket delicacy shelf.

It had never occurred to her that nopal leaves could be preserved; in her village they are eaten fresh.

She bought a jar and tasted. Too bitter, she thought.

Sanchez realized that her village could tap into a growing market for something migrants crave — food from home — and create enough jobs to lure some of them back. The U.S. is home to 27 million people of Mexican origin, 1.5 million of whom are from Oaxaca.

"When your whole family is away, you feel alone and sad," she said one day at the market in Oaxaca, peeling cactus on her stool without looking up. "They leave to seek a better life, but a lot of things can go wrong up there.

"My wish is to have them all home, each with a little job, a dignified job. Every mother here feels the same."

Returning from California, Sanchez organized the Women Nopal Bottlers of Ayoquezco with help from two lifelong choir mates at the Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity.

The co-op grew quickly and caught the attention of Roberto Ramirez, director of the Foundation for Productivity in the Countryside, a Mexico City-based nonprofit agency.

Ramirez put the cactus growers in touch with two Ayoquezco natives active in California immigrant networks — Candida Hernandez, a North Hollywood cook, and Felix Cruz, a factory quality-control supervisor from San Marcos in San Diego County.

Ayoquezco's home-bottled nopal sold briskly at a Oaxacan festival in San Marcos, prompting Hernandez and Cruz to form Chapulin Distributors Inc. to import and market the product.

That led to a deal, brokered by Ramirez, giving the growers 61% of the equity in a joint venture, Chapulin 34% and the foundation 5%.

For all its promise, the enterprise struggled. Ignorant about banks, the growers turned to the government for help. The village mayor reluctantly agreed to extend municipal water pipes to the site of the nopal processing plant, then charged the growers $7,500.

It has taken the women more than two years to secure government financing, but the $1.5-million plant is finally nearing completion in an abandoned cornfield.

The sight of rising concrete walls has set off a wave of expectation, altering the life of a village with no other industry. Cactus growers switched to organic farming to open a wider U.S. market niche. Dozens of farmers not in the co-op began planting nopal, hoping to join and share its profits.

Chapulin Distributors rented a warehouse in Oceanside for the expected imports and began sounding out potential clients. Its 38 investors — Oaxacan immigrants working in California as hairdressers, farm laborers, factory workers and housekeepers — have sunk $48,000 into the venture.

"A lot of the money we had been saving for our old age is going into that plant," said Hernandez, the distribution company's 44-year-old vice president. "We are confident that we will get much more in return."

As migrant men return home, some have lectured their wives on how to run the co-op, and at least seven women have been forced to drop out. But the women have remained firmly in charge. The co-op has admitted six male applicants, turning away others who seemed intent on imposing their ideas.

"The women started this when they were alone," said Maria Gomez Vargas, who worked on the project's early stages. "They want the last word."

The factory is due to start production in June with 32 employees. Ramirez said the business projected $2.4 million in sales and $535,000 in profit in its first year of full operation and was expected to generate an additional 210 jobs in the community.

"It's going to bring in a lot of money," predicted Remedios Cruz, the shoe store proprietor who hands out remittances here. "A lot of people will get jobs working the assembly line, guarding the building, driving the delivery trucks, harvesting the fields. And the people who do not get those jobs, we'll be waiting for payday to see what we can sell to the people who do."

To the pioneers of the nopal project, its success will be measured by the answer to one question: Will it reverse the flow of migration?

The women of Ayoquezco are optimistic. If the enterprise prospers, says Asela Barrios, her husband will quit picking strawberries after 17 seasons in Salinas. Sara Natividad Lustre Martinez says her brother, who manages a garlic warehouse in the Cental Valley town of Huron, also wants to come home. Leonides Cruz Chavez's husband is already back, sitting in on growers co-op meetings.

Erasmo Alonzo, whose wife inspired the venture, came home to stay in late 2004 and recently became chief inspector of cactus grown for the plant. His wife is chief of sales. But their family is still divided; their four children remain in Salinas.

"The women don't want me to go north again," he said. "They scolded me, and I'm going to obey them. If not, they'll get angry."

The 60-year-old patriarch smiled. In truth, he said, he prefers being home. He was ambling through his wife's nopal field, clearing diseased leaves with a sharp metal stick and looking far more relaxed than he had in California.

"With the plant, there will be enough work for us here," he said. "In our village, the land is ours and we will soon have everything we need. We won't have to be up before the sun. In my house, nobody will say, 'Get up. Hurry. It's time to work now.' "

His morning's tasks done, Alonzo retired to the porch of his cinder-block house and plopped down on a plastic chair, joining his wife and three of their children.

Elvia, 26, Armando, 23, and Omar, 19, were home for the winter, but they would soon return to Salinas. Only Elvia expressed interest in settling in Ayoquezco after the plant starts producing.

"We live in two worlds now," Armando Alonzo said. "A job at the new plant will be fine for those who have never worked up north.

"But I can earn $100 a day up there. Here I would earn maybe one-tenth of that."

Armando's words had a defiant ring. Omar smiled in agreement and gave his brother a high-five.

A pained expression crossed their mother's face.

"Maybe my children are already too old to benefit from what we are building," Catalina Sanchez said. "But their children and other children can finally grow up with this dream, the promise of a decent job right here at home. They should never have to think about leaving."

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Statistical Snapshot of Mexico

Key facts, based on the most recent figures available.

Population estimate - 106 million

GDP, per person - $10,000

Percent living in poverty - 40%

Remittance income annually - $20 billion

*

Sources: CIA World Factbook, World Bank, Mexico's statistics institute, Times reporting. Compiled by John L. Jackson

*

About this series

Four articles examining the worldwide flow of remittances.

{ Today }

Mexico: Catalina Sanchez plowed her husband's earnings from California into a project to provide jobs at home.

{ Tuesday }

Haiti: When Dieuseul Lundi comes home for a visit, dozens of outstretched hands await him.

{ Thursday }

Philippines: Money from expatriates props up the economy, but many doubt the country is any better off.

{ Saturday }

Kenya: Benta Wauna worked abroad to give her sister alternatives to arranged marriage and extreme poverty.

On the Web: For an interactive photo gallery and a discussion forum, go to latimes.com/foreignaid.

An Easier Way to Send Large Email Attachments

2006-07-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

An Easier Way to Send
Large Email Attachments

Free Application Helps To Avoid Clogging Inboxes; Speeds Still Might Vary

How many times have you wanted to email a large attachment -- like a bunch of digital photos, an album of songs, or a hefty video -- but didn't do so because it exceeded your email provider's, or the recipient's, limits on attachment size, or because it might max out the recipient's mailbox?

This frustration is growing increasingly common as better digital cameras produce bigger photos and large video clips, and digital music becomes more widespread. Computer hard disks have grown nicely to accommodate these files, but limits on the size of email messages haven't. And, even if you could send such large attachments, it can take forever to send them via email, partly because broadband upload speeds lag far behind download speeds.

Instead of suffering the frustration of a bounced email, many folks have resorted to Web-based services like Shutterfly or Kodak EasyShare Gallery or YouTube.com or Google Video for sharing digital photos and videos. They upload the files to these sites, then send links to their friends and family. But this method has major drawbacks. The recipients don't get the full-size files on their own computers, and sometimes must register with the sites to view your material.

This week, we tested a new, free, application called Pando that aims to solve this problem without requiring you to use an intermediary Web site. Pando lets you email huge attachments -- up to one gigabyte each -- to anyone, without breaching email size limits, or clogging anyone's inbox. It comes in versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers, available for downloading at www.pando.com1.

It sounded fishy to us, too, but Pando, from Pando Networks Inc., performed really well in our tests -- even in its current "beta," or trial, stage. It's simple, fast, and effective, and it solves the large-attachment problem.

Pando works by merging the mechanism of email with its own small program and a modified version of BitTorrent, a back-end file-transfer system best known until now for speeding up the downloading of large, unauthorized files, like pirated movies.

Here's how you use Pando. First, you download and install the small Pando program. Then, you select the files you want to send. These can be any type of files you want, or even whole folders of files. Then, still using the Pando software, you type in the addresses of the recipients, the subject, and a message. The software then does three things: it creates a Pando Package, a small special file that instructs the recipient's computer on how to fetch the files; it sends an email containing that package file, plus any text you want; and it uploads the files to a Pando server.

On the recipient's end, an email is received in his or her normal email program containing the Pando Package as a tiny attachment (one huge 94 megabyte attachment we sent required only a 22-kilobyte attachment). The recipient just opens the Pando Package attachment, and it in turn launches the Pando software, which then downloads the files or folders you sent. The first time the recipient receives a Pando email, he or she will have to download and install the Pando software. There's a link in the email to the download site.

Once downloaded onto the receiver's computer, all Pando files can be found in a special folder that Pando automatically creates. In Windows, it's called My Pando Packages and is in My Documents. On the Mac, it's called Pando Packages and is in the home folder. The files are also listed in the handy Received list in the Pando software.

As a bonus, Pando can sometimes transmit these large files faster than your email program or Web browser could. That's because it uses a modified version of the speedy BitTorrent technology.

We downloaded and installed Pando in just a few minutes. Opening the small Pando email attachment from Microsoft Outlook on Windows or Apple Mail on the Mac prompted a little Pando window to pop up, in which all sent and received files were organized. This window is simple, showing a thumbnail image and text description of each file. A list of received files shows who sent the file and when; the sent list shows to whom you sent files and when.

We started out big, sharing a 95-megabyte, high-resolution video. You must create a username and password to send using Pando, which we did, entering our email and first and last names. A simple "Send New" icon opens the email-like form, where we dragged and dropped this big video file.

No Pando Package can total more than one gigabyte, and an automatic tally shows you how large the Package is becoming as you drag and drop more files into it. The Pando software program allows users to send large email attachments without running afoul of normal size limitations.

Another way to send files using Pando is by right-clicking on any file or folder in your computer and selecting a "Send With Pando" option that appears after the software application is downloaded. Selecting this also opens the familiar sending window. But this works only in Windows.

The 95-megabyte video took eight minutes to upload, and nine minutes to download -- impressively fast times. Another Pando Package filled with 44 high-resolution digital photos totaling 65 megabytes took six minutes to upload, and six minutes to receive.

But Pando can't entirely overcome slow Internet connections, so your speeds may vary considerably. This is especially true on the uploading side, as even broadband cable and DSL connections typically offer upload speeds that are a fraction of their download speeds. In our tests, at our office and homes, our download and upload speeds ranged from 30 kilobits per second to 250, depending on where we were and when we were testing.

Even if you didn't see any speed improvement with Pando, you'd still benefit from the sheer ability to send huge attachments. That's a big deal.

On July 25, Pando Networks will introduce a special plug-in for Outlook, making it even easier for users to send huge files without worrying about inbox congestion. And the company also has plans to introduce plug-ins for Web-based email programs like Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail.

If you're tired of bounced emails, and of using Web sites to share your personal videos or photos, Pando is a straightforward solution that anyone can understand in a matter of minutes. It's a great solution to a vexing problem.

2006-07-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

99 Essential L.A. Restaurants

Written by Jonathan Gold

Summer Restaurants '06

What does the Weekly mean by “99 Essential L.A. Restaurants”? It isn’t necessarily a list of the very best restaurants in Los Angeles; that would almost certainly include L’Orangerie, which has been the most rigorously French restaurant on the West Coast for decades, as well as Belvedere at the Peninsula Hotel, Noe at the Omni, and too many high-end sushi bars to count, Mori, Shibucho and Wa among them. Nor is it a roster of the most influential restaurants: Valentino, Chinois and Patina are conspicuously absent. It certainly isn’t an inventory of the most popular places to eat — we do include Casa Bianca and Pink’s, but Langer’s Delicatessen is included instead of Junior’s and Brent’s, and you will find the quirky Mexican cooking of Babita instead of the throng-pleasing cuisine of El Coyote, Marix or Mexico City.

An essential restaurant is a restaurant that reflects Los Angeles in a startling and unusual way, that uses fresh local ingredients in a fashion that respects the land in which they were grown, that showcases cooking echoing both foreign-trained chefs’ region of origin and the hypercharged mosaic of the Los Angeles dining scene. An essential restaurant moves people, inspires them to think about food in a new way, inspires them to think about Southern California as a great agricultural region, a great port, a builder of the shiny symbolism that is a large factor in how the rest of the world thinks of itself. And it’s also a damned good place to eat.

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Alcazar

A fragrant slice of coastal Lebanon, Alcazar is a shaded terrace of music, grilled mullet and waiters who transfer bright coals of apple-flavored tobacco to brass hookahs. Enormous kebab plates are rushed to tables — and the shish towook, grilled kebabs of extravagantly marinated chicken breast, is as good as a kebab ever gets. On weekends, ultrathin sajj bread is baked on the patio in a vast heated pan, wrapped around grilled meat or made into the thin, crisp, thyme-scented Arab quesadillas called kl’leg. Lebanon is famous for its red wine, but Alcazar, in the gentle levant of Encino, also serves oceans of arak, an anise-scented Lebanese liquor that turns milky when you stir it with ice and cool water. 17239 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 789-0991. Tues.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10:30 p.m., Sat. 11:30 a.m.–mid., Sun. noon–9 p.m. Full bar. Hookah and cigar lounge. Takeout. Lot parking in rear. AE, MC, V. Lebanese. $

Alegria

Alegria is the kind of Mexican bohemian hangout you may have suspected must exist somewhere in Los Angeles, an art-infused Silver Lake café where the talk always seems to be of music, gallery shows and the depredations of City Hall. The usual taco plates and vegetarian burritos are well-represented, but the best food here revolves around the extraordinary mole sauce: sharp, thick, sweetly complex, with top notes of smoke, clove and citrus, lashed with dried-chile heat, black enough to darken the brightest Pepsodent smile. (It takes two days to make, a million steps, and has something like 20 ingredients.) If you insist, you can get a side of mole sauce to put on your burrito. 3510 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 913-1422, www.alegriaonsunset.com. Mon.–Thurs. 10 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 10 a.m.–11 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Mexican. $

Al-Watan

A bare, smoky dining room adjacent to a Muslim butcher shop, Al-Watan is the summit of basic Pakistani cooking in Los Angeles, spicy, meaty, and deeply inflected by the flavors of ginger, cardamom and chiles, with some of the most vividly smoky tandoor-cooked meats you will ever taste. First among the stews is haleem, beef braised with shredded wheat until it breaks down into a thick gravy with the flavor of well-browned roast-beef drippings, but as meaty as Al-Watan may be, even vegetarians can be happy here: Navratan korma, a mixture of cauliflower, green beans and carrots stir-fried with chile and plenty of spices, is like a wonderful Muslim ratatouille, the flavors of each vegetable fresh and distinct while contributing to the cumulative effect of the cumin-scented whole. 13611 Inglewood Ave., Hawthorne, (310) 644-6395. Open daily 11 a.m.–10 p.m. No alcohol. MC, V. Indian. $$

Angeli Caffe

Before Angeli, Angelenos had no idea how much they loved casual Italian cooking — not four-cheese lasagna or cognac-flamed veal fillets, but the spaghetti alla checca, roast chicken and minimally garnished pizza that a Sienese teenager might eat for dinner at the trattoria down the block on the nights his mother didn’t feel like turning on the stove. Angeli’s popularity may have inspired hundreds of restaurants featuring salads dressed with balsamic vinegar, but Angeli’s rustic simplicity is still the benchmark. The pastas of chef Evan Kleiman, KCRW radio host and the local standard-bearer for the Slow Food movement, are beyond remarkable. And if you live within a few miles of the restaurant, they even deliver. The Thursday-night dinners, multicourse prix fixe extravaganzas based around a different cuisine each week, are legend. 7274 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 936-9086, www.angelicaffe.com. Lunch Tues.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Thurs., Sun. 5–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5–11 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Rustic regional Italian. $$

Angelini Osteria

A loud Italian trattoria with reasonable versions of Roman trattoria classics like saltimbocca, spaghetti and pollo alla diavola, Angelini Osteria is the place to go for a decent scottadito, a glass of Chianti or a crisp, sparely dressed pizza. The more formal La Terza seems closer to chef Gino Angelini’s sensibilities, but sometimes you crave the challenging textural complexities of smoked sea bass smeared with bottarga, and sometimes you just want a quick plate of spaghetti carbonara. If the nightly specials include Angelini’s braised oxtails, do not hesitate. 7313 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 297-0070. Lunch Tues.–Fri. noon–2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Sun. 5:30–10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. Valet parking. AE, JCB, MC, V. Italian. $$

Antequera de Oaxaca

The place specializes in botanas — bar munchies, more or less, served in a restaurant without alcohol. The botanas are assembled into a big combination plate for one, two or four people: crunchy balls of chorizo, dried beef, professional-strength slabs of fried pork rind, a tangle of shredded string cheese, Oaxacan chile relleno stuffed with a sweet-sour chicken stew, and chunky, rustic guacamole. The pace is just right. The dining room is pleasant. And the plate is enough for two or three hungry people. 5200 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 466-1101. Open daily 9 a.m.–8:30 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Street parking. MC, V. Oaxacan. $

A.O.C.

If Suzanne Goin’s wine bar weren’t quite so popular, it would be the kind of place you dropped into for a glass of vino and maybe a bit of octopus, then a glass of Sancerre and a few grilled sardines, then a glass of Friulian Tocai and a plate of sliced prosciutto, then a glass of Corbières and the tiniest plate of skewered grilled lamb with mint. Unless you were in the mood for the bacon-wrapped dates with Parmesan on the bar menu, which would go so nicely with one of those big southern Italian reds, or a ripe Crozier blue with a late-bottled port, or whatever creature comes with a bit of Goin’s romesco sauce. You could drink and eat like this all night if you remembered to make a reservation — and if A.O.C. didn’t unreasonably stop serving at 11. 8022 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (323) 653-6359. Mon.–Fri. 6–11 p.m., Sat. 5:30–11 p.m., Sun. 5:30–10 p.m. Wine bar. Valet parking. AE, DC, MC, V. French-Mediterranean-influenced small plates. $$

Asanebo

For a while, Asanebo was famous as the No-Sushi Bar, and all of Hollywood rushed to its Studio City mini-mall, eager to visit a restaurant that had come up with an entirely new way to deny satisfaction to its customers. These days, there is plenty of sushi at Asanebo, home to some of the best omakase dinners in town, although you will almost certainly be happier with the sashimi of steel-bright Spanish mackerel, the slabs of Japanese kanpache, and the peerless monkfish liver. Because the only displeasure to be found at Asanebo (unless you happen to be a prawn) comes with the expensive bill. 11941 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, (818) 760-3348. Lunch Tues.–Fri. noon–2 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Thurs. 6–10:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–11:30 p.m., Sun. 6–10 p.m. Takeout. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $$

Attari

If you grew up in pre-revolution Tehran, this leafy patio is probably the café of your dreams, a pleasant place where the sandwiches are made with Iranian vegetable cutlets or extravagantly dressed hot dogs, and the clientele is as well-dressed as the lunch crowd at Spago. On Fridays, ab-goosht is the closest thing there is in the restaurant world to an automatic order, an intricate lamb stew mashed into a thick, homogeneous paste with the texture of refried beans, and an expressed liquid, the soul of the dish, served separately as soup. 1388 Westwood Blvd., Westwood (entrance on Wilkins), (310) 441-5488. Tues.–Sun. 11 a.m.–6 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking, plus validated lot parking at Borders. Cash only. Iranian. $

Babita

Babita may be the platonic ideal of a Southern California Mexican restaurant, a comfortable place that just happens to have great food, a rough-edged Eastside joint whose service is burnished to a white-tablecloth sheen. Chef Roberto Berrelleza, who spent decades as a maitre d’ before he ever picked up a pan, is a modern master of Mexican cuisine; and his fish-stuffed yellow chiles, his seared fish with huitlacoche vinaigrette and his oozy, porky chiles en nogada are worth the drive across town. (The latter is seasonal, September to January.) His best dishes tend to be those closest to the seafood preparations inspired by his coastal Sinaloan hometown. His shrimp Topolobampo may still be the single fieriest invention in the history of Los Angeles cuisine, a citrusy sauté of white wine, tomatoes and diced habanero peppers that takes over its victims’ bodies like an Ebola infection. The sensation isn’t anguish, exactly — the endorphin rush tends to kick in before the pain receptors realize something has gone terribly, terribly wrong — as much as it is a total, irrevocable loss of control. 1823 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 288-7265. Lunch Tues.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.; dinner Sun. and Tues.–Thurs. 5:30–9 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5:30–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Street parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V. Mexican. $

Beacon: An Asian Cafe

Beacon marks the triumphant return to form of Kazuto Matsusaka, who was chef for almost a decade at Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois in the ’80s. His current versions of miso-marinated cod, vegetable nabemono and grilled shisito peppers are all fine. Grilled-chicken skewers are powerfully flavored with the herb shiso and the tiny Japanese plum called ume. You’d probably never find anything like Matsusaka’s salad of perfectly ripe avocado dressed with toasted sesame seeds and minced scallions in Tokyo, but the salad follows classical principles, and it is luscious. The hanger steak with wasabi is so successful, the searing tang of the horseradish doing something wonderful to the tart, carbonized flavor of grilled meat, that you might wonder why nobody thought of the combination until now. 3280 Helms Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 838-7500. Lunch Mon.–Sat. 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Wed. and Sun. 5:30–8:15 p.m., Thurs.–Sat. 5:30–9:15 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Asian Fusion. $$$

Beechwood

Only in the 21st century could you find a restaurant quite so midcentury modern, with sleek love-seat sofas and machine-polished wood and a quantity of prefabricated design that probably would have amused Ray and Charles Eames back in the days when their aesthetic was found more in your kindergarten classroom than in fashionable cafés. Chefs Brooke Williamson and Nick Roberts, a kitchen team who have been the Next Big Thing in Los Angeles since their late pubescence, seem to have settled into variations on the theme of bar snacks here, the farmers-market-inflected rib-eye burgers, sticky pork ribs and burrata-tomato salads you may remember from their last venture, Amuse, plus a slightly more formal New American menu for the serene back dining room that includes things like duck confit with dandelion greens and sautéed catfish with collards and black-eyed peas. But the restaurant is open until 1 a.m. And if you are so inclined, the fire pit in the patio may be even cozier than the one at Johnny’s French Dip Pastrami. If you ask nicely, the waitress may even bring you a plate of fried smelt to go with your Amstel Light. 822 Washington Blvd., Venice, (310) 448-8884. Dinner menu Tues.–Sat. 6–11 p.m.; bar menu served late into the evening and also Sun.–Mon. Full bar. Valet parking. New American. $$

Bistro K

To put it plainly, Bistro K is a restaurant out of a foodie’s daydream, a kitchen that may rank among the dozen best in town, run by gifted and accomplished French chef Laurent Quenioux with a bring-your-own-wine policy and no corkage, where a fine, intimate dinner costs rather less than a quick meal of cheeseburgers and drinks down the road. You will find neither steak frites nor roast chicken, but there are plenty of oddities like braised snips of veal tendon garnishing medallions of rare venison, ant eggs in season and such seasonally appropriate things as oeufs en meurette, a wintry harvest dish of eggs poached in a red-wine reduction with meaty slivers of bacon. A warm salad of duck gizzards sautéed with cèpes, chanterelle mushrooms and hot chiles, one of the most satisfying appetizers I have ever eaten in Los Angeles, costs only $7. The cassoulet of duck hearts, tender nuggets of meat braised with turnips and slippery bits of poached duck’s tongue, served in a cardamom-scented mushroom sauce on a sort of footed cake plate, is worthy of a multistarred Michelin laureate. 1000 S. Fremont Ave., South Pasadena, (626) 799-5052. Wed.–Sat. 5:30–9 p.m. Free corkage. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. French Bistro. $$$

Bluebird Cafe

Let Beacon and Ford’s hog the credit: A few blocks from downtown Culver City, in a freshly painted diner that looks as if it has been languishing since the ’50s, Vincent Trevino and Chris Marble’s breakfast-lunch café is the real soul of the new Media District, a center of muscular omelets, big salads and thick hamburgers, BLTs with avocado, real iced tea, and a tuna melt for the ages. His pressed sandwiches of cold cuts and cheeses actually taste like their inspirations, the panini served at the Autogrills that dot every superhighway in Italy, more than the fancier uptown versions do, and Trevino’s pretty iced cupcakes are renowned. 8572 National Blvd., Culver City, (310) 841-0939, www.bluebirdcafela.com. Mon.–Fri. 8 a.m.–5 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.–3 p.m. Free lot parking. AE, MC, V. American. $$

Border Grill

Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger don’t redefine Mexican food; they just prepare it well, transforming the taco, the tostada, the homely chile relleno — here a freshly roasted poblano crammed with Mexican cheese and fried in an egg batter crisp and lacy as the coating on tempura shrimp — into creatures almost unrecognizable if you’re used to their Cal-Mex equivalents. The long, black dining room, delineated by a crazily skewed ceiling painted with rocket ships and wrestling-masked batmen, looks even better now than it did when the place first opened. Border Grill is the rare mainstream restaurant whose tacos don’t make you yearn for a truck parked by an auto-parts junkyard somewhere in East L.A. 1445 Fourth St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-1655. Sun.–Thurs. 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. till 11 p.m. Full bar open till mid. Takeout. Street and valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Modern Mexican. $$

Bridge Restaurant & Lounge

Bridge is the newest restaurant from the group that owns Koi, which means that the music is banging, the guy at the next table really is Ludacris, and the food, pan-peninsular Italian in this case, tends to be light, based on impeccable ingredients, and lovely to behold: thin petals of vitello tonnato arranged like fugu sashimi; delicate asparagus ravioli with butter and sage; a truly lovely, Koi-quality tuna tartare. The quality of the Italian cooking here will never quite measure up to that of the glorious prime of Alto Palato, which used to occupy this space, but the cuisine created by Dolce alum Mirko Paderno and Giorgio’s veteran Santos MacDonal can be almost as sparkling as the crowd. 755 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 659-3535, www.bridgela.com. Restaurant Mon.–Sat. 6–11 p.m. Lounge 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Full bar. Street and valet parking. AE, MC, V. Italian. $$$

Caioti Pizza Cafe´

When the secret history of California pizza is finally written, a greasy volume inscribed in arugula, goat cheese and white truffle oil, former Spago pizza chef Ed LaDou’s name will be known across the land. If a pizza in Denmark or Ohio has smoked Gouda and pine nuts on it, it is in no small part due to LaDou. And Caioti Pizza Café is a shrine to LaDou’s creations. The barbecue chicken pizza, with slivered red onion, smoked Gouda and barbecue sauce instead of tomato, is definitive nostalgia, a taste of multiculti post-Olympics Los Angeles. 4346 Tujunga Ave., Studio City, (818) 761-3588. Sun.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. till 11 p.m.; brunch Sat. 9–11 a.m., Sun. 9 a.m.–3 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Street parking. MC, V. Contemporary California. $

Campanile

If it’s been a while since you visited Campanile, the home of big grilled-vegetable plates, giant blocks of seared protein and artfully homey desserts, its menu, which has evolved into a relatively refined document of Italian-influenced cooking, may come as a bit of a surprise. These days, Campanile feels like a cosmopolitan Tuscan restaurant that has just received its second Michelin star. The basic premise of Mark Peel’s cuisine is the perfection of Mediterranean peasant dishes, often in ways that may be incomprehensible to the Mediterranean peasants in question: the best farmers-market ingredients, assembled with chefly skill, and illuminating the spirit of each dish as if from within. 624 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-1447, www.campanilerestaurant.com. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Wed. 6–10 p.m., Thurs.–Sat. 5:30–11 p.m.; brunch Sat.–Sun. 9:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, DC, MC, V. California/Mediterranean. $$$

Casa Bianca

Of all the neighborhood pizza parlors in Los Angeles touted as the best this side of New Haven, one of them actually has to be the best. And my vote goes to Casa Bianca, especially if the pizza happens to include the fried eggplant, the sweetly spiced homemade sausage — or preferably both. The lines are extremely long, but the crust is chewy, and speckled with enough carbony, bubbly, burnt bits to make each bite slightly different from the last. Remarkable. And there’s freshly filled cannoli for dessert. 1650 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 256-9617. Dinner Tues.–Thurs. 4 p.m.–mid., Fri.–Sat. 4 p.m.–1 a.m. Beer and wine. Street parking. Cash only. Italian. $

Chameau

Chameau may describe itself as French-Moroccan, but the food is quite different from both the plain cooking you’ll find at the fashionable couscous cafés in Paris’ Marais and the new-style cuisine you’ll find in Mediterranean restaurants that happen to feature a tagine or two on their menus. Chef Adel Chagar’s flavors may be modern, lightened and fresh, but his techniques, many of them, come from the traditional Moroccan kitchen, whose methods tend to be fairly languid: chicken-stuffed b’stilla made with incredibly time-consuming warka, couscous made by hand and lamb-shoulder tagines cooked until the meat almost dissolves into a lamb-scented cloud. 339 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 951-0039. Dinner Tues.–Sat. 6–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Street parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V. French Moroccan. $$$

Chiche´n Itza´

The community-run market La Paloma is everything a shopping center should be in Los Angeles, a collection of shops selling art and artisanal products, a bakery, and a food court representing the gamut of Mexican regional cooking in Los Angeles: a Oaxacan juice bar, a Michoacán-style taqueria — and Chichén Itzá, which may have the most serious Yucatecan cooking in town, its menu a living, chile-intensive thesaurus of the panuchos and codzitos, sopa de lima and papadzules, banana-leaf tamales and shark casseroles that make up one of Mexico’s most thrilling cuisines. From the delicious banana leaf–baked pork called cochinito pibil to the cinnamon-scented bread pudding called caballeros pobres, Chichén Itzá, named for the vast temple complex north of Cancún, is as fresh as a marketplace restaurant in Mérida. In Mercado La Paloma, 3655 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 741-1075. Sun.–Wed. 8 a.m.–6:30 p.m., Thurs.–Sat. 8 a.m.–8 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Yucatecan. $$

Chosun Galbi

For decades, Woo Lae Oak on Western was the favorite Korean restaurant of people who didn’t like Korean food all that much, a fancy place where they could convince themselves that galbi wasn’t too different from an ordinary steak dinner. Now that the Koreatown Woo Lae Oak is on hiatus, the conservative Koreatown choice is probably Chosun Galbi, a pleasant restaurant with the patio-side glamour of a Beverly Hills garden party: granite tables, gorgeous waitresses and expensive, well-marbled meat that glows as pinkly as a Tintoretto cherub. Don’t miss the chewy cold buckwheat noodles with marinated stingray. And make sure to throw some shrimp on the barbie, too — the pricey little beasties crisp up like a dream. 3330 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 734-3330. Open daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Korean barbecue. $$

Citizen Smith

Your opinion of Citizen Smith probably has a lot to do with whether you think it’s amusing or insulting to be offered a bottle of Mickey’s Big Mouth with your fried chicken, whether you’d enjoy a live DJ with a fondness for Foghat and ELO, and whether you’d be comfortable in a restaurant whose specialty is probably giant onion rings, stacked on a plate like so many snow tires in a garage — the dining room feels like a lavish backstage party after a Strokes concert, although probably with less vegan food. 1600 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 461-5001. Lunch Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m.-3 p.m.; dinner nightly 6 p.m.-2 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. American. $

Ciudad

Cuchifritos at happy hour. Fatally strong mojitos. Peruvian-style ceviches and Bolivian-style tamales, Caribbean paella and a classic pescado Veracruzana, Bahia-style moqueqas and a fritanga that would knock them silly in Managua. Ciudad, the Pan-Latin downtown outpost of Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, may be all things to all people, but especially to all people whose pleasures include bending an elbow every now and then. Daytime is for office workers; at night, two-thirds of the customers are dressed in black. 445 S. Figueroa St., downtown, (213) 486-5171. Mon.–Tues. 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m., Wed.–Thurs. 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m., Sat. 5–11 p.m., Sun. 5–9 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Pan-Latino. $

Clementine

At lunchtime, there may be no happier place in Los Angeles than Annie Miler’s cheerful takeout café across from Century City, home to Southern-ham biscuits, a showcaseful of carefully composed roast-vegetable salads, and an anthology’s worth of grilled cheese sandwiches crisped in an Italian sandwich press. The hot chocolate, made in the style of the Parisian tearoom Angelina, is a local legend. 1751 Ensley Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 552-1080, www.clementineonline.com. Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–7:30 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.–5 p.m. No alcohol. Parking in rear lot and on street. AE, DC, MC, V. American. ¢

Cobras & Matadors

Steven Arroyo is the Bill Graham of tapas in Los Angeles, the impresario who made the concept of Spanish drinks ’n’ snacks as popular as sushi platters after dozens of others had tried and failed. And his dark, buzzy tapas parlors are teeming dens of olive oil and garlic, octopus and cured pig, grilled meats and pungent concoctions of seafood and paprika and beans rushed to the table still crackling in unglazed crocks. The Los Feliz restaurant has a nicely curated list of Spanish and South American wines; at the Hollywood restaurant, you buy your wines from the shop conveniently located next door. When you bring your prize back to the table, don’t be surprised if the counter guy is standing right there, corkscrew in hand. 7615 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 932-6178. 4655 Hollywood Blvd., Los Feliz, (323) 669-3922. Dinner Sun.–Thurs. 6–11 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6 p.m.–mid. BYOB. Valet parking. MC, V. Spanish. $

Cora’s Coffee Shoppe

An artfully rusted pergola, a patio shaded with crimson bougainvillea, a burbling Tuscan fountain, the low rumble of the nearby sea — Cora’s is to grungy beach cafés what a James Perse T-shirt is to something out of a Hanes three-pack: superficially similar, but perfected, made luxurious, and vastly more expensive. But sometimes you want a chef’s salad, and sometimes you want an insalata caprese made with farmers-market tomatoes and oozingly creamy burrata cheese; sometimes ham ’n’ eggs, and sometimes San Daniele prosciutto. Cora’s hamburgers are magnificent, drippy creatures made of coarsely chopped, beyond-prime Wagyu cow, and for dessert, there is an intense homemade burnt-caramel ice cream bitter enough to make a 10-year-old child weep. 1802 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 451-9562. Tues.–Sat. 7 a.m.–9 p.m. Closed Sun.–Mon. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Continental, Italian-based. $

Cut

Have you ever tasted Kobe beef — not the admittedly decent American wagyu from the same breed of cow, but the real stuff, the $200-a-pound steaks imported from Japan? It’s like something Willy Wonka might make if he were into steak instead of chocolate, a single mouthful of which pumps out flavor after flavor after flavor, every possible sensation of smoke and char and tang and animal richness you can imagine until your teeth have extracted all the juices and the remaining fibers lie limply on your tongue. If you happen to be at Wolfgang Puck’s new steak house, Cut, which at the moment is probably the best steakhouse in the world that doesn’t happen to be in either Tokyo or Buenos Aires, and you happen to have in front of you what would ordinarily be a perfectly splendid corn-fed Nebraska strip steak, aged 35 days, seared at 1,200 degrees then finished over oak to a ruddy, juicy medium rare, and garnished, perhaps with bone marrow, you would take one bite of your neighbor’s Kobe steak and look around for rocks to throw at your own hunk of meat. If you have $120 million to spend on a painting, you might as well buy yourself a Klimt. If you have $120 to spend on a steak, you might want to consider visiting Cut — and splitting the Kobe strip three or four ways, because there is no way you can finish even a small example by yourself. Inserted into a new Richard Meier–designed space in the Regent Beverly Wilshire, in a semicircular all-white room whose angles make you feel as if you’re dining in a mid-’60s Frank Stella painting, Cut is to the other steak houses in town at the moment what Spago was to the pizza parlors back in 1981. Lee Hefter’s warm veal tongue with salsa verde, succulent maple-glazed pork belly, crisp-skinned potato “tart tatin” and pan-roasted Maine lobster with truffle sabayon are quite unlike anything before served in Los Angeles. 9500 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 275-5200. Dinner Mon.–Sat. Full bar. Valet parking a half-block south of Wilshire Blvd. on Rodeo Drive. AE, D, MC, V. California Contemporary. $$$

Daikokuya

Sooner or later, all ramen lovers end up at Daikokuya, a loud, steamy noodle shop just a few blocks from the Music Center. Most ramen shops offer an endless list of possibilities; at Daikokuya, the choice is taken out of the equation — you will have the thin, curly noodles in pork broth, or you will have them kotteri-style, in even stronger pork broth, a formidable liquid, opaque and calcium-intensive, almost as rich as milk. Floating with the noodles are plump slabs of simmered pork, slices of seasoned bamboo shoots and a dusky, soy-simmered egg. When you’re in the mood, you can improve on the kitchen’s excesses by spooning in minced garlic from a tabletop jar. 327 E. First St., downtown, (213) 626-1680. Lunch Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–2:20 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Thurs. 5 p.m.–mid., Fri.–Sat. 5 p.m.–1 a.m., Sun. noon–7 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $

Europane

A good croissant is a joy forever, crisp, airy and saturated with butter, large enough to take the sting off a double cappuccino but not so large that you’d be tempted to use it for anything so vulgar as a “croissandwich.” On a good day, Europane’s magnificent croissants could be mistaken for France’s best in a police lineup — the crisp, buttery chocolate croissant could make you swoon. Toss in the homemade granola, the epochal bread pudding and the gooiest egg-salad sandwich in town, and it’s no wonder that Europane’s regulars treat the bakery more as a permanent residence than as a café. 950 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 577-1828. Mon.–Sat. 7 a.m.–5:30 p.m., Sun. till 3 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. MC, V. California Bakery. ¢

Father’s Office

Creator of the most-imitated Los Angeles dish since Nancy Silverton reinvented an obscure Piedmontese dessert called panna cotta, Sang Yoon is the baron of the new-style cheeseburger: dry-aged beef cooked exceptionally rare, dressed with onions cooked down to the sweetness of maple syrup, Gruyère and Maytag blue cheeses, smoky bacon, arugula, and a tomato compote, all on a French roll. I don’t know if it’s a new health-department regulation, but I’m not sure that a restaurant opened in Los Angeles County this year without some kind of variation on Yoon’s burger. I expect to see a ciabatta-based version at Jack in the Box any day now. Still, at Yoon’s adults-only microbrew fiefdom, dining is a full-contact sport. If you want one of the few tables in the bar, you will have to circle the room until somebody gets ready to leave, then plunge into a scrum. 1018 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-BEER, www.fathersoffice.com. Food served Mon.–Wed. 5–10 p.m., Thurs. 5–11 p.m., Fri. 4–11 p.m., Sat. 3–11 p.m., Sun. 3–10 p.m. 21 and over only. Beer and wine. Takeout. Difficult street parking. AE, M, V. California Contemporary. $

Fogo de Chao

Churrascarias, southern Brazilian steak houses, are not new in Los Angeles. But Fogo de Chao is less a restaurant than a sizzling theme park of meat, a quarter-acre of sword-wielding gauchos, smoldering logs, and soaring walls perforated with bottles of the heartier red wines. It is a land of razor-sharp knives and double-weight forks, A-1 sauce and chimichurri, and all the dripping, smoking flesh you can eat carved off swords at your table: $48.50, cash on the barrelhead. 133 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 289-7755. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Thurs. 5–10 p.m., Fri. 5–10:30 p.m., Sat. 4:30–10:30 p.m., Sun. 4–9:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Southern Brazilian. $$$

Ford’s Filling Station

Ford’s, whose chef-owner is Benjamin Ford, formerly of the restaurant Chadwick, is a bar that happens to have ambitious, organic food as opposed to a restaurant that happens to have a bar attached, a gastropub where you can enjoy pretty decent cooking while being bounced around like a pachinko ball. If you manage to power your way to a barstool or to an actual table, you will find most of the usual Los Angeles gastropub classics. If you like the fried Ipswich clams at Jar, you will probably like Ford’s rudely indelicate version. There is a hamburger tricked out with blue cheese and an onion compote, the requisite butter-lettuce salad with bacon, and a decent selection of cheeses and meats, some of them procured from Armandino Batali in Seattle, to help down the wine. And there’s butterscotch pudding for dessert. 9531 Culver Blvd., Culver City, (310) 202-1470. Mon.–Fri. 11 a.m.–11 p.m., Sat. 5–11 p.m. Full bar. Parking at city lot around the corner. AE, MC, V. California Contemporary. $

Geisha House

Geisha House is a monument of conspicuous consumption, bottles of champagne and expensive sake ornamenting the tables, the most exquisite tuna tartare, the vast, two-story post–Blade Runner space teeming with light, color and horny 25-year-olds with corporate American Express cards. You have never seen so many people at one time focused on getting fed, tipsy and laid — Geisha House is like a giant orgone box fueled by strong drink and sea-urchin roe, and lewd, happy vibrations seem to radiate in concentric circles throughout the restaurant. Have you seen this menu before? Of course you have, at Koi. 6633 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 460-6300. Sun.–Wed. 6–10:30 p.m., Thurs. 6–11:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6 p.m.–1 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $$

Golden Triangle

Possibly the most compelling culinary reason to visit Whittier, the suburb that gave us Richard Nixon, MFK Fisher and conceptual artist Mark Kostabi, Golden Triangle may be the best Burmese restaurant in California. The place specializes in the garbanzo-flour-thickened fish chowder called moh hin gha, the biryani-style rice dish called dun buk htaminh, and lap pad thoke, a salad made with pickled tea leaves that have the consistency of stewed collard greens and the caffeine kick of a double espresso. Then there’s the incredible ginger salad, biting shreds of the spice tossed with coconut, fried garlic, fried yellow peas, peanuts and sesame seeds. If the world ever gave it a chance, ginger salad might have the universal appeal of a Big Mac. 7011 S. Greenleaf Ave., Whittier, (562) 945-6778. Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.–9 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. AE, D, MC, V. Thai-Burmese. $

Grace

If Los Angeles restaurants are like rock bands, Neal Fraser is the glamorous indie-rock hero, a chef with a wobbly, idiosyncratic style that couldn’t be further from the finish-fetish crowd pleasers, a detailed, market-oriented sort of New American cuisine, heavy on French technique and inspired by the strong flavors and intricate presentations of New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The cooking can still be a little rough around the edges at Grace, but Fraser is clearly aspiring to greatness here — this is tremendously ambitious food. And there are freshly fried jelly doughnuts for dessert. What more could you want? 7360 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 934-4400. Tues.–Thurs. 6–10:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–11 p.m., Sun. 6–10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking; difficult street parking. AE, MC, V. American. $$

The Griddle

The Griddle is an instant Hollywood institution, an alternate universe of unshaven, bed-headed young actors in muscle shirts and those who would ogle them, of guys from the craft unions, gangs of pretty script readers, and middle-aged men preening in Robert Evans shades. The Griddle is probably the best place in Los Angeles to take an out-of-town niece intent on spotting a Fox network star. Coffee comes to the table in squat plunger pots, and the enormous pancakes are available blanketed in cinnamon streusel, or spiked with Kahlua and Bailey’s, or smothered under an improbable mass of whipped cream and crumbled Oreos, and they are not the best pancakes in Los Angeles, but they’re good enough. 7916 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 874-0377. Breakfast and lunch Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–4 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 8 a.m.–4 p.m. Beer. Lot parking in rear. AE, D, MC, V. American. $

The Grill on the Alley

Yes, the steaks are good; yes, the martinis are perfect; yes, the corned-beef hash (well-done, thank you very much) is sublime. But within the decidedly nonsoothing confines of the Grill, where show-business moguls still pack into the booths in the front dining room as thickly as commuters on a rush-hour MTA bus, you will also find this town’s essential rice pudding: touched with cinnamon, drizzled with heavy cream, coaxing the nutty, rounded essence out of every grain of rice. If Musso’s rice pudding is a lullaby, the Grill’s is a lullaby as sung by Renée Fleming. 9560 Dayton Way, Beverly Hills, (310) 276-0615. Mon.–Thurs. 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m., Sun. 5–9 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking after 6 p.m.; free street parking before that. AE, D, DC, MC, V. Traditional American Steak House. $$

Guelaguetza

Are you in the mood for fried grasshoppers with chile and lime? Even if you aren’t, at Guelaguetza, the best of the Oaxacan-style restaurants by far, you’ll find dishes you may have only read about in cookbooks or glossy magazines. At the original Koreatown location of Guelaguetza, not far from the biggest concentration of Oaxacan restaurants and bakeries this side of Oaxaca itself, you’ll find tortilla-like tlayudas the size of manhole covers, delicate beverages made from squash, and delicious, mole-drenched tamales. The black mole, based on ingredients the restaurant brings up from Oaxaca, is rich with chopped chocolate and burnt grain, toasted chile, and wave upon wave of textured spice — it’s as simple yet as nuanced as a great, old Côte Rôtie. 3337½ W. Eighth St., Los Angeles, (213) 427-0779. Open daily 8 a.m.–10 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Oaxacan. $

Haru Ulala

Los Angeles is in the middle of an izakaya renaissance, an explosion of intimate, beer-soaked taverns flipping out beakers of sake, small plates of tofu and braised seaweed, and small, oily grilled fish of every description. Haru Ulala, a neighborhood izakaya affiliated with the nearby Go-55 sushi bar, may have neither the encyclopedic sake list nor the fancy seafood selection of some other restaurants, but the steamed cow tongue, yellowtail with daikon radish, and simmered Kurobuta pork belly are delicious, the green-tea noodles are soothing, and the restaurant is open very late on weekends. If you grew up in Japan, the crayon-scrawled menu may well remind you of home. 368 E. Second St., downtown, (213) 620-0977. Mon.–Thurs. 6 p.m.–mid., Fri.–Sat. 6 p.m.–2 a.m. Street parking. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $$

Hatfield’s

In restaurants as in actresses, forced quirkiness can be an unforgivable flaw. But some restaurants, like the comfortable, modern Hatfield’s near Hollywood, can’t help themselves. Instead of merlot and Chianti, there is a weirdly wonderful list of old Loire whites, stern reds from Austria and the Italian Alps, and German “champagne.” The croque madame sandwich is made with yellowtail and prosciutto instead of Gruyère cheese and pale ham, and tentacles of Japanese octopus just happen to curl around pillars of vanilla-braised hearts of palm. The warm summer salad could be mistaken for an appetizer of tiny, corn-stuffed ravioli, and the rare leaves of roasted squab breast are garnished not with the usual squab-leg confit, but with the leg meat smashed flat, breaded, and fried into a kind of tiny schnitzel, served with red cabbage. Even the steak and potatoes are odd — the rare onglet is predictable enough, and the garnish of horseradish-crusted short ribs is nothing we haven’t seen before, but the smokiness of the dish comes not from the meat but from the mashed potatoes. From most chefs, this style might come across as affected, but from Quinn and Karen Hatfield, whose cooking at small-plates restaurant Cortez in San Francisco sometimes seemed like Mediterranean cuisine reflected in a fun-house mirror, I would expect nothing less. 7458 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-2977. Mon.–Sat. 6–10 p.m. Beer and wine. AE, MC, V. California Contemporary. $$

Hungry Cat

The best hamburger in Los Angeles? It may be the pug burger at Hungry Cat, an oozingly juicy patty of beef dressed with onions and full-fat blue cheese on a crusty La Brea Bakery roll, a $14 hamburger that leaves Hollywood’s other high-end hamburgers dog-paddling in the relish. And Hungry Cat doesn’t even specialize in burgers — it is Suzanne Goin’s answer to Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, a place to drop into for a dozen oysters or a bowl of shrimp, a boiled crab or a bowl of chowder. The wine list is tiny, but includes a ton of obscure seafood-friendly wines, and everything is available by the glass. The primary object of desire here is the lobster roll, an abstracted rendition of the New England beach-shack standard transformed into a split, crisp, rectangular object about the size of a Twinkie. In Cape Porpoise, the $22 it costs would buy you a lobster the size of a small pony. But we are in Hollywood, where the next acceptable lobster roll may be 2,800 miles away. 1535 N. Vine St., Hollywood, (323) 462-2155, www.thehungrycat.com. Lunch Tues.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; brunch Sun. 11 a.m.–3 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Sat. 5:30 p.m.–mid., Sun. 5–11 p.m. Beer and wine. Validated parking. AE, MC, V. Seafood. $$

Jar

Any place in town can serve you a grilled T-bone, but Suzanne Tracht’s snazzy steak house is strictly postmodernsville, man, chefly riffs on the strip steak and the porterhouse, the hash brown and the French fry that may or may not incorporate every last pea tendril and star-anise infusion in the Asian-fusion playbook, if that happens to be your desire. Some people we know have never even tried the steak here — the braised pork belly, the glorious pot roast, and the various and sundry wonders of Nancy Silverton’s Mozzarella Monday are just too compelling. But the steak is about as good as it gets. The décor is straight off the set of a Cary Grant movie. And there’s banana cream pie. 8225 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-6566. Dinner Mon.–Thurs. 5:30–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5:30–11 p.m.; brunch Sun. 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. California American. $$

JiRaffe

JiRaffe is a pleasant space in a bright corner of Santa Monica, all neo-Palladian windows, white tablecloths and the kind of minimal Gallic décor you see in the restored farmhouses they feature in Elle Decor. Raphael Lunetta’s food tends to be elegant, almost ladylike, with the sort of seasonality you might expect from a serious restaurant located a few hundred yards from the best farmers' market in Southern California, and careful, restrained presentations. JiRaffe is a real California bistro, the kind of casual yet slightly formal place the Ivy only pretends to be, and with much better food. In restaurants as in architecture, sometimes less is more. 502 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 917-6671. Mon. 6–9 p.m., Tues.–Thurs. 6-10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m., Sun. 5:30–9 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. California Bistro. $$

Josie

Josie LeBalch, who spent her 20s as the chef of an Italian restaurant but grew up the daughter of one of L.A.’s most famous French chefs, is known for her game dishes but may be as deft with a composition of baby squid and lentils as she is with all-American preparations of duck, wild boar and elk. She is large. She contains multitudes. She makes chocolate bread pudding for dessert. 2424 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 581-9888. Dinner Mon.–Thurs. 6–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6-11 p.m., Sun. 5:30–9 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Progressive American with French and Italian. $$

Kagaya

Shabu shabu is pretty basic: a slice of prime meat swished through bubbling broth for a second or two, just until the pink becomes frosted with white. If you’ve done it right — and if the quality of the ingredients is as high as it is at Little Tokyo’s superb (and expensive) Kagaya — the texture is extraordinary, almost liquid, and the concentrated, sourish flavor of really good beef becomes vivid. 418 E. Second St., downtown, (213) 617-1016. Tues.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m., Sun. 6–10 p.m. Wine, beer, sake. Lot parking. DC, MC, V. Japanese. $

Kiriko

Kiriko may be the great undiscovered sushi bar in Los Angeles, and Ken Namba’s traditional yet creative sashimi surpasses most of what is sold at three times the price. Namba smokes his salmon over smoldering cherry wood, slices it thick and wraps it around spears of ripe mango: The sashimi is soft and luscious, salty and sweet, penetratingly smoky yet delicate — one of the most magnificent mouthfuls of food imaginable. There is Spanish mackerel dressed with grated ginger and ponzu, and mackerel as rich as ripe Brie. The sea bream pulled out of Japan’s Inland Sea is almost gooey in its extreme freshness, dusted with the zest of a tiny yuzu, served with a tiny dish of salt grated to order from a pink, quartzlike stone. One of the gifts of a great sushi chef is the ability to appear casual, unhurried, processing the food for an entire restaurant while looking as serene and unbothered as a flirting Fred Astaire. 11301 Olympic Blvd., No. 102, West Los Angeles, (310) 478-7769. Lunch Tues.–Fri. noon–2:15 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Sun. 6–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Parking lot. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $$

Koi

Koi’s warren of intimate patios and forested corners is a hookup nirvana, a dining room whose seating chart seems ripped straight from the pages of Us Weekly, and the lighting, a grid of dim spotlights more intricate than anything Robert Wilson ever devised for an opera production, makes even modestly attractive people look like extras on The O.C. Its matrix of sushi, celebrity and sex bumped up the paradigm. It is widely believed, however, that the post-Matsuhisa-style cuisine at Koi is an afterthought, that the avocado-laden tuna tartare on crispy won tons, the tuna sashimi with jalapeño, and the albacore Italiano are secondary to the rush, the scene, even the steak. But somebody has been paying attention behind the sushi bar lately. And if you’re going to eat something like a baked-crab hand roll, you might as well have a good one. It’ll give you something to do while you eavesdrop on Lindsay Lohan or the Black Eyed Peas. 730 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 659-9449. Dinner Mon.–Wed. 6–11 p.m., Thurs. 6–11:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–mid., Sun. 6–10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards. California Contemporary. $$

Krua Thai

Like any respectable Thai joint in this part of Los Angeles, Krua Thai features a sign outside boasting of serving the Best Noodles in Town, but unlike the rest of them, Krua Thai has a pretty fair title to the claim. In a city where great Thai noodle shops are all that keeps some of us going some days, when the anguish of the Dodgers’ annual collapse can be eased, at least a little, by the knowledge of a great bowl of boat noodles, Krua Thai’s pad Thai and pad kee mao and rad na and pad see ew may be the very best of all. In its way, Krua Thai could be the Thai equivalent of a delicatessen like Canter’s: cheerful, fast, popular across ethnic lines, and open very, very late. 13130 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, (818) 759-7998. Open daily 11 a.m.–3:30 a.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. All major credit cards accepted. Also at 935 S. Glendora Ave., West Covina, (626) 480-0116. Thai. $

Langer’s

A short subway ride away from practically anywhere in Los Angeles, the best pastrami sandwiches in America are kitty-corner from the tamale vendors of MacArthur Park, slapped together by the venerable countermen at Langer’s Delicatessen. The rye bread, double-baked, has a hard, crunchy crust. The meat, dense, hand-sliced, nowhere near lean, has the firm, chewy consistency of Parma prosciutto, a gentle flavor of garlic, and a clean edge of smokiness that can remind you of the kinship between pastrami and Texas barbecue. 704 S. Alvarado St., Los Angeles, (213) 483-8050. Mon.–Sat. 8 a.m.–4 p.m. Beer and wine. Curbside service (call ahead). Validated lot parking (on corner of Westlake Ave. and Seventh St.). MC, V. Jewish Deli. ¢

La Terza

There is an entire school of cooking sometimes called Cal-Italian, but this isn’t that — although dishes like cool, sliced veal tongue slicked with puréed herbs, thick, smoky grilled rib steaks served with Umbrian rice beans, and farro salad with pecorino cheese may well qualify as such. What chef Gino Angelini is attempting at La Terza may be no less than re-imagining California food through the prism of his advanced Italian technique, re-imagining California as an Italian province that happens to have a few agricultural virtues of its own. La Terza is a modern Italian restaurant, perfumed by a wood-fired rotisserie, powered by Angelini’s earthy sauces thickened with vegetable purées, and lubricated by a sharp wine list put together by Claudio Blotta. 8384 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (323) 782-8384. Breakfast 7–11 a.m. Lunch 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.; dinner 5:30–11 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Italian. $$

Lawry’s the Prime Rib

When Italian gourmets hit Los Angeles, do they pine for Valentino? When Japanese aesthetes blow into town, do they exercise their credit cards at Nishimura? Do famous French chefs hang out at L’Orangerie? Of course not — like everybody else, they head straight for Lawry’s, which would be the all-American house of beef if it weren’t conceived 70 years ago as an homage to a British institution its owner had never seen: the London restaurant Simpson’s in the Strand. Lawry’s is actually better than the original: vast barons of good American beef cut to order tableside on enormous silver carts, and served with horseradish and Yorkshire pudding. Relocated across the street a few years ago and restored to what it must have looked like in the ’30s, Lawry’s is that perfect Los Angeles thing, a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Calling Jean Baudrillard . . . 100 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 652-2827. Mon.–Thurs. 5–10 p.m., Fri. 5–11 p.m., Sat. 4:30–11 p.m., Sun. 4–10 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet and street parking. All major credit cards. American. $$

Literati II

This is the other kind of California restaurant, a place just as happy to serve you a really good pork chop as an exquisite organic salad, a stiff drink as a bottle of Viognier, and it seems as if some of the customers practically live here: setting up camp beneath the framed pencils and the circa-1964 photographs of Santa Monica, borrowing novels from the dining-room bookcase to read over lunch — like Literati Café next door, from which it spawned, Literati II is popular with screenwriters and others eager for a second home. Chef Chris Kidder and pastry chef Kimberly Sklar are both veterans of Campanile in the very best way, in love with woodsmoke and seasonal farmers’ market produce, generous portions and plenty of herbs; tapping old Mediterranean traditions and making them their own — don’t miss the pasta with arugula pesto or the hot churros with bitter chocolate. This is one of the most appealing new Westside restaurants in years. 12081 Wilshire Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 479-3400. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.-Thurs. 6–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5:30–10 p.m.; brunch Sat.–Sun. 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Full bar. $2 valet parking in rear. AE, MC, V. California Contemporary. $$

Lodge

A waitress will try to sell you a third or fourth martini. The $75 porterhouse-for-two starts to seem not only possible but desirable in the heat of The Lodge moment, and if you do the math, it is one of the least costly items on the menu. But, for example, while every steak house in town has the au courant wedge-of-iceberg salad, The Lodge ups the ante by pairing its wedge with another wedge. The potatoes are not just baked, but salt-baked, crunchy-skinned, accompanied by enough condiments to crank the vibe from Ornish all the way up to Atkins with just a few dips of the fork. 14 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 854-0024. Open nightly 5 p.m.–1 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. California Steak House. $$

Los Balcones del Peru

A scant block below the glowing Sunset + Vine complex, so close to the ArcLight Theater that it shares its parking lot, Los Balcones del Peru lies at the precise border of redeveloped Hollywood and its shadow, a breath of authenticity a few steps south from the overamped velvet-rope district, and home to camarones a la piedra, a warm shrimp preparation from the tropical northern coast of Peru that is one of the most formidable ceviches in town. Los Balcones also may be the only Peruvian restaurant in town without tapes of Andean panpipe music, which is almost a miracle, at least if you ignore the occasional charanga version of “Feelings.” It is easy to spend hours here after a movie at the ArcLight, eating fried fish, fried-chicken “chicharrones,” and scallops broiled with Parmesan cheese, drinking Peruvian beer from the Inca city of Cuzco. 1360 N. Vine St., Hollywood, (323) 871-9600. Sun.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Validated parking at ArcLight Cinema. AE, MC, V. Peruvian. $$

Lou

If pigs had their way, pig candy would be made out of chocolate — better yet, out of chocolate that made its way into their troughs. But for better or worse, pig candy is the vernacular name for a snack made out of smoky, thick-cut bacon baked with lots and lots of brown sugar until it transforms itself into demonically fragrant slabs that bear more than a passing resemblance to pork-belly terrine. You want some of this stuff. Really you do. Lou, a tiny, wonderful wine bar on the south end of Vine, serves a pretty decent range of artisanal cheeses, the garlic-laced salamis of Seattle’s Armandino Batali, and slivers of Kentucky ham. The wine list is pleasantly oddball, thick with rustic bottles of obscure country wines. Lou has a minor specialty in both long-braised meats and tasty vegetarian soups. Still, on cool nights there may be nothing better than a plateful of pig candy, a bowlful of olives and a glass of organic Côtes du Luberon. 724 N. Vine St., Hollywood, (323) 962-6369. Mon.–Thurs. 5–11 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5 p.m.–mid. Wine. Lot parking. MC, V. California Contemporary. $$

Lucques delicious: Harissa-marinated chicken with baked ricotta
Lucques delicious: Harissa-marinated chicken with baked ricotta
Lucques

The California-Mediterranean cooking of Suzanne Goin, which is feminine in all the best ways, is profoundly beautiful in its simplicity, and there is satori to be found in every bite of grilled fish, every herb salad. When she’s on, Goin teases out the flavor from a tomato with the precision of a sushi master, makes textural contrasts dance, plays with bursts of acidity, deep, fleshy resonance and the resinous flavors of fresh herbs. Lucques, which is named for a vivid-green variety of French olive, is located in Harold Lloyd’s old carriage house, boasts an ultrasleek Barbara Barry design and is home to one of the nicest patios in West Hollywood; but on loud weekend nights, the restaurant can sometimes seem as if it is about 90 percent bar. 8474 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (323) 655-6277. Sunday nights feature three-course prix fixe dinners. Lunch Tues.–Sat. noon–2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Sat. 6–11 p.m., Sun. 5:30–10 p.m. Full bar (limited bar menu available 10 p.m.–mid.). Valet parking. AE, MC, V. French. $$

Magnolia

Magnolia is the very model of a useful restaurant, open after the clubs close but prepared to make you eggs Benedict for brunch the next day, suitable both for a first date and an impromptu burger after a movie at the ArcLight, with an outdoor dining room suited to long conversations and an indoor one so loud that conversation is moot. The wine list is short and pleasant. The menu of big salads, hearty pastas, hummus with pita, and pan-seared halibut is probably the sort of thing you could assemble yourself out of ingredients bought from Trader Joe’s, but the kitchen does a pretty good job — and the point is to be out, with music, cocktails and your friends. 6266 1/2 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 467-0660. Open daily 11 a.m.–2 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. California Contemporary. $$

Mama’s Hot Tamales Cafe´

On weekends, a line of wooden tamale carts runs along the eastern edge of MacArthur Park, each run by a vendor from a different part of Latin America selling his or her particular kind of tamale: banana-leaf-wrapped Oaxacan tamales oozing black mole sauce, wet chicken tamales from Honduras, green-chile tamales from Acapulco, densely sweet little torpedoes from El Salvador and grainy tamales from Michoacán. The driving force behind the vending district is Mama’s Hot Tamales Café, a sprawling, brightly painted complex across the street from the park that provides the kinds of curatorial services and logistical support to the district’s tamale masters that in a better world MOCA would be providing to Los Angeles artists, and also happens to sell a rotating selection of the handmade tamales in the restaurant itself. 2124 W. Seventh St., Los Angeles, (213) 487-7474. Open daily 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. No alcohol. Coffee bar. Takeout. Validated parking around the corner on Lake Street in the Unified parking lot. AE, MC, V. Mexican. $

Mama Voula’s

Mama Voula, who commands her namesake kitchen as if she were commanding a nuclear submarine, is an overwhelming presence in this family-owned Greek restaurant. Expect the sharp funk of garlic and charring meat, decent seafood, and a killer gyro that combines the virtues of extreme lambiness with a delicate, carbonized crunchiness. 11923 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-9464. Mon. 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Tues.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun. 1–9 p.m. BYOB. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Mediterranean/Greek. $

Marouch

If you wanted to imagine you were in Beirut, you could stop by this place a few times a day, easy — midmornings for a piece of baklava and a thimbleful of Turkish coffee, lunch for a kebab and a bottle of Lebanese beer, late afternoons for a bowl of dense lentil soup. At dinner, it’s a splendid, wild-thyme-dusted version of the toasted-bread salad fattoush, unsurpassed makanek sausages dressed with lemon and oil, the fine hummus with pine nuts, the grilled quail, and the complicated Lebanese desserts. Year after year, Marouch becomes nothing but better. 4905 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 662-9325. Tues.–Sun. 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. All major credit cards. Middle Eastern/Lebanese/Armenian. $

Matsuhisa

Nobu Matsuhisa, the baron of a sushi empire that stretches from London to Peru and the inventor of a strange, new cuisine, is perhaps the only Japanese chef in Los Angeles whose influence is felt as strongly in Japan as it is in California. Whenever you taste chopped chiles on sashimi or warmed oil on a sliver of fluke, that’s Matsuhisa’s influence at work. His restaurant is the most influential in California since Spago. And if, when you visit, reserving far in advance and rubbing shoulders with both Robert De Niro and busloads of Japanese tourists, you notice that the famous omakase menu hasn’t changed in years, that you are still going to get new-style shrimp sashimi, sashimi salad, miso-marinated cod and (if you rate it) toro tartare with caviar, you may remember to sit at the sushi bar next time and pull the best out of the chefs. 129 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 659-9639. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:45 a.m.–2:15 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Sun. 5:45–10:15 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards. Japanese. $$$

Max

Fusion chefs, even the best of them, tend to fall on one side of the spectrum or the other, either dressing up essentially Western techniques with Asian flavors and exotic ingredients or supercharging existing Asian dishes with professional French technique. Chef Andre Guerrero, who is Filipino-American, seems to split the difference about as adroitly as anyone in town. So where his “ahi towers” are nothing like traditional sushi, for example, the perfectly engineered cylinders of fried sticky-rice cake, seaweed, pickled ginger, wasabi-flavored flying-fish roe and raw fish have all the sensations of a great, trashy tuna roll. This is a midlevel restaurant, not a temple of cuisine. But Guerrero’s formidable chicken adobo is a remarkable, remarkable dish. 13355 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 784-2915. Sun.–Thurs. 5:30–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5:30–11 p.m. Full bar. Street parking. Takeout. California Asian. $$

Meals by Genet

At the heart of Fairfax Avenue’s Little Ethiopia, Meals by Genet is more or less an Ethiopian bistro, which is to say a homey, soft-lit dining room that looks at least as French as it does African. The menu is short: crisp-skinned fried trout, half a dozen stews, and Genet Agonafer’s delicious version of kitfo, a dish of minced raw beef tossed with warm, spiced butter. And her dorowot is jaw-droppingly good, vibrating with what must be ginger and black pepper and bishop’s weed and clove, but tasting of none of them, so formidably solid that the chicken, which is well-cooked, becomes just another ingredient in the sauce. Even an Ethiopian grandmother would approve. 1053 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-9304, www.mealsbygenet.com. Lunch and dinner Wed.–Fri. 5:30 p.m.–10 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Catering. Street parking. MC, V. Ethiopian. $$

Member’s only: M Café de Chaya’s California Club
Member’s only: M Café de Chaya’s California Club
M Cafe´ de Chaya

We hope you will humor us when we admit that we really like the macrobiotic food at M Café de Chaya — a bright, cheerful diner in a Melrose mini-mall that probably feeds more actresses per square inch than anywhere this side of a craft-services truck — partly because almost anything tastes great when it is made with vegetables bought at a decent growers' market, but also because the kitchen lets flavor come first. As grisly as a macrobiotic club sandwich may sound, the triple-decker itself is pretty good — blackened strips of tempeh “bacon,” as crunchy and salty as well-done rashers of the real thing; lettuce and tomato, rather tart; and the sweetish goosh of soy mayonnaise is exactly right. 7119 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 525-0588. www.mcafedechaya.com. Open daily 9 a.m.–9 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Limited lot parking. All major credit cards. California Contemporary. $

Metro Cafe´

At first glance, Metro Café might be one of the least-promising restaurants in Los Angeles, a faux-’50s diner attached to a stucco chain motel. But the strange, fragrant dishes everybody seems to be eating bear little resemblance to the food listed on the menu. Metro Café is basically an informal Serbian restaurant disguised as an American diner, or at least an American diner that sometimes serves a Serbian dish or two: white-bean soup, flavored with ham imported from a Santa Monica deli; spareribs grilled with lots of garlic; or a grilled trout, nothing fancy, plopped on a bed of garlicky greens. If the owners are feeling charitable, there may be crepes for dessert, special, secret crepes stuffed with Nutella and raspberry jam. 11188 Washington Place, Culver City, (310) 559-6821. Breakfast and lunch 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; dinner 6–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Parking in Travelodge lot. MC, V. Serbian. $$

Michael’s

Back in its Nouvelle Cuisine days, Michael’s may have been the first market-oriented restaurant in Southern California, a showcase not just of glorious art — Rauschenberg, Stella, Graham, Hockney — but of tiny vegetables, local meats, California wines, and luxury foodstuffs identified by port of origin. There still may be no better afternoons in Los Angeles than those spent on Michael’s garden patio, hefting Christofle silver, inhaling Dungeness crab salad, house-made gravlax, tweaked yellowtail sashimi and an oaky, buttery Napa Chardonnay with just enough bottle age. Michael’s still feels a little like an exclusive party that somebody forgot to invite us to. 1147 Third St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-0843. Mon.–Fri. noon–2:30 p.m. & 6–10:30 p.m., Sat. 6–10:30 p.m. Full bar. Nonsmoking, including patio. Takeout. Valet and street parking. All major credit cards. California. $$$

Mimosa

In an era when two splashy new restaurants out of three try to re-define cooking as we know it, there is a certain guilty pleasure in Jean-Pierre Bosc’s thoroughly unambitious restaurant: steak frites instead of wok-charred escolar; chicken-liver pâté instead of seared foie gras with honey and figs. Few Food Network scouts are likely to get excited about the “tarte tatin” of pungently herbed tomatoes on a buttery puff-pastry tart shell smeared with pesto, though it’s the sort of dish you’d like to eat every night; or the Alsatian-style tarte flambée, a thin, crisp pizza crusted with an eggy cheese custard and a few slivers of smoked ham; or the thick, proper Provençal fish soup; or the plate of French charcuterie. In fact, Mimosa resembles an ordinary restaurant in almost every way except one: The food is really good. 8009 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-8895. Dinner Mon.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m. Beer and wine. Valet and street parking. AE, D, MC, V. Reservations recommended on weekends. French Bistro. $$

Mission 261

Mission 261 may be the most ambitious Chinese restaurant ever to open in the United States, a mammoth Cantonese banquet hall fitted into a sprawling adobe complex built 100 years ago as San Gabriel’s City Hall. The suckling pig, a house specialty, is made from an animal so young it is practically prenatal; the braised pork belly is the essence of melting fat; the fried whole chicken with fermented taro is almost a sacrament. The steamed rock cod is the standard by which all local Chinese kitchens should be measured, and if you’re into plundering the endangered-species list, Mission 261 does that too. And the dim sum is extraordinary, possibly the best in California at the moment — less a teeming mass-feed than a sort of aestheticized dim sum meal, where you sit with a pot of really great chrysanthemum tea and a few small plates of attractive, exquisitely prepared food, the clatter of plates replaced by the contemplative sounds of live Chinese music. 261 Mission Drive, San Gabriel, (626) 588-1666. Mon.–Fri. 10:30 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5:30–10 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 9 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5:30–10:30 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, D, MC, V. Cantonese. $

Take a load off Manny: Musso & Frank’s cashier is all about the Benjamins
Take a load off Manny: Musso & Frank’s cashier is all about the Benjamins
Musso & Frank Grill

Before Musso & Frank Grill became a martini-fueled Hollywood clubhouse, the place where Faulkner blew out his liver and generations of character actors learned to show up on Wednesday for the chicken potpie, the restaurant was practically a showcase for what was then considered California cuisine, a genteel marriage of the local produce, abundant local fisheries and masculinized lunchroom cooking: avocado cocktails smeared with sweet, pink dressing and frigid bowls of chilled consommé; great, naked planks of boiled finnan haddie and dainty plates of crab Louie; creamy Welsh rabbit served over crustless triangles of toast and kidneys Turbigo. This is what the cosmopolitan life was like, before cosmopolitans. 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 467-7788. Tues.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Full bar. Validated parking in rear. AE, DC, MC, V. American. $$

New Concept: Asparagus tastes better with pork
New Concept: Asparagus tastes better with pork
New Concept

From the week it opened, New Concept was celebrated as a beacon of Chinese cuisine in Los Angeles, an elegant Monterey Park restaurant with actual mainland ownership, elaborate photo menus and a chef, Chen Chen Liang, who had reinvented the possibilities of Chinese cooking in America. The foodie community swooned over the coffee-flavored pork, the oatmeal prawns and the soda-pop chicken wings. But you’ll do better with more traditional Hong Kong–style dishes: succulent roast duck seasoned with cinnamon; Shunde-style fish soup; rich Macao-style roast pork; smoky clay-pot rice with barbecue; and steamed whole fish, which can be ruinously expensive if you forget to determine the price. The morning dim sum, ordered from menus instead of carts, yields the gooiest rice noodles in Monterey Park, crisp barbecued-pork pies, and luxuriously plump steamed chicken feet with chile. 700 S. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, (626) 282-6800. Dim sum Mon.–Fri. 10:30 a.m.–3 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 10 a.m.–3 p.m.; dinner nightly 5–11 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. MC, V. Chinese. $$$

Nook

Sometimes you get the feeling that the owners of Nook are running less an American bistro than a joke about an American bistro. As faithfully as they reproduce the fundamentals of the kinds of fancily unfancy restaurants that pepper every urban neighborhood from San Diego to Augusta, Maine, they are also poking fun at them with every dried-cranberry garnish and each day-boat scallop, each obscure Belgian beer and each boutique Oregon Pinot Noir, each crusty roast chicken and dish of iconic macaroni and cheese. Almost every aspect of the restaurant, from its double-height communal table to the admonition on the menu that cell-phone use interferes with the controls on the deep fryer, is as ironically pitch-perfect as the Neil Diamond songs on a Silver Lake DJ’s iPod. 11628 Santa Monica Blvd., No. 9, West Los Angeles, (310) 207-5160, www.nookbistro.com. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Sat. 5–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. American Bistro. $$

Norman’s

Norman Van Aken’s style of cooking, sometimes called Floribbean cuisine and developed at his Palm Beach restaurant, processes Caribbean recipes through the matrix of French technique, often inflecting a dish with an Asian flavor or two: the kind of French toast you’d hope to find in an $800-per-night Antigua resort, for example, piled with seared foie gras and gingered lime zest, or duck cracklings served with a loose polenta that can’t decide whether its flavors come from Valencia or the Yucatán. Sommelier Peter Birmingham, the public face of Norman’s, seems to have as much fun matching wines (and rums) with the restaurant’s crazy-quilt cuisine as his best customers do drinking them. If you remember to reserve, Friday night is Pig Night: suckling pig cooked on the patio and seafood paella, all for $19. 8570 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-2400. Tues.–Thurs. 6–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m. Lounge open Tues.–Sat. at 5:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. Takeout. AE, MC, V. Caribbean. $$

O-Dae San

This is the grandest fish restaurant in Koreatown, a vast, sleek space with a Korean-style sushi bar running the length of the dining room. The private dining rooms are sumptuous. The valet parkers handle more $150,000 Mercedes sedans than anyone else this side of Stuttgart. There are massive live halibut in the sushi tanks and subtleties to O-Dae San’s long menu that we won’t even try to address, because we can rarely tear ourselves away from the ever-fascinating al bap, a big bowl of sushi rice frosted — frosted! — with a half-dozen different kinds of fish eggs, laid out in contrasting streaks radiating from a plop of creamy sea-urchin roe at the center of the bowl like rays from the sun. Nothing, though, goes better with a brimming glass of soju than something like O-Dae San’s hwe do bap, which is to say bits of impeccably fresh sashimi topped with vinegared slivers of cucumber, strips of toasted seaweed, black sesame seeds, tossed at the table with sweet bean sauce and a raw egg. 2889 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 383-9800. Open daily 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Korean. $$

101 Noodle Express

You could drive by this mini-mall café place a thousand times without easing up on the gas. But the restaurant is home to the Shandong-style beef roll, a splendid object of desire, a massive, bronzed construction of crisp Chinese pancakes, slivers of stewed beef and a sweet, house-made bean paste that bears the same relationship to ordinary hoisin sauce that a L’Orangerie’s demi-glacé might to a slug of canned brown gravy. It is a simple composition, and yet not; ordinary street food, but raised to the transcendent level of a great carne asada taco or a Modena housewife’s very best homemade tortellini. The actual house specialty of this Shandong-style café is dezhou chicken, a tan, tender bird that has been simmered with soy sauce and spices, served at room temperature in all of its plain, wrinkly splendor, but there is also a pretty extensive roster of dumplings at 101, distinctly handmade things that couldn’t be more different from their glossy cousins at the more famous Din Tai Fung. 1408 E. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, (626) 300-8654. Mon.–Fri. 10 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5–10 p.m. Sat.–Sun. 10 a.m.–11 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Chinese. $

Orris

Is Orris in any sense a sushi bar? No. It is a great place to drop in for new-age sashimi like smoked scallops garnished with salmon roe, seared tuna with sweet onion marmalade, or even what amounts to lamb sashimi. Its location, convenient to the Nuart and the manga-intensive shopping strip anchored by the Giant Robot complex, couldn’t be better, and the small sake selection is swell. 2006 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 268-2212. Dinner Mon.–Fri. 6–10 p.m., Sat. 5:30–10:30 p.m., Sun. 5:30–9:30 p.m. Beer, wine and sake. Lot parking (valet Wed.–Sat.). AE, D, MC, V. Small-plate cuisine. $$

Ortolan

While L’Orangerie is straggling, Bastide is closed for remodeling, and half the émigré chefs in California are putting their knowledge of Escoffier to work cooking pasta, Ortolan, which reflects Christophe Emé’s Loire-trained palate, may be the most serious French restaurant in Los Angeles. If you are a fan of intimate, dungeonlike restaurant spaces, dining rooms so dark that diners are issued little flashlights along with their menus, and presentations that extend to mushroom soup served in test tubes and fish seared on hot river rocks, then Ortolan may be the restaurant for you. Actually, Ortolan’s basic premise — high-level French cooking served in a supper-club setting — is an attractive one. And Emé, who co-owns the restaurant with his paramour Jeri Ryan, is remarkably skilled: The squab, served as a roasted breast paired with a leg confit, is exceptional, as are the crisp langoustines, and the complex tasting menus are among the most accomplished in town. 8338 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (323) 653-3300. Tues.–Sat. 6–10 p.m. (Closed Sun.–Mon. in summer.) Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. French. $$$

Philippe the Original

The place is so much a part of old Los Angeles that sometimes it feels as if it isn’t really a part of Los Angeles, as if it belongs to an older city without chrome. The French-dipped sandwiches of lamb or beef are wet and rich, with something of the gamy animal pungency of old-fashioned roast meat. And if you enjoy the sight of eyes bulging and nostrils flaring as people encounter depth charges of ultrahot mustard in their sandwiches, there’s even something of a floor show. 1001 N. Alameda St., Los Angeles, (213) 628-3781. Open daily 6 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer and wine. For takeout, must call ahead, and order must be over $40. Lot parking. Cash only. American. ¢

Phillips’ Barbecue

Crusted with black and deeply smoky, the spareribs at Phillips’ Barbecue are rich and crisp and juicy, not too lean. Beef ribs, almost as big around as beer cans, are beefy as rib roasts beneath their coat of char, tasty even without the sauce. They are the best ribs in Los Angeles, perhaps the only ribs that can compete on equal terms with the best from Kansas City or Tuscaloosa. And the extra-hot sauce, so crowded with whole dried chiles that the ribs occasionally look as if they have been embellished with Byzantine mosaics, can be pretty exhilarating. Tucked into a mini-mall between a liquor store and the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original Phillips’ might be a little hard to find, although if you keep your window open, you should be able to sniff it out from half a mile away. But the newest location, in the well-scrubbed chalet-style Crenshaw building that until recently housed the well-regarded Leo’s Bar-B-Q, is only a couple of blocks south of the 10 freeway. 4307 Leimert Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 292-7613. Mon. 11 a.m.–8 p.m., Tues.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–mid., Sun. 11 a.m.–6 p.m. 2619 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 731-4772. Tues.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Also at 1517 Centinela Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 412-7135. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Barbecue. $

Pie ’n Burger

Even in Los Angeles . . . where it is possible to eat not only wood-fired goat-cheese pizza with duck sausage and sun-dried fennel, but also reasonably authentic Merida-style cochinito pibil and properly made Cambodian catfish amok, hand-ground, of course, steamed to a fine fluffiness and garnished — why not! — with a single, perfect banana blossom, sometimes only a hamburger will do. Pie ’n Burger is an essential address at these times. Like all good hamburgers, paper-jacketed Pie ’n Burgers are all about texture, the crunchy sheaf of lettuce, the carbonized surface of the meat, the outer rim of the bun crisped to almost the consistency of toast, plus pink dressing and soft, sweet grilled onions. The fries are good too. 913 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 795-1123. Mon.–Fri. 6 a.m.–10 p.m., Sat. 7 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun,. 7 a.m.–9 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash or check. American. $

Pink’s

Consider the Pink’s dog, uncouth and garlicky, skin thick and taut, so that when you sink your teeth into it, the sausage . . . pops . . . into a mouthful of juice. The bun is soft enough to achieve a oneness with the thick chili that is ladled over the dog, but firm enough to resist dissolving altogether, unless you order it with sauerkraut. And why wouldn’t you? Avoid the fries. 709 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood, (323) 931-4223. Sun.–Thurs. 9:30 a.m.–2 a.m., Fri.–Sat. 9:30 a.m.–3 a.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. American. ¢

Pollo a la Brasa

If you are anywhere near Koreatown when the need for takeout chicken strikes, follow your nose to Pollo a la Brasa, a Peruvian chicken joint all but concealed behind a fortress of hardwood logs. The smoky, crisp-skinned chicken here, sizzled over a hot wood fire and served with the incendiary Peruvian herb sauce aji, is what happens when you cross a chicken with a smoldering log. 764 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 382-4090. Lunch and dinner Wed.–Mon. 11 a.m.–10 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. MC, V. Peruvian. ¢

Rub-a-dub dinner: Michael Cimarusti of Providence
Rub-a-dub dinner: Michael Cimarusti of Providence
Providence

Ever since Michael Cimarusti left the stoves at Water Grill, well-heeled Los Angeles fish lovers have been waiting expectantly for his new restaurant in the old Patina space, which was widely rumored to become the Los Angeles equivalent of fish palaces like Le Bernardin and Oceana in New York. At this glowing new restaurant, he managed to fulfill even those super-high expectations — this is among the best restaurants ever to hit Los Angeles. It just doesn’t get better than Cimarusti’s tartare of live spot prawns served with buttery leaves of brik pastry, sautéed squid with piquillo peppers and meltingly soft slivers of stewed pig’s ear, or a terrine of foie gras with muscat gelée that may be the best foie gras preparation in this foie gras–happy town. 5955 Melrose Ave., Hancock Park, (323) 460-4170. Mon.–Fri. 6–10 p.m., Sat. 5:30–10 p.m., Sun. 5:30–9 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Modern American Seafood. $$$

Red Corner Asia

The signature attraction at Red Corner Asia is a phenomenon known as Volcano Chicken, a rotisserie-cooked creation brought to the table trailing liquid streamers of fire, rising from the flames like a phoenix, whole and reborn and new as the day. Red Corner Asia describes itself as a Thai grill, and although you will find all the usual Thai curries, pan-fried noodles and crocks of chicken-coconut soup, the emphasis is on the gentler products of Thai live-fire cooking: candy-coated grilled pork ribs; crosshatched bits of grilled squid served with a tart green dipping sauce; and all the traditional satays. You can’t go wrong with the grilled-meat salads — a delicious num tok of dripping-rare grilled beef tossed with mint leaves and citrus; grilled calamari salad; a spicy salad of grilled pork. And after the meal, if you aren’t in the mood for coconut soup spiked with taro balls, know that, as George Clinton once said, “fried ice cream is a reality.” Flaming fried ice cream, with chocolate sauce and sliced mango. 5267 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 466-6722, www.redcornerasia.com. Open daily 11 a.m.–2 a.m. No alcohol (liquor license pending). Takeout. Valet parking on weekends. AE, MC, V. Asian Fusion. $$$

Sapp Coffee Shop

Sapp may be the best lunchroom in Hollywood, a bright Thai restaurant, unrelentingly yellow inside, sharing a small mini-mall with a video shop and a place to get griddled Thai desserts; crowded at noon not with revelers, but with people who have come to Thai Town to shop and eat spicy, stinky boat noodles, remarkable grilled chicken, and bright-green “jade” noodles tossed with Chinese barbecue. Sapp is the Thai equivalent of Pie ’n Burger, a lunchroom where the virtues of homeliness become extraordinary when put in context with the shiny, glittery surfaces against which it might compete. 5183 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 665-1035. Lunch and dinner 7 a.m.–8:30 p.m. Closed Wed. No alcohol. Takeout. Lot parking. Cash only. Thai. $

Sona

What we know as California cuisine may be dedicated to revealing produce at its best, but David Myers goes after nature with blowtorches and microtomes and dynamite, determined to bend the old woman to their will. A sliver of watermelon may be less a sliver of watermelon than a wisp in a chilled soup, a salted crunch tracing the shape of a curl of marinated yellowtail, a glistening cellophane window into the soul of a pistachio, a texture in a sorbet, a jelly exposing its cucumberlike soul. The morning after nine courses at Sona (this is one restaurant where only the tasting menu will do), it will already seem like a half-forgotten dream. 401 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 659-7708. Dinner Tues.–Thurs. 6–10 p.m., Fri. 6–11 p.m., Sat. 5:30–11 p.m. Closed Sun.–Mon. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, DC, MC, V. Modern French (with global influences). $$$

Spago

Wolfgang Puck long ago re-defined Americans’ idea of what a great restaurant might be. His cooking always had a deceptive air of simplicity about it, like the culinary equivalent of a caprice by Yo-Yo Ma on the Today show. In the past several years, bolstered by imaginative executive chef Lee Hefter and pastry chef Sherry Yard, he’s re-defining our idea of what Spago might be — and the roasted-beet cake with goat cheese, the turbot with Chino Ranch vegetables, and the roast duck perfumed with star anise are good enough to make you forget the duck-sausage pizza and the chopped-vegetable salad that originally made Spago famous. Is a tasting menu within your budget? Don’t think twice. 176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 385-0880. Lunch Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:15 p.m., Sat. noon–2:15 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Thurs. 5:30–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 5:30–11 p.m., Sun. 5:30–10:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. California with Asia and Europe. $$$

Susina Bakery and Cafe´

Crackling croissants, ultrarich café au lait and tiny fruit tarts are the signature attractions of Susina, along with a carefully curated collection of artisanal chocolates and an incredible buttery puff-pastry turnover stuffed with spinach and garlic that always sells out way too early in the afternoon. There are coffeehouses in Hollywood that stay open somewhat later, and others equipped with multiple electrical outlets and three kinds of WiFi access, but it is hard to imagine a more civilized setting in which to spend quality time with your laptop, fueled with hot pressed sandwiches and lubricated with fresh-pressed citrus in a fairly impressive replica of a Belle Epoque Parisian café. And the kitchen has started experimenting with American pies. 7122 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 934-7900. Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–11 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.–11 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.–11 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. Street parking. AE, MC, V. European Bakery. ¢

Table 8

At this painfully hip, house-music-blasting restaurant, Govind Armstrong has finally found his groove, which is to say beachy, vaguely Mediterranean California cuisine with impeccably sourced meat and fish, plenty of organic farmers'-market vegetables, and a rather generous notion of the places where bacon might be appropriate. (Jonathan Waxman’s cooking comes to mind, as do the first years of Campanile, one of the restaurants where Armstrong has worked.) In Los Angeles, this is what passes for classicism, sunny, global-ingredient cooking updated by a chef whose frequent-flier miles do not necessarily take him only to France. 7661 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 782-8258. Mon.–Thurs. 6–10 p.m. (late-night menu until 10:30), Fri.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m. (late-night menu until 11:30). Full bar. Takeout. Valet and street parking. All major credit cards. California Seasonal. $$$

Tacos Baja Ensenada

In most of Mexico, the words estilo Ensenada signify just one thing: fish tacos, specifically the fried-fish tacos served at stalls in the fish market down by the docks. In East L.A., you will come no closer to the ideal than these crunchy, sizzlingly hot strips of batter-fried halibut, folded into warm corn tortillas with salsa, shredded cabbage and a squeeze of lime, sprinkled with freshly chopped herbs and finished with a squirt of thick, cultured cream. Entire religions have been founded on miracles less profound than the Ensenada fish taco. 5385 Whittier Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 887-1980. Lunch and dinner Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–9 p.m. No alcohol. Lot parking. Cash only. Mexican. ¢

Tiara

Its giant range hood tricked out to resemble the kind of glittery diadem that Godzilla might wear when he was exploring his feminine side, Tiara, Fred Eric’s new Fashion District restaurant-cum-organic-market, shoots the girly aesthetic up with steroids. Eric is the chef who practically invented the hypereclectic style of the modern Los Angeles restaurant, and the Asian-tinged, pan-Mediterranean menu is painted in 17 shades of farmers’-market salad. There are bubbly lengths of curry-brushed flatbread served with little dishes of baba ghanoush and puréed fresh fava beans, a Cuban-style pressed sandwich made with smoked duck and house-pickled cucumbers, and noodle dishes vegan and not — I suspect there is not a single peculiar diet or system of culinary belief the kitchen is not prepared to handle. 127 E. Ninth St., downtown, (213) 623-3663. Food served Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. Market open Mon.– Fri. 8 a.m.–5 p.m. Beer, wine, sake, and Champagne only. Street parking. All major credit cards. California Seasonal. $$

Torafuku

Devoted to the Japanese cult of perfect rice, Torafuku is the first American outpost of a small Tokyo-based chain. The restaurant’s rice is warm and fluffy with a sort of toasty quality that supposedly comes from a blast of heat at the end. It’s the focus of Torafuku’s expensive, luxurious izakaya menu: at the center of set meals, accompanied only by miso soup and pickles; topped with fried prawns or marinated tuna; or as tou-ban-yaki, seared in a superheated clay bowl with bits of seaweed, tiny dried sardines and a lightly poached egg. 10914 Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 470-0014. Lunch Mon.–Sat. noon–2:30 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Thurs. 6–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. 6–10:30 p.m., Sun. 5–10 p.m. Beer, wine and sake. Valet and street parking. AE, MC, V. Prix fixe starts at $80, set dinners $38, bento lunches $8.50–$12, à la carte meals vary, takeout $55. Traditional Japanese. $$

Trattoria Tre Venezie

Tre Venezie, a tiny Italian restaurant in Pasadena’s Old Town, could easily pass for one of the better trattorias in Udine — the cooking, mostly in the Slavic-influenced style of Friuli, northeast of Venice, is superb. True, the careful authenticity of the food must be balanced against the fact that dinner with a nice wine can cost not much less than a roundtrip ticket to Venice itself, and the wine list is egregiously overpriced. But I love the orzotto, a soothing Friulian stew of tripe and grain that emphasizes the gentle muskiness, the slippery contours of the meat, without an offending chile in sight. 119 W. Green St., Pasadena, (626) 795-4455. Lunch Fri. 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.–Sun. 5:30–10 p.m. Full bar. Valet and street parking. AE, DC, MC, V. Italian. $$

Urasawa

This tiny, luxurious sushi bar is famously the most expensive restaurant in California, and most nights, it is also the best, with fish unseen anywhere else in the country. Other sushi restaurants display fish triple-wrapped behind glass in a refrigerated case; at Urasawa, the fish is out in the open, lighted as carefully as the tomatoes in a Carl’s Jr. ad, all glistening pinks and glowing translucence. If a particular leaf or species of clam is in its Japanese two-week season, it will certainly be on your plate. Waitresses refill your glass with sake, replace hot towels and remove plates so efficiently that you are barely aware of them at all. And Urasawa’s artistry with a fillet is surpassed in the United States only by that of his mentor, Masa Takayama — there is, one senses, an enormous effort to keep the customers in a bubble of serenity, an uninterrupted flow of bliss. 218 N. Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-8939. Mon.–Sun. 6–8:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet. AE, MC, V. Japanese. $$$

Vietnam House

Golden Deli, you may not need to be told, has the best cha gio, fried Vietnamese spring rolls, in the observable universe, and the owners know it. Vietnam House, its sister across the street, has the same cha gio, and gently spiced pho, and the rice-noodle mats called banh hoi that you wrap into lettuce bundles with grilled beef and lots of herbs. But Vietnam House is almost the anti–Golden Deli, with the functional air conditioning, beer, daily specials and its acceptance of credit cards that its older sibling lacks. Almost as a public service, Vietnam House prepares bo bay mon, the fabled Vietnamese seven-course beef dinner that was a specialty in this dining room when it was still called Pagode Saigon. 710 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (626) 282-6327. Lunch and dinner Mon., Wed., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.–Sun. 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Beer only. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Vietnamese. $$

Vincenti

The mastery of the wood-burning oven at Vincenti can be deduced from a single bite — a scallop, say, sprinkled with bread crumbs and baked in its shell until it just sizzles. The adjacent rotisserie turns out the best restaurant version of porchetta in Los Angeles, loin and belly wrapped into a spiral, seasoned with fennel, and spit-roasted to a crackling, licorice-y succulence. Vincenti is the real thing, a spare, elegant embassy of modern Italian cooking: minimally sauced pastas and house-cured meats; pungent flavors and abundant herbs; and an obsession with grilled steak that is unmistakably Italian. Perfection does not come cheap, and it is certainly possible to eat several mediocre Italian meals elsewhere in this neighborhood for the price of a single superb one here. Should that thought cross your mind, it is good to remember that Monday is pizza night. 11930 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 207-0127. Mon.–Sat. 6–10 p.m., Friday for lunch noon–2 p.m. Full bar. Takeout. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Italian. $$

Wat Thai

At the northern end of drab, endless Coldwater Canyon Boulevard lies this massive, gold-encrusted Thai Buddhist temple, grounds crowded with parishioners, saffron-robed monks, and small children who run about as if the temple were a private playground. On weekend afternoons and during festivals, the air around the temple almost throbs with the smells of Thai cooking: meat grilling at satay stands, the wheat pancakes called roti sizzling on massive griddles, pungent, briny salt crabs being pounded for the ultraspicy green-papaya salad. This spread may be more or less the equivalent of the smothered chicken and collard greens eaten after services at some African-American churches, and it feels just as homely; the inexpensive Thai feast is open to everyone who cares to come. 8225 Coldwater Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 785-9552, Open weekends only 10 a.m.-2 p.m. No alcohol. Parking lot. Cash only. Thai. $$

Wilshire

Wilshire is an odd place, a handsome patio restaurant that seems unable to decide whether it is a farm-driven restaurant or a roaring bar and grill; a celebration of the seasons, a paparazzi’s stalking ground, or a celebration of the organic wine and food that can be purchased with an American Express card. Christopher Blobaum, who has run more high-end hotel kitchens than anybody else this side of Escoffier, seems to be running his dream restaurant, and he obviously spends some of his happiest hours at the Santa Monica farmers' market. At Wilshire, there will always be jewel-like baby Nantes carrots the week that baby Nantes carrots hit the best farm stands; sweet satsuma tangerines in the duck confit salad at the time satsumas are at their peak; tiny purple artichokes when tiny purple artichokes are the thing — the stuff that defines Southern California as a great agricultural region. 2454 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 586-1707. Lunch Mon.–Fri. noon–2 p.m.; dinner Mon.–Wed. 6–10 p.m., Thurs.–Sat. 6–10:45 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. California Seasonal. $$$$

Woodlands

In the afternoons, Woodlands is strictly a buffet restaurant, and on the steam table you’ll find the crunchy fried-lentil doughnuts called vada, puffs of poori bread, buttery rounds of paratha, knobby lumps of limp vegetable pakora, and a vat of Woodlands’ special lemon rasam, a thin, peppery Tamil vegetable sauce for rice that doubles as a soup and a healing tonic. Depending on the chef’s mood, you may find something mysteriously identified as moore khulambzu, a tart, runny, complex curry of yogurt and tiny fried-lentil dumplings that is among the best Indian dishes we have ever tasted. There are the usual south Indian starches too — the steamed rice cakes called iddly, the oniony porridge pancakes called uttupam, the mung-bean crepes called pesarat — served with the usual complements of sambar and chutney, and done extremely well. 9840 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Chatsworth, (818) 998-3031. Also at 11833 Artesia Blvd., Artesia, (562) 860-6500.Tues.–Sun. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. & 5–10 p.m. Beer and wine. Takeout. Lot parking. AE, MC, V. Indian. $$$