Salt of the Earth

Six Types of Salt and How to Use Them

by Maureen Callahan

Knowing the difference between Kosher and sea salt can make a world of difference in your dishes. Here, six easy-to-find varieties, with tips on when and where to sprinkle them.

Kosher Salt

Use it for: All cooking. Kosher salt dissolves fast, and its flavor disperses quickly, so chefs recommend tossing it on everything from pork roast to popcorn.

Origin: Either the sea or the earth. Widely sold brands include Morton and Diamond Crystal, which are made using different methods. Kosher salt got its name because its craggy crystals make it perfect for curing meat―a step in the koshering process.

Texture: Coarse. Cooks prize crystals like these; their roughness makes it easy to pinch a perfect amount.

To buy: Look in your local supermarket. Kosher salts cost about $1 a pound. If you don't mind a few clumps, buy Diamond Crystal; it has no anticaking agents, which can leave a chemical aftertaste.

Crystalline Sea Salt

Use it for: Adding a pungent burst of flavor to just-cooked foods. These crystals will complement anything from a fresh salad to a salmon fillet.

Origin: Coasts from Portugal to Maine, California to the Pacific Rim.

Texture: Fine or coarse. The size of the irregular crystals affects how fast the salt dissolves. It varies in color, depending on the minerals it contains (iron-rich red clay, for example, gives Hawaiian sea salt a pinkish hue). These natural impurities can add subtly briny, sweet, or even bitter flavors to the salts.

To buy: Check gourmet shops or on-line (thespicehouse.com stocks Hawaiian sea salt). Expect to pay $2 to $15 or more a pound. Many markets sell La Baleine, a relatively inexpensive brand ($3 for 26.5 ounces).

Charting American Exceptionalism

We’re #1: Charting American Exceptionalism

by David Morris

Los Amigos Invisibles

Have some fun.

Second Thoughts

via:

Advice From 'America's Worst Mom'

A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old ride New York City’s subway by himself. In a new book, she explains why she has no regrets.

by Lenore Skenazy

About a year ago, I let my 9-year-old ride the New York subway alone for the first time. I didn’t do it because I was brave or reckless or seeking a book contract. I did it because I know my son the way you know your kids. I knew he was ready, so I let him go. Then I wrote a column about it for The New York Sun. Big deal, right?

Well, the night the column ran, someone from the Today show called me at home to ask, Did I really let my son take the subway by himself?

Yes.

Just abandoned him in the middle of the city and told him to find his way home?

Well, abandoned is kind of a strong word, but … yes, I did leave him at Bloomingdale’s.

In this day and age?

No, in Ladies’ Handbags.

Oh, she loved that. Would I be willing to come on the air and talk about it?

Sure, why not?

I had no idea what was about to hit me.

A day later, there across from me was Ann Curry looking outrageously pretty and slightly alarmed, because her next guest (the one right before George Clooney) just might be criminally insane. By way of introduction, she turned to the camera and asked, “Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?”

The shot widened to reveal … me. And my son Izzy. And some “parenting expert” perched on that famous couch right next to us, who, I soon learned, was there to Teach Us a Lesson.

Read more:

Creativity vs. Innovation

Creativity

Innovation

Sometimes there's a difference

image credits:

Friday Book Club - Gould's Book of Fish

Reviewed by James Campbell, NY Times

The narrator of ''Gould's Book of Fish'' ends his tale having become his subject matter and ''knowing that a scam is just a dream, & that a dream is a dangerous thing if you believe in it too much.'' Richard Flanagan is a Tasmanian writer who has confronted dreams, heedless of danger, and been much rewarded in his home region for having done so. His first novel, ''Death of a River Guide'' (1994), was narrated by a drowning man, Aljaz, who had been ''granted visions -- grand, great, wild, sweeping visions.'' Over 300 pages of antipodean magic realism followed, while Aljaz submitted to the river. Flanagan's next novel, ''The Sound of One Hand Clapping'' (1997), resorted to naturalism, albeit of a sort that allowed the story to be told in chopped-up time. With his new book, the author has turned back to his earlier recipe -- one part Rabelais, one part García Márquez, one part Ned Kelly -- to ''wild, sweeping visions'' and to water.

The hero of ''Gould's Book of Fish'' is based on a historical figure, William Buelow Gould, an English convict and painter who drowned in 1831 while trying to escape from Sarah Island, a penal colony off Tasmania. The original ''Book of Fish'' is Gould's taxonomy of the fish caught locally, which is now housed in the State Library of Tasmania. In an audacious effort at postcolonial recovery, Flanagan has adopted the existing plates and other fragments of Gould's work and attempted to imagine a history of ''an island in the middle of a wilderness far off the coast of a nowhere land so blighted it existed only as a gaol.'' Flanagan's version is outspoken on many unspeakable stories, like the aboriginal genocide. It undercuts the history dictated by judges and jailers, and in order to escape the invidious rationalism of its era it deploys a method whereby, as his publisher said of Flanagan's first novel, ''dreaming reasserts its power over thinking.''

The basic situation of Billy Gould, convicted murderer, thief and forger, is confinement to a cliffside cage, in which seawater washes up to his neck when the tide rolls in. ''I count my blessings as I float,'' he writes; ''this twice-daily bath lately seems to have rid me of my lice.'' His jailer, Pobjoy, beats him regularly and receives in return the prisoner's weapon, feces. Unsurprisingly for a man in such dire straits, Gould's speech is correspondingly scatological. When he puts paint to paper, however, he is a genius. As if things weren't bad enough, Gould is surrounded by people on the convict island who are half-mad and bent on oppressing him: the Commandant; the surgeon, Lempriere; Pobjoy himself. There is also a black British convict named Capois Death and an aboriginal woman, Twopenny Sal, who may have borne Gould's child. Larger than life though they all are, none has much force as a fictional character, a deficiency apparently justified by the novel's final trick, revealed in an afterword.

Flanagan has a terrific narrative energy, and he reaches for ''the marvelous, the extraordinary, the gorgeously inexplicable wonder of a universe only limited by one's own imagining of it.'' The disadvantage for the reader, in a novel of phantasmagoric happenings, is that these are apt to take the place of mundane but engaging devices like plot, dialogue, character. ''Gould's Book of Fish'' has no plot and next to no dialogue of the ordinary kind, and Gould, for all his talent, has no human personality. A typical anecdote is the one in which we learn how he was sent to the penal colony: ''In that courtroom there was a lot of dark wood trying to take itself seriously. In order to lighten all that sorry timber up I should have told it the story I am telling you now, of how life is best appreciated as a joke when you discover all Heaven & all Hell are implicit in the most insignificant: a soiled sheet, a kangaroo hunt, the eyes of a fish.''

Read more:

Hope

via:

Building the Guitar You’ll Keep

Above: Gerard Egan sets up a guitar before it heads out the door at Santa Cruz Guitar. It takes about four hours to install and adjust everything that touches the strings, from the bridge to the frets to the tuning keys. Once a guitar is properly set up, it’s played to make sure everything is just right.
 
“He'll make the guitars speak their first words,” Hoover said.

by  Chuck Squatiglia

James Nash didn’t pack a guitar when he went off to college, which in hindsight was a boneheaded move.

Nash was 17 at the time and had been playing for about a dozen years. He was good. But he didn’t have any plans to “do music seriously” and didn’t think he’d play much while he was at school.

That didn’t last. Once you’ve discovered you enjoy playing the guitar, you can’t stop playing the guitar. It wasn’t long before Nash was borrowing guitars, playing whatever he could get his hands on whenever he could get his hands on it. Somewhere along the line he picked up a cheap Japanese guitar and was happy.

His father, however, was not.

Dad loved music and always had nice guitars lying around. It wouldn’t do to have his son playing something that sounded like a cat in heat. He showed up one day with a Santa Cruz Guitar six-string he’d picked up secondhand. An OM, Sitka spruce and Indian rosewood.

“Here,” he said. “Play this.”

It was perfect, with a bright, clear tone and great sound. Well, almost perfect. The neck was just a bit ... off. Not quite the right shape. No amount of adjustment would set it right. Finally, Nash walked into Santa Cruz Guitars to see what they could do.

“Let me have a look at that,” company founder Richard Hoover said. Santa Cruz was — and still is — a small place, the kind of place where Hoover himself will show you around if you ask for a tour. He did everything he could think of to set that neck right, but nothing worked. So he made a new neck and installed it for free, just because.

Nash, who’s 37 now, still has that guitar. He’s played it at hundreds of gigs with his band, The Waybacks. And all these years later, he hasn’t forgotten what Hoover did for a kid who wandered in one day looking for some help.

“You never forget something like that,” Nash said. “I was a 20-year-old kid. A no one. Not even in a band. But he treated me nicely when he had absolutely no reason to, or anything to gain from it.”

That’s how they are at Santa Cruz Guitar.

Starting the Company

Richard Hoover is a vivacious, cheerful man of 59, with horn-rimmed glasses, a thick beard and graying hair worn in a ponytail. He looks like someone who would have fallen in love with Santa Cruz as a child and vowed to move there, which is exactly what happened. He also looks like someone who could have been a cowboy in Montana, which is almost what happened.

He and his sweetheart arrived in Santa Cruz in 1972. He started repairing, then building, guitars when his beloved Martin D-28 was stolen a short time later. He had a knack for it, but was frustrated by the dearth of information about his craft.

“There was nothing written about steel-string guitars,” he said. “But there was a great deal of information on violin-making.”

Hoover read everything he could find about how the masters used science and art — and, to hear him explain it, not a little magic — to make wood and glue and varnish sing. The more he learned, the more he saw how much he had to learn. So he turned to other luthiers for help, figuring they could do more together than individually. After spending a few years building guitars on his own, Hoover founded Santa Cruz Guitar Co. with William Davis and Bruce Ross in 1976. Had they asked around, most people would have said they were crazy.

“We came along at the worst possible time,” Hoover said with a chuckle. “The acoustic guitar was all but extinct.”

It didn’t help that this little company no one had heard of, from a hippie town in California, was competing against the likes of Gibson, Martin and Guild. It also didn’t help that they were using wood almost no one had heard of.

Read more:

Rio de Janeiro’s Transit Solution

by  Nate Berg, Wired Magazine

The slums of Rio de Janeiro—the infamous favelas—pile onto and up and over the city’s iconic steep hillsides. Simply getting from point A to point B requires a sub-alphabet of zigzaggery up stairs, over switchbacks, and through alleyways that can be just a few feet wide. There’s nowhere for public transit to go. Nowhere, that is, but up.

That’s the direction for the newest transportation system in Rio, slated to open in March: a six-station gondola line running above a collection of favelas known as the Complexo do Alemão. The government says that 152 gondolas will carry 30,000 people a day along a 2.1-mile route over the neighborhood, transforming the hour-and-a-half trudge to a nearby commuter rail station into a 16-minute sky ride.

Spending $74 million for this kind of imagineering may sound a little wacky, but in recent years Medellín and Caracas have also built gondolas for underserved areas. Jorge Mario Jáuregui, the architect behind Rio’s system, says the project has real and symbolic value—”real because the connection has been built, and symbolic because it makes the informal city part of the formal city.” Still, in the favelas—where there’s no running water or sewers and a street battle between police and drug gangs killed dozens last year—perhaps flying cable cars shouldn’t be a top priority.

Then again, sanitation and safety might not be the problems that Rio officials want to solve. With the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics coming to town, making the favelas look like a theme park could convey just the right impression.

via:

Spam Profits

Equation: How Much Money Do Spammers Rake In?

by  Julie Rehmeyer, Wired Magazine

After deleting the 10,000th Viagra offer from your inbox, you might wonder, does anyone actually make money off this crap? Chris Kanich and his colleagues at UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too—so they hijacked a botnet to find out. Kanich’s team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found in the wild that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. Then they changed the orders, effectively zombifying the botnet for their own research. Instead of sending hapless rubes to the botmaster’s website, spam ads would instead funnel them to a site built by Kanich’s team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but instead of taking credit card numbers in return for a bottle of sugar pills (or worse), the site coughed up an error message and counted the clicks. Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000. Here’s the equation they used to generate that number.

via:

Is Hell Dead?

by  Jon Meacham

As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill's growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.

A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: "Reality check: He's in hell." Bell was struck.

Really? he recalls thinking.

Gandhi's in hell?

He is?

We have confirmation of this?

Somebody knows this?

Without a doubt?

And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?

So begins Bell's controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Works by Evangelical Christian pastors tend to be pious or at least on theological message. The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises "eternal life" to "whosoever believeth in Him." Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, "for us and for our salvation came down from heaven ... and was made man." In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.

Bell, a tall, 40-year-old son of a Michigan federal judge, begs to differ. He suggests that the redemptive work of Jesus may be universal — meaning that, as his book's subtitle puts it, "every person who ever lived" could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be. Such a simple premise, but with Easter at hand, this slim, lively book has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond. When word of Love Wins reached the Internet, one conservative Evangelical pastor, John Piper, tweeted, "Farewell Rob Bell," unilaterally attempting to evict Bell from the Evangelical community. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Bell's book is "theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way." In North Carolina, a young pastor was fired by his church for endorsing the book.

Read more:

Seattle to Baghdad

[ed.  This article is a bit dated but has not lost any of its relevance.  I found it while looking for something else.  I was first introduced to Naomi Klein through her monumental work The Shock Doctrine which describes disaster capitalism i.e., economic/political opportunism in the wake of natural or man-made catastrophes.  I haven't read No Logo but would think that the concerns she expressed then, as I understand them, have been vindicated repeatedly over the last decade.]

by Naomi Klein, N+1 Magazine

Naomi Klein had already sent her first book, No Logo, to the printers when activists halted the November 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. For the new author, it was a serendipitous turn of events. No Logo was a chronicle of the “anticorporate” movement, an analysis of a new wave of protests against the business control of media, politics, and culture. When Klein started the book, she was connecting the dots of a largely underground world of resistance: “global street parties,” protests outside Niketown, occupations of Shell stations in Nigeria. In Seattle, the movement burst into full view. For people stunned by the Seattle demonstrations, Klein’s book was a field guide; for people inspired by them, it was a bible.

Less than two years after Seattle, two planes flew into the World Trade Center: a symbol of global capital, the towering logo for Wall Street. Political leaders and pundits proclaimed the nascent anticorporate movement dead, and practically accused the sweatshop opponents of bombing the Twin Towers. “The antiglobalization movement . . . is, in part, a movement motivated by hatred of the United States,” scolded New Republic editor Peter Beinart in an editorial two days after the attacks. Clare Short, the British secretary of state for international development, commented in November 2001, “Since September 11, we haven’t heard from the protesters. I’m sure they’re reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden’s network.” This was slander, but still, many commentators accepted the twisted logic that one of Washington’s enemies (the protesters) must be the friend of another of its enemies (al Qaeda). It seemed, at first, as though the movement that had produced the Seattle protests could not possibly survive.

Even before September 11, many “antiglobalizers” felt that journalists and pundits had tagged them with the wrong name. Here was an international movement if there ever was one: the shared effort of French farmers, Amazonian Indians, American steelworkers, and landless Africans to win a decent and secure livelihood. They protested something that, outside of America, most people called “neoliberalism,” after the liberal economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Neoliberals revived the 19th-century faith in the free market as the final arbiter of human affairs, a utopian certainty that had been dampened by the two World Wars and the Great Depression. They insisted that only the invisible hand could distribute goods efficiently or allocate wealth justly, and that therefore all barriers to its perfect operation—such as labor unions, tariffs, or welfare states—needed to be swept aside. When, in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, the neoliberal ideology began to sweep the world, its proponents were able to identify it as “globalization,” making it sound like an inevitable trend, not a set of political choices. The result was that protesters could easily be painted as provincial xenophobes who yearned for an autarkic past and refused to accept economic reality. After September 11, it appeared that they might be branded traitors as well. Everything had changed, and it seemed that anticorporate activism—and with it, Naomi Klein—would simply fade away.

Instead, the opposite happened. The antiglobalization movement emerged—for a moment, at least—in a new, broader and deeper form, as the opposition to the war with Iraq. And Naomi Klein kept on writing, not only about the resistance to the war but also about the war itself. It is hard enough to write about politics in peace time. The stakes grow higher in a time of war. One must recognize how violence alters the most mundane aspects of our daily politics, yet also remain aware of the larger world—the political context—in which the fighting takes place. Klein, almost unique among political journalists, has struggled to make our post-9/11 moment continuous with the late 1990s. She has looked for the neoliberalism inside of neoconservatism. The degree to which she has succeeded tells us something about whether the movement for greater economic justice—under whatever name—can expect to have a future.

Wet House

by  John Burnside

Over the years, I've seen a number of people die from alcohol and, usually, it's a long, slow, fairly sickening process.

The body is surprisingly resilient and can take decades of abuse, culminating in what Dylan Thomas's doctor called "a massive insult to the brain", before it finally comes to a sorry and bewildering end.  Yet what the drinker's friends and family find just as distressing are the many dangers attendant on this long fall: the arrests, the accidents, the discovery in some wet alley, the thefts and lies, the assaults. Sometimes the worst thing is simply not knowing the whereabouts of someone you love, someone hopelessly vulnerable, for days or weeks at a time – where they are, who they are with, what they are doing, what might, at any moment, be done to them. As it happens, I have been on both sides of this scenario and I know that, for the drinker, it's a matter of almost unbearable shame and self-disgust. For the loved ones, the process can be likened to a campaign of attrition, a long and monstrous betrayal inflicted on them for no apparent reason.

It would seem obvious, then, that the provision of a safe place for those drinkers who do not want to be "saved" or "cured", would be a welcome development – and, at the St Anthony Residence, in St Paul, Minnesota, this is exactly what drinkers are offered, free of charge. For years, this "wet house" (one of four in the state) has provided shelter to its hopelessly alcoholic residents, at a cost of $18,000 per person per year. Nobody has to attend therapy sessions; there is no 12-step programme and no homilies about hope or the future.

Similar facilities are available elsewhere in the US, and in Canada, where a study based around Ottawa's "wet shelter" found that emergency room visits and arrests were reduced by around 50%, saving the individual drinker untold humiliation and pain and significantly reducing the bills of local taxpayers, while freeing up medical staff and police officers for other jobs. Can it be doubted, then, that such programmes provide a win-win situation? The drinker is taken off the street and out of the emergency room, the local community benefits and, though this is not altogether a solution to their problem, friends and family are eased of at least some of the pain that goes with loving a chronic drunk. Meanwhile, within the limits of their condition, drinkers attending facilities like St Anthony's are surprisingly happy.

And that, perhaps, is the problem. Hopeless drunks aren't supposed to be happy: they're supposed to suffer until they see the error of their ways and submit to a cure. Critics of the wet houses never say this, of course; they talk about wet houses "giving up" on people, about "writing people off" – and yet, though they may well be sincere, their opposition to harm reduction programmes raises serious questions about liberty and civil rights. When a grown man who, whether drunk or sober, maintains, often with real cogency and persuasiveness, that he does not wish to be treated for what other people may think of as a "condition" but which he sees as an essential part of his identity, what right does anyone have to oblige him to seek therapy? It may not be desirable (or rather, we may not see it as desirable) to be a chronic drinker, but it is not so long since it was seen as equally undesirable to be gay. When Alan Turing was forced to endure female hormone treatment ("chemical castration") in an attempt to "treat" his homosexuality, many people thought this was an appropriate course of action and attributed his suicide to his unstable – ie deviant – personality. That was in 1954. Will some future observer, say 50 years from now, look back on the treatment programmes that so many drunks have to endure and see a clear infringement of their most basic civil liberties?

Read more:

Karate School

via:

Panda Bread

[ed.  Too cool.  This is way beyond my ability, but perhaps not yours.  Recipe translated from the Asian web site Taro Taro]

Panda Bread:

Ingredients:

600g loaf (206 x 108 x100h)
230g bread flour
70g cake flour
30g sugar
milk + 1 yolk = 210g (I used skim milk)
4.5g salt
18g unsalted butter (I used 20g)
4g yeast
8g green tea powder dissolved in 10g boiling hot water
8g cocoa powder dissolved in 8g boiling water

Just A Minute

via:

Miso Happy

Miso: An Ancient Solution For Modern Meals

by Eve Turow, NPR

Get recipes for Miso-Glazed Halibut, Miso Ginger Salad Dressing, Grilled Miso-Marinated Flat Iron Steak, Pan-Roasted Asparagus, Poached Eggs And Miso Butter, Dark Miso Soup With Sweet Potato, and Green Beans With Creamy Sesame-Miso Sauce.

It was 8 p.m. I had told my friend to be over at 8:30 for dinner, and there I was, dripping sweat in my yoga gear, plowing through my front door with my day's work clothes and yoga mat in hand.

"What had I been thinking," I wondered, "offering dinner a half-hour after I return home?"

My options were limited. Thankfully, I was cooking for a friend who I knew would love me, bathed or not. So I decided to skip a shower and throw on a sweatshirt instead. Scurrying into the kitchen, I threw the freezer and refrigerator doors open. Frozen tilapia, check. A fresh vegetable, check. Now, what to do with the fish?

My eyes scoured the back of the fridge. Then I spied my ingredient, hiding under gochujang — a hot pepper paste — and a container of cream cheese: miso. My sister had once made me a miso-glazed fish, and taking the filets out to thaw, I attempted to re-taste the ingredients in my mind. Something sweet, I recalled, and something tangy. Miso, unlike many other flavoring components, has a strong taste and texture of its own.  Feeling similar to nut butter on the tongue, it's exudes a distinct salty, funky aroma.

Miso is a fermented soybean paste. Though once uncommon in U.S. food stores, it is now available year round in several varieties. Miso ranges from light to dark, gaining flavor and intensity with the depth of its color. Some types are fermented with other grains: barley, rice and buckwheat, while others simply use the fundamental soybean.

The origins of miso trace back to the 700s B.C. in China, when fish bones and meat were used as the base. Soybeans became the main ingredient around 100 B.C. Miso, then known as jiang or "paste," was an essential condiment for pickling, keeping produce fresh for a longer period of time.

Miso arrived in Japan around the same time as Buddhism, approximately A.D. 550. It also traveled throughout Southeast Asia, taking on different names and qualities as each culture adapted the recipe, becoming varieties of Korean jang, Indonesian taucho, Vietnamese tuong, Thai tao-chio and Malaysian tau-cheo. Homemade miso traditions gained a stronghold in northern Japan, eventually integrating soybeans as they did in China by following a 6th-century encyclopedia outlining the how-to's of miso-making. Today it is an essential element in Japanese cooking, especially in the well-known miso soup.

A Mother's Gift

by Janny Scott

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.

Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”

Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”

Read more:

Sparking a Revolution

Laser sparks revolution in internal combustion engines

For more than 150 years, spark plugs have powered internal combustion engines. Automakers are now one step closer to being able to replace this long-standing technology with laser igniters, which will enable cleaner, more efficient, and more economical vehicles.

In the past, lasers strong enough to ignite an engine’s air-fuel mixtures were too large to fit under an automobile’s hood. At this year’s Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011), to be held in Baltimore May 1 – 6, researchers from Japan will describe the first multibeam laser system small enough to screw into an engine’s cylinder head.

Equally significant, the new laser system is made from ceramics, and could be produced inexpensively in large volumes, according to one of the presentation’s authors, Takunori Taira of Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences.

According to Taira, conventional spark plugs pose a barrier to improving fuel economy and reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), a key component of smog.

Spark plugs work by sending small, high-voltage electrical sparks across a gap between two metal electrodes. The spark ignites the air-fuel mixture in the engine’s cylinder — producing a controlled explosion that forces the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder, generating the horsepower needed to move the vehicle.
Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner — burnt more air and less fuel — they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.