20/04/2011

MAGAZINE: Obama’s Young Mother Abroad

Obama’s Young Mother Abroad
Friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham
Stanley Ann Dunham at Borobudur in Indonesia, in the early 1970s.
The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.
Multimedia
Barack Obama with his mother in Hawaii.
The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.
The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”
Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”
Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann’s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.
The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.

Real-Life Lessons in the Delicate Art of Setting Prices

Small-Business Guide

Real-Life Lessons in the Delicate Art of Setting Prices

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
To raise prices, Naomi Poe, founder of Better Batter Gluten-Free Flour,  had to convince customers her products offered added value.
Setting prices can be tricky for a small business. If prices are too high, it is usually obvious, and there is an easy solution. But if they are too low, things can get complicated. That is because many business owners find it difficult to raise prices — even if they know they are losing money on every sale.
You're the Boss

Why Is It So Hard to Raise Prices?

Have you tried to raise prices? What has your experience been?
Quick Tips:
From Rafi Mohammed, a pricing consultant and author of “The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow” (Harper Business):
Create a baseline and set goals for improvement.
Don’t set prices only by marking up the cost of your product or service by a certain percentage. Look also at what your competitors charge and determine why your product is worth more.
Give your customers choices, like off-peak pricing or tiered pricing, where the price varies depending on enhancements to the product.
Talk to your customers to understand their needs. You may find they will pay more for access to a help line or would be willing to order in volume for a small discount.
The fear, of course, is that raising prices will send customers fleeing. While that can happen, many small businesses have raised prices and lived to tell about it.
They echo a common sentiment: setting prices strategically is not just about the numbers. Buyers are not necessarily looking for the best price, said Mark Kronenberg, founder of Math 1-2-3, a New York-based tutoring and test preparation company.
“I learned it’s a misconception that if you raise prices too much, you’ll have no business,” Mr. Kronenberg said. “There are many customers who shop based on quality, not lowest price.”
Over the years, some prospective clients have balked at Mr. Kronenberg’s rates — his highest hourly rate is now $200 — but he said the company has more than made up for the losses by attracting and retaining higher-end clients who are more inclined to keep a tutor for a long time.
“I think it’s best to avoid a race to the bottom,” he said. “It’s an easy race to win, but you won’t have a lot of profit to show for it.”
This guide offers examples of small-business owners who decided to raise prices and the lessons they learned.
DON’T ASSUME PRICE IS ALL About three years ago a computer error caused all of the prices on Headsets.com to be displayed at cost rather than retail. With the lower prices on display for a weekend, Mike Faith, the chief executive, expected sales to soar. Instead, the increase was marginal. “It was a big lesson for us,” Mr. Faith said.
He realized that sales for his company, which is based in San Francisco, were far less dependent on price than on what he now says differentiates his business: customer service. “Every call we get is answered by a human being within four rings,” he said, “and our reps are well trained and know a lot about the headsets.”
Since the incident, Mr. Faith has raised prices once, by 8 percent and without much fanfare, although regular customers were told in advance. The result? Revenue rose about 8 percent as well.
“Over all, we didn’t notice any change in sales revenues, but all our sales were of the higher margin,” he said. “Did some customers not like the price? Yes, I’m sure. But that’s the case with any price you charge — there’s always somebody cheaper. The truth about pricing is it’s an art with a little bit of science, rather than a science with a little bit of art.”
Melanie Downey, the owner of Wilava, which manufactures and sells natural skin care products, also assumed that her customers were motivated primarily by price. Over time, she realized she had set prices too low to sustain the business. Yet she hesitated to raise them because she wanted her products to be affordable for those who needed them, and many of her customers have cancer or severe skin problems, including children with eczema. Concerned about maintaining trust, she decided not to act until after the company’s spring busy season.
The increase will range from 4 percent to 20 percent across Wilava’s line. Ms. Downey has been alerting customers in person and has gotten positive, even encouraging, feedback. In the next few weeks she will begin telling online customers. “I’m nervous about that,” she said, “since I won’t get immediate feedback.”
Still, looking back at the last year, she said, “I wish I had done this months ago.”
RIVALS’ PRICES MAY NOT MATTER A lot of small-business owners set prices just by looking at what their competitors charge. Naomi Poe, founder of Better Batter Gluten Free Flour near Altoona, Pa., learned that it is important to try to understand how your customers value your product.
In the food industry, Ms. Poe said, customers generally look for the cheapest price, but because her flour and baking mixes contain no gluten, they cost more to manufacture. She initially tried to compete with products that contain gluten on price but lost money on every sale.

SCIENCE: Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say

Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say
In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.
 
Blood type, meet bug type.
“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”
The research team, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they call enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.
Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of gut microbes. The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.
Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make.
Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).
The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.
“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.
Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said. Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.”
The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body— the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes. (For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.
As genetics developed, scientists learned how to study the microbiome by analyzing its DNA. Scientists extracted DNA fragments from people’s skin, saliva and stool. They learned how to recognize and discard human DNA, so that they were left with genes from the microbiome. They searched through the remaining DNA for all the variants of a specific gene and compared them with known species. In some cases, the variants proved to be from familiar bacteria, like E. coli. In other cases, the gene belonged to a species new to science.
These studies offered glimpses of a diversity akin to a rain forest’s. Different regions of the body were home to different combinations of species. From one person to another, scientists found more tremendous variety. Many of the species that lived in one person’s mouth, for example, were missing from another’s.
Scientists wondered if deeper studies would reveal a unity to human microbiomes. Over the past few years, researchers have identified the genomes — the complete catalog of genes — of hundreds of microbe species that live in humans. Now they can compare any gene they find with these reference genomes. They can identify the gene’s function, and identify which genus of bacteria the microbe belongs to. And by tallying all the genes they find, the scientists can estimate how abundant each type of bacteria is.
In the recent work, Dr. Bork and his team carried out an analysis of the gut microbes in 22 people from Denmark, France, Italy and Spain. Some of their subjects were healthy, while others were obese or suffered from intestinal disorders like Crohn’s disease. Dr. Bork and his colleagues searched for fragments of DNA corresponding to the genomes of 1,511 different species of bacteria. The researchers combined their results with previous studies of 13 Japanese individuals and four Americans.
The scientists then searched for patterns. “We didn’t have any hypothesis,” Dr. Bork said. “Anything that came out would be new.”
Still, Dr. Bork was startled by the result of the study: all the microbiomes fell neatly into three distinct groups.
And, as Dr. Bork and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, each of the three enterotypes was composed of a different balance of species. People with type 1, for example, had high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides. In type 2, on the other hand, Bacteroides were relatively rare, while the genus Prevotella was unusually common.
“You can cut the data in lots of different ways, and you still get these three clusters,” Dr. Bork said.
Dr. Bork and his colleagues found confirmation of the three enterotypes when they turned to other microbiome surveys, and the groups continue to hold up now that they have expanded their own study to 400 people.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 20, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of microbes relative to the number of cells in the human body. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes, not 10 trillion, and is made up of about 10 trillion cells, not one million. 

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Solar on the Water
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Elvin Batz, an installer at SPG Solar, checks the pontoon structure and panels of a floating solar array in an irrigation pond in Petaluma, Calif.
PETALUMA, Calif. — Solar panels have sprouted on countless rooftops, carports and fields in Northern California. Now, several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water.
Green
Mark Defeo
The solar panel system at Far Niente Winery involves nearly 1,000 panels on pontoons and about 1,300 panels on adjacent land.
Already, 144 solar panels sit atop pontoons moored on a three-acre irrigation pond surrounded by vineyards in Petaluma in Sonoma County. Some 35 miles to the north, in the heart of the Napa Valley, another array of 994 solar panels covers the surface of a pond at the Far Niente Winery.
“Vineyard land in this part of the Napa Valley runs somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 an acre,” said Larry Maguire, Far Niente’s chief executive. “We wanted to go solar but we didn’t want to pull out vines.”
The company that installed the two arrays, SPG Solar of Novato, Calif., as well as Sunengy of Australia and Solaris Synergy of Israel, are among the companies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals. While it is a niche market, it is potentially a large one globally. The solar panel aqua farms have drawn interest from municipal water agencies, farmers and mining companies enticed by the prospect of finding a new use for — and new revenue from — their liquid assets, solar executives said.
Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine, according to Philip Connor, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
Chris Robine, SPG Solar’s chief executive, said he had heard from potential customers as far away as India, Australia and the Middle East. When your land is precious, he said, “There’s a great benefit in that you have clean power coming from solar, and it doesn’t take up resources for farming or mining.”
Sunengy, based in Sydney, said it had signed a deal with Tata Power, India’s largest private utility, to build a small pilot project on a hydroelectric reservoir near Mumbai. Solaris Synergy, meanwhile, said it planned to float a solar array on a reservoir in the south of France in a trial with the French utility EDF.
MDU Resources Group, a $4.3 billion mining and energy infrastructure conglomerate based in Bismarck, N.D., has been in talks with SPG Solar about installing floating photovoltaic arrays on settling ponds at one of its California gravel mines, according to Bill Connors, MDU’s vice president of renewable resources.
“We don’t want to put a renewable resource project in the middle of our operations that would disrupt mining,” Mr. Connors said. “The settling ponds are land we’re not utilizing right now except for discharge and if we can put that unproductive land into productive use while reducing our electric costs and our carbon foot footprint, that’s something we’re interested in.”
Mr. Connors declined to discuss the cost of an SPG floating solar array. But he noted, “We wouldn’t be looking at systems that are not competitive.”
SPG Solar’s main business is installing conventional solar systems for homes and commercial operations. It built Far Niente’s 400-kilowatt floating array on a 1.3-acre pond in 2007 as a special project and has spent the last four years developing a commercial version called Floatovoltaics that executives say is competitive in cost with a conventional ground-mounted system.
The Floatovoltaics model now being brought to market by SPG Solar is the array that bobs on the surface of the Petaluma irrigation pond.
“We have been able to utilize a seemingly very simple system, minimizing the amount of steel,” said Phil Alwitt, project development manager for SPG Solar, standing on a walkway built into the 38-kilowatt array.
“With steel being so expensive, that’s our main cost,” Mr. Alwitt said.
Long rows of standard photovoltaic panels made by Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer, sit tilted at an eight-degree angle on a metal lattice fitted to pontoons and anchored by tie lines to buoys to withstand wind and waves.
The array, which is not yet operational, will be hooked up to a transmission line through a cable laid under the pond bed. Mr. Alwitt said that when the array is completed, 2,016 panels would cover most of the pond’s surface and generate one megawatt of electricity at peak output.
He noted that the cooling effect of the water increased electricity production at the Far Niente winery by 1 percent over a typical ground-mounted system.

Is Sugar Toxic?

Is Sugar Toxic?

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.
The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”
It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.
The number of viewers Lustig has attracted suggests that people are paying attention to his argument. When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment “surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,” not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.
This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?
It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.
If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

To read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?hpw

Is Sugar Toxic?

Kenji Aoki for The New York Times
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Q. and A With Gary Taubes

The author answered reader questions on the Well blog.
Multimedia
What the average American consumes in added sugars:

Related

Kenji Aoki for The New York Times
Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.
The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”
It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.
The number of viewers Lustig has attracted suggests that people are paying attention to his argument. When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment “surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,” not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.
This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?
It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.
If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

Gary Taubes (gataubes@gmail.com) is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy and the author of “Why We Get Fat.” Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

FASHION: This Is What ‘Parisienne’ Looks Like

Fashion & Style

Skin Deep

This Is What ‘Parisienne’ Looks Like

Alice Dison for The New York Times
Inès de la Fressange at her Roger Vivier office.
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: April 20, 2011
PARIS

Alice Dison for The New York Times
She graces a recent advertisement for Galeries Lafayette.
THE perfect Parisian woman is an illusion, bien sûr. But learning to pretend to be one is a serious business that dates back centuries.
It is an enterprise that continues to thrive with profitable how-to books like, “How to Become a Real Parisian,” “The Parisian Woman’s Guide to Style” and “All You Need to Be Impossibly French.” Now Inès de la Fressange, ex-runway model, former face of Chanel, Legion of Honor winner, designer, businesswoman and daughter of a marquis, offers yet another take on how to dress, shop, eat and act like a true “Parisienne.” This onetime muse of Karl Lagerfeld has spun her beauty and style tips into a confection of a best seller, “Parisian Chic: A Style Guide,” which has sold more than 100,000 copies in French and has just hit the American market.
The book might have withered and died on the shelves, except that Ms. de la Fressange combines a “je ne sais quoi” audacity with a sassy tone, and leaves readers believing that, by following her rules and experimenting with confidence, they, too, can be just like her.
They can’t.
Ms. de la Fressange is almost 6 feet tall, about 125 pounds and hipless. She has been the official model for Marianne, the ageless symbol of the French republic that appears on postage stamps and municipal buildings. She is wealthy and quadrilingual. She drinks wine and lots of strong espresso. She doesn’t diet. “Potatoes, chocolate, bonbons, wine, bread — I eat everything that’s good,” she said.
She is 53, but dared to pose topless for Madame Figaro magazine last year. “Photoshop helped,” she said, knowing you don’t really believe her. As for exercise, she said, “I thought about doing it once.”
She even smokes, a lot, but not in front of Americans. When asked about the three oversize ashtrays on the chrome and glass-topped table that serves as her desk, she replied: “You don’t see any ashtrays in my office! They are all art objects!”
She wears sensible lingerie from Etam and doesn’t use concealer to hide the circles under her deep-set eyes. One of her uniforms — a navy crew-neck sweater, rolled-up jeans and brown loafers — makes her look elegant-casual; most anyone else would look like the L. L. Bean catalog.
Ms. de la Fressange and Mr. Lagerfeld had a falling out decades ago but have since reconciled. After giving up modeling, Ms. de la Fressange became a fashion and accessories designer. Since 2003 she has been a “brand identity consultant” for Roger Vivier, the French shoe designer, installed in an office crammed with decades of her sentimental history in the Vivier boutique on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
She has just returned from Los Angeles, where she signed a contract to be one of the new faces for L’Oréal.
“I told them that France was an old country, and I guess they had to choose an old model,” she said: “They told me, ‘Oh, no, you aren’t the oldest. We had Jane Fonda.’ Facial bags are the new style!”
It is that blend of self-deprecation and irreverence, delivered in one-liners with deep, throaty laughter and a dramatic toss of the head, that both men and women find enticing.
“It’s the fantasy of the entire world of women, even French women, to be the perfect Parisienne,” said Bertrand de Saint-Vincent, the society columnist for Le Figaro and author of “Tout Paris,” a volume of essays on the Parisian glitterati, their style, their parties, their foibles. Asked who comes closest, Mr. Saint-Vincent does not hesitate. “Inès!” he said.
Despite her relaxed, flexible style, Ms. de la Fressange is a disciplined businesswoman who knows how to sell her brand: herself.
“She’s very clever because she knows the key to being beautiful is self-confidence,” said Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, a writer who captures the essence of Parisian style in “American Lady,” a new biography of Susan Mary Alsop, the American doyenne of French style. “In the end there’s no rule. It doesn’t matter what you wear, as long as it suits you, and as long as you feel pretty.”
Ms. de la Fressange is so strong a brand that the Galeries Lafayette department store is featuring this perfect Parisienne in a tie-in, with posters and advertisements of her in rolled-up jeans, black lace-up shoes, white socks and a beret, sitting behind an accordion. As for Ms. de la Fressange’s 239-page guidebook, it is printed with a leatherlike cover in shiny red with gold lettering. Ms. de la Fressange did the illustrations; her older daughter, Nine, who is 17, did the modeling. Its six-point guide to Parisian style includes a ban on coordinated outfits, feeling uncomfortable and looking rich.

THE ROYALS: Prince William to Spend Evening Before Wedding with Prince Charles

Prince William to Spend Evening Before Wedding with Prince Charles

Wednesday April 20, 2011 12:30 AM EDT
Prince William to Spend Evening Before Wedding with Prince Charles

On his final night as a single man, Prince William is expected to spend a quiet evening with his father Prince Charles at St. James's Palace in London, according to a report.

"Prince Charles is a loving father who's a lot closer to his sons than people often realize," a royal source tells Britain's Sun newspaper. "He's made it clear his priority in the hours before the wedding is his son."

St. James's Palace is just across Green Park and Buckingham Palace Gardens from the Goring Hotel, where William's bride, Kate Middleton, will spend her last night before the wedding, in the Royal Suite.



Charles, 62, will return from his Easter break in Birkhall, Scotland, to help William, 28, prepare for the biggest day of his life.

William, meanwhile, will be on duty with his helicopter search and rescue unit in the coming days, but make time for final wedding preparations and rehearsals in London.

To that note, his godfather, the former King Constantine of Greece, told the BBC that in a recent letter to William, he wrote: "It's quite dangerous to fly a helicopter when you're in love because you have to concentrate on keeping that machine in the air ... Be careful, concentrate on that helicopter now and think of Catherine later on."

CATHERINE ZETA-JONES BIPOLAR

Catherine Zeta-Jones: 'There Is No Need to Suffer Silently'

Update Wednesday April 20, 2011 11:00 AM EDT Originally posted Wednesday April 20, 2011
Catherine Zeta-Jones: 'There Is No Need to Suffer Silently' | Catherine Zeta-Jones
Catherine Zeta-Jones
 
When Catherine Zeta-Jones received a recent diagnosis of bipolar II disorder, a mental illness marked by prolonged periods of depression alternating with episodes of mild mania, she didn't hesitate to step forward with the news.

"This is a disorder that affects millions of people and I am one of them," the actress, 41, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement in this week's cover story. "If my revelation of having bipolar II has encouraged one person to seek help, then it is worth it. There is no need to suffer silently and there is no shame in seeking help."

In early April, the Oscar-winning wife of actor Michael Douglas, 66, and mom to son Dylan, 10, and daughter Carys, 8, checked in to Silver Hill Hospital, a mental-health facility in New Canaan, Conn.

Shaken by Douglas's battle with throat cancer, Zeta-Jones was privately struggling, a friend says. As Douglas recovered, Zeta-Jones didn't – and with her new movie, the romantic comedy Playing the Field, slated to start shooting in Louisiana, the actress realized she needed help in the face of mounting depression.

"The simple things would just seem overwhelming, like going out to dinner," says the close friend. "There was just a little piece of her chipped away. It was hard to watch because I knew how hard she was trying."

10 Ideas That Will Change the World

10 Ideas That Will Change the World
Our best shots for tackling our worst problems, from war and disease to unemployment and
deficits
By
BRYAN WALSH Thursday, Mar. 17, 2011
Today's Smart Choice: Don't Own. Share

Someday we'll look back on the 20th century and wonder why we owned so much stuff. Not that it wasn't great at first. After thousands of years during which most human beings lived hand to mouth, in the 20th century the industrial economies of the West and eventually
much of the rest of the world began churning out consumer goods — refrigerators, cars, TVs, telephones, computers. George W. Bush won re-election as President in 2004 in part by
proclaiming an "ownership society": "The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America."
Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the
subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us. Ownership
hadn't made the U.S. vital; it had just about ruined the country.

Maybe we're all learning though. You're not likely to be buying big-ticket items if you're out
of work, and even if you have a job and a house, good luck taking out a second mortgage to
help you scratch that consumerist itch. That's especially true for the young, who've borne
the brunt of the recession, with a jobless rate in the U.S. of about 20%.
And it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a
collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying
them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million
subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000
members the chance to share cars part-time.

Those companies, however, while successful, are essentially Internet-era upgrades of old
car- and video-rental businesses. The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption
can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods
via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers. There's a
green element here, of course: sharing and renting more stuff means producing and wasting
less stuff, which is good for the planet and even better for one's self-image. And renting a
power drill via SnapGoods for the one day you need it is a lot cheaper than buying it. It's a
perfect fit for an urban lifestyle in which you have lots of neighbors and little storage.

But the real benefit of collaborative consumption turns out to be social. In an era when
families are scattered and we may not know the people down the street, sharing things —
even with strangers we've just met online — allows us to make meaningful connections.
Peer-to-peer sharing "involves the re-emergence of community," says Rachel Botsman,
co-author of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. "This works
because people can trust each other."
We yearn to trust and be trusted — one researcher has found that people get a spike of the
pleasant neurotransmitter oxytocin when they're entrusted with another's goods. That's the
beauty of a sharing society — and perhaps the reason it might prove more lasting than one
built on ownership.

TIME MAGAZINE

What's Collaborative Consumption?

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

The Movement

TIME. names Collaborative Consumption as one of the “10 Ideas That Will Change The World
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before.

Watch the video: http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/spreadables/
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers charts this movement.


From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa), peer-to-peer travel (Airbnb) and car sharing (Zipcar or peer-to-peer RelayRides), Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business and reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume. New marketplaces such as TaskRabbit, ParkatmyHouse, Zimride, Swap.com, Zilok, Bartercard and thredUP are enabling “peer-to-peer” to become the default way people exchange — whether it’s unused space, goods, skills, money, or services — and sites like these are appearing everyday, all over the world.