Monsanto Westinghouse's New York Times/Los Angeles Times ReCap

Finding Historical Loops, and Opening Them
By MATT HABER
Published: March 5, 2006

For nearly 25 years, Lawrence Weschler has been collecting what he calls convergences, tearing out images from magazines, advertising and newspapers that recall works of art or nature or even science.

What differentiates his juxtapositions from the “A Looks Like B” school of cultural criticism (see Birth, Separated at), is that rather than close a loop, in his new book, “Everything That Rises” (McSweeney’s), a collection of dozens of these pairings, Mr. Weschler seeks to open it. “The convergence is like the rhyme,” he said recently in his art and ephemera-crammed office in the New York Institute for the Humanities, which he directs. “But then you’ve got to write the poem about it. The thing that makes it sing is the cascading of possible meanings.”

He first saw the photograph, above right, of firefighters at ground zero in a gallery show of Joel Meyerowitz’s work. It might not have put the average viewer in mind of a Civil War-era image, but nearly imperceptible cues — the placement of the flag, the position of the photographer — reminded Mr. Wechsler of a Civil War image, below, from 1861 of Union Army engineers (the photographer is unknown). Two photos speaking across generations. A rhyme — and a convergence — were born.

Related
Directions: They Don't Even Stand to the Right (March 5, 2006)
The Conversation: Go Ahead, Turn That Thing On (March 5, 2006)
Playing Politics With The Remote Control (March 5, 2006)
Directions: The Professor and the Chanteuse (March 5, 2006)
Directions: The Few, the Proud, the Ensemble (March 5, 2006)
Directions: The 60th Brick in His Wall (March 5, 2006)

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Uptown Girl
By BY ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC
Published: February 1, 2004

IT seems significant that on one of my first outings to the South Bronx, I couldn't find my way back home. I lived in Chelsea then, and I was still new to New York. I worked days as an editor at Seventeen magazine and did my freelance reporting at night. The Village Voice had assigned me a piece on drug dealers' girlfriends. I borrowed a friend's clunking car to take some of the girls clubbing. Entering a pool hall on the Grand Concourse, I had my first experience of being frisked. It was after 4 A.M. when I dropped off the last girl. The rain dumped down.

Back then, in the early 90's, the South Bronx still seemed to me like the iconic ghetto it was purported to be; that night, as I drove up and down its desolate boulevards, the shapes of the ordinary world disappeared. All I saw beyond the fogging windshield was threat. No hint of the pace of well-lit, clipped Manhattan. Rain slashed the signs of unfamiliar streets. Elevated subway tracks loomed overhead. At a gas station, I anxiously left the car to ask directions, but my questions got drowned out by the pleas of the Indian attendant, barricaded in behind his bars, urgently waving me, please, away.

My own fear increased with the resulting chill. Eventually, I was flying by the Whitestone Cinema, headed east. Blessedly, I spotted the ''New England Thruway'' sign, a friendly highway green.

Originally, I come from Leominster, in northern Massachusetts. Absurdly, I seriously considered driving the four hours home. In a panic, one reverts to what one knows. At least from Leominster, I knew my way back to New York. What I wouldn't realize for another decade was that the homecoming would ultimately occur the other way around: the pull of the Bronx, and the connection to the family I found there, not the fear of it, would carry me home to my blood family.

Only now, a year after its publication, is the full meaning of the title of my first book, ''Random Family,'' revealing itself to me. The book documents more than a decade in the life of one extended family from the South Bronx. Had I been asked midway through the reporting what the title meant, I might have answered, ''The families my subjects inherited and those they chose'' or ''The family that teenagers create among their friends.''

But from where I stand now, I'd say that a sense of belonging can also spring from a geographical affinity, the comfort we feel in places both known and discovered or, in some cases, the places that are within us even before we arrive, their streets coursing through our personal histories.

MY strongest early memories of my father involve him driving away. Off he'd go, in the orange pumpkin, our nickname for the rust-colored American Ambassador supplied by the union when he left a chemical factory job and turned to organizing full time. My father drove to faraway destinations -- Pittsburgh, Akron, Detroit -- and returned with exotic tales infused with the urgency of the mundane world, compelling stories about regular people struggling to make ends meet.

Once we spent a family holiday at a roadside Ramada Inn in Delaware. While my mother sunned by the pool, I trailed Edie, an elderly maid whose gentle presence made my father's hotel room a home. Edie let me refill the vending machine with miniature toothbrushes, their silver tubes of toothpaste as slim and shiny as smelts. She let me push her tidy hallway cart. In the sweet-smelling laundry closet, which doubled as her office, we counted her tips.

As I was growing up, my mother liked to tell me that every woman needs an education and a car. (The education was something no one could ever take away from you, while a car could take you away from anywhere you suddenly didn't want to be.) After high school, I was always driving away -- for college, for graduate school, on assignment, back to my apartment in New York.

Like my father's, my visits home were brief; I was using my education the way I was supposed to, to escape the working class that my ambitious mother had found herself trapped in. She devoted her life to making my escape possible, struggling to balance her love without letting me feel entirely at home. But if I wanted to succeed -- whatever that meant -- I couldn't stop moving. Irrationally, I worried that if I ever slowed down, or slipped up, I'd somehow end up on my father's old slot on the assembly line.

When I started my reporting in the Bronx, however, suddenly I was like my father with his union: I knew that this was the work I wanted to do. I felt a sense of purpose, energized and fully alive. The work drew on my deepest self, yet, unlike the elite worlds to which my education exposed me, didn't require that I bury my working-class alliances.

In fact, those initial nights of reporting -- listening to music and watching the girls dress up to go dancing, hanging out in front of bodegas and in courtyards and on stoops, driving around as they shouted out of the car to the windows of the boys they liked -- took me back to an earlier time. It was a lot like my teenage years with my hometown friends, aimless and open-ended, not about the things we didn't have, or some distant future, but about the vitality and wonder of the life that was already ours, and within our reach.

It turns out I wasn't the first of my relatives to do time in the Bronx. Not long after I began serious work on my book, I called my mother from the pay phone of a cafe in the Italian neighborhood of Belmont. ''I don't know why,'' I told her, ''I feel so at home here.'' I supposed it was the familiarity of the Italians on Arthur Avenue. My mother neglected to mention that her parents had lived there for a decade before moving to Leominster, where, not long after, my grandfather died. It would be years before an uncle, in an emotional moment after a family funeral, confessed that the greatest love story in my family's history had taken place in that neighborhood - perhaps the site of the loss of promise the most painful to bear.

My mother's father rented a room as a boarder from my grandmother's older sister, who had come from a neighboring village in Italy. He saw my grandmother's photograph, and they started corresponding; he dictated his letters because he didn't know how to write. Eventually, he helped pay her passage; her younger brother, Orazio, escorted her. There was a swoon after the first kiss in Central Park, another legendary kiss in the stairwell of the sister's house.

Six months later, on Oct. 8, 1905, the Rev. Thomas T. Lynch officiated at the marriage at St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church in Washington Heights. My grandmother liked to tell my mother how she looked like a princess that day, dressed in white, perched atop a carriage driven by six white horses that delivered her to the church. She was adorned in jewelry, including a gold chain that my grandfather had given her and a bracelet, etched with a delicate scroll. Over her heart, she pinned a bird with four tiny pearls, two on each wing, and a ruby balanced on its beak.

It was a hopeful beginning, but things got harder quickly. As my grandmother began having children, nine in all, my grandfather took whatever work he could find -- lighting lamps, maintenance, delivering coal. For a time, he was a superintendent in a building in Belmont, just two blocks away from Thorpe house, the homeless shelter on Crotona Avenue where, 90 years later, I would be spending my weekends and nights.

By then, I'd met Lolli, the young woman who would become one of my primary subjects (and who is identified as Coco in my book). In the restroom at Seventeen, I'd slip out of my black blazer and miniskirt at the end of my work day and put on a T-shirt and jeans. We happily explored her Bronx streets, pointing out our favorites among the trays of gold medallions and door-knocker earrings in the jewelry shops on Fordham Road; admiring the dusty baby shower cakes decorated with miniature pacifiers in the window of the cuchifrito-bakery on Burnside Avenue; watching the bright fake fish that paddled spastic laps in a plastic aquarium at the dollar store.

On Mount Hope Place, where her first love had lived before he went to prison, Lolli showed me the graffiti heart she'd etched into the wall of a stairwell where they used to kiss. One Sunday morning, on Tremont Avenue, we waved to a young bride and groom gleefully shouting from the sun roof of a white stretch limousine.

I gradually realized, however, that Lolli had never ventured the few blocks from her Puerto Rican neighborhood to the Italian section. So one afternoon, when her 3-year-old daughter was hungry, I suggested lunch on Arthur Avenue. I was slowly becoming a familiar face on the street; the bakery clerk nodded hello, and the butcher at the Arthur Avenue Market tutored me about what to look for in a proper cut of beef.

Lolli was uncharacteristically reluctant as we stepped into a coffee shop where I'd been a few times. Helping her daughter climb onto a stool, she stood behind her, pressing her pregnant belly against the little girl's back so she wouldn't topple off. We waited while the waitress chatted with a customer at the far end of the counter. I asked for menus. It was 11 A.M. The short order cook was flipping eggs on the grill. From the opposite end of the room, without looking in our direction, the waitress said, ''Kitchen's closed.''

IN the meantime, I had moved to SoHo. I didn't find it an easy fit. On weekends, when it teemed with shoppers buying things I could never afford, I'd linger around the corner of Something Special, Lenny Cecere's small store on Macdougal, just to hear the banter of Italian men. On the rare days I didn't go to the Bronx, I'd head out to Coney Island, to stroll on the boardwalk among the old Russians, or to Bensonhurst, to eat panelle at Joe's of Avenue U. My apartment was rent-stabilized, so I couldn't think of leaving permanently, but it was more like a hotel than a home.

The parts of the Bronx that I was getting to know didn't require the same stretching. Uptown, on the sidewalk, in the Laundromat, at the Western Union office, my movements came naturally. What became taxing were the transitions.

I remember the day I realized that I had to leave my Midtown job. I'd spent a spate of nights out reporting in the Soundview projects, where the elevator doors rattled and ached, and that tired morning I was struck by the silence of my ascent at Seventeen. The bell for my floor gently sounded, and I stepped noiselessly off the elevator onto the red carpet that led to my office. I no longer knew what I was doing there.

Whenever I was downtown, which was less and less, I felt that life was elsewhere. Uptown, I was learning to surrender to the slower rhythms of my subjects' days. Ordinary acts absorbed me utterly. Even the most mundane things -- children playing, a trip to the grocery store, watching an old dog sleeping -- gave me a sense of discovery. After all, I was supposed to spend hours hanging out, observing. I started to crave the street. On the best days, I was keenly aware of the sensory environment but unaware of myself. I knew I was in precisely the right place, at the right time. Doing my work meant remaining still.

Like that of a child shuttling between divorced parents, my behavior changed with my surroundings: at a welfare office in the Bronx, I could be endlessly patient, numbed. Yet if I had to wait in line at the Gourmet Garage, I became irritable. Increasingly at ease in the places most white New Yorkers thought of as impossibly dangerous, I'd tense up at book parties and gallery openings. I preferred to brave the stairwell in a housing project than walk into a roof-top party. A college friend, now a psychologist, declared me counter-phobic. Possibly true, but what good do labels do?

But the greatest threat to my reporting wasn't the danger, which was erratic and unusual, but the frustrations and despair, which were relentless, pervading every task of daily life. In the Bronx, survival regularly felt impossible, escape unimaginable. Even hope became a risk.

Back in SoHo, I slept, a lot. I'm generally an early morning person, but I came to love the bed. I'd sleep a solid 12 hours after a prison visit, a whole day after a weekend in Lolli's mother's courtyard. One afternoon, one of the girls from the Bronx called to wake me; I used to be prompt, calling up to their windows, waking them. Now, I was late, I answered the telephone cranky. ''You sound like my mother,'' she said critically.

Poverty is a climate. Within a few years, I had adapted to its weather's unpredictability: I stopped believing that institutions functioned in any reliable or useful fashion. I would be surprised, delighted, when anything went smoothly. I developed a sense of humor. I stopped wearing black, started wearing fuchsia. I became an optimist, and a fatalist. I cared more about my sex appeal. My downtown friends commented that I'd become more defensive, suspicious and sarcastic. My uptown friends told me I needed to gain weight and relax.

Surely some of this was a result of my immersion in my subjects' world, my experience of their profound economic and physical vulnerability. I wish I'd been strong enough to move to the Bronx and live in the spaces that, for 24 hours a day, filled my head.

MY own family's crisis took me back to Leominster; my father was found to have cancer. During the 18 months that I cared for my him, my city life receded; my hometown roots were renewed. Over the phone, my downtown friends expressed their worries about me: I needed to rest, I needed to eat, I needed to get back to New York. My Bronx friends told me to stay strong, to fight the terror, to try to make my father laugh, to fill the house with children. They'd shown me what my Italian ancestors had buried in their stoic formality. When it's not possible to protect the people you love and make things better, you grab onto the good moments when you can.

A Bronx friend, who had survived a spinal injury, coached my father through a similar trauma and gave me indispensable caretaking advice. Another friend, who worked as a home health aide, prepared me for what to expect as my father moved closer to death. Lolli and her children came to visit. (''You mad skinny,'' said her 9-year-old, taking in my father. ''That's for sure,'' my father said.) As I watched Lolli holding my father's bony hand, I felt the reconnection of something broken running through my life. When my father passed, Lolli's mother told me to take care of my own. ''Your mother's the only one you've got,'' she said.

Not so long ago, I returned to New York and reintroduced myself to my apartment and my neighborhood. I walked to the Angelika, became a morning regular at Once Upon a Tart, swam laps at a nearby pool. Photographs got framed, dinners cooked, walls painted. I moved into my place, then I got restless again. Nights, I reported a story about a rapper and drug dealer who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I was back at work. Absorbed, I watched him get his weekly trim among the men debating politics at his barbershop. Sitting in the passenger seat of his S.U.V., flying down the low Brooklyn streets, windows open, his music blasting, looking out at the new neighborhood, I felt life pouring over me.

To be where I am is to accept where I came from, to be both a visitor and an escapee. Maybe always-leaving is my closest kinship, but I've learned to claim the life I live here, wherever that may be. The open invitation is what I cherish most about my work in this city -- the righteousness of my ignorance, the job of getting lost again and again.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is the author of ''Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx,'' which will be published in paperback this month by Scribner.
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Buyers Pounce as Homes Go on the Block By JOHN LELAND
For some investors, the misery of subprime loans, exploding adjustable rate mortgages and slumping sales mean one thing: opportunity.
"It's a symptom of the foreclosure crisis. And it's a cause for concern that through this auction, areas that are already hit by the foreclosure crisis will now be hit by investors who are buying up properties to rent them out, which makes neighborhoods less stable than owner-occupied housing."
JIM DAVNIE, a Minnesota state representative, at an auction of foreclosed properties in Minnesota.

Clashing visions of 'Paradise' By Richard Fausset
The fantastical work of the Rev. Howard Finster, a folk artist who's been called the 'Andy Warhol of the South,' is at the heart of cultural tug of war in rural Georgia.

Traveling, only the connection is remote By Marjorie Miller
In an era of cellphones and the Internet, few areas of the world qualify as secluded, as long as a BlackBerry can get a signal.

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web By KATIE HAFNER
Several major libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft, instead signing on with a nonprofit effort.

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Perry aims to go over well abroad
Writer-actor-director wants to shatter the stereotype that African American-themed films don't click overseas.
By Lorenza Muñoz, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 22, 2007

Tyler Perry debunked the Hollywood myth that movies and television shows about family, relationships and God were too narrow and folksy to resonate with a large audience.

His latest film, "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?" has pulled in nearly $40 million in only two weeks and outdid such films as George Clooney's "Michael Clayton" in its opening weekend.

But can Perry take on the rest of the world? The Atlanta-based writer-actor-director wants to build an international following, shattering a Hollywood stereotype that African American-themed movies have little currency abroad.

He's taking a page from the global success stories of such stars as Will Smith and Denzel Washington and the gospel-inspired play "Mama I Want to Sing!" which has toured the world for more than a decade.

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Niall Ferguson:
One strike, Iran could be out
October 22, 2007

Of all the columns I've written for this newspaper over the last couple of years, none has elicited a more heated response than the one published in January 2006 about the Great War of 2007. Indeed, it still gets quoted back at me more than a year and a half later.

The column was written in the style of a future historian looking back on a war that I imagined breaking out this year. My point was that if a major war were to break out in 2007, future historians would not have far to look to find its origins.

My imaginary war began in the Middle East and lasted four years. With the benefit of hindsight, the historian of the future would be able to list its causes as (a) competition for the region's abundant reserves of fossil fuels, (b) demographic pressures arising from the region's high birthrates, (c) the growth of radical Islamism and (d) the determination of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

My nightmare scenario involved a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel in August. You may have noticed that this didn't happen. However, the point of the column was not to make a prophecy. No one has the power to predict the future because (as I frequently remind my history students) there is no such thing as the future, singular -- only futures, plural.

My aim in writing the column was not to soothsay but to alert readers to the seriousness of the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program -- and to persuade them that the United States should do something to stop it. True, after all that has gone wrong in Iraq, Americans are scarcely eager for another preventive war to stop another rogue regime from owning yet more weapons of mass destruction that don't currently exist. It's easy to imagine the international uproar that would ensue in the event of U.S. air strikes. It's also easy to imagine the havoc that might be wreaked by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Iraq by way of retaliation. So it's very tempting to hope for a purely diplomatic solution.

Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force -- and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees "no evidence" that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called "a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics."

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.

By contrast, Washington's most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month's attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.

The big question of 2007 therefore remains: Will he do it?

With every passing day, the president attracts less media coverage, while the contenders to succeed him attract more. Yet Bush made news last week with his observation at a White House news conference that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [the Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." That would seem to suggest that he is ready to use military force against Iran if he sees the alternative as mere appeasement. One eminent expert on nuclear warfare told me last week that he still puts the probability of air strikes on Iran as high as 30%.

In domestic politics, it's always a good idea to follow the money. When it comes to grand strategy, however, you need to follow the navy -- to be precise, the aircraft carriers that would be the launching platforms for any major air offensive against Iran's nuclear facilities. To do this, you don't need to be very skilled at espionage. The U.S. Navy makes the information freely available at http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.htmlor in the "Around the Navy" column published each week in the Navy Times.

The U.S. has 11 active aircraft carriers. Of these, the Kitty Hawk is in port in Japan. The Nimitz and Reagan are in San Diego. The Washington is in Norfolk, Va. The Lincoln and Stennis are in Washington state. And the Eisenhower, Vinson, Roosevelt and Truman are undergoing various sorts of refitting and maintenance checks in the vicinity of "WestLant" (Navy-speak for the western Atlantic). Only one -- the Enterprise -- is in the Persian Gulf.

At present, then, talk of World War III seems to be mere saber-rattling, not serious strategy. U.S. aircraft carriers can move fast, it's true. The Lincoln's top speed is in excess of 30 knots (30 nautical miles per hour). And it, along with the Truman, Eisenhower and Nimitz, are said to be "surge ready." But take a look at the map. It's a very long way from San Diego to the Strait of Hormuz. Even from Norfolk, it takes 17.5 days for an aircraft carrier group to reach Bahrain. If you were Ahmadinejad, how worried would you be?

As for me, I am jumping ship. This is my last weekly column on these pages. But remember when the Great Gulf War does finally come: You read about it here first.

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A Once and Future Nation
By ROGER COHEN
Published: October 22, 2007

QALAT, Afghanistan - Once upon a time there was a country, more a space than a nation, landlocked, mountainous, impoverished and windblown.

There resided many peoples, including Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen, and a new tribe called the Americans.

They had come, the Americans, after 30 years of bloodshed, to bring peace to this land called Afghanistan. But what did they know — what could they know — of life behind burkas, or on the other side of mud walls, or inside minds made mad by war?

Past goat herds and yellowing almond trees, the helmeted Americans drove armored Humvees. Beside lurching stacks of battered tires children gathered in villages and, unlike those in another broken land called Iraq, they smiled and waved.

The Americans talked about empowering Afghans. Sometimes they took to Blackhawk choppers and swooped along the dun-colored river beds and sent goats scurrying for cover.

The 26,000 U.S. troops meant well. They wielded billions of dollars. They calculated “metrics” of progress. They had learned, to their cost, how this faraway place — invaded and used and at last abandoned to pile rubble upon rubble — could nurture danger.

Not only was it once home to the American-financed Islamists who humbled the Soviet empire. It also housed their jihadist offspring, who, like sorcerers’ apprentices, turned on a distracted sponsor and brought the dust of two fallen towers to Manhattan.

To help forge a better Afghanistan — or merely an Afghanistan — the Americans involved their NATO friends. An alliance forged to defend the West against the Soviets was transformed into an agent of democratic change in southwest Asia.

How strange! The enemy now was Taliban Islamofascists rather than Kremlin totalitarians. On a hillside in south-eastern Afghanistan rose “Camp Dracula,” a garrison of 700 Romanian soldiers on this NATO mission.

It would take a great fabulist to make up such stories. Yet they wrote themselves after reports that the cold war’s conclusion marked the end of history proved greatly exaggerated.

And so, one recent morning, Lt. Col. James Bramble, a reservist from El Paso, Tex., with a job there as a pharmaceuticals executive, found himself visiting the Romanian forces and then going to the nearby village of Morad Khan Kalay.

Nations are built one village at a time. Or so Colonel Bramble has come to believe. He is a thoughtful man, commanding a NATO provincial reconstruction team, one of 25 across the country, at a base in Qalat, between Kandahar and Kabul. His team is supposed to deliver the development and good governance that will marginalize the Taliban.

That’s the theory. The practice looks like this. Seven armored U.S. Humvees form a “perimeter” on the edge of the village and newly trained members of the Afghan police — the “Afghan face” on this mission — are dispatched to bring out village elders.

Looking apprehensive, the Afghans appear swathed in robes and headgear whose bold colors mock dreary U.S. Army camouflage. Staff Sgt. Marco Villalta, of San Mateo, Calif., steps forward: “We would like to ask you some questions about your village.”

The following is elicited: There are 300 families using 25 wells. Their irrigation ditches get washed away in winter. A small bridge keeps collapsing. They send their children to a school in nearby Shajoy, but it’s often closed because of Taliban threats to teachers.

Sergeant Villalta takes notes. “We’ll share this information with the governor and make sure that something is done.”

“No! No!,” says Sardar Mohammed. “We don’t trust the governor. If he gets food, he gives it to 10 families. He puts money in his pocket. We trust you more than him. Bring aid directly to us.”

Bramble’s view is that the governor is as good as officials get around here. The U.S. officer, like his country and NATO, is caught in the hall of mirrors of contested nation-building. The exchange at the village has traversed cultures, civilizations and centuries. For Western soldiers trained to kill, and now in the business of hoisting an Islamic country from nothing as fighting continues, that’s challenging.

Still, Bramble thinks this first contact will lead to others and perhaps he can arrange for the bridge to be bolstered soon. Another community will be brought around in “the good war” against death-to-the-West Islamists.

This process will be very slow. The West’s stomach for investing blood and treasure here for another decade is unclear. But I see no alternative if Afghanistan is to move from its destructive gyre and the global threat that brings.

The children’s smiles suggest hope still flickers. To lose Afghanistan by way of smile-free Iraq — and do so on the border of a turbulent nuclear-armed Pakistan — would be a terrible betrayal and an unacceptable risk.

That, alas, is no fairy tale.
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A Two-Cigarette Society

By DAVID G. ADAMS
Published: October 22, 2007

WHEN it comes to the health of our children, two cigarettes may be better than one. Young smokers who begin their habit with nicotine-laden cigarettes need a cigarette that will not leave them to later fight the ravages of addiction.

Experts tell us that teenagers often begin smoking to copy their peers and others whom they see smoking. As adults, however, they continue smoking largely because of the addictive qualities of nicotine. (Ninety percent of smokers regret having begun smoking and most make efforts to stop.) This means that in the absence of addictive levels of nicotine in their cigarettes, most young smokers would ultimately quit.

A two-cigarette strategy would prohibit young smokers from buying addictive cigarettes. The tobacco industry is capable of producing cigarettes that are virtually free of nicotine, and regulators could develop clear standards for non-addictive cigarettes. (Disclosure: My law firm represents tobacco companies, but I have recused myself from that work.)

The age to purchase addictive cigarettes might be set at 21. Better yet, sales of addictive cigarettes could be restricted to individuals born 19 or more years before the two-cigarette strategy was put into effect. Under this approach, 18-year-olds who start smoking non-addictive cigarettes would be prohibited from switching to addictive cigarettes even after they turned 21. In addition, a higher federal excise tax on addictive cigarettes than on non-addictive cigarettes would create a financial incentive for smokers of all ages, including scofflaw adolescents, to select non-addictive cigarettes.

Granted, a two-cigarette policy would not be a panacea. It would not end smoking, it would not give us safer cigarettes, and it would not undo the addiction that grips the current generation of smokers.

The Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, has called for a gradual reduction of the nicotine content in all cigarettes to non-addictive levels (an approach I proposed 13 years ago when I worked at the Food and Drug Administration). But it would take decades to eliminate addictive cigarettes from the market. While a worthy strategy for eliminating addiction many years from now, a gradual approach would still permit the addiction of the next generation of smokers.

Decades of addiction will mean disease and death for millions of our children. If we can prevent addiction at the outset, we shouldn’t waste another day.

David G. Adams, a lawyer, was the director of the policy staff at the Food and Drug Administration from 1992 to 1994.
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