Lemongrass

by Anthony Kuhn

Imagine you're trekking through the concrete jungle of just about any Southeast Asian city. The first thing you notice is the smorgasbord of smells, some enticing, others downright rank. Amid the urban odor-rama, one sweet herbal fragrance stands out. It's lemongrass. And it's just about everywhere.

This herb is essential to Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian and other Asian cuisines that have become popular in the West in recent years. And lemongrass takes much of the credit for the light and aromatic character of Southeast Asian cooking. It's prized for lightening meat-laden, oily dishes and strong seafood smells. Thai people also swear by its legendary medicinal properties.

To really understand the role of lemongrass in Thai cuisine, visit Naj, a family-run restaurant and cooking school located beside Bangkok's bustling Convent Road. The founder's son, Tanaporn Markawat shows us where he gets some of his ingredients.

"So now we are in our herbs garden. We have more than 50 herbs," he says, pointing out over the yard. "We have lemongrass, basil, cumin, pandanus...the main ingredients that we use in Thai food."

Tanaporn removes the tough, fibrous outer layers of a stalk of lemongrass, revealing its pink insides, and unleashes an incredible smell.

Inhale deeply, and you will absorb a fragrance that is intense and ornate, like a filigreed eave curlicuing from the roof of a Thai Buddhist temple.

Asian restaurants rely heavily on stir-frying and deep frying, and too much oil can be a problem. But lemongrass, Tanaporn says, can lift the weight of the meat and oil, and replace that weight with an herbal pungency and an exquisite lightness.

"In most of the Thai dishes, we use the lemongrass, it's very important," he explains. "Sometimes when you have the curry, the curry is oily, and the lemongrass can help you digest, it can help your blood circulation. It's very healthy," he says.

To really understand the power of lemongrass, eat a pile of the stuff raw...in the form of a Thai lemongrass salad. It's a dish you seldom find in restaurants outside Thailand, but it's not hard to make yourself. Lemongrass is increasingly available at Asian markets and grocers in the U.S.

Tanaporn cuts several lemongrass stalks into little discs. Bits of dried shrimp, squid and peanuts add crunch. Tiny chili peppers provide punch – far above their weight. Finally, Tanaporn pours on a dressing of lime juice, fish sauce and sugar. He tosses the salad and serves it wrapped in jade green-colored betel leaves. The resulting dish is typically Thai in its combination of citrus, seafood, hot, sour, salty and spicy flavors.

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Michael Carson, The lost ring somewhere in this area (21st century)
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Your Next Partner

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I believe that we, that this planet, hasn’t seen its Golden Age. Everybody says its finished … art’s finished, rock and roll is dead, God is dead. Fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn’t live back there in Mesopotamia, I wasn’t there in the Garden of Eden, I wasn’t there with Emperor Han, I’m right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age …if only each generation would realise that the time for greatness is right now when they’re alive … the time to flower is now.

Patti Smith
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Elton John

Contemporary Batik and Tie Dye, Crown Publishers  1973
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Protesters Bare All Over a Proposed San Francisco Law

[ed.  Ahhh...I love San Francisco.]

by Malia Wollan

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that San Francisco does not have a law against being naked in public, nor that a small, unselfconscious segment of the city’s residents regularly exercise that right.

That tiny minority was joined this weekend in the autumn fog and cold by unclothed sympathizers at a “Nude-In.” One of their objectives was to draw attention to a proposed law — introduced by Scott Wiener, a city supervisor — that would prohibit nudity in restaurants and require unclad people to put a towel or other material down before sitting bare-bottomed on benches or other public seats.

Mr. Wiener said the law was introduced in response to an increase in nakedness in parks, streets and restaurants.

“It used to be that there would be one nude guy wandering around the neighborhood and no one thought twice about it,” said Mr. Wiener, who represents the city’s Castro district. “Now it’s a regular thing and much more obnoxious. We have guys sitting down naked in public without the common decency to put something down underneath them.”

Mr. Wiener’s effort was destined to grab headlines, but he probably did not anticipate that his legislation would inspire even more people to disrobe.

“Wiener might as well have shot lasers and fireworks into the sky announcing that public nudity is legal,” said George Davis, 65.

A self-described “urban nudist” who once ran for mayor and often campaigned in the buff, Mr. Davis now spends most afternoons lounging in his birthday suit in a public plaza in the Castro.

Putting a towel between your backside and a seat is “basic nudist etiquette,” said Mr. Davis, adding that the legislation requiring it was “totally unnecessary.”

Still, Mr. Davis said, the publicity about the proposed law could be credited for the new faces at the Nude-In, which was held Saturday at the Jane Warner Plaza in the Castro.

Other nearby cities like Berkeley and San Jose have passed laws prohibiting public nudity, but in San Francisco it remains legal. In accordance with state law, public nudity is only illegal when accompanied by “lewd thoughts or acts” or “where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed.” But since state law prohibits police officers from being the offended party, it takes a citizen’s arrest— a rare occurrence in a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness and tolerance — to take a naked person into custody.

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How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down

by George Musser

It didn’t take long for the recent Foundational Questions Institute conference on the nature of time to delve into the purpose of life. “The purpose of life,” meeting co-organizer and Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll said in his opening remarks, “is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” Well, there you have it. Carroll is one of the most reflective scientists I know and would never claim to reduce all of human existence to molecular disequilibrium. Still, it’s nice to know your place in the grand scheme of things. The FQXi meeting had much to say about where we came from—and where we’re headed.

Last year, Carroll blogged the backstory of where his purpose-of-life line came from. He had bumped into Mike Russell of JPL, an expert on the origin of life, on an airplane and got to chatting about the role that living things play in the geochemical cycles of our planet. Russell was on hand at the FQXi conference, too, and elaborated on his engrossing thesis tracing our descent to inorganic chemical reactions.

In Russell’s picture, the primeval Earth looked uncannily like a giant bacterium. At the seafloor, in spots like the Lost City hydrothermal vents, the chemically reduced interior met the oxidized exterior, creating a state of chemical disequilibrium. Hydrogen bubbling up from the interior sought to combine with carbon dioxide dissolved from the atmosphere to form methane, but this reaction has a bottleneck because intermediate stages such as formaldehyde require an input of energy (see this helpful graph). A geochemical reaction known as serpentinization can push through the bottleneck, using metals such as iron as catalysts, but biological reactions are more efficient, and Russell mapped out a series of steps whereby serpentinization would evolve into membrane-encased cells.

Evolution at this stage was not by natural selection, but by the spontaneous generation of complexity; the Darwinian version came later as information-bearing molecules arose. The scenario is commonly referred to as “metabolism-first” as opposed to “genetics-first.” It is the protobiological version of the principle that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

The process would have given birth to two of the three kingdoms of life, bacteria and archaea. Russell suggested that life might have arisen multiple times on Earth and, indeed, on any planet with similar chemical imbalances. Phylogeny replicates geology.

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Photo of Lost City​ hydrothermal field, courtesy of NOAA

Inappropriate Force

[ed.  The officer in question has now been identified as Deputy Inspector Anthony V. Bologna of the NYPD Patrol Borough Manhattan South.]

by James Fallows

Unless there is something faked about this video, which is on the New York Times' City Room site and is based on annotation and slow-mo apparently from USLaw.com, a uniformed New York City police officer abused power in a way that was cruel and cowardly during yesterday's Wall Street protests. It's worth the time to watch.
 

He walks up; unprovoked he shoots Mace or pepper spray straight into the eyes of women held inside a police enclosure; he turns and walks away quickly (as they scream, wail, and fall to the ground clawing at their eyes) in a way familiar from hitmen in crime movies; and he discreetly reholsters his spray can.

You may have already seen this. If you haven't, it is worth knowing about. If this is what it looks like, it is outrageous. The mayor and others should say something. And this man can certainly be identified.
____
Update: according to the NYT, the chief police spokesman, Paul Browne, said that the policeman used pepper spray "appropriately." Great. On the video we can't hear what either side is saying. But at face value, the casualness of the officer who saunters over, sprays right in the women's eyes, and then slinks away without a backward glance, as if he'd just put down an animal, does not match my sense of "appropriate" behavior by officers of the law in a free society.

Think about it: If this were part of some concerted, "appropriate" crowd-control plan, then presumably the pepper-spray officer would have talked with the other policemen trying to control the women. He would have stayed on the scene; he had done something dramatic to affect a situation, so -- again, if this were "appropriate" -- presumably he would have talked with the other officers about what to do next. But look at that video and see what seems "appropriate" to you.

Police officers make countless hard decisions every day, often at the risk of their own safety or lives. It's a harder job than I have. But everything about this scene suggests an officer who has forgotten about some of these hard choices. He just zaps 'em and walks away as they scream.

Update I  Video taping makes a difference.

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Personal Best

by Atul Gawande

I've been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.
-----
It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d hit a plateau. I grew up in Ohio, and when I was in high school I hoped to become a serious tennis player. But I peaked at seventeen. That was the year that Danny Trevas and I climbed to the top tier for doubles in the Ohio Valley. I qualified to play singles in a couple of national tournaments, only to be smothered in the first round both times. The kids at that level were playing a different game than I was. At Stanford, where I went to college, the tennis team ranked No. 1 in the nation, and I had no chance of being picked. That meant spending the past twenty-five years trying to slow the steady decline of my game.

I still love getting out on the court on a warm summer day, swinging a racquet strung to fifty-six pounds of tension at a two-ounce felt-covered sphere, and trying for those increasingly elusive moments when my racquet feels like an extension of my arm, and my legs are putting me exactly where the ball is going to be. But I came to accept that I’d never be remotely as good as I was when I was seventeen. In the hope of not losing my game altogether, I play when I can. I often bring my racquet on trips, for instance, and look for time to squeeze in a match.

One July day a couple of years ago, when I was at a medical meeting in Nantucket, I had an afternoon free and went looking for someone to hit with. I found a local tennis club and asked if there was anyone who wanted to play. There wasn’t. I saw that there was a ball machine, and I asked the club pro if I could use it to practice ground strokes. He told me that it was for members only. But I could pay for a lesson and hit with him.

He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate who’d played on his college team. We hit back and forth for a while. He went easy on me at first, and then started running me around. I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. You know, he said, you could get more power from your serve.

I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. He had me pay attention to my feet as I served, and I gradually recognized that my legs weren’t really underneath me when I swung my racquet up into the air. My right leg dragged a few inches behind my body, reducing my power. With a few minutes of tinkering, he’d added at least ten miles an hour to my serve. I was serving harder than I ever had in my life.

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

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Illustration: Barry Blitt

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Memphis Dust Rub Recipe

[ed.  I'm running out of my favorite rib rub and had to find the recipe again.  This is THE site for all things barbeque.]

Rubs are spice mixes that you can apply to raw food before cooking and there are scores of commercial blends on the market. But there's no need to buy a rub when you can make your own and customize it to your taste. And they're easy to make!

Here's my recipe for a great all purpose pork rub. Although it is formulated for pork, I've used it with success on smoked salmon, stuffed raw celery, on the rim of Bloody Mary's, and even popcorn. It is carefully formulated to flavor, color, and form the proper crust when cooked at low temps. People tell me I really ought to bottle and sell it. Nah. You can have it for free. It's all here, nothing held back.

Since I originally designed this for ribs, let's talk about how to use it on this succulent bit of pig candy. Many purists in that barbecue mecca named Memphis lay a dry rub on their ribs before and after cooking, and then they eat their slabs crunchy, sans sauce. There are even restaurants that only serve "dry" ribs. No sauce in the joint.

Even if you like your pork "wet" (with sauce) a good rub can add flavor, texture, and color, and you need one if only so, when you are asked "What's your secret?", you can answer as the pros do, by saying "It's my rub, man."

Some pros leave their rub on overnight, sort of a dry marinade, that can work like a brine or a curing process. There is a reaction between the rub and the surface that helps form a nice crust, called bark, if the rub is on for at least two hours in the fridge.

Some put it right on the meat and then massage it in. Others lay down a mustard base first to act like glue, others make a wet rub by mixing it with oil or booze because the spices dissolve in lipids or alcohol, not water. I like to put a thin layer of vegetable oil on the meat and then sprinkle the rub on top.

Because of the sugar, make sure to cook at low temps.

As background for this recipe, read these articles, The Zen of Herbs & Spices, The Zen of Chiles, the Zen of Garlic, and The Zen of Salt. 

Memphis Dust Recipe

Yield. Makes about 3 cups. I typically use about 1 tablespoon per side of a slab of St. Louis cut ribs, and a bit less for baby backs. Store the extra in a zipper bag or a glass jar with a tight lid.

Preparation time. 10 minutes to find everything and 5 minutes to dump them together.

Ingredients
3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup paprika
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup garlic powder
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
2 tablespoons ground ginger powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 teaspoons rosemary powder

About the sugar and salt. I encourage readers to experiment with recipes, and "no rules in the bedroom or dining room" is my motto, but I have gotten some emails that require a comment. One said he loved this recipe but left out the salt. Another left out the white sugar. I appreciate the need to reduce sugar and salt in our diets, but they are in the recipe for more than flavor enhancement, they help form the crust (a.k.a. called "the bark" by the pros), an important part of the texture of the surface of ribs and slow smoke roasted pork. The salt pulls some moisture to the surface to form a "pellicle" and the sugar mixes with the moisture, caramelizes, and also contributes to the crust. There's only about 2 tablespoons of rub to a large slab. Of that about 1 tablespoon is sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. If you eat half a slab, you're not eating much sugar and salt. I recommend you leave them in. And for those of you who object to white sugar for non-dietary reasons, and use brown sugar instead, you need to know brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses added. It is not unrefined sugar. I use brown sugar for the flavor and white sugar because it improves the bark. You can substitute table salt, but beware that if you do, you should use about 2/3 as much. Read my article on salt.

About the rosemary. One reader hates rosemary and leaves it out. Trust me, it hides in the background and you will never know it is there. Substitute thyme or oregano if you must, but I think rosemary is the best choice. If you can find ground rosemary, good for you. It's hard to find. So just grind the rosemary leaves in a mortar and pestle or in a coffee grinder. It will take 2 to 3 tablespoons of leaves to make 2 teaspoons of powder.

About the paprika. If you read my discussion of paprika by clicking the link you'll learn about the different kinds of paprika. In short, garden variety grocery store paprika has little flavor and is used mostly for color. But fresh Hungarian or Spanish paprika have mild but distinctive flavors. If you can find them, they improve this recipe. If you wish, you can use smoked paprika, especially good if you are cooking indoors, or even mix in some stronger stuff like ancho (slightly spicy), chipotle powder, cayenne, or chili powder. Chipotle can be quite hot, so be thoughtful of who will be eating your food. I usually go easy on the heat in deference to the kids and wimps (like me) and add it to the sauce or put chipotle powder on the table for the chile heads.

About the ginger. I think it is a very important ingredient. If you don't have any, get some.

Do this

1) Mix the ingredients thoroughly in a bowl. If the sugar is lumpy, crumble the lumps by hand or on the side of the bowl with a fork. If you store the rub in a tight jar, you can keep it for months. If it clumps just chop it up, or if you wish, spread it on a baking sheet and put it in a 250°F oven for 15 minutes to drive off moisture. No hotter or the sugar can burn.

2) For most meats, sprinkle just enough on to color it. Not too thick, about 2 tablespoons per side of a large slab of St. Louis Cut ribs. For Memphis style ribs without a sauce, apply the rub thick enough to make a crunchy crust, about 3 tablespoons per side (remember to Skin 'n' Trim the back side). To prevent contaminating your rub with uncooked meat juices, spoon out the proper amount before you start and seal the bottle for future use. Keep your powder dry. To prevent cross-contamination, one hand sprinkles on the rub and the other hand does the rubbing. Don't put the hand that is rubbing into the powder.

3) Massage the rub into the meat at least an hour before cooking. Better still, rub them up, wrap them in plastic wrap, and refrigerate them overnight before cooking.

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Irma Thomas

The Best Time a Waiter Convinced Me to Not Get a Tattoo

by Jaya Saxena

When I was 17 I knew exactly the tattoo I was going to get when I turned 18. It was the best tattoo: delicate yet totally punk rock. It was going to be a red-and-black (or blue-and-black, that was still up in the air) nautical star on the inside of my wrist, with tiny red stars and black music notes going around the rest of my wrist like a bracelet. It was going to be so hot, and I could cover it with a thick cuff. Oh man, this tattoo was going to make me so cool. And then Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 would finally want to make out with me. What do you mean, "What does the tattoo mean?" It means I like music and I think nautical stars look cool. Do tattoos have to mean more than that? Whatever, I was convinced this tattoo was going to make me the coolest. But first I had to go to lunch with my mom.

My mom and I, living in the East Village, saw our fair share of tattoos. I developed a hopeless fascination with the art, chatting up the tattoo artists in my neighborhood about what they did and what they had on their bodies. My mom didn't have the same relationship with them. As a WASP she is polite and neat and compassionate and accepting, but also pretty squeamish when it comes to body modifications. As curious as she would get, most of the time she was just freaked out. Every once in a while one of the tattoos had to come up in conversation. This happened during our lunch at the Life Cafe:

"So the other day, I saw this woman with a tattoo of a black line down her eye. Just...how sad do you have to be to do that?"

[Turn on most petulant teenage voice here] "Whatever, maybe she liked it. People should be able to do what they want. I want a tattoo."

"Really? Why? Jaya, that's going to be on you forever. How do you know you even want it on you forever?"

"I designed it myself and it's going to be really pretty! And I drew it on my wrist in Sharpie and it looks awesome."

At this point the Waiter-With-Deep-Brown-Eyes-I-Could-Gaze-At-Forever comes to take our order.

"Hi ladies, how are you doing today?"

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No Robots

[ed. Reminded me of an article in the NY Times this morning about the value of work and preserving jobs in a small Minnesota town.]

A New Bretton Woods

[ed.  Big picture view of the global financial crisis]

by Neil Irwin

The beginnings of the old global financial system came about in the closing months of World War II, following three weeks of negotiation by 730 delegates from 44 nations in the mountains of New Hampshire.

That system came to an end 40 years ago after a weekend of secret deliberations by President Richard Nixon and several aides at Camp David, Md. He announced the decision with a nationwide broadcast on a Sunday night: The United States would no longer back the dollar with gold. The postwar financial system created in Bretton Woods, N.H., was effectively finished.

We are still living with the consequences.

The improvised, on-the-fly financial system that replaced Bretton Woods after 1971 has failed. The great challenge facing the world leaders gathering for the annual World Bank-International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington this weekend is to figure out what will replace it.

For the past 40 years, capital has moved freely around the globe, with currencies fluctuating according to market forces and countries intervening to affect those flows according to their domestic interests.

It has all proved remarkably prone to financial crises: in northern Europe in the early 1990s, Mexico in 1994, several East Asian nations in 1997, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001. And, most disastrously, nearly the entire planet in 2008.

This is no way to run a global economy. But it’s not clear whether there is enough political will to find a new framework, because it would require many countries to sacrifice something dear to them.

A new system could mean limits on the kind of gaps that can arise between what countries produce and what they consume. For the United States, that would mean giving up the gusher of borrowed money that has allowed the country to live beyond its means. For China, it would mean giving up the export-driven approach to growth that has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In Germany, it would mean living without the high savings levels that comfort its residents, and in Britain, it would mean finding a new economic model that doesn’t rely so much on gigantic banks.

This stuff is hard.

The Bretton Woods system sprung from the legacy of the Great Depression and World War II.

The world leaders who assembled in the White Mountains of New Hampshire — most notably the British economist John Maynard Keynes — understood that the earlier world economic order had gone horribly wrong, and they set out to create a fundamentally different and more resilient system, even when it might mean their own countries would have to give up prerogatives and priorities.

When the panic of 2008 happened, policymakers on all corners of the globe responded in ways that reflected the lessons of the Great Depression and prevented a far worse outcome for the economy. They bailed out banks instead of letting them fail, eased monetary policy rather than tightening it, opened the spigots of fiscal stimulus and avoided any temptation to put in place tariffs to disrupt trade flows.

They succeeded at what they set out to do: They averted the calamities that followed the panic of 1929, namely 25 percent unemployment and a catastrophic global war. But that success is the reason there has not yet been a new Bretton Woods. Things haven’t gotten bad enough to spur nations to make the sacrifices involved for an over-arching remake of the world financial system.

This weekend the world’s leaders are more focused on responding to the emergency of the moment — the ongoing European debt crisis. Even on a longer time horizon, countries are finding it more convenient to muddle along with weak growth than to make more fundamental adjustments. As bad as things seem in most of the world’s advanced economies, conditions haven’t become bad enough to prompt a global grand bargain that might create a more durable economic system.

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h/t: Good

Sometimes, It’s Not You

by Sara Eckel

On my first date with Mark, he asked how long it had been since my last relationship.

I looked at the table, cupping my hand around my beer. I had always hated this question. It seemed so brazenly evaluative — an employment counselor inquiring about a gap in your résumé, a dental hygienist asking how often you flossed.

I knew he wasn’t appraising me. We had worked together for two months, and in this crowded bar we spoke with the easiness and candor of good friends — he told me about the pain of his divorce, the financial strain, the loneliness. He had been hanging around my office, sending flirty e-mails and — most adorable to me and mortifying to him — blushing whenever I spoke to him. He was kind of in the bag.

But still I didn’t answer. I didn’t want him to know the truth: that I was 39 and hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in eight years. I had seen men balk at this information before — even when the numbers were lower. They would look at me in a cool and curious way, as if I were a restaurant with too few customers, a house that had been listed for too long. One man actually said it: “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” I had answered.

“But you’re attractive?” he said, as if he wasn’t sure anymore.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

Now, faced with Mark’s innocent question, I hedged. “A long time,” I said quickly.

Mark didn’t seem to notice the evasion. He sipped his beer, and we moved on to other topics — our co-workers, Douglas Coupland novels, Seattle — and then, on a street corner outside the bar, to our first kiss. I knew I would eventually have to tell him. But not yet.

When my long-ago date asked that question — “What’s wrong with you?” — I was, of course, outraged. I finished my drink, said I had to get up early. But honestly, his question was no worse than the one I asked myself nearly every day. It wasn’t full-blown self-loathing, more a hollowness that hit me in the chest at certain times — a long subway ride home from a mediocre date, a phone conversation with a married friend who suddenly said she has to go, her husband just took the roast out of the oven.

My solace came from the place where single women usually find it: my other single friends. We would gather on weekend nights, swapping funny and tragic stories of our dismal dating lives, reassuring one another of our collective beauty, intelligence and kindness, marveling at the idiocy of men who failed to see this in our friends.

Mostly, we would try to make sense of it all. Were our married friends really so much more desirable than we were? Once in a while someone would declare that married women were actually miserable, that it was they who envied us. But this theory never got too far — we knew our married friends wouldn’t switch places with us, no matter how much they complained about their husbands.

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illustration: Brian Rea

Elaine Elias

More Banksy

Several works by the renowned graffiti artist Banksy were sold yesterday evening (21 September 2011) in a packed saleroom at Bonhams, New Bond Street, as part of its Urban Art sale. Leading the way was a work featuring one of Banksy’s most iconic images, the monkey, entitled Monkey Detonator, which had attracted a pre-sale estimate of £70,000 – 90,000, and was sold for £97,250. Executed in 2000, this canvas displays the typically dark sense of humour which has endeared Banksy to both art collectors and the general public.

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Tell Me Where It Hurts

[ed. Personal and societal issues associated with an increasingly disabled population.]

by Heather Kovich

- excerpt:

Payments to the disabled and their families make up about 20 percent of new Social Security awards every year, with retirement benefits constituting most of the rest. Even though Social Security remains in surplus, with the amounts taken in from taxpayers exceeding the amount owed to them, American politicians fret about the impending bankruptcy of Social Security and blame the aging baby boomer generation. Annual awards to disabled workers, however, are increasing. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2010 one of the two Social Security programs paid out $124 billion in benefits to 10.2 million people.

In the 1980s, before Doug’s life unraveled, he was making a good salary at an engineering firm in Seattle. His work was complex: he helped build a crane for NASA that assembled orbiters at Kennedy Space Center and an underwater crane for nuclear submarines. He and Laurel married in 1983 and she brought three children into the marriage. Doug quickly came to consider them his own. They owned a house in the working-class suburbs south of Seattle. But in the winter of 1996, when the tingling started, Doug’s life started to fall apart.

He felt it first in his right arm: little electrical pinpricks in the tips of his fingers that shot up to his elbow, causing an aching heaviness at his shoulder. After months of physical therapy the pain had only worsened and spread. An MRI showed the cause of the problem: his spine was collapsing around his spinal cord, crushing many of the nerves, and strangling the cord itself: cervical spinal stenosis. It was bad luck—there was no injury that caused it, no family history that would have predicted it. A neurosurgeon operated to stabilize the vertebrae and take pressure off the spinal cord, but the cord had suffered permanent damage and the pain never lessened. He started drinking to dull it, the drinking affected his work. Eventually he lost his job.

He spent his severance on a drafting table so that he could continue to do part-time work from home. Then, too disabled to support himself completely, he applied for Social Security Disability Insurance.


***
Before 1956, when Social Security expanded to include disability benefits, disabled workers had to rely on their families or on state welfare for financial subsistence. The 1956 federal bill was controversial—it was expensive, and many politicians thought that paying the disabled not to work would lead to laziness. But Henry Jackson, a senator from Washington, passionately argued for the benefit: “It should be clear to all of us that no matter at what age a person becomes totally and permanently disabled, he needs Social Security payments worse than a person who retires at sixty-five in good health. The worker who is disabled early in life usually has accumulated less savings than has an older person. He has more dependents to care for than has an older worker whose family has grown up and left home… Retirement after one’s working years can be planned for. Disability strikes without warning.” President Eisenhower signed the bill, giving rise to SSDI, which allowed workers to collect their Social Security prior to age sixty-five if they became disabled. In 1974 the program added Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, which provided minimal payments to the disabled, including children, who had not contributed enough to Social Security to qualify for SSDI.

Doctors were leery of the bill. They worried that they would be put in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether their patients, people they may have known for years, were eligible for this income. To deal with this concern, applicants are now often sent to doctors who work for private staffing firms that contract with the government. This was my job, “independent medical examiner.” On the basis of a forty-minute interview and examination, I was supposed to determine how disabled an applicant or “claimant” was.

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Photograph via Flickr by John Williams