Friday, November 19, 2010

19/11 Ngọc Quyên mặc váy xẻ cổ táo bạo


Thứ sáu, 19/11/2010, 15:11 GMT+7

Nữ người mẫu khoe ngực tròn, căng đầy trong bộ áo dạ hội rực đỏ. Ngọc Quyên trình diễn trong đêm ra mắt nhãn hiệu thời trang mới tại TP HCM, tối 18/11.
Ngọc Quyên che mắt vẫn tự tin sải bước

Bộ ngực gợi cảm của a Ngọc Quyên được nhiều người tham dự đêm tiệc chú ý.
Bộ ngực gợi cảm của Ngọc Quyên gây chú ý với khách tham dự.
Ngọc Quyên xuất hiện trong sưu tập "Evening gown" của hai nhà thiết kế Vincent Đoàn và Lê Thanh Hòa.
Vincent Đoàn cũng là nhà thiết kế trang phục cho cuộc thi Hoa hậu Thế giới người Việt 2010.
Phong cách trình diễn cuốn hút cũng là điểm mạnh của Ngọc Quyên trên sàn catwalk.
Ngọc Quyên còn khoe bộ ngực của mình trong bộ sưu tập đồ điển sàng với chủ đề
Ở sưu tập "Ready to wear", bộ ngực quyến rũ của người đẹp tiếp tục được khoe khéo léo.
Trái với bộ áo dạ hội, trang phục này có gam màu trắng và bạc làm chủ đạo.
Ngoài Ngọc Quyên, chương trình có sự tham gia của nhiều gương mặt khác.
Trang Nhung cũng không thua kém gì Ngọc Quyên khi khoe bộ ngực nóng bỏng của mình.
Trang Nhung.
Phùng Ngọc Yến
Phùng Ngọc Yến.
Quanh Đi.
Dung LâmẢnh

18/11 Life’s Work Is a Talmud Accessible to All Jews

Jerusalem Journal
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: November 18, 2010

JERUSALEM — In the 1960s, when a young Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz embarked on the mammoth task of translating the ancient Jewish texts of the Talmud into modern Hebrew and, even more daringly, providing his own commentary alongside those of the classical sages, the state of Israel was still in its teens, there were no home computers, and man had not yet landed on the moon.

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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Rabbi Adin Steinsalz

The monumental work took 45 years. But this month in his hometown, Jerusalem, Rabbi Steinsaltz, now 73, marked the end of the endeavor, as the last of the 45 volumes of his edition of the Babylonian Talmud, originally completed 1,500 years ago, rolled off the press.

“When I began it I did not think it would be so difficult or so long,” the rabbi said in a meandering interview that went late into the night at his Steinsaltz Center for religious studies in the city’s historic Nahlaot neighborhood. “I thought it would take maybe half the time.”

First, he said, there was the arrogance of youth, then financial and political obstacles, several spells in the hospital and the disruptive effect of a few wars.

Rabbi Steinsaltz, frail after a recent illness, sealed his achievement on Nov. 7 with a modest closing ceremony at City Hall here and a live video linkup connecting 360 Jewish communities across 48 countries on a global day of Jewish learning in the spirit of the Talmud.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sent greetings by video and, recalling his private Talmud sessions with the rabbi in the past, said they were among the most rewarding intellectual experiences of his life.

The original Talmud, written in a mixture of old Hebrew and Aramaic, is all about learning. The act of learning, according to the rabbi, is the “central pillar” or “backbone” of Judaism — what connects Jews with the Almighty above, with their roots below and with one another.

“This book is essential for our existence,” Rabbi Steinsaltz said.

The Talmud, a compilation and analysis of oral Jewish law and ethics governing everything from marital relations to agriculture, is written as a flowing rabbinic discourse. Though the terms are archaic, many say the Talmud contains founding principles that can still be applied today. But its condensed and obscure style made it largely incomprehensible to all but serious scholars.

By adding vowel markings and punctuation to the ancient text, a modern Hebrew translation that fills in gaps, and contemporary interpretations, the Steinsaltz edition aims to make the Talmud accessible to everyone.

Rabbi Steinsaltz, a diminutive man with straggly hair and an unruly white beard tinged yellow after decades of smoking a pipe, is widely considered one of the most brilliant Jewish scholars of his age.

He was born into what he described as a “not especially religious home”; his father was a Zionist socialist who volunteered in the international brigades in Spain. The rabbi says his religious belief developed gradually in his teens.

“By nature I am a skeptical person, and people with a lot of skepticism start to question atheism,” he said.

His father sent him to a Talmud tutor at the age of 10 so that he would not grow up an “ignoramus.” Later, in college, he specialized in mathematics and physics. As a result, the rabbi has an unusual ability to move easily between different worlds — secular and sacred, scientific and spiritual, earthly and divine.

Though born sickly, Rabbi Steinsaltz has long compensated for the limitations of the human condition with intellectual and metaphysical flights. Among his most popular works is “The Thirteen Petalled Rose,” a journey into Jewish mysticism that he described as “a book for the soul.”

Asking questions, he said, is both the secret of science and the essence of the Talmud, the dialectic forming the character of the Jewish people.

He denied that his translation detracted from the book’s inner complexity and mystique. “I am not simplifying the Talmud; I am cutting some of the technical difficulties,” he said. “I am paving roads, opening doors. Not more.”

Just finding the right format for the millions of words of the Talmud was a challenge. Each page consists of a central block of the original text bordered by the classical commentary, alongside the translation, new analysis and notes, each part distinguished from the others by different typefaces and fonts.

Rabbi Steinsaltz began the task alone, but later found people “willing to lend a hand.” It became easier with computers — not least, he said, because his handwriting is so atrocious that he himself finds it hard to read.

Some in the traditional establishment were suspicious, even hostile at first. The rabbi’s level of religiosity was in doubt, and there was a reluctance to open up locked treasures.

Since he started work on it, three million volumes of the Steinsaltz edition are said to have been sold, and it has been partly translated into several other languages, including English.

Today, the rabbi bridges different streams and communities within Judaism, an unusual feat helped by the fact that he chose not to associate himself fully with any one religious group, according to his son, Rabbi Menachem Even Yisrael.

Rabbi Steinsaltz is now eager to get on with his other work, including a concise commentary of the Bible. He says he regularly puts in a 17-hour day.

He leads Shefa, an umbrella organization for all his activities and educational institutions, including schools, seminaries and less formal centers of learning for men and women. Rabbi Even Yisrael is the executive director of Shefa, which has a United States affiliate, the Aleph Society.

Known as a sharp social critic, Rabbi Steinsaltz seems to have lost none of his bite. He has little patience for vanity or pretense, and says he admires the unsparing honesty and curiosity of small children, finding them more inspiring than some adult members of the species.

He is also fond of animals and spent time at the zoo, where he says he discovered how a peacock looks “undressed.”

“A peacock without feathers is like a very unappealing, big chicken,” he said, adding, “There are a lot of people like that.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 19, 2010, on page A8 of the New York edition.

16/11 Is It Time for an Oil Change in the Kitchen?

The Curious Cook


Jason Lee
By HAROLD McGEE
Published: November 16, 2010

WHAT’S the best oil for everyday frying? Some markets where I shop offer more than a dozen oils, from argan and avocado to tea seed and walnut. I’d long figured that the choice is a matter of taste and price. I usually use canola oil because it’s neutral in flavor, a good source of omega-3s and inexpensive. Like soy oil, it costs about a dime a tablespoon, whereas extra-virgin olive oils can run well over a dollar.
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Jason Lee
Partisans of the olive maintain that a high-quality extra-virgin oil brings its special flavor and health benefits to foods cooked in it. More recipes now suggest it for frying and other high-heat techniques, not just for last-minute drizzling. But does it make enough difference that it’s worth a tenfold premium in price?
I investigated the flavor question by heating 15 oils — 4 olive and 11 seed oils — with nothing else in the pan, so I could taste what heat alone does to them. And I served some of them to trained oil judges.
We were surprised at how thoroughly heat obliterated the flavors in cooking oil until they all tasted more or less the same. Even prize-winning, and costly, extra-virgin olive oils lost much of what makes them special, though they retain their apparently healthful pungency. To get food with the green and fruity flavor of good olive oil, it seems more economical and effective to fry with an inexpensive refined oil and drizzle on a little fresh olive oil after cooking.
Many oils have little or no flavor to begin with, as they’ve been refined to remove almost everything except the oil molecules. This is true of most oils extracted from seeds, including canola and soy. Fresh out of the bottle, the nine refined seed oils I tested were almost odorless. Some seed oils, including peanut and sesame, are also sold in unrefined or partly refined form. These are usually darker and can carry the flavor of their sources. They’re also more sensitive to heat than refined oils. They start breaking down, developing unpleasant flavors and giving off smoke at lower temperatures. Heated in a frying pan, the two unrefined seed oils I tested began to smoke between 375 and 390 degrees, at the upper end of the frying range. The refined oils didn’t start smoking until 475 degrees or higher.
When heated to a moderate frying temperature of 350 degrees, only the unrefined sesame oil had a distinctive flavor. The other 10 seed oils tasted about the same, slightly nutty and, well, fried.
Unlike seed oils, olive oils are pressed from fresh fruits, so their flavors can vary tremendously. Of the four tested, one was an inexpensive “light” olive oil, made primarily of neutral refined oil, with very little aroma.
The other three were labeled “extra virgin,” a standard that in theory signifies an unrefined oil of good quality but in practice doesn’t signify much at all. The first two were a fruity Spanish oil and a spicy, pungent one from California. Both were international medal winners and priced accordingly, at a dollar or more a tablespoon. The third was a suspiciously inexpensive bottle from an upscale supermarket, a blend from several Mediterranean countries. It smelled stale and had a strong odor of fermented olives. These qualities should have disqualified it from extra virgin status because they indicate that the oil was made from damaged fruit.
But oil appeal is on the palate of the taster. According to a forthcoming study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, many California consumers actually like and expect these off flavors in olive oils, probably because they’re used to them and have had little or no experience of fresh, well-made oils.
The refined olive oil and two of three extra-virgin olive oils I tested began to smoke at a respectable 450 degrees. The inexpensive extra-virgin oil started to smell of rubber and plastic almost as soon as it became warm, and fumed at 350 degrees.
After I’d heated them, none of the olive oils had much olive flavor left. In fact, they didn’t taste much different from the seed oils.

To get a set of more expert second opinions, I took the olive oils to a meeting of the University of California’s olive oil research group. This panel of trained tasters evaluates oils from all over the world to provide guidance to California’s young olive-oil industry.
In a blind tasting of the four unheated olive oils, the six tasters easily distinguished the medal winners from the cheaper oils and found many interesting aroma notes in them, from tea and mint to green banana, stone fruit and cinnamon.
For the second blind tasting, I heated each oil to 350 degrees for five minutes. I also heated a sample of the Spanish oil more gently, to 300 degrees, to see whether it might retain more olive flavor.
The panelists said nothing as they swirled and sniffed the heated oils in their small tasting glasses, tinted blue to eliminate any consideration of color, then sipped, slurped and spat. The first spoken comment, immediately seconded by most of the panel members, was, “These oils all taste like popcorn.” In fact the panel ranked the heated light oil higher than the heated pricey California extra-virgin oil, whose pungency was no longer balanced by a spicy aroma and had become overbearing.
Even the defective supermarket oil had become much less offensive. This surprise led one panelist to recall that heating is part of the refining process that manufacturers use to deodorize raw oils. Cooking clearly also drives aromas out of the oil and into the air. That helps explain the harsh smell that filled our kitchen decades ago whenever my mother started to make spaghetti sauce. I hated that aroma, which came from the poor oil she must have used, but I loved her spaghetti sauce.
While it’s understandable that many people have learned to enjoy off flavors in oils, there’s a good reason to recognize staleness and rancidity for what they are and avoid them.
All cooking oils are fragile. Fresh oil begins to deteriorate as soon as it’s exposed to light, heat, oxygen or moisture, all of which can break intact oil molecules into fragments. One set of fragments is responsible for the hints of cardboard, paint and fish that we smell in stale, rancid oil.
It turns out that stale aromas, pleasant fried aromas and unpleasant scorched aromas all come from oil fragments called aldehydes that are more or less toxic to our cells, whether we eat them or inhale them during cooking. Frequent exposure to frying fumes has been found to damage the airways of both restaurant and home cooks. Fresh oils, and in particular fresh olive oils, generate the fewest toxic aldehydes.
So the choice of everyday frying oil should indeed be a matter of taste. Choose a cheap or expensive oil as you like. Fans of extra-virgin olive oil willingly pay more for its provenance and polyphenols as much as its aroma. But learn to taste the difference between good fresh oils and stale or funky ones. Buy small containers that you’ll use up in a few weeks, keep them dark and cool, and taste before you fry.

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A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.

17/11 India Microcredit Faces Collapse From Defaults

By LYDIA POLGREEN and VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: November 17, 2010

MADOOR, India — India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor.
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Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
K. Shivamma, a 38-year-old farmer in the Indian village of Madoor, is struggling to pay back a debt of almost $2,000 incurred through microloans.
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Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
D. Mallama spoke about her daughter, Durgamma, who ran away from her village in Andhra Pradesh, India, after not being able to pay back loans from microfinance agencies.
The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies lent to poor consumers, are increasingly worried that after surviving the global financial crisis mostly unscathed, they could now face serious losses. Indian banks have about $4 billion tied up in the industry, banking officials say.
“We are extremely worried about our exposure to the microfinance sector,” said Sunand K. Mitra, a senior executive at Axis Bank, speaking Tuesday on a panel at the India Economic Summit.
The region’s crisis is likely to reverberate around the globe. Initially the work of nonprofit groups, the tiny loans to the poor known as microcredit once seemed a promising path out of poverty for millions. In recent years, foundations, venture capitalists and the World Bank have used India as a petri dish for similar for-profit “social enterprises” that seek to make money while filling a social need. Like-minded industries have sprung up in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia.
But microfinance in pursuit of profits has led some microcredit companies around the world to extend loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. Some companies have more than doubled their revenues annually.
Now some Indian officials fear that microfinance could become India’s version of the United States’ subprime mortgage debacle, in which the seemingly noble idea of extending home ownership to low-income households threatened to collapse the global banking system because of a reckless, grow-at-any-cost strategy.
Responding to public anger over abuses in the microcredit industry — and growing reports of suicides among people unable to pay mounting debts — legislators in the state of Andhra Pradesh last month passed a stringent new law restricting how the companies can lend and collect money.
Even as the new legislation was being passed, local leaders urged people to renege on their loans, and repayments on nearly $2 billion in loans in the state have virtually ceased. Lenders say that less than 10 percent of borrowers have made payments in the past couple of weeks.
If the trend continues, the industry faces collapse in a state where more than a third of its borrowers live. Lenders are also having trouble making new loans in other states, because banks have slowed lending to them as fears about defaults have grown.
Government officials in the state say they had little choice but to act, and point to women like Durgamma Dappu, a widowed laborer from this impoverished village who took a loan from a private microfinance company because she wanted to build a house.
She had never had a bank account or earned a regular salary but was given a $200 loan anyway, which she struggled to repay. So she took another from a different company, then another, until she was nearly $2,000 in debt. In September she fled her village, leaving her family little choice but to forfeit her tiny plot of land, and her dreams.
“These institutions are using quite coercive methods to collect,” said V. Vasant Kumar, the state’s minister for rural development. “They aren’t looking at sustainability or ensuring the money is going to income-generating activities. They are just making money.”
Reddy Subrahmanyam, a senior official who helped write the Andhra Pradesh legislation, accuses microfinance companies of making “hyperprofits off the poor,” and said the industry had become no better than the widely despised village loan sharks it was intended to replace.
“The money lender lives in the community,” he said. “At least you can burn down his house. With these companies, it is loot and scoot.”
Indeed, some of the anger appears to have been fueled by the recent initial public offering of shares by SKS Microfinance, India’s largest for-profit microlender, backed by famous investors like George Soros and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
SKS and its shareholders raised more than $350 million on the stock market in August. Its revenue and profits have grown around 100 percent annually in recent years. This year, Vikram Akula, chairman of SKS Microfinance, privately sold shares worth about $13 million.

He defended the industry’s record before the India Economic Summit meeting, saying that a few rogue operators may have given improper loans, but that the industry was too important to fail. “Microfinance has made a tremendous contribution to inclusive growth,” he said. Destroying microfinance, he said, would result in “nothing less than financial apartheid.”
Indian microfinance companies have some of the world’s lowest interest rates for small loans. Mr. Akula said that his company had reduced its interest rate by six percentage points, to 24 percent, in the past several years as volume had brought down expenses.
Unlike other officials in his industry, Vijay Mahajan, the chairman of Basix, an organization that provides loans and other services to the poor, acknowledged that many lenders grew too fast and lent too aggressively. Investments by private equity firms and the prospect of a stock market listing drove firms to increase lending as fast as they could, he said.
“In their quest to grow,” he said, “they kept piling on more loans in the same geographies.” He added, “That led to more indebtedness, and in some cases it led to suicides.”
Still, he said, the number of borrowers who are struggling to pay off their debts is much smaller than officials have asserted. He estimates that 20 percent have borrowed more than they can afford and that just 1 percent are in serious trouble.
One of India’s leading social workers, Ela Bhatt, who heads the Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, said microfinance firms had lost sight of the fact that the poor needed more than loans to be successful entrepreneurs. They need business and financial advice as well, she said.
“They were more concerned about growth — not growth of the livelihoods and economic status of the clients, but only the institutions’ growth,” she said.
Mr. Mahajan, who is also the chairman of the Microfinance Institutions Network, said that the industry was now planning to create a fund to help restructure the loans of the 20 percent of borrowers in Andhra Pradesh who were struggling.
He also said the industry, which has been reluctant to accept outside help, would share its client databases with the government and was negotiating restrictions on retail lending that did not go through the nonprofit self-help lending groups.
The collapse of the industry could have severe consequences for borrowers, who may be forced to resort to money lenders once again. It is tough to find a household in this village in an impoverished district of Andhra Pradesh that is not deeply in debt to a for-profit microfinance company.
K. Shivamma, a 38-year-old farmer, said she took her first loan hoping to reverse several years of crop failure brought on by drought.
“When you take the loan they say, ‘Don’t worry, it is easy to pay back,’ ” Ms. Shivamma said.
The man from Share, the company that made her first loan, did not ask about her income, Ms. Shivamma said. She soon ran into trouble paying back the $400 loan, and took out another loan, and then another.
Now she owes nearly $2,000 and has no idea how she will repay it. The television, the mobile phone and the two buffaloes she bought with one loan were sold long ago. “I know it is a vicious circle,” she said. “But there is no choice but to go on.”

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Lydia Polgreen reported from Madoor, and Vikas Bajaj from Mumbai, India. Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Madoor.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 18, 2010, on page A5 of the New York edition.

18/11 A Trailblazer With Her Eye on the Bottom Line

Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Cathleen P. Black, the mayor’s pick to lead New York schools, waiting for a taxi outside her Park Avenue apartment.


By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, MICHAEL BARBARO and FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: November 18, 2010

She grew up sheltered and privileged, in a middle-class Irish enclave of Chicago at midcentury, attending Catholic schools and riding horses at a country club where blacks and Jews were not allowed. Yet from age 28, she blazed a trail for working women, persuading male-dominated Madison Avenue to get behind an upstart magazine called Ms.
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Ms. Black and her husband, Thomas E. Harvey, at a media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July.
She was the newspaper industry’s chief lobbyist in the 1990s, fighting a ban on tobacco advertising, and she occasionally mused about running for office. But she has otherwise barely dabbled in the public sphere: describing her strengths in internal documents, the Coca-Cola Company, where she is a longtime board member, leaves unchecked the box next to “governmental, political or diplomatic expertise.”
She has shown a common touch as president of Hearst Magazines since 1995 by riding in yellow cabs rather than black limousines. At the same time, she is given to showy extravagance, lending a $47,600 bracelet — a Bulgari confection called the Allegra — to a Manhattan museum for its current exhibit showcasing the jewels and clothing of New York’s most influential women.
Cathleen Prunty Black, who is Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s choice to be the next chancellor of the New York City public school system, has during more than 40 years in the publishing industry broken numerous glass ceilings — and amassed a personal fortune — with quick and definitive decision making, crystal-clear goal setting and an all-surpassing attention to the bottom line. She not only produced results but also carefully managed up, winning the confidence of powerful bosses like Allen H. Neuharth and Rupert Murdoch. And she threw herself into knotty problems, developing two tennis elbows from carrying around overstuffed briefcases in her first year as president of USA Today.
“She’s the closest thing to Superman that exists,” said Atoosa Rubenstein, on whom Ms. Black placed an audacious bet, letting her start a new magazine, CosmoGirl, at age 26.
But while Ms. Black, 66, has been a highly visible and celebrated corporate executive, she has rarely spoken out on the big issues of the day. Her civic engagement and philanthropic activity are scant beyond donating money to politicians and charities and inviting political figures like Mr. Bloomberg, former President Bill Clinton and Cindy McCain to speak at Hearst functions.
There is also little evidence that Ms. Black has until now had to wrestle with the challenges of the school system, including race, poverty, immigration and public health, never mind pedagogical and philosophical questions like teacher tenure, charter schools or the new math.
“It will certainly be a challenge,” said her sister, Susan Webb, 74, a decorator who lives outside Chicago. “But my sister loves a challenge.”
If the state education commissioner grants Ms. Black a waiver from the law requiring leaders of school districts to have substantial education credentials and experience, she would take over a system whose size, demographics and challenges are like nothing else she has tried to manage.
Its one million students — two-thirds of them poor enough to qualify for free lunch; 85 percent of them black, Hispanic or Asian — bear little resemblance to the middle-class, middle American consumers she has spent her career appealing to.
Its more than 80,000 unionized teachers and principals cannot be easily fired if they fail to meet expectations, the way she replaced editors and publishers who did not make their numbers.
And many of its 1,600 schools have challenges far beyond that of any printed product or company whose brand Ms. Black has tried to “refresh and reinvent,” to use one of her catchphrases.
Ms. Black, a mother of two, has refused interviews since her appointment. But conversations with dozens of people who know her — her siblings, lifelong friends, famous neighbors, bosses, employees and competitors — show that in a life of daring leaps and many firsts, Ms. Black’s aspiration to lead the nation’s largest school system is far and away her riskiest move.
One subordinate likened the news to a bulletin that Ms. Black had decided to “move to the North Pole and become Santa Claus.” But others see it as a fitting capstone and have no doubt her sheer devotion and force of personality will propel her to success.
“Cathie is kind of a Bill Clinton character: if you’re with her and if you’re in conversation with her, nothing else matters,” said Jane Dammen McAuliffe, a college classmate who is now president of Bryn Mawr College. “She always found a way to galvanize people around some ambitious agenda.”
Eager to Stand Out
At 12, she changed the spelling of her name to Cathie, to stand out. It was a childhood she says was idyllic, growing up on the South Side of Chicago near the South Shore Country Club, where she played tennis and won ribbons in dressage, the equestrian sport.
Each week, Ms. Black’s mother took the three children to Mass at St. Philip Neri, a large stone church with a turquoise steeple. Her father, James, ran a food company.
“You kind of knew, very definitely, that we had some advantages,” said her brother, Jim, 70, a retired manufacturing executive who lives in the Chicago suburbs.

At the all-white, all-girls Aquinas Dominican High School, Ms. Black was a hard worker but not a straight-A student. In 1962, she followed her sister to Trinity College in Washington, where Ms. Black tutored children at a local public school and at an orphanage.
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Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
A photo of Ms. Black in the 1963 yearbook from what was then Trinity College in Washington, D.C.
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Ms. Black lent a $47,600 bracelet to a museum exhibit showcasing the clothes and jewelry of influential New York women.
The next year, she was among the legions who waited for hours outside the Capitol for a chance to walk past President John F. Kennedy’s coffin. Classmates recalled Ms. Black as a sort of Pied Piper who organized trips to Garfinckel’s, a downtown department store, and to mixers at Georgetown.
An English major, Ms. Black spent a year studying in Rome and traveling across Europe, celebrating the New Year in Egypt, fleeing an uprising in Syria and hitchhiking to Northern Ireland to see relatives. The adventure, she has said, made her think “this is a very big world and I want a big bite out of it.”
So she headed to Manhattan, sharing an apartment on East 80th Street with three classmates, and earning $85 a week selling advertisements for Holiday, a travel magazine. “Our goal wasn’t to leave college, get a husband and be model housewives,” a roommate, Kathleen M. Doyle, said. “We wanted to have our careers, and we worked really hard.”
She had been on the job for a year when her boss quit. Not entirely qualified, Ms. Black nonetheless asked for the job — and then demanded to match her predecessor’s salary (she got the title but not the money). She went from there to the nascent New York magazine, and then to Ms., where Ms. Black instantly saw opportunity she could not seize in the martini-fueled, heavily male publishing world.
“She understood that she was not going to get the kind of shots that the guys who had just graduated from Georgetown were getting,” said Patricia Carbine, the publisher who recruited her as the advertising manager of Ms. in 1972. “She had zero to lose and God knew what to gain.”
The trick was getting advertisers to take female consumers more seriously and buy space in a publication that was being derided, as Ms. Carbine put it, as “a lesbian magazine for women who don’t shave their legs, who aren’t normal.” Ms. Black’s tailored suits stood out amid the editors’ blue jeans and wild hair. “When advertisers looked at her, they thought, ‘Maybe these people are not as bad as they seem,’ ” recalled Gloria Steinem, a founding editor. In sales meetings, Ms. Black would insist that Ms. Steinem and her co-founder, Letty Cotton Pogrebin, stay focused on closing the deal.
“She said, ‘There are all kinds of feminists — I’m one, Gloria’s one, we have feminists who are homemakers,’ ” Ms. Pogrebin recalled. “ ‘If you want to reach them all, they’re reading us — you’d better get on this bandwagon.’ ”
But the style that succeeded with advertisers caused problems internally. Early in her tenure as ad director, Ms. Black’s staff mutinied, threatening to quit en masse because of her harsh management. “I told her that it was important to be both empathetic and sympathetic as well as firm and strong,” Ms. Carbine said.
Her pragmatism, too, sometimes clashed with the magazine’s mission. When Ms. Steinem and others wanted to make a stand by rejecting advertisements from Virginia Slims, whose new slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” they found offensive, Ms. Black insisted on accepting a small ad, which incensed readers. She backed down, but in her 2007 memoir she griped that the decision cost the magazine “untold millions.”
Ms. Black’s best-selling book, “Basic Black,” is a readable, anecdote-laden, how-to guide — not so much about the business of business, as about how to operate in the corridors of power. There are handy tips — wear Burberry when meeting someone from Burberry; greet guests at the door of an office party and depart before they get tipsy — sandwiched between recountings of triumphs large and small.
For example, when she discovered that House Beautiful had misidentified the owner of an Aspen retreat as Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, when it really belonged to his brother, Leonard, Ms. Black tracked Leonard down in Paris to apologize. “This was a micromanagement issue that was really of no consequence,” his wife, Evelyn, said this week. “I was extremely impressed.”

She mastered the art of the touching personal gesture. After Mr. Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, tried to woo her by sending a limousine with a basket of treats to her Connecticut home, Ms. Black responded by presenting him with a giant homegrown tomato over lunch at the Four Seasons. She took the job as president of the newspaper, and later commandeered the Gannett Company jet to fly executives to the funeral of a top deputy’s father.
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But even as she institutionalized flexible work schedules, established an internship program and mentored people like Ms. Rubenstein at Hearst, Ms. Black also battled criticism that her day-to-day management style was unfeeling and intimidating, particularly to younger women. Executives quickly learned never to go into a meeting unprepared or to beat around the bush. “There’s no dillydallying,” said Gayle King, editor at large of O: The Oprah Magazine. “She has an agenda and that is it.”
Ms. Black was not afraid to call people out in front of large groups. “ ‘What are you saying’; ‘you’re not being clear,’ ” Ms. Rubenstein recalled hearing her say more than once. Another former editor, who like others insisted on anonymity for fear of offending such a powerful industry figure, remembered being snapped at: “You’ve been talking for five minutes, and I still don’t know what you want.”
And many people say they felt that she was judging more than their work. “You feel she is making very strong, intuitive decisions about you with every word you speak,” said another woman who worked under her.
“Nice shoes,” Ms. Black told one woman who showed up for a second job interview, before adding, “You wore them the last time.”
Throughout her career, Ms. Black has displayed a gift for wiping away red ink: making New York magazine profitable, attracting skeptical advertisers to USA Today and, at Hearst, inventing several winning titles during an era of industry decline. She sold Oprah Winfrey on the idea of the magazine, which became Hearst’s most successful new one ever; in 2008, her new Food Network Magazine exceeded one million circulation. Ms. Black also saw hard times coming years before Hearst’s rivals did, and began making layoffs, closing troubled titles like Tina Brown’s Talk and streamlining production soon after 9/11 and the burst of the dot-com bubble.
“That prepared us,” David Granger, the editor of Esquire, said. “And she didn’t let up.”
But the most vexing riddle facing print media also confounded Ms. Black. Hearst spent tens of millions of dollars trying to figure out how best to exploit the Internet, and made what some executives saw as rash decisions, first in being a partner with the Web start-up iVillage, then by creating its own costly digital division.
Throughout, colleagues said, she was eager to help executives sort through difficult issues — within limits.
“At various points, she’d lay it out for me,” Mr. Granger said. “ ‘Things are not going well; unless things change, I’m going to have to make a change.’ ”
Ms. Black has said she hates the expression “having it all,” preferring to speak of “achieving balance” between life and work. But while it may look as if she does have it all — beautiful homes, two children and a black Labrador named Madison, a soaring career and the right outfit for every occasion — achieving that balance was a struggle.
Her first marriage, after a 1970 wedding at the Church of St. Thomas More and a reception at the Plaza Hotel, ended in 1976. “We were focused too much on our jobs,” said James O’Callaghan, a stockbroker.
Six years later, Ms. Black married Thomas E. Harvey, a lawyer and Vietnam veteran, in her Upper East Side apartment. They moved to Washington, where Mr. Harvey worked for the Senate and Ms. Black, after USA Today, led the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
At that trade group, her biggest achievement was setting up a national network to sell advertisements in local newspapers; it generated $30 million. She also eliminated scores of jobs, and she paid herself more than double what her predecessor made — in her first year, $1 million — prompting some publishers to quit.
In 1987, she and Mr. Harvey adopted a son, Duffy; she returned to work four weeks later. The baby shower for her daughter, Alison, adopted in 1991, was hosted by Marilyn Quayle, wife of the vice president. The next winter, recalled John Sturm, the association’s general counsel, whenever he spent Sundays at the office, “often the only other car in the parking lot was Cathie Black’s.”
Her return to New York was in grand style: in 1996 she and her husband bought a Park Avenue penthouse duplex with a vast kitchen, where she has lived above Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs chairman, Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch and Tom Brokaw of NBC, who says he sees her most mornings before dawn working out with a personal trainer in the basement gym. “I get the impression that there are not idle moments in her life,” Mr. Brokaw said.
In 1998, the Harveys bought a white clapboard house with a pool in Bridgewater, Conn., for $1.15 million. (It was recently reported sold; the asking price was $2.35 million.) In 2006, they added a $4.1 million home in Southampton. Ms. Black has earned at least $4.7 million in cash and stock over two decades from serving on the boards of Coke, I.B.M. and iVillage, according to Equilar, a company that tracks corporate compensation, and her current stock holdings in those companies are valued at about $8 million.
Her parties are legendary: a 50th birthday bash under a tent in her Washington backyard attended by the Quayles; her 60th at a rented villa in Tuscany, with 75 relatives and friends; and the annual pre-Thanksgiving fete that brings 100 or more of Manhattan’s boldfaced names to the penthouse.
Ms. Black belongs to the New York Athletic Club and to a Westchester County golf club where the initiation fee today is about $300,000. She is a trustee of the Kent School in Connecticut, where her children graduated, and of the University of Notre Dame, which her son left after a semester. (He plans to enroll soon in a community college.)
Out of Reach
The only brass ring left — a coveted seat on the board of the Hearst family trust — has eluded Ms. Black’s grasp. And this summer, a rival from Condé Nast was handed her job, while she was given the title of chairman but with diminished responsibilities.
Then the mayor called. Ms. Black was as surprised as everyone else.
She had rarely before weighed in on current events, apart from holding a corporate retreat in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or reassuring workers the day after 9/11 that the best thing they could do was to continue working.
Yet Ms. Black is fulfilling some people’s expectations. When Ms. Black moved to Washington, many thought she had a career in politics in mind, said Wenda Harris Millard, who has known her for decades. At the newspaper association, some suspected she wanted to run for the Senate. Now, there is already chatter in her circle that schools chancellor may not be enough.
In three years, they wonder, will Ms. Black run for Mr. Bloomberg’s job?

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Reporting was contributed by Jack Begg, David Carr, Alain Delaquérière, John Eligon, Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Trip Gabriel, Elissa Gootman, Christine Haughney, Sarah Maslin Nir, Richard Pérez-Peña and Jeremy W. Peters.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 19, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

18/11 10 Favorite iPhone Apps

November 18, 2010, 1:25 pm — Updated: 2:13 pm -->

From left, SoundHound, FakeCalls and Dragon Dictation.
I noticed that the No. 1 most e-mailed New York Times article for all of last week was Bob Tedeschi’s list of great iPhone apps. It’s still on the most-e-mailed list. Wow—hot topic, eh? O.K., fine—two can play that game. Here are my top 10 iPhone apps.
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* Dragon Dictation (free). Speak to type. In general, excellent accuracy. After the transcription appears, one tap slaps the text into an outgoing e-mail message, text message, Twitter or Facebook update. Or just copies it to the clipboard. Not as good as dictating directly into any box where you can type, as on Android phones. But much faster than typing with your finger. My review is here.
* Ocarina ($1). People complain about their kids becoming addicted to their gadgets. But on long rides, I’m delighted that my son and daughter spent hours practicing this bona fide wind instrument. Blow into the microphone, learn the fingerings of the four “holes” on the glass screen…beautiful music. It was one of the first apps I reviewed.
* Google Mobile (free). Speak to search Google’s maps. Now with Google Goggles built in: Point the phone’s camera at a book, DVD, wine bottle, logo, painting, landmark or bit of text, and the hyper-intelligent app recognizes it and displays information about it from the Web.
Bonus suggestion: Google Voice. Hot off the presses! This app finally surfaced on the app store after a year and a half in limbo, as Apple mysteriously refused to approve it. But it’s here, it’s sweet, it offers free text messages, cheap international calls, free transcripts of your voicemails, and a raft of other useful features. I reviewed just this week after its release.
* LED Light (free). The LED “flash” on the iPhone 4 is incredibly powerful; you could practically light up a runway with it. It’s fantastic for reading menus and show programs in dim light, for inspecting plumbing and car parts in narrow spaces, and for removing splinters. Unfortunately, turning it on involves opening the Camera app, switching to video and turning on the video light. Right? Not anymore. Just open this app to activate the LED instantly—bright and easy.
* FlightTrack Pro ($10). Incredible. Shows every detail of every flight: gate, time delayed, airline phone number, where the flight is on the map, and more. Knows more—and knows it sooner—than the actual airlines do. Better yet: the Pro version auto-syncs with Tripit.com. You book a flight online; you forward the receipt to plans@tripit.com; and Tripit puts the flight details into FlightTrack Pro wirelessly and automatically. You never do any data entry at all. I reviewed it last year.
* FakeCalls. When you tap this icon on your Home screen (it’s disguised and labeled only FC), in about ten seconds, your phone rings. It’s a fake call from—anyone you’ve selected in advance. (I have mine set to Barack Obama, but that’s just me.)
The simulation of the iPhone’s traditional incoming-call screen is perfect—ringtone, contact info, Mute and Hold buttons, the works. Ideal for extricating yourself from difficult situations, like meetings or bad dates.
* Line2 (free). Gives your iPhone a second phone line with its own number—one that makes or receives calls over WiFi when you’re in a hot spot (no AT&T minutes!), or over AT&T when you’re not. Unlimited texting, unlimited calling, $10 a month. I’ve reviewed it several times, most recently in September.
* Twitter (free). Most free Twitter apps are a bit on the baffling side. This one is the official app from Twitter, Inc., and it’s simple and clean.
* SoundHound (free). Beats Shazam at its own game. Hold this app up to a song that’s playing on the radio, or even hum or sing the song, and the app miraculously identifies the song and offers you lyrics. It’s faster than Shazam too.
* Bump (free). If you and another iPhone owner both have this app, you just bump your phones together to exchange business cards. Sadly, it’s gotten a lot more complex as it’s matured, to the extent that a buddy and I could barely figure out how to store the received “card.” But although there are many similar apps, this is the one most people are most likely to have already, making bumping extra convenient.
What else is on my iPhone? Red Laser. Glee. Kayak. FlightBoard. OnTime. The New York Times, of course. Skype. Kindle reader, B&N eReader. Dictionary. Facebook. WeDoodle. TEDPlayer. Mint.com. FingerFoos. Scrabble. Remote (for Keynote). SpawnHD. FourSquare. Pandora. MobileMe apps (FindiPhone, iDisk, Gallery). Yelp. Flickr. And about 65,000 little games and fun apps deposited by my kids on car trips.
Happy apping!

17/11 Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle

Epilepsy’s Big, Fat Miracle

Stephen Lewis for The New York Times; Food Stylist: Brett Kurzweil

By FRED VOGELSTEIN
Published: November 17, 2010

Once every three or four months my son, Sam, grabs a cookie or a piece of candy and, wide-eyed, holds it inches from his mouth, ready to devour it. He knows he’s not allowed to eat these things, but like any 9-year-old, he hopes that somehow, this once, my wife, Evelyn, or I will make an exception.
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Tierney Gearon for The New York Times
FAMILY CIRCLE Sam’s twin sister, Beatrice, also has epilepsy.
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We never make exceptions when it comes to Sam and food, though, which means that when temptation takes hold of Sam and he is denied, things can get pretty hairy. Confronted with a gingerbread house at a friend’s party last December, he went scorched earth, grabbing parts of the structure and smashing it to bits. Reason rarely works. Usually one of us has to pry the food out of his hands. Sometimes he ends up in tears.
It’s not just cookies and candy that we forbid Sam to eat. Cake, ice cream, pizza, tortilla chips and soda aren’t allowed, either. Macaroni and cheese used to be his favorite food, but he told Evelyn the other day that he couldn’t remember what it tastes like anymore. At Halloween we let him collect candy, but he trades it in for a present. At birthday parties and play dates, he brings a lunchbox to eat from.
There is no crusade against unhealthful food in our house. Some might argue that unhealthful food is all we let Sam eat. His breakfast eggs are mixed with heavy cream and served with bacon. A typical lunch is full-fat Greek yogurt mixed with coconut oil. Dinner is hot dogs, bacon, macadamia nuts and cheese. We figure that in an average week, Sam consumes a quart and a third of heavy cream, nearly a stick and a half of butter, 13 teaspoons of coconut oil, 20 slices of bacon and 9 eggs. Sam’s diet is just shy of 90 percent fat. That is twice the fat content of a McDonald’s Happy Meal and about 25 percent more than the most fat-laden phase of the Atkins diet. It puts Sam at risk of developing kidney stones if he doesn’t drink enough. It is constipating, so he has to take daily stool softeners. And it lacks so many essential nutrients that if Sam didn’t take a multivitamin and a calcium-magnesium supplement every day, his growth would be stunted, his hair and teeth would fall out and his bones would become as brittle as an 80-year-old’s.
Evelyn, Sam’s twin sister Beatrice and I don’t eat this way. But Sam has epilepsy, and the food he eats is controlling most of his seizures (he used to have as many as 130 a day). The diet, which drastically reduces the amount of carbohydrates he takes in, tricks his body into a starvation state in which it burns fat, and not carbs, for fuel. Remarkably, and for reasons that are still unclear, this process — called ketosis — has an antiepileptic effect. He has been eating this way for almost two years.
Curiosity bordering on alarm is the only way to describe how people receive this information. “In-teresting,” one acquaintance said. “Did you make this up yourself?” Another friend was more direct: “Is this a mainstream-science thing or more of a fringe treatment?” We are not surprised by these reactions. What we are doing to Sam just seems wrong. The bad eating habits of Americans, especially those of children, are a national health crisis. Yet we are intentionally feeding our son fatty food and little else.
But what we are doing is mainstream science. Elizabeth Thiele, the doctor who prescribed and oversees Sam’s diet, is the head of the pediatric epilepsy program at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In fact, the regimen, known as the ketogenic diet, is now offered at more than 100 hospitals in the United States, Canada and other countries. We’re not opposed to drugs; we tried many. But Sam’s seizures were drug-resistant, and keto, the universal shorthand, often provides seizure control when drugs do not.
The idea of food as medicine has been a controversial topic in this country in recent years. For decades the fight that the late Robert Atkins and his low-carb acolytes had with mainstream medicine has been as vitriolic as a religious war. There are food cures for everything from cancer and heart disease to cataracts. Doctors talk about diet as a part of basic good health all the time. But talk to them about a diet instead of drugs to stop an infection or treat a tumor and most would be visibly alarmed, and in many cases, they would have good reason to be. A decade ago most doctors held the same contempt for keto. An Atkins-like diet that worked as well — and often better — than antiepileptic drugs? Common sense suggests that’s crazy.
But when it comes to keto’s impact on pediatric seizures, there is wide acceptance. There are about two dozen backward-looking analyses of patient data suggesting keto works, and, more significant, two randomized, controlled studies published in 2008. One of the trials, by researchers at University College London, found that 38 percent of patients on the diet had their seizure frequency reduced more than 50 percent and that 7 percent had their seizure frequency reduced more than 90 percent.
Those numbers may look low, but they’re not. These were patients for whom antiepileptic drugs had already failed. For children with certain kinds of drug-resistant seizures, Thiele’s clinical data show an even better response: 7 out of 10 were able to reduce their count more than 90 percent with the diet. Those statistics are as good as those for any antiepileptic drug ever made. Other pediatric neurologists get similar results. The diet has cut Sam’s seizures by 75 percent.
That is a big deal. There are dozens of antiepileptic drugs on the market, many approved in the last 15 years. The newer ones work with fewer side effects, and that’s important. But the percentage of patients who take drugs and still have seizures hasn’t changed meaningfully in decades. About a third of the nearly 3 million epileptics in the United States have drug-resistant seizures, and doctors estimate that at least 250,000 of those drug-resistant patients are children. Since keto often works when drugs do not, neurologists finally see a way to fix that problem.

There has been so much buzz around keto that neurologists and scientists have begun wondering what else it can do. Could it be used to treat seizures in adults? What about Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, A.L.S. and certain cancers? Tumors typically need glucose to grow. There is very little of this simple sugar in a keto diet, and there have been interesting results with mice that suggest the diet might slow tumor growth. These scientific explorations are in their early stages and may not amount to much. Nonetheless, researchers are taking them seriously.
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Stephen Lewis for The New York Times; Food Stylist: Brett Kurzweil
Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack: ingredients for a typical meal for Sam Vogelstein.
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Food as part of disease treatment is slowly being accepted by more doctors. Many think it is new. But it is not. During the first half of the 20th century, the impact of food on our bodies was one of the hottest scientific fields. Insulin was discovered in 1921, and its commercial production meant survival for diabetics. In the 1930s, three scientists won a Nobel Prize for discovering that a substance in raw liver cured pernicious anemia, a disease that was almost always fatal. Eight Nobels were awarded just for work related to vitamins. And, it turns out, the ketogenic diet was developed back in the early part of the last century, too, only to disappear from medical literature for two generations.
Our family’s introduction to keto came in February 2009, when we flew to Boston to see Thiele and Heidi Pfeifer, a dietitian who works with her, at Mass General. Joseph Sullivan, our neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told us that Thiele and Pfeifer were doing cutting-edge work. And we needed cutting-edge help. We tried 11 seizure drugs, and Sam was hospitalized twice during the previous year. Yet we were still struggling to keep Sam’s seizure count below 10 per hour. Every day, seven days a week, during the 13 hours he was awake, he would have between 100 and 130 seizures.
Nothing did any good. Some drugs, because of the side effects, actually did him harm. One drug gave him hand tremors, another made him a zombie and a third made him hallucinate, thinking that bugs and worms were crawling out of his skin.
I hit my low point the night we took Sam home from his second hospitalization in six months. He had been seizing almost nonstop for more than a week despite being on four medications. So after keeping him home from school for a week and having daily conversations with Sullivan, we decided to admit him for what Sullivan called a “reset.” The thinking is that, like a computer, doctors can reboot a person’s brain to reduce or stop seizures. They knocked Sam out with Ativan for 15 hours and monitored his brain waves. The following day he was discharged, seizing just as frequently, and, for his bravery, sporting a head-to-toe body rash from a reaction to a medication.
The best way to think about a seizure is to imagine an electrical storm. Our brains and bodies are normally full of electricity. The brain generates biochemical electrical charges, allowing brain cells, nerves and muscles to communicate. A seizure happens when this electricity surges out of control and overloads parts of the brain’s circuitry.
Sam doesn’t have grand mal seizures — the kind you see in movies — but a form of what’s known as petit mal, or absence seizures. Instead of falling down and twitching for minutes, Sam loses consciousness for short 5-to-20-second bursts. Grand mal and many other seizure types — there are dozens — often leave the sufferer exhausted. Sam’s seizures are more like hitting the pause button on a DVD. He stops and stares vacantly. His jaw slackens. And his head and torso lean forward slightly, bobbing rhythmically. Then it’s over, as if it had never happened. He is not disoriented, tired or in pain. If he was in the middle of a sentence, he would finish it. If he was going hand-over-hand on the monkey bars, he would pause without falling. It is not like a faint, when you go limp. Part of his brain has momentarily shut down. Though Sam says that he is sometimes aware when he is having a seizure, typically his only clue is that when he comes to, everything around him has shifted slightly. A lot more happens in 10 seconds than we think.
His seizures didn’t start this way. Epilepsy was first diagnosed in 2005, when Sam was just shy of 5. The diagnosis then was myoclonic epilepsy. Each day he would have about half a dozen spells that looked as if he had been touched by a cattle prod. Each was a strong, 45-degree snap forward at the waist. After a few tries, we found a medication that controlled them.
The absence seizures started at the end of 2007. We tried first to treat them by increasing the dose of the seizure drug he was already on. But by the end of March 2008 he was having more, not fewer, seizures, and by early fall he was having trouble finishing a sentence. His teachers watched out for him and told the class about what was going on. But it’s hard to learn math or reading when you’re receiving life on the other end of a bad cell-phone connection.

Swimming? Bike riding? Soccer team? Forget it. Sam couldn’t even cry without interruption: he would stub a toe or skin a knee; cry for 15 seconds; have a 15-second seizure; and then continue sobbing. Sam had trouble even watching a movie. Once after seeing “Speed Racer” at home, he said: “Dad, I think the DVD is scratched. When I was watching, it kept leaving words out.”
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We were desperate, and frankly, despite advances, the ketogenic diet is still only for the desperate. For Sam’s diet to be effective, he must eat a certain number of calories every day with specific ratios of fat, protein and carbohydrates. These are not back-of-the-envelope calculations, but ratios that have to be hit exactly at every meal. If Sam wants a snack after school, he gets 18 grams of bacon (about two slices), 14 grams of macadamia nuts (about seven nuts) and 18 grams of apple (less than an eighth). In keto-speak that’s 3.04 grams of fat to every gram of protein and carbs combined. A snack using the ratios of the typical American diet — about 30 percent fat, 15 percent protein, 55 percent carbs — would have twice the protein, a third the fat and eight times the carbs.
To jump through these arithmetic hoops, Evelyn, who gave up her career to take on the now full-time job of feeding Sam, plans meals on the kitchen computer using a Web-based program called KetoCalculator. It is hard to imagine how to administer keto without it. A meal for Sam might have eight ingredients. Mathematically, there are potentially millions of combinations — a bit more of this; a bit less of that — that gets you to a 400-­calorie meal and a 3-to-1 ratio. KetoCalculator does the math. Every ingredient — butter, cream, bacon, oil, eggs, nuts and fruit — is weighed to the 10th of a gram on an electronic jeweler’s scale. When Evelyn comes up with a recipe that works, she hits “print” and files it in a black loose-leaf binder. We now have more than 200 recipes.
Doing all this once is fascinating. Who knew that a cup of milk had more carbs than half a slice of toast or that macadamia nuts have more than twice the fat of pork rinds? But administering the diet for three meals and two snacks a day, seven days a week for two years is relentless. There is no “Let’s just order pizza” in our house, no matter how crazy the week has been. A barbecue at a friend’s house takes Evelyn 30 minutes of prep time. A sleepover takes two hours, because she labels all the food and writes out heating and serving instructions for the parents. Evelyn spent six hours preparing food for a three-day camping trip in August. Unexpected events that barely register in most families — like the fact that I recently ate the applesauce that was to be part of Sam’s breakfast — create mad scrambles to recalculate and reweigh meals so Sam gets out the door on time.
The diet is administered like medicine, and parents need to work with their neurologist and a keto dietitian to come up with an appropriate caloric intake for the child. You receive a log-in to KetoCalculator, which is only available through a clinician. Every three months, Sam’s height and weight are measured, and a baseline blood test is administered. This medical oversight lessens the worry that we are going to poison Sam with all the fat he eats. Children can fall into ketoacidosis — essentially overdoing keto. It’s rare, and easily reversible, but it can be fatal if you don’t know what to look for.
Ultimately what makes the diet so stressful is that on top of all the gross recipes and weird mechanics, there is no margin for error. Just as you can’t take blood-pressure medicine sporadically or vary its dose day to day, on keto you can’t just dump beaten eggs into a pan; you have to take a rubber spatula and scrape out the two or three grams that typically adhere to the measuring bowl. Then Sam needs to finish every bite of every meal. (Two other, somewhat less restrictive diets are also being prescribed for epileptic children, but neither worked as well for Sam.) The penalty for cheating, at least in Sam’s case, is seizures. During the first few weeks on the diet, a friend in his carpool shared a piece of toast. We lost seizure control for a week. Miraculously, Sam has done this only once.
Will the diet doom Sam to a lifetime of heart disease and high cholesterol? Thiele and Pfeifer don’t think so. There is research, published this year, suggesting that there are few lingering effects in the years after stopping the diet. Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital in Baltimore, where the diet was pioneered in the 1920s, surveyed 101 former patients, most of whom had been off the diet for more than six years, and found that they had normal cholesterol and cardiovascular levels, no preference for fatty foods and, for those off the diet the longest, normal growth rates.
Certainly Sam’s appearance shows no sign that he is eating so much fat. There are reports that the diet can stunt children’s growth even if they are on vitamin supplements. But Sam started the diet when he was 4 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 51 pounds. He is now 4 feet 8 inches tall and 68 pounds. His cholesterol and related measures of fat in the bloodstream are elevated, as is typical for children on the diet. But the other tests are normal.

We don’t know how long Sam will be on this diet. It won’t be forever. Most who respond stay on it for about two years — which for Sam would be in April. But there is no magic number. I’ve read about some children who started in infancy and were on the diet for more than five years. Typically the diet is stopped at one of three junctures: when children have been seizure-­free for two years; when they outgrow their seizures, as about 60 percent do; or when families decide the sacrifices required to stay on the diet have become too onerous.
If you want to see someone who has been on the ketogenic diet, look up Charlie Abrahams on YouTube. The video to look for is his speech to some 300 doctors, dietitians and researchers at the International Symposium on Dietary Therapy for Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders. When Charlie was a baby, his doctors diagnosed Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, a particularly severe form of epilepsy that if not properly treated often leaves sufferers permanently brain damaged.
Drugs did nothing, and so, like many parents of children with serious illnesses, his parents, Jim and Nancy, became experts themselves. Jim, a Hollywood director and producer, read about the diet in an epilepsy book and called the author, Dr. John Freeman, at Johns Hopkins Medical Institution. In 1993 Freeman was the only doctor in the country using the diet consistently. He had been using it since 1969 and claimed that 30 percent of his patients were seizure-free. The idea seemed ridiculous to Charlie’s neurologist and most of the medical community at the time. The only thing you could stop with that much fat was your heart. “Flip a coin — I don’t think either will work,” his son’s neurologist said when Abrahams asked about trying keto or an herbal remedy he had also read about.
With nothing to lose, the Abrahamses put their son on the diet just after Thanksgiving in 1993. Three days later his seizures stopped. He was on the diet for four years and hasn’t had another seizure since. Today, at 18, Charlie is getting ready to graduate from high school.
The diet effectively cured a very sick child, but it only made an impact because Jim Abrahams made sure the rest of the world heard about it. He filmed a video about his experience starring his friend, Meryl Streep. “Dateline NBC” did a segment on Charlie in 1994, which led to an avalanche of media interest and letters from patients. At the same time, Abrahams started the Charlie Foundation to Help Cure Pediatric Epilepsy, an organization whose sole mission is to enable the diet to be administered in every hospital worldwide.
All this publicity led patients to ask their doctors about the diet; doctors started experimenting with it and recording their results; and as e-mail and Internet databases became widely available, word spread at an accelerating rate. In 1997, 15 hospitals were offering keto to epileptic children; now roughly 150 do, Abrahams says.
What astonished Abrahams and helped drive his effort to publicize the diet was that keto was not a new idea. It was first used as a medical treatment for epilepsy in the 1920s. The principles underlying the diet have been around since Hippocrates touched on them nearly 2,500 years ago. Starvation had long been one approach to treating epilepsy. Deny the patient food for, say, a week and often their seizures went away. But there were obvious limits on how long starvation could be used as a treatment. In the 1920s, researchers at the Mayo Clinic, looking for a way to treat diabetics, figured out that it was not fasting per se that helped control seizures. Rather, they found that it was what the body did during an extended fast that helped control them. Deprived of food, the human body starts burning body fat as fuel, and it was that process of ketosis that somehow had the antiepileptic effect. Trick the body into thinking it was starving by taking away its primary fuel of carbohydrates and forcing it to subsist on an all-fat diet, and you could create that antiepileptic effect as long as necessary.
The diet was quickly adopted and widely used through the 1930s. And then, almost as fast as it had appeared, the keto diet disappeared. When Dilantin was first used as an antiepileptic drug in 1938, its success steered medical minds toward pharmaceutical solutions. A generation later, the diet had been all but forgotten. There was no scientific evidence that it worked, after all. More important, it was incredibly difficult to administer. Even in the 1990s, Millicent Kelly, Charlie Abrahams’s dietitian at Johns Hopkins, was planning menus with a calculator and a legal pad.
By 2000, more people were asking about keto, but most pediatric neurologists still would not prescribe it. That bias seemed ridiculous to J. Helen Cross, the principal investigator of the 2008 randomized keto trial at University College London. “I’d been dealing with complex epilepsy cases for 10 years, and it was quite clear to me that certain children did respond to the ketogenic diet,” Cross says. “But we in our institution — and I know we weren’t alone — were coming up against barriers to get the resources to do it. They’d say there’s no evidence it works. It’s a quack diet. There is no controlled data. So I wanted to prove that it did work once and for all, and do it in a way so that people couldn’t argue with it.”

It took five years to enroll and track enough patients to make the study credible and another two years to analyze the data and undergo the rigorous academic peer-review process. But since the study was published in 2008, it has answered doubts about keto’s clinical effectiveness.
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Keto has now attracted attention from all corners of the neurological community. Two scientists at the National Institutes of Health are planning a study of its effectiveness in Parkinson’s patients. Papers published in the past two years suggest that keto may slow the growth of a brain tumor in mice. A biotechnology company named Accera is marketing a high-fat powder to Alzheimer’s patients that is supposed to reproduce the effects of ketosis, without the dietary restrictions of keto.
Still, there is one giant unanswered question: Why does keto work? Jong Rho, the head of pediatric neurology at the University of Calgary and the Alberta Children’s Hospital, theorizes that ketone bodies — the compounds made by the liver when the body burns fat for energy — protect brain cells from being damaged. Rho, who just received a $2 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue to investigate this theory, says experiments with epileptic mice suggest that extended time on the diet makes them more seizure-resistant.
Rho’s theory, however, only raises more questions. How would ketone bodies protect brain cells? Scientists don’t have a clue about how our cells react during ketosis. They don’t even know how much ketone bodies themselves matter. Until scientists understand the basic biological mechanisms, they can’t begin to embark on the long and costly process of drug development.
The success of the pediatric diet seems to have made it easier for keto scientists to get money for this basic research. “Before Helen’s study, we all had a clear sense that keto worked,” says Carl Stafstrom, the head of pediatric neurology at the University of Wisconsin, “but we couldn’t say in a grant proposal that the diet has been proven to be effective. Now we can.” There are recently financed studies, for example, exploring why the body resists ketosis and exploring compounds that might trigger the antiepileptic mechanism.
All of this still puts us a long way from anything remotely resembling a pill that would replace the keto diet. Being able to eat normally — or even close to normally — is critical to expanding the benefits of the ketogenic diet beyond the roughly 3,500 pediatric epilepsy patients currently on it. There are few adults who could adhere to a diet like the one Sam is on.
For now the main alternatives to keto are the Modified Atkins Diet (MAD), published by Johns Hopkins in 2003, and Thiele and Pfeifer’s Low Glycemic Index Treatment (L.G.I.T.), published in 2005. MAD is more restrictive than the Atkins diet that people use for weight loss, but nonetheless a bit easier to follow than keto because it allows more protein; L.G.I.T. is easier than keto because it allows more carbs and protein as long as the carbs are like strawberries — which affect blood sugar slowly — and not like bread, potatoes or candy, which make it spike. There are volumes of clinical data supporting the effectiveness of these diets, but not yet the kind of randomized, controlled study that show these diets work as well as keto, and keto is still most often prescribed. We started Sam on L.G.I.T., moved to MAD and are now at keto. For the moment it seems to work best for him.
Sam isn’t seizure-free yet, but he’s so close that you might think he was. From well over 100 seizures a day, Sam now typically has fewer than 6. Keto got us most of the way there, but not all the way. The diet cut his seizures to roughly 30 a day, and two drugs, added separately to make sure we were changing only one variable at a time, did the rest. Sam is finally a happy, healthy and independent kid.
He’s learning to skateboard and swim out of the shallow end. We’re about to teach him to ride a bike. In June he made me go on the 100-foot free-fall ride at an amusement park. He loved it. (I loved it less.) He and his friends Nick and Ethan spend almost every weekend searching for portals to other worlds. And he leaves people who meet him to wonder if he isn’t one of the bravest and most disciplined kids they have ever met.
The truth is that as much control as Evelyn and I think we exert over Sam’s life — especially what he eats — we both understand that the person who is truly in charge of his health is Sam. Most days he and his Batman lunchbox are out of the house from 7 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. At lunch, at class birthdays — everywhere he goes, really — there is the temptation to quite reasonably say, “I would like to eat and drink like all the other kids.” But he doesn’t. Instead, on his own, he politely says: “I’m not supposed to eat that. It gives me seizures.”
That doesn’t mean he likes it. He hates the diet. For his 10th birthday in May, he wants to go off keto; and we are going to try to honor that request. Will he start to seize uncontrollably again? In March, we found out that Sam’s twin sister, Beatrice, had epilepsy, too. At the moment, it’s completely controlled with medication. Will she grow out of it like many children do? Will Sam? Like all parents in our situation, we hope so. But we don’t know. At least we can comfort ourselves with the idea that we are participating in a grand exploration of the link between metabolism and brain chemistry that over the years may find some answers. That, at least, takes away some of the bad taste of this lousy diet.


Fred Vogelstein, a contributing editor for Wired, is writing a book about the intersection of technology and media in Silicon Valley.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 21, 2010, on page MM51 of the Sunday Magazine.