Spanish? No hay problema (No problem)

Coming out of the USSR could be a disorienting experience, as then- Graduate Student Extreme found out in 1979 after seven months here as a guide-interpreter on a cultural exhibit: in my first encounter with an automatic bank teller back in the States, the newfangled “ATM” took my card, scanned it and then asked if I wanted to continue our transaction (a) in English or (b) en español. What? In Spanish?!?

Who would choose a Spanish option in suburban Washington, DC? Had Zorro taken over the neighborhood? After the prolonged suspended animation of Soviet life, it was hard to resist an Extreme impulse to to look defiantly into the camera of this big-brotherish machine and ask, “Are you KIDDING, amigo?”

Flash forward a decade to 1989, when Instructor Extreme is showing the first group of Soviet high-school exchange students a popular U.S. film, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986), as part of their orientation: the hero drives an expensive sports car into a Chicago parking garage, where he asks the smiling but non-responsive attendant, “Do you speak English?” – only to receive the taken-aback reply “What country do you think this is?”

This gets a big laugh from the young Russians, just as it had in theaters around the States. It’s America, so people speak English, of course – always have, always will.

Wrong and wrong, it so happens. If in 1979 and 1989 there was still little doubt about Anglo-hegemony, by 1999 the party was over for a homogeneous English-only national culture – and the new millennium has seen this transformation quicken its pace.

Spanish was spoken in the Americas long before English: the Columbus trip was a Spanish project, and was followed by many more Hispanic forays north and south in the New World. While the young United States emerged as an Anglophonemajority state, it did so without adopting an official language – and does not have one today.

It does have a new fastestgrowing segment of the population, however: today every sixth U.S. citizen is Hispanic, the census bureau tells us, and three decades from now non-Hispanic whites will be a minority – a situation utterly unthreatening to such utterly American icons as Bart Simpson, whose trademark exclamation is ¡Ay, caramba! (Oh gosh!/Wow!/etc.) and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose Terminator famously wished usHasta la vista, baby! (See you later!), coining one of the most famous lines in Hollywood history.

In short, Spanish is the second most used language in the United States, spoken by some 45 million Hispanophones and six million language students, comprising the largest national Spanish-speaking community anywhere outside of Mexico. Little wonder that the 2000 U.S. presidential election saw both major candidates – the resolutely white bread/mayonnaise/Anglophone- gringos George W. Bush and Albert Gore – deliver campaign speeches in Spanish. Votes are where you find ‘em, señor.

So you are very likely to encounter Spanish and Spanish-speakers in American films, literature and on your trip to the United States – but your English textbooks haven’t factored this in yet, have they? “No problemo!” (which is actually popular pseudo-Spanish for no hay problema). Here’s Prof. Extremo’s Hispanic Starter Kit: The Top 10 Spanish Words/Phrases/Usages you’ll see/hear throughout the US – often occurring in otherwise exclusively English contexts:

1. adios [ah-dee-OHS] – goodbye

2. amigo [uh-MEE-goh], amiga [uh- MEE-guh] – friend (masc., fem.)

3. barrio [BAHR-ee-oh] – neighborhood, usually a heavily Hispanic area

4. bueno [BWE-naw] – good, all right, OK; buenos días – good morning/day

5. Comprende? [kuhm-PREN-dey] – Understand? Got it?

6. gracias [GRAH-see-uhs] – thank you

7. hombre [OM-brey] – man, guy

8. nada [NAH-duh] – nothing, zilch; de nada – you’re welcome

9. por favor [PAWR fah-VAWR] – please

10. señor [seyn-YAWR], señora [seyn- YAWR-uh], señorita [seyn-yuh- REE-tuh] – Mr., Mrs., Miss/Ms.

Hundreds of Spanish words and phrases have become dual-language terms – which is why all of the above now turn up in English dictionaries – and both the total number and their “lexical share” of the general American dialogue are growing as you’d expect: at a pace that parallels that of the Hispanic population.

So get ready to rumba, hombre. Bart Simpson’s still ahead of you! 

Text by Mark H. Teeter at 11/03/2013

(Mark H. Teeter is an English teacher and translator based in Moscow)

Check this Link:

http://www.gap360.com/learning-spanish-in-peru

 

Graphic Humor 209

 

Martha Stewart in meet market on Match.com

Martha Stewart yesterday revealed that she’s a Diva of Desire looking for a good time between the 700-thread-count sheets — and is hunting for a bedmate on Match.com.

“I’d like to have breakfast with somebody. I’d like to go to bed with somebody. Sleep with somebody,” the usually prim and proper 71-year-old media mogul cooed to a stunned Matt Lauer on the “Today” show.

She then signed up on the popular dating Web site on the air.

Coached by Sam Yagan, Match.com’s chief executive, the near-billionaire completed a profile that she said she had started earlier but given up on after getting frustrated with navigating the site.

AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM

ON THE PROWL: Martha Stewart says she’d “like to go to bed with somebody. Sleep with somebody.”

“I put out ‘young-ish,’ ” she told Lauer of her earlier profile, saying she wanted someone “active” without specifying an age. “Energetic, outdoor-ish, really smart. Tall-ish.”

The homemaking maven said her Mr. Right should be successful — not for her sake but “for him.”

She described herself as “curious, intelligent, entrepreneurial, hardworking, fun, adventurous,” reported the Web site Jezebel, which said it found her profile.

Yagan advised Stewart to not use her name or photos or list any identifying details.

“Only because I think it would be distracting to those initial conversations you have where everyone is going to be about talking to Martha as opposed to really getting to know the person first,” he said.

Stewart said she had long been interested in Internet dating after seeing her employees find successful dates online.

“Do you think I could possibly, maybe find a match like many of my employees?” Stewart asked Yagan.

“What we know we can get you is some great first dates,’’ he told her. “I think finding a soul mate for you might be a little bit difficult, but I think first dates are easily doable.”

Not a problem, Stewart shot back, “I don’t like the word ‘soul mate.’ ”

Calling herself “very liberal” in the profile, the Leo listed her interests as “Cooking, Dining out, Fishing/Hunting, Gardening/Landscaping, Movies/Videos, Museums and art, Shopping/Antiques, Travel/Sightseeing.”

Her “favorite hot spot” is Sushi Yasuda at 204 E. 43rd St. in Midtown, she said, while her pets include “Birds, Cats, Dogs, Horses, Other.”

Also on the show was Stewart’s nephew-in-law, Dan Slater, author of “Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.” He said his aunt’s desire wasn’t exactly news to him.

“The first time I met Martha, we spent most of the evening talking about her past suitors,” said Slater, who recently wed Martha’s niece.

Martha hasn’t been in a long-term relationship for roughly five years.

“I had a longtime boyfriend. That ended a couple years ago,” she said, referring to Charles Simonyi, the billionaire ex-Microsoft exec she split with after leaving federal prison on charges related to a 2008 stock deal.

“And I haven’t found the next Mr. Right,” she said.

Stewart has been married once — to publishing exec Andrew Stewart. They got hitched when she was 19 and stayed together for 26 years before splitting in 1987. They have a daughter, Alexis, and two grandchildren, Jude, 2, and Truman, 1.

 

• By BOB FREDERICKS, April 30, 2013

 

Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab.  Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship.  In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status.  However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners.  Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.

These results suggest that men, relative to women, have a particularly hard time being “just friends.” What makes these results particularly interesting is that they were found within particular friendships (remember, each participant was only asked about the specific, platonic, friend with whom they entered the lab). This is not just a bit of confirmation for stereotypes about sex-hungry males and naïve females; it is direct proof that two people can experience the exact same relationship in radically different ways. Men seem to see myriad opportunities for romance in their supposedly platonic opposite-sex friendships. The women in these friendships, however, seem to have a completely different orientation—one that is actually platonic.

To the outside observer, it seems clear that these vastly different views about the potential for romance in opposite-sex friendships could cause serious complications—and people within opposite-sex relationships agree. In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex. Variables related to romantic attraction (e.g., “our relationship could lead to romantic feelings”) were five times more likely to be listed as negative aspects of the friendship than as positive ones. However, the differences between men and women appeared here as well. Males were significantly more likely than females to list romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, and this discrepancy increased as men aged—males on the younger end of the spectrum were four times more likely than females to report romantic attraction as a benefit of opposite-sex friendships, whereas those on the older end of the spectrum were ten times more likely to do the same.

Taken together, these studies suggest that men and women have vastly different views of what it means to be “just friends”—and that these differing views have the potential to lead to trouble. Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that opposite-sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off their desire for something more. And even though both genders agree overall that attraction between platonic friends is more negative than positive, males are less likely than females to hold this view.

So, can men and women be “just friends?” If we all thought like women, almost certainly.  But if we all thought like men, we’d probably be facing a serious overpopulation crisis.

 

By Adrian F. Ward  (S.A./ Oct. 2012)

Adrian F. Ward is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His doctoral research is focused on the relationships between technology, cognition, social relationships, and self-esteem, and he worked briefly as a scientific consultant for a dating website.

 

Love and Death

In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a reporter who, confronted with living the same day over and over again, matures from an arrogant, self-serving professional climber to someone capable of loving and appreciating others and his world. Murray convincingly portrays the transformation from someone whose self-importance is difficult to abide into a person imbued with kindness.  It seems that the Nietzschean test of eternal return, insofar as it is played out in Punxsutawney, yields not an overman but a man of decency.

But there is another story line at work in the film, one we can see if we examine Murray’s character not in the early arrogant stage, nor in the post-epiphany stage, where the calendar is once again set in motion, but in the film’s middle, where he is knowingly stuck in the repetition of days. In this part of the narrative, Murray’s character has come to terms with his situation. He alone knows what is going to happen, over and over again.  He has no expectations for anything different.  In this period, his period of reconciliation, he becomes a model citizen of Punxsutawney. He radiates warmth and kindness, but also a certain distance.

The early and final moments of “Groundhog Day” offer something that is missing during this period of peace:  passion. Granted, Phil Connors’s early ambitious passion for advancement is a far less attractive thing than the later passion of his love for Rita (played by Andie MacDowell).  But there is passion in both cases.  It seems that the eternal return of the same may bring peace and reconciliation, but at least in this case not intensity.

And here is where a lesson about love may lie.  One would not want to deny that Connors comes to love Rita during the period of the eternal Groundhog Day.  But his love lacks the passion, the abandon, of the love he feels when he is released into a real future with her. There is something different in those final moments of the film.  A future has opened for their relationship, and with it new avenues for the intensity of his feelings for her. Without a future for growth and development, romantic love can extend only so far.  Its distinction from, say, a friendship with benefits begins to become effaced.

There is, of course, in all romantic love the initial infatuation, which rarely lasts.  But if the love is to remain romantic, that infatuation must evolve into a longer-term intensity, even if a quiet one, that nourishes and is nourished by the common engagements and projects undertaken over time.

This might be taken to mean that a limitless future would allow for even more intensity to love than a limited one.  Romantic love among immortals would open itself to an intensity that eludes our mortal race.  After all, immortality opens an infinite future.  And this would seem to be to the benefit of love’s passion.  I think, however, that matters are quite the opposite, and that “Groundhog Day” gives us the clue as to why this is.  What the film displays, if we follow this interpretive thread past the film’s plot, is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time:  time for development.  The eternal return of “Groundhog Day” offered plenty of time.  It promised an eternity of it.  But it was the wrong kind of time.  There was no time to develop a coexistence.  There was instead just more of the same.

The intensity we associate with romantic love requires a future that can allow its elaboration.  That intensity is of the moment, to be sure, but is also bound to the unfolding of a trajectory that it sees as its fate.  If we were stuck in the same moment, the same day, day after day, the love might still remain, but its animating passion would begin to diminish.

This is why romantic love requires death.

If our time were endless, then sooner or later the future would resemble an endless Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney.  It is not simply the fact of a future that ensures the intensity of romantic love; it is the future of meaningful coexistence.  It is the future of common projects and the passion that unfolds within them.  One might indeed remain in love with another for all eternity.  But that love would not burn as brightly if the years were to stammer on without number.

Why not, one might ask?  The future is open.  Unlike the future in “Groundhog Day,” it is not already decided.  We do not have our next days framed for us by the day just passed.  We can make something different of our relationships.  There is always more to do and more to create of ourselves with the ones with whom we are in love.

This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why.  Love is between two particular people in their particularity.  We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities.  If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.”  But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t.  This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity.  And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities.  Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.

Sooner or later the paths that can be opened by the specificities of a relationship come to an end.  Not every couple can, with a sense of common meaningfulness, take up skiing or karaoke, political discussion or gardening.  Eventually we must tread the same roads again, wearing them with our days.  This need not kill love, although it might.  But it cannot, over the course of eternity, sustain the intensity that makes romantic love, well, romantic.

One might object here that the intensity of love is a filling of the present, not a projection into the future.  It is now, in a moment that needs no other moments, that I feel the vitality of romantic love.  Why could this not continue, moment after moment?

To this, I can answer only that the human experience does not point this way.  This is why so many sages have asked us to distance ourselves from the world in order to be able to cherish it properly.  Phil Connors, in his reconciled moments, is something like a Buddhist.  But he is not a romantic.

Many readers will probably already have recognized that this lesson about love concerns not only its relationship with death, but also its relationship with life.  It doesn’t take eternity for many of our romantic love’s embers to begin to dim.  We lose the freshness of our shared projects and our passions, and something of our relationships gets lost along with them.  We still love our partner, but we think more about the old days, when love was new and the horizons of the future beckoned us.  In those cases, we needn’t look for Groundhog Day, for it will already have found us.

And how do we live with this?  How do we assimilate the contingency of romance, the waning of the intensity of our loves?  We can reconcile ourselves to our loves as they are, or we can aim to sacrifice our placid comfort for an uncertain future, with or without the one we love.  Just as there is no guarantee that love’s intensity must continue, there is no guarantee that it must diminish.  An old teacher of mine once said that “one has to risk somewhat for his soul.” Perhaps this is true of romantic love as well. The gift of our deaths saves us from the ineluctability of the dimming of our love; perhaps the gift of our lives might, here or there, save us from the dimming itself.

 

* Text By TODD MAY, NYT, FEBRUARY 26, 2012

 Todd May is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University.  His forthcoming book, “Friendship in an Age of Economics,” is based on an earlier column for The Stone.

 

Trying to Find a Cry of Desperation Amid the Facebook Drama

For adolescents, Facebook and other social media have created an irresistible forum for online sharing and oversharing, so much so that endless mood-of-the-moment updates have inspired a snickering retort on T-shirts and posters: “Face your problems, don’t Facebook them.”

But specialists in adolescent medicine and mental health experts say that dark postings should not be hastily dismissed because they can serve as signs of depression and an early warning system for timely intervention. Whether therapists should engage with patients over Facebook, however, remains a matter of debate.

And parents have their own conundrum: how to distinguish a teenager’s typically melodramatic mutterings — like the “worst day of my life” rants about their “frenemies,” academics or even cafeteria food — from a true emerging crisis.

(Dr. Megan A. Moreno has studied college students’ Facebook postings for signs of depression. Some showed signs of risk.)

Last year, researchers examined Facebook profiles of 200 students at the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Some 30 percent posted updates that met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a symptom of depression, reporting feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness, insomnia or sleeping too much, and difficulty concentrating.

Their findings echo research that suggests depression is increasingly common among college students. Some studies have concluded that 30 to 40 percent of college students suffer a debilitating depressive episode each year. Yet scarcely 10 percent seek counseling.

“You can identify adolescents and young adults on Facebook who are showing signs of being at risk, who would benefit from a clinical visit for screening,” said Dr. Megan A. Moreno, a principal investigator in the Facebook studies and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sometimes the warnings are seen in hindsight. Before 15-year-old Amanda Cummings committed suicide by jumping in front of a bus near her Staten Island home on Dec. 27, her Facebook updates may have revealed her anguish. On Dec. 1, she wrote: “then ill go kill myself, with these pills, this knife, this life has already done half the job.”

Facebook started working with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2007. A reader who spots a disturbing post can alert Facebook and report the content as “suicidal.” After Facebook verifies the comment, it sends a link for the prevention lifeline to both the person who may need help and the person who alerted Facebook. In December, Facebook also began sending the distressed person a link to an online counselor.

While Facebook’s reporting feature has been criticized by some technology experts as unwieldy, and by some suicide prevention experts as a blunt instrument to address a volatile situation, other therapists have praised it as a positive step.

At some universities, resident advisers are using Facebook to monitor their charges. Last year, when Lilly Cao, then a junior, was a house fellow at Wisconsin-Madison, she decided to accept Facebook “friend” requests from most of the 56 freshmen on her floor.

She spotted posts about homesickness, academic despair and a menacing ex-boyfriend.

“One student clearly had an alcohol problem,” recalled Ms. Cao. “I found her unconscious in front of the dorm and had to call the ambulance. I began paying more attention to her status updates.”

Ms. Cao said she would never reply on Facebook, preferring instead to talk to students in person. The students were grateful for the conversations, she said.

“If they say something alarming on Facebook,” she added, “they know it’s public and they want someone to respond.”

While social media updates can offer clues that someone is overwrought, they also raise difficult questions: Who should intervene? When? How?

“Do you hire someone in the university clinic to look at Facebook all day?” Dr. Moreno said. “That’s not practical and borders on creepy.”

She said a student might be willing to take a concerned call from a parent, or from a professor who could be trained what to look for.

But ethically, should professors or even therapists “friend” a student or patient? (The students monitored by Dr. Moreno’s team had given their consent.)

Debra Corbett, a therapist in Charlotte, N.C., who treats adolescents and young adults, said some clients do “friend” her. But she limits their access to her Facebook profile. When clients post updates relevant to therapy, she feels chagrined. But she will not respond online, to maintain the confidentiality of the therapeutic relationship.

Instead, Ms. Corbett will address the posts in therapy sessions. One client, for example, is a college student who has low self-esteem. Her Facebook posts are virtual pleas for applause.

Ms. Corbett will say to her: “How did you feel when you posted that? We’re working on you validating yourself. When you put it out there, you have no control about what they’ll say back.”

Susan Kidd, who teaches emotionally vulnerable students at a Kentucky high school, follows their Facebook updates, which she calls a “valuable tool” for intervention with those who “may otherwise not have been forthcoming with serious issues.”

At Cornell University, psychologists do not “friend” students. At weekly meetings, however, counselors, residence advisors and the police discuss students who may be at risk. As one marker among many, they may bring up Facebook comments that have been forwarded to them.

“People do post very distressing things,” said Dr. Gregory T. Eells, director of Cornell’s counseling and psychological services. “Sometimes they’re just letting off steam, using Facebook as something between a diary and an op-ed piece. But sometimes we’ll tell the team, ‘check in on this person.’ ”

They proceed cautiously, because of “false positives,” like a report of a Facebook photo of a student posing with guns. “When you look,” said Dr. Eells, “it’s often benign.”

Dr. Moreno said she thought it made sense for house fellows at the University of Wisconsin to keep an eye on their students who “friend” them. Students’ immediate friends, she said, should not be expected to shoulder responsibility for intervention: “How well they can identify and help each other, I’m not so sure.”

Tolu Taiwo, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agreed. “I know someone who wrote that he wanted to kill himself,” she said. “It turned out he probably just wanted attention. But what if it was real? We wouldn’t know.”

In fact, when adolescents bare their souls on Facebook, they risk derision. Replying to questions posted on Facebook by The New York Times, Daylina Miller, a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, said that when she poured out her sadness online, some readers responded only with the Facebook “like” symbol: a thumb’s up.

“You feel the same way?” said Ms. Miller, puzzled. “Or you like that I’m sad? You’re sadistic?”

Some readers, flummoxed by a friend’s misery, remain silent, which inadvertently may be taken as the most hurtful response.

In comments to The Times, parents who followed their children’s Facebook posts said they did not always know how to distinguish the drama du jour from silent screams. Often their teenagers felt angry and embarrassed when parents responded on Facebook walls or even, after reading a worrisome comment by their child’s friend, alerted the friend’s parents.

Many parents said they felt embarrassed, too. After reading a grim post, they might raise an alarm, only to be curtly told by their offspring that it was a popular song lyric, a tactic teens use to comment in code, in part to confound snooping parents.

Ms. Corbett, the Charlotte therapist, said that when she followed her sons’ Facebook pages, she used caution before responding to occasional downbeat posts. If parents react to every little bad mood, she said, children might be less open on Facebook, assuming that “my parents will freak out.”

Dr. Moreno said that parents should consider whether the posts are typical for their child or whether the child also seems depressed at home. Early intervention can be low-key — a brief text or knock on the bedroom door: “I saw you posted this on Facebook. Is everything O.K.?”

Sometimes a Facebook posting can truly be a last-resort cry for help. One recent afternoon while Jackie Wells, who lives near Dayton, Ohio, was waiting for her phone service to be fixed, she went online to check on her daughter, 18, who lives about an hour away. Just 20 minutes earlier, the girl, unable to reach her mother by phone, used her own Facebook page to post to Mrs. Wells or anyone else who might read it:

“I just did something stupid, mom. Help me.”

Mrs. Wells borrowed a cellphone from her parents and called relatives who lived closer to her daughter. The girl had overdosed on pills. They got her to the hospital in time.

“Facebook might be a pain in the neck to keep up with,” Mrs. Wells said. “But having that extra form of communication saves lives.”

Liz Heron contributed reporting.

 

 

By JAN HOFFMAN, NYT, February 23, 2012

 

 

Graphic Humor 182

 

 

Facebook Makes Headway Around the World

Sergey Brin, a Google founder, takes issue with people who say Google has failed to gain a foothold in social networking. Google has had successes, he often says, especially with Orkut, the dominant service in Brazil and India.

Mr. Brin may soon have to revise his answer.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Though he did not say when it would reach that mark, the prediction was not greeted with the skepticism that had met his previous boasts of fast growth.
“They have been more innovative than any other social network, and they are going to continue to grow,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “Facebook wants to be ubiquitous, and they are being successful for now.”

The rapid ascent of Facebook has no company more worried than Google, which sees the social networking giant as a threat on multiple fronts. Much of the activity on Facebook is invisible to Google’s search engine, which makes it less useful over time. What’s more, the billions of links posted by users on Facebook have turned the social network into an important driver of users to sites across the Web. That has been Google’s role.

Google has tried time and again to break into social networking not only with Orkut, but also with user profiles, with an industrywide initiative called OpenSocial, and, most recently, with Buzz, a social network that mixes elements of Facebook and Twitter with Gmail. But none of those initiatives have made a dent in Facebook.

Google is said to be trying again with a secret project for a service called Google Me, according to several reports. Google declined to comment for this article.
Google makes its money from advertising, and even here, Facebook poses a challenge.

“There is nothing more threatening to Google than a company that has 500 million subscribers and knows a lot about them and places targeted advertisements in front of them,” said Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, a venture firm that has invested in Twitter and other social networking companies. “For every second that people are on Facebook and for every ad that Facebook puts in front of their face, it is one less second they are on Google and one less ad that Google puts in front of their face.”

With nearly two-thirds of all Internet users in the United States signed up on Facebook, the company has focused on international expansion.
Just over two years ago, Facebook was available only in English. Still, nearly half of its users were outside the United States, and its presence was particularly strong in Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

The task of expanding the site overseas fell on Javier Olivan, a 33-year-old Spaniard who joined Facebook three years ago, when the site had 30 million users. Mr. Olivan led an innovative effort by Facebook to have its users translate the site into more than 80 languages. Other Web sites and technology companies, notably Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had used volunteers to translate their sites or programs.

But with 300,000 words on Facebook’s site — not counting material posted by users — the task was immense. Facebook not only encouraged users to translate parts of the site, but also let other users fine-tune those translations or pick among multiple translations. Nearly 300,000 users participated.

“Nobody had done it at the scale that we were doing it,” Mr. Olivan said.
The effort paid off. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.

With every new translation, Facebook pushed into a new country or region, and its spread often mirrored the ties between nations or the movement of people across borders. After becoming popular in Italy, for example, Facebook spread to the Italian-speaking portions of Switzerland. But in German-speaking areas of Switzerland, adoption of Facebook lagged. When Facebook began to gain momentum in Brazil, the activity was most intense in southern parts of the country that border on neighboring Argentina, where Facebook was already popular.
“It’s a mapping of the real world,” Mr. Olivan said.

Facebook is not popular everywhere. The Web site is largely blocked in China. And with fewer than a million users each in Japan, South Korea and Russia, it lags far behind home-grown social networks in those major markets.

Mr. Olivan, who leads a team of just 12 people, hopes to change that. Facebook recently sent some of its best engineers to a new office in Tokyo, where they are working to fine-tune searches so they work with all three Japanese scripts. In South Korea, as well as in Japan, where users post to their social networks on mobile phones more than on PCs, the company is working with network operators to ensure distribution of its service.

Industry insiders say that, most of all, Facebook is benefiting from a cycle where success breeds more success. In particular, its growing revenue, estimated at $1 billion annually, allows the company to invest in improving its product and keep competitors at bay.

“I think that Facebook is winning for two reasons,” said Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a board member of Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Mr. Gordon said that Facebook had hired some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, and he said that the company’s strategy to create a platform for other software developers had played a critical role.
“They have opened up a platform, and they have the best apps on that platform,” Mr. Gordon said.

With Facebook’s social networking lead growing, it is not clear whether Google, or any other company, will succeed in derailing its march forward.
Says Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog, “Google can’t even get to the first base of social networks, which is people interacting with each other, much less to second or third base, which is people interacting with each other through games and applications.”

By MIGUEL HELFT (NYT. July 7, 2010)

 

Graphic humor 154 (Tiger Wood)

 

How to Help the Haiti Earthquake Victims

For children and innocent people who are suffering from this natural disaster in Haiti, I think all of us, we can help them, we must do so out of solidarity and love our neighbor (Brother). Further details will be in the coming weeks, but today we must help them quickly.
Here I share some Internet addresses (below)
So long.

Carlos Tiger without time (CTsT)

American Red Cross
redcross.org
800-HELP-NOW

World Vision
worldvision.org
888-56-CHILD

UNICEF
unicefusa.org
800-4-UNICEF

Doctors Without Borders
doctorswithoutborders.org
888-392-0392

 

Poet Cordelia Brown dies at 29

San Francisco writer Cordelia Brown knew she was gambling with death when she stopped taking her epilepsy medications two years ago. But she told her mother she had no choice.

It was for her art, she said. She wanted her head clearer for poetry.
“Sharpen yourself like a knife and plunge into the sky,” Ms. Brown wrote in her 2008 book of poems, “Asylum.” That perfectly fit her approach to life: from overcoming a childhood automobile accident that nearly killed her to later journeying to India to teach English to Tibetan monks and living in a remote artists colony in the Venezuelan Andes mountains.

On May 1, at age 29, Ms. Brown faced her own apparent premonition of the nearing end with a peace beyond her years.
“Starting over – sinking into the night – my slate is clean,” were the last words she posted on her Facebook page before going to sleep.
And then, sometime that night, she died of an epileptic seizure.

The epilepsy was the only holdover effect of the accident in 1994 near Cloverdale, when a car driven by a 13-year-old girl slammed into the Brown family Ford Explorer, injuring six family members on their way to a Christmas vacation. Cordelia, then 14, was the most seriously injured, and was hospitalized in critical condition with head injuries.

Her gentle spirit, which shone through in her probing brown eyes and easy laugh, will be missed by not just her family, but poets and other artists through Northern California, friends and relatives said.
“My daughter was a stunning, beautiful woman, inside and out,” said her mother, Josie Brown of Petrolia (Humboldt County). “After the accident, she had to learn everything all over again – how to walk, how to swallow, how to do her studies. But she did it all.”

What Ms. Brown came away with from the experience, other than the epilepsy from injuries to her brain, her mother said, was “a quickening sense of living. She felt like she had a lot to do.”
And she did.

Ms. Brown was born in Homer, Ala., where her parents, Josie and John Brown, raised cattle and ran a travel guide business. When she was 6, the family moved to Petrolia, where the Browns still raise cattle and organic vegetables – and where Josie Brown runs the nearby Lost Coast Camp summer program for children.

After graduating from Mattole Triple Junction High School in Petrolia one year early, Ms. Brown first went to Spanish language school in Costa Rica and then worked at an orphanage in Nicaragua. She took to traveling and teaching English all over the world, and between jaunts she came back to San Francisco long enough to earn a bachelor’s degree in linguistics at New College of California in 2004.

In 2005, by then fluent in Spanish, she earned a certificate at UC Berkeley for teaching English as a second language. She went from there to the artists colony in the Andes, and when she returned two years ago she devoted herself to producing her only poetry book.

“When she came back, she had such a strong passion to do a lot of writing that she stopped taking the series of epilepsy medications she was taking,” her mother said. “She thought they were clouding her brain and she wanted to concentrate.
“I think she knew her life wasn’t going to go on and on,” because of her condition, Josie Brown said. “Cordelia wasn’t thinking about that accident any more, it was all behind her. She was doing her art.”

David Ulansey, a friend and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, said he wasn’t sure whether the last words Ms. Brown posted on her Facebook site were “premonition or synchronicity, but they have been very healing for us.”
“Cordelia was a real force of nature,” he said. “She and her poetry radiated sensitivity and insight about the details of things that in the end make all the difference.”

Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, May 15, 2009

 

Have American teenagers gone wild?

Have American teenagers gone wild?

Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome.

It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.

And that is not the only alarm being sounded. The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.
In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven’t yet had intercourse. Researchers say children’s more relaxed attitude about oral sex probably reflects a similar change among adults since the 1950s. In addition, some teenagers may view oral sex as “safer,” since unplanned pregnancy is not an issue.

Health researchers say parents who fret about teenage sex often fail to focus on the important lessons they can learn from the kids who aren’t having sex. Teenagers with more parental supervision, who come from two-parent households and who are doing well in school are more likely to delay sex until their late teens or beyond.

“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”

Although the data is clear, health researchers say it is often hard to convince adults that most teenagers have healthy attitudes about sex.

“I give presentations nationwide where I’m showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse,” Dr. Bogle said. “But so many people think we’re morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It’s very difficult to convince people otherwise.”

* By TARA PARKER-POPE (January 27, 2009,”The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity”)

 

The most reviled and beloved advice of the year.

This year, Dear Prudence letter-writers had questions about everything from diaper fetishes to food-spitters to self-mutilation. But the answers that got readers most riled up were those in which you felt I unfairly maligned three already outcast groups: supercilious boyfriends, smokers, and pit bulls.

           (Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.)

My answer to In Love With a Supercomputer, who said she was dating a genius who had to win every argument, outraged many of you. I said he was a twit and a bully and suggested he read Emotional Intelligence. Many wrote I was the sexist bully because my estrogen-addled mind couldn’t accept the fact that there are certain people—they’re called “men”—who simply are always right. “This article is the senseless dribble people in your profession spout out about the differences between men and women. Never have any of you made the recommendation for a woman to find a partner who is more illogical, needlessly emotional, or with lower IQ,” wrote one dissenter. According to another: “There’s something you should have learned as a little girl: rationality and intellect drive the world we live in and contrary to popular belief your emotions are not good for the world. You strike me as an arrogant feminist who thinks you are better then men because you have a vagina.” Oh, gentlemen, you sure know how to charm a gal!

Other readers offered armchair diagnoses for the boyfriend—from Asperger’s syndrome to Narcissistic Personality Disorder to having the personality type INTJ. Whether any of these conclusions is correct, I was too harsh in the way I described this young man. But I won’t back down from my belief that this boyfriend needs a new set of social tools because no matter his IQ, no one is always right.

Probably no letter got more angry mail than my reply to Nest-Featherer, who complained that her upstairs neighbors were tossing their cigarette butts into their shared yard, which she wanted to keep clean for her new puppy. I took the opportunity to trash smokers for their penchant for littering and their general defensive hostility about their habit. Smokers smoldered in response. Hundreds of you rebutted my remarks and said such gross stereotyping belongs in the ash heap. “The way you replied sounded like you believe all smokers are slobby pigs who also can’t handle their emotions. You owe many decent, non-littering, considerate, and perfectly mentally normal folks a great big apology,” fumed one. “The neighbors are rude people who happen to smoke—they are not rude people because they smoke,” another argued.

The smokers were right—I unfairly tarred all of you. However, look at the sidewalks of any city, and you will notice that they are covered with cigarette butts. So, please, considerate smokers of America, intervene when you see your boorish brethren toss their trash in the street.

Everyone got mad at me for my answer to Uneasy. She was writing because her 20-year-old sister—a single mother with a toddler—just moved in with a roommate who had a nervous pit bull. I said both baby and dog must be intensely supervised when together and otherwise separated to avert a tragedy. Pit-bull lovers said my answer maligned their loyal, loving breed. Pit-bull haters said I exonerated these malevolent dogs and sent me articles from around the country on pit-bull maulings. Single mothers and others were outraged by what they felt was a gratuitous slap when I said that since the mother of the toddler had her while still a teenager, that indicated she lacked an ability to understand the consequences of her actions. “The fact that she is 20 and a new mother and single is why she’s not able to clearly see the danger. But you lost me the minute you basically called her a slut,” one reader bristled. “Two years ago, the woman had sex. God forbid! If you ever have pre-marital sex, you could end up with an unexpected pregnancy. So what?” asked another.

No, I did not call her a “slut,” and, yes, I agree she is too young to be a mother. The “So what?” is that it’s a tragedy that so many young women with no education, prospects, or partner are raising children alone.

I need to completely atone for my answer to Church Newbies about the young couple who were converting to Catholicism and found the elderly couple who were their church sponsors to be creepily huggy and free with their hands. I said the youngsters should tell off the oldsters, and, if that didn’t work, instead of telling the priest, they should find a new parish. Wrong! As one reader, the Rev. Joshua Williams, wrote to me: “First, if this older couple might one day serve in some sort of an official capacity, their actions might leave the church open to lawsuits. Second, if I were in the priest’s position, I would want to know so I could keep an eye out for the older couple and try to help them understand the detrimental effect their behavior is having on the church’s attempts to reach out to new members.”

Another theological question, according to many readers, in my answer to Oy Vey, a non-Jew employed at a small Jewish-owned firm whose bosses let other Jews leave early on Fridays in the winter for Sabbath but expect everyone else to work. Since she had complained to no avail, I agreed with her that the owners were behaving poorly. However, I advised she’d be best off to let it go. Many of you suggested she should take legal action. Instead, I agree with reader Dan Phillips, who suggested Oy Vey take the perfect Biblical passage, Deuteronomy 5:14, to her bosses and show them that this injunction means that on the Sabbath, all should enjoy a day of rest.

The dilemma of Terrible Twos, the father who got no pleasure out of interacting with his 2-year-old daughter, provoked a variety of reactions. I praised him for being able to acknowledge this unpleasant truth, suggested he might find his daughter more interesting when she became more independent, and urged that he look for ways to connect with her until then. One young woman in her 20s wrote that from girlhood her father was distant and uninterested, and when she became a teenager she made a difficult choice: “For the sake of both our sanity, I finally decided that the best way to have a relationship with my father was to have none. I hope Terrible Twos takes some of your suggestions. Otherwise, he’s going to lose out on knowing his daughter and hurt her in ways he never consciously would intend.”

One father acknowledged: “I could have written that letter myself three years ago. The important thing is that fathers who feel this way know that they are not alone. It’s not an easy thing to admit to feeling. But now that our daughter is five, it’s a different story. Your advice is right, time and growth change everything. I’ve gone from ‘What did I do?’ to ‘I can’t wait to get home to see her.’ “

——————————————————————————–
Related on the Web
Buy Emily Yoffe’s book What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner.And one mother wrote in response: “I would love if my daughter would initiate play with either me or my husband. I would love if she turned to one of us and called us by name. You see, my daughter is autistic. That father should count his blessings that she has an interest in him and wants him to be a part of her world.”

Thanks to this mother for the reminder that counting your blessings is good advice for us all. And one of my blessings is that I have such forthright, provocative, and insightful readers.

* Posted Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2008, W.P.

 

Heaven for the Godless?

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.

The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus.

Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible.

Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it … for goodness sake.

By CHARLES M. BLOW, December 27, 2008, Op-Ed Columnist

 

A Lynching in Brooklyn

The murder of José Sucuzhañay, an Ecuadorean immigrant who died over the weekend at a hospital in Queens, has thrown a harsh light onto a savage, hate-inspired crime that should sicken us all. This horror is also a reminder that bigotry can be deadly, not just to the groups intentionally targeted, but to anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path.

José and his brother Romel appear to have been misidentified as gay as they walked home, arms around each other, on a predawn morning in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Romel managed to escape the three men who emerged from a passing car wielding a baseball bat and shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino epithets.
José was struck on the head with a bottle, then kicked and beaten into unconsciousness. He was subsequently declared brain dead and expired last Friday night, one day before his mother, who was traveling from Ecuador, could reach him.
The victim, who had come to this country a decade ago, had been living the immigrant dream. Starting out as a waiter, he eventually bought several buildings and became co-owner of a real estate agency in Bushwick. He cared for his community and was well-liked in return.

This was the second recent killing of an Ecuadorean in the New York area. In November, Marcelo Lucero was stabbed and beaten in the Long Island village of Patchogue by a group of teenagers who, the police say, had been roaming the streets looking to beat up “a Mexican.”

Several teenagers have been arrested and charged in the Long Island case. But New York City police, who are still searching for Mr. Sucuzhañay’s killers, need to do all they can to bring those people to justice. A lynching in the heart of New York City is more than enough to remind us that bigotry cannot be tolerated.

 

* EDITORIAL , NYT,17 December 2008

 

The Caged Bird Speaks

“Alex & Me,” Irene Pepperberg’s memoir of her 30-year scientific collaboration with an African gray parrot, was written for the legions of Alex’s fans, the (probably) millions whose lives he and she touched with their groundbreaking work on nonhuman communication. Alex — for anyone who missed the commemorations last year in The Economist, Nature, The New York Times and on the radio and TV — could label more than a hundred objects and understood the concept of categories, as well as bigger-smaller, same-different and absence. (The Guardian called Alex “smarter than the average U.S. president.”) To anyone who’s dreamed of talking with the animals, Dr. Doolittle style, Alex was a revelation.

For a technical analysis of his feats, you’ll want to read Pepperberg’s book “The Alex Studies,” published in 2000. The present book, in contrast, is largely celebratory — light on science, heavy on cute animal stories and heartwarming in its depiction of what was either a fruitful professional collaboration or a weirdly dependent friendship, or both. Still, it isn’t all billing and cooing: a strain of “I’ll show them” runs through the text. Accusations against the scientific establishment, which at first denied Pepperberg funding, publication, prestigious appointments and professional respect, propel the narrative.

Pepperberg’s basic biography ought to be rousing (nerdy girl abandons career in chemistry to pursue animal intelligence; is rejected by establishment; achieves international acclaim). But she tells her own story with far less emotion than she does Alex’s. There’s much that Pepperberg is unwilling to reveal — about her cold and controlling parents, her failed marriage and her relationships with colleagues. That’s the author’s prerogative, but it leaves a reader wondering how she ended up in her 50s, alone and jobless, reduced to eating 14 tofu meals a week (to save money, not the earth). Her approach to herself is neither scientific nor humanistic: the woman remains an enigma.

Alex, on the other hand, is a delight — a one-pound, three-dimensional force of nature. Mischievous and cocky, he also gets bored and frustrated. (And who wouldn’t, when asked to repeat tasks 60 times to ensure statistical significance?) He shouts out correct answers when his colleagues (other birds) fail to produce them. If Pepperberg inadvertently greets another bird first in the morning, Alex sulks all day and refuses to cooperate. He demands food, toys, showers, a transfer to his gym.
This ornery reviewer tried to resist Alex’s charms on principle (the principle that says any author who keeps telling us how remarkable her subject is cannot possibly be right). But his achievements got the better of me. During one training session, Alex repeatedly asked for a nut, a request that Pepperberg refused (work comes first). Finally, Alex looked at her and said, slowly, “Want a nut. Nnn . . . uh . . . tuh.”

“I was stunned,” Pepperberg writes. “It was as if he were saying, ‘Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it out for you?’ ” Alex had leaped from phonemes to sound out a complete word — a major leap in cognitive processing. Perching near a harried accountant, Alex asks over and over if she wants a nut, wants corn, wants water. Frustrated by the noes, he asks, “Well, what do you want?” Mimicry? Maybe. Still, it made me laugh.
After performing major surgery on Alex, a doctor hands him, wrapped in a towel, to an overwrought Pepperberg. Alex “opened an eye, blinked, and said in a tremulous voice, ‘Wanna go back.’ ” It’s a phrase Alex routinely used to mean “I’m done with this, take me back to my cage.” The scene is both wrenching — Alex had been near death — and creepy, evoking the talking bundle in “Eraserhead.”

Pepperberg frames her story with Alex’s death: the sudden shock of it, and the emotional abyss into which she fell. Ever the scientist, she wonders why she felt so strongly. The answer she comes up with is both simple — her friend was dead — and complex. At long last, and buoyed by the outpouring of support from people around the world, she could express the emotions she’d kept in check for 30 years, the better to convince the scientific establishment that she was a serious researcher generating valid and groundbreaking data (some had called her claims about animal minds “vacuous”). When Alex died, that weight lifted.

BUT in revealing how Alex lived, and the day-to-day workings of her lab, Pepperberg may soon find herself open to fresh criticism. Her book raises an important question: why, if Alex has the cognitive skills of a young child, and even seems to grasp such concepts as love, would anyone confine him to a cage in a lab? Why run him through the drills, or scold him for getting answers “wrong”? (“You turkey,” he’d say, mimicking his trainers, or “Say better!”) During a stint at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, Pepperberg worked on a device, designed for gray parrot owners, that projects terrifying images of predators when their pets’ vocalizations “exceeded the desired level.” She doesn’t comment on the morality of either confining a highly intelligent creatureor scaring it into submission. She deals with the question of animal rights in just one sentence: while acknowledging it would be cruel to adopt a gray and leave it alone all day, “that doesn’t mean grays or other animals have wide-ranging political rights.”
Alex was a celebrity, and this book will surely please his legions of fans. Meanwhile, supporters of Pepperberg, who continues her research with other grays, will remind critics that we’d have no inkling of parrot intelligence without Alex’s sacrifice.
Elizabeth Royte, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash” and “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.”

 

By ELIZABETH ROYTE (NYT, November 9, 2008)