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.
Friday, November 19, 2010
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.
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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Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News
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.
Enlarge This Image
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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Chancellor Choice Begins Calling Skeptics (November 18, 2010)
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.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.Sign up See Sample
* 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!
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.
The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.Sign up See Sample
* 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.
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.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
11/11 Siêu mẫu Tây Ban Nha với Carina
Carina vừa giới thiệu hàng chục mẫu thiết kế thu đông mới. Những mẫu vest, đầm phá cách sử dụng chất liệu đặc trưng của thời tiết se lạnh như dạ, thun, tuýt xi pha len… tạo sự lịch lãm, sang trọng và lôi cuốn cho phụ nữ.
Với sự trẻ trung và hiện đại của siêu mẫu 19 tuổi Mariya đến từ công ty người mẫu Venus miền Bắc, bộ sưu tập lần này của Carina sẽ là một điểm nhấn của mùa đông năm nay dành cho những người yêu thích thời trang Việt Nam.
Ngoài ra, để đón chào sinh nhật Carina tròn 2 tuổi và hưởng ứng tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội, hãng giảm giá 20-50% cho toàn bộ sản phẩm có tại 4 showroom và dành nhiều quà tặng cho khách hàng.
Hình ảnh các mẫu thiết kế trong bộ sưu tập mới:
Người mẫu: Mariya Obukhovskaya Chụp ảnh: NhãDTĐịa điểm: Oriland Café
Hệ thống cửa hàng Carina tại Hà Nội :
- 215 Tôn Đức Thắng. Tel: (04) 66748668- 182 Quán Thánh. Tel: (04) 37152777- 152 Bà Triệu. Tel: (04) 39929092- Tầng 2, TTTM Grand Plaza, 117 Trần Duy Hưng. Tel: (04) 85873640
Hotline: 0946408686Website: http://www.carina.vn/; http://www.carina.com.vn/
(Nguồn: Thời trang Carina)
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
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Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
Trali giảm giá tới 50% nhân tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội (08/11)
Thùy Dung biến hóa trên sàn catwalk (06/11)
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IVY Moda giảm giá tới 50% (04/11)
Ngọc Thạch khoe dáng với bikini (04/11)
Fiona mở cửa hàng mới (03/11)
Đồ da cao cấp đến từ Đức (03/11)
Bí ẩn đêm thời trang Pháp - Việt (03/11)
Với sự trẻ trung và hiện đại của siêu mẫu 19 tuổi Mariya đến từ công ty người mẫu Venus miền Bắc, bộ sưu tập lần này của Carina sẽ là một điểm nhấn của mùa đông năm nay dành cho những người yêu thích thời trang Việt Nam.
Ngoài ra, để đón chào sinh nhật Carina tròn 2 tuổi và hưởng ứng tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội, hãng giảm giá 20-50% cho toàn bộ sản phẩm có tại 4 showroom và dành nhiều quà tặng cho khách hàng.
Hình ảnh các mẫu thiết kế trong bộ sưu tập mới:
Người mẫu: Mariya Obukhovskaya Chụp ảnh: NhãDTĐịa điểm: Oriland Café
Hệ thống cửa hàng Carina tại Hà Nội :
- 215 Tôn Đức Thắng. Tel: (04) 66748668- 182 Quán Thánh. Tel: (04) 37152777- 152 Bà Triệu. Tel: (04) 39929092- Tầng 2, TTTM Grand Plaza, 117 Trần Duy Hưng. Tel: (04) 85873640
Hotline: 0946408686Website: http://www.carina.vn/; http://www.carina.com.vn/
(Nguồn: Thời trang Carina)
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
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Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
Trali giảm giá tới 50% nhân tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội (08/11)
Thùy Dung biến hóa trên sàn catwalk (06/11)
Tăng Bảo Quyên trẻ trung với Alcado (05/11)
Bộ sưu tập Chic-Land Winter 2010 (05/11)
Ngọc Bích Nephrite giảm 10% (04/11)
Paris - Hà Nội: Đêm thời trang không catwalk (04/11)
'Nhẫn kim cương mơ ước' ZELA (04/11)
'Hạnh phúc vàng 2010' cùng PNJ (04/11)
IVY Moda giảm giá tới 50% (04/11)
Ngọc Thạch khoe dáng với bikini (04/11)
Fiona mở cửa hàng mới (03/11)
Đồ da cao cấp đến từ Đức (03/11)
Bí ẩn đêm thời trang Pháp - Việt (03/11)
11/11 Victoria's Secret - đêm rực rỡ thời trang và nhan sắc
Tối 10/11, ở câu lạc bộ Lexington Armory, New York (Mỹ) diễn ra buổi trình diễn hoành tráng nhất trong năm của Victoria’s Secret với một rừng ‘thiên thần’ quyến rũ: Rosie Huntington, Jessica Stam, Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio...> 'Thiên thần' Victoria's Secret rực rỡ khoe sắc/ Bộ sưu tập áo tắm gợi cảm nhất Victoria's Secret (phần 2)
Sân khấu lộng lẫy của đêm thời trang Victoria's Secret.
Alessandra Ambrosio.
Rosie Huntington, người đẹp của Robot đại chiến phần 3.
Alessandra Ambrosio.
Jessica Stam.
Selita Ebanks.
Karolina Kurkova.
Julia Stegner.
Anne Vyalitsina.
Erin Heatherton.
Erin Heatherton.Xem tiếp trang 2 >>>
(Ảnh: AFP)
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
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Bolzano 'tri ân thầy cô' (11/11)
Đón đông cùng Fiona (11/11)
Bộ sưu tập thời trang mùa đông Evita Peroni (11/11)
Câu lạc bộ người mẫu Tracy tuyển thành viên (10/11)
Thương hiệu thời trang nổi tiếng quy tụ tại Zen Plaza (10/11)
Anh Khoa tạo cảm hứng cho siêu mẫu tương lai (10/11)
Siêu mẫu Tây Ban Nha với Carina (10/11)
Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
Trali giảm giá tới 50% nhân tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội (08/11)
Thùy Dung biến hóa trên sàn catwalk (06/11)
Tăng Bảo Quyên trẻ trung với Alcado (05/11)
Bộ sưu tập Chic-Land Winter 2010 (05/11)
Ngọc Bích Nephrite giảm 10% (04/11)
Paris - Hà Nội: Đêm thời trang không catwalk (04/11)
Sân khấu lộng lẫy của đêm thời trang Victoria's Secret.
Alessandra Ambrosio.
Rosie Huntington, người đẹp của Robot đại chiến phần 3.
Alessandra Ambrosio.
Jessica Stam.
Selita Ebanks.
Karolina Kurkova.
Julia Stegner.
Anne Vyalitsina.
Erin Heatherton.
Erin Heatherton.Xem tiếp trang 2 >>>
(Ảnh: AFP)
ShowArticlebanner();
Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
Các tin khác
[Trở về]
Bolzano 'tri ân thầy cô' (11/11)
Đón đông cùng Fiona (11/11)
Bộ sưu tập thời trang mùa đông Evita Peroni (11/11)
Câu lạc bộ người mẫu Tracy tuyển thành viên (10/11)
Thương hiệu thời trang nổi tiếng quy tụ tại Zen Plaza (10/11)
Anh Khoa tạo cảm hứng cho siêu mẫu tương lai (10/11)
Siêu mẫu Tây Ban Nha với Carina (10/11)
Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
Trali giảm giá tới 50% nhân tháng khuyến mại Hà Nội (08/11)
Thùy Dung biến hóa trên sàn catwalk (06/11)
Tăng Bảo Quyên trẻ trung với Alcado (05/11)
Bộ sưu tập Chic-Land Winter 2010 (05/11)
Ngọc Bích Nephrite giảm 10% (04/11)
Paris - Hà Nội: Đêm thời trang không catwalk (04/11)
18/11 Thanh Hằng diễn catwalk ở Anh
Siêu mẫu chân dài cùng nhiều tên tuổi của làng mẫu sẽ xuất hiện trong đêm ‘Sắc đẹp Việt’, giới thiệu thời trang Việt Nam ở thủ đô nước Anh vào 5/12.
Đây là lần đầu tiên công ty Venus tổ chức một đêm diễn thời trang tại London. Giám đốc Vũ Khắc Tiệp cho biết: “Chương trình sẽ cung cấp một cái nhìn thực tế về thời trang cũng như các người mẫu Việt Nam với bạn bè quốc tế. Với sự góp mặt của 3 nhà thiết kế hàng đầu trong nước, đây còn là sự kiện cho thấy ngành thời trang Việt ngày một phát triển và trên đà hội nhập”.
Thang Hằng sẽ sải bước trên sàn catwalk tại London. Ảnh: Boby Nguyễn.
3 đại diện sẽ có những bộ sưu tập được giới thiệu trong gala này là: nhãn hiệu Gosto, nhà thiết kế Hoàng Hải và Kelly Bùi (từng tốt nghiệp thời trang tại Anh).
Ngoài siêu mẫu Thanh Hằng, tham gia chương trình còn có nhiều gương mặt quen thuộc: Hương Giang, Hà Anh, Ngọc Thạch, Thái Hà, Lan Hương, Triệu Trang, Minh Triệu, Vĩnh Thụy, Quang Thịnh, Quang Hòa…. Sẽ có 10 người mẫu ở London cùng diễn với các người mẫu Việt.
Trước khi lên đường sang Anh, các người mẫu còn có buổi họp mặt vào 27/11 tại TP HCM để đấu giá bộ sách ảnh của nhiếp ảnh gia Boby Nguyễn. Với tên gọi I Model, sách tập hợp nhiều bức ảnh của các gương mặt tên tuổi người mẫu, chụp ở các góc máy "hấp dẫn và xuất thần” nhất theo đánh giá của người chụp.
Toàn bộ số tiền thu được từ buổi đấu giá dùng để ủng hộ đồng bào lũ lụt miền Trung.
* Ảnh: Siêu mẫu khoe sắc trong 'I Model'
An Nhiên
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
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Thời trang Sophie Paris đến Việt Nam (12/11)
Cùng NEM khoe vẻ nữ tính và quyến rũ (12/11)
Nhẫn kim cương 3 ly Goodman 3,9 triệu đồng (11/11)
Victoria's Secret - đêm rực rỡ thời trang và nhan sắc (11/11)
Bolzano 'tri ân thầy cô' (11/11)
Đón đông cùng Fiona (11/11)
Bộ sưu tập thời trang mùa đông Evita Peroni (11/11)
Câu lạc bộ người mẫu Tracy tuyển thành viên (10/11)
Thương hiệu thời trang nổi tiếng quy tụ tại Zen Plaza (10/11)
Anh Khoa tạo cảm hứng cho siêu mẫu tương lai (10/11)
Siêu mẫu Tây Ban Nha với Carina (10/11)
Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
Đây là lần đầu tiên công ty Venus tổ chức một đêm diễn thời trang tại London. Giám đốc Vũ Khắc Tiệp cho biết: “Chương trình sẽ cung cấp một cái nhìn thực tế về thời trang cũng như các người mẫu Việt Nam với bạn bè quốc tế. Với sự góp mặt của 3 nhà thiết kế hàng đầu trong nước, đây còn là sự kiện cho thấy ngành thời trang Việt ngày một phát triển và trên đà hội nhập”.
Thang Hằng sẽ sải bước trên sàn catwalk tại London. Ảnh: Boby Nguyễn.
3 đại diện sẽ có những bộ sưu tập được giới thiệu trong gala này là: nhãn hiệu Gosto, nhà thiết kế Hoàng Hải và Kelly Bùi (từng tốt nghiệp thời trang tại Anh).
Ngoài siêu mẫu Thanh Hằng, tham gia chương trình còn có nhiều gương mặt quen thuộc: Hương Giang, Hà Anh, Ngọc Thạch, Thái Hà, Lan Hương, Triệu Trang, Minh Triệu, Vĩnh Thụy, Quang Thịnh, Quang Hòa…. Sẽ có 10 người mẫu ở London cùng diễn với các người mẫu Việt.
Trước khi lên đường sang Anh, các người mẫu còn có buổi họp mặt vào 27/11 tại TP HCM để đấu giá bộ sách ảnh của nhiếp ảnh gia Boby Nguyễn. Với tên gọi I Model, sách tập hợp nhiều bức ảnh của các gương mặt tên tuổi người mẫu, chụp ở các góc máy "hấp dẫn và xuất thần” nhất theo đánh giá của người chụp.
Toàn bộ số tiền thu được từ buổi đấu giá dùng để ủng hộ đồng bào lũ lụt miền Trung.
* Ảnh: Siêu mẫu khoe sắc trong 'I Model'
An Nhiên
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
Các tin khác
[Trở về]
Hoàng Gia Ngọc phiêu trong không gian 3D (13/11)
Giờ vàng tại Thế giới kim cương (12/11)
Thời trang Sophie Paris đến Việt Nam (12/11)
Cùng NEM khoe vẻ nữ tính và quyến rũ (12/11)
Nhẫn kim cương 3 ly Goodman 3,9 triệu đồng (11/11)
Victoria's Secret - đêm rực rỡ thời trang và nhan sắc (11/11)
Bolzano 'tri ân thầy cô' (11/11)
Đón đông cùng Fiona (11/11)
Bộ sưu tập thời trang mùa đông Evita Peroni (11/11)
Câu lạc bộ người mẫu Tracy tuyển thành viên (10/11)
Thương hiệu thời trang nổi tiếng quy tụ tại Zen Plaza (10/11)
Anh Khoa tạo cảm hứng cho siêu mẫu tương lai (10/11)
Siêu mẫu Tây Ban Nha với Carina (10/11)
Ấm áp mùa đông cùng BST 'The Light' của Pantio (09/11)
Yes24 ưu đãi nhân dịp 20/11 (09/11)
18/11 Hoa hậu Trái đất Serbia mặc áo dài đẹp nhất
Đêm 17/11, màn trình diễn của người đẹp Tijana Rakic từ Serbia được chấm điểm cao nhất tại phần thi áo dài Miss Earth 2010. Ngoài ra, thí sinh Ecuador đoạt danh hiệu Người đẹp áo dạ hội.> Miss Earth Nhật đoạt giải Trang phục truyền thống
Đêm thi trang phục áo dài và áo dạ hội diễn ra tại sân khấu lớn của Diamond Bay, Nha Trang. Khi Tijana Rakic xuất hiện trên sân khấu, cô gây ấn tượng với bộ áo cách điệu cùng những sải bước nhịp nhàng, uyển chuyển. Phong cách biểu diễn đầy tự tin giúp cho thí sinh đến từ châu Âu này được khán giả Việt Nam ủng hộ bằng những tràng pháo tay nồng nhiệt.
Người đẹp Tijana Rakic trong phần thi áo dài. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
"Đây là lần đầu tiên tôi biết đến và mặc áo dài lên sân khấu. Thật sự tôi cảm thấy rất thoải mái, và khi biểu diễn tôi cứ nghĩ mình là cô gái châu Á dịu dàng. Đêm nay, tôi có cảm giác mình là một nàng công chúa đấy!”, Miss Earth Serbia chia sẻ với VnExpress.net niềm vui chiến thắng .
Tijana Rakic cho biết thêm, cô rất cảm kích sự nhiệt tình của những người bạn Việt Nam trong êkíp thực hiện chương trình. Họ đã giúp cô vượt qua bỡ ngỡ ban đầu để làm quen với phong thái trình diễn khi mặc chiếc áo Việt Nam. Đoạt danh hiệu này, phần thưởng dành cho người đẹp Serbia là viên kim cương 5 li cùng nhiều tặng phẩm giá trị khác do các nhà tài trợ trao tặng.
Khi Jennifer Stephanie Pazmino xuất hiện trên sân khấu, khán phòng vang tiếng reo hò của khán giả gọi "Ecuador! Ecuador!". Sự nổi bật của người đẹp khiến chiến thắng của cô đã được báo trước. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
Danh hiệu Người đẹp áo dạ hội được trao cho Jennifer Stephanie Pazmino, từ Ecuador, trong tiếng reo hò của khán giả. Bộ váy trắng đính đá pha lê trang nhã cùng phong cách biểu diễn quyến rũ giúp Jennifer chiếm được nhiều cảm tình. Khuôn mặt thanh tú cùng nụ cười trong sáng của cô gái 22 tuổi này đã thu hút nhiều người mỗi khi cô xuất hiện từ những ngày đầu cuộc thi.
Chia sẻ niềm hạnh phúc, Jennifer cho biết, một ngày trước, cô còn đắn đo không biết nên chọn bộ váy nào để dự thi. “Hành lý tôi mang đến Miss Earth 2010 là 9 bộ váy dạ hội cho các đêm thi và 20 bộ áo váy truyền thống. Tôi đã cân nhắc nhiều và quyết định mặc bộ váy trắng mà nhà thiết kế Kein Piedrahita chuẩn bị cho tôi. Thật vui là tôi đã chọn đúng và chiến thắng này là dành cho ông ấy”, cô nói với VnExpress.net. Phần thưởng dành cho người đẹp Ecuador là bộ trang sức trị giá 30.000 USD cùng nhiều tặng phẩm khác.
Trước đó, tại phần thi Trang phục truyền thống tại Phan Thiết, cô gái 22 tuổi này cũng lọt vào top 5 người đẹp nhất đêm thi với bộ áo độc đáo màu xanh được kết vô số vỏ sò ốc, thể hiện hệ sinh vật biển phong phú của đất nước cô.
Đêm thi phụ tối 17/11 của Miss Earth kéo dài hơn 2 giờ đồng hồ. Mở đầu, 79 thí sinh có màn trình diễn những kiểu áo dài của thương hiệu ABC với màu sắc rực rỡ. Sau đó, các cô được ban giám khảo chia làm hai nhóm khác nhau. Nhóm thứ nhất gồm 39 thí sinh thi trình diễn áo dài. Nhóm còn lại có 40 người thi diễn áo dạ hội.
Người đẹp Serbia (trái) và Ecuador chung niềm vui đoạt danh hiệu cao. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
Sau phần thi của hai nhóm, ban giám khảo chọn ra top 5 người đẹp áo dài gồm: thí sinh Hàn Quốc, Philippines, Nicaragua, Serbia, Đài Loan. Top 5 người đẹp dạ hội có: thí sinh Thái Lan, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador và CH Czech.
Hoa hậu Lưu Thị Diễm Hương được chọn nằm trong nhóm thí sinh thi trang phục dạ hội. Cô thể hiện kém tự nhiên trên sân khấu và không vào được top 5. Thậm chí, ở màn mở đầu phần thi, khi các thí sinh cùng ra chào khán giả, Diễm Hương bị vấp chiếc váy dạ hội màu cam đang mặc và suýt té. Nhiều người thông cảm cho cô khi biết trước đó một ngày, trong buổi tập luyện cùng các thí sinh, người đẹp bị ngã trật chân. “Tôi phải cố gắng nén đau để hoàn thành phần thi của mình”, Diễm Hương cho biết.
Trong đêm này, ban tổ chức Miss Earth 2010 cùng công ty Vinpearl Land, Nha Trang gửi tặng đồng bào miền Trung hơn 2 tỷ đồng. 79 người đẹp của cuộc thi cũng cùng nhau chung tay bỏ phong bì quyên góp vào thùng cứu trợ. Nghĩa cử của các cô đã kêu gọi được nhiều khán giả ủng hộ tiền trực tiếp tại sân khấu.
Tối 18/11, tại Banquet Hall của Diamond Bay, Nha Trang, các người đẹp Miss Earth tiếp tục có buổi Gala Dinner gây quỹ từ thiện mang chủ đề: “Con người cần được yêu thương - Trái đất cần được bảo vệ.”
Ảnh
* Top 5 người đẹp trình diễn áo dài và áo dạ hội
* Người đẹp vui mừng nhận giải
Thoại Hà
Theo dòng sự kiện:
Người đẹp da màu tâm sự chuyện thi Miss Earth (17/11)
Miss Earth Nhật đoạt giải Trang phục truyền thống (14/11)
Bộ linh vật do Ngọc Hân đại diện thu gần 48 tỷ đồng (12/11)
Ronan Keating hát trong chung kết Miss Earth 2010 (11/11)
Thí sinh Ấn Độ đoạt giải Người đẹp tài năng Miss Earth (10/11)
Xem tiếp
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
Các tin khác
[Trở về]
Người đẹp da màu tâm sự chuyện thi Miss Earth (17/11)
Hoàng Gia Ngọc sẽ mặc áo dài thêu rồng vàng (17/11)
Người đẹp Trái đất đốt lửa trại, nhảy múa bên bờ biển (17/11)
Bóng hồng có làn da đen nhất Miss Earth 2010 (17/11)
Gia Ngọc có số bình chọn qua mạng bằng 0 (16/11)
Thí sinh Miss Earth khoe sắc với áo dài (16/11)
Ngọc Thạch tiếp tục tỏa sáng (16/11)
Người đẹp Miss Earth vất vả tập đi mềm mại (16/11)
Diễm Hương dẫn đầu bình chọn qua mạng (15/11)
Người đẹp Trái đất thư giãn với nắng gió Nha Trang (15/11)
Miss Earth nhặt rác bãi biển, trồng cây trên sân golf (15/11)
Hoàng Gia Ngọc hội ngộ người mẫu quốc tế (13/11)
Cuộc thi sắc đẹp nam giới đến Việt Nam (13/11)
Người đẹp Australia mặc áo dài tím Huế (12/11)
Ngọc Thạch được khen đẹp nổi bật (12/11)
Đêm thi trang phục áo dài và áo dạ hội diễn ra tại sân khấu lớn của Diamond Bay, Nha Trang. Khi Tijana Rakic xuất hiện trên sân khấu, cô gây ấn tượng với bộ áo cách điệu cùng những sải bước nhịp nhàng, uyển chuyển. Phong cách biểu diễn đầy tự tin giúp cho thí sinh đến từ châu Âu này được khán giả Việt Nam ủng hộ bằng những tràng pháo tay nồng nhiệt.
Người đẹp Tijana Rakic trong phần thi áo dài. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
"Đây là lần đầu tiên tôi biết đến và mặc áo dài lên sân khấu. Thật sự tôi cảm thấy rất thoải mái, và khi biểu diễn tôi cứ nghĩ mình là cô gái châu Á dịu dàng. Đêm nay, tôi có cảm giác mình là một nàng công chúa đấy!”, Miss Earth Serbia chia sẻ với VnExpress.net niềm vui chiến thắng .
Tijana Rakic cho biết thêm, cô rất cảm kích sự nhiệt tình của những người bạn Việt Nam trong êkíp thực hiện chương trình. Họ đã giúp cô vượt qua bỡ ngỡ ban đầu để làm quen với phong thái trình diễn khi mặc chiếc áo Việt Nam. Đoạt danh hiệu này, phần thưởng dành cho người đẹp Serbia là viên kim cương 5 li cùng nhiều tặng phẩm giá trị khác do các nhà tài trợ trao tặng.
Khi Jennifer Stephanie Pazmino xuất hiện trên sân khấu, khán phòng vang tiếng reo hò của khán giả gọi "Ecuador! Ecuador!". Sự nổi bật của người đẹp khiến chiến thắng của cô đã được báo trước. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
Danh hiệu Người đẹp áo dạ hội được trao cho Jennifer Stephanie Pazmino, từ Ecuador, trong tiếng reo hò của khán giả. Bộ váy trắng đính đá pha lê trang nhã cùng phong cách biểu diễn quyến rũ giúp Jennifer chiếm được nhiều cảm tình. Khuôn mặt thanh tú cùng nụ cười trong sáng của cô gái 22 tuổi này đã thu hút nhiều người mỗi khi cô xuất hiện từ những ngày đầu cuộc thi.
Chia sẻ niềm hạnh phúc, Jennifer cho biết, một ngày trước, cô còn đắn đo không biết nên chọn bộ váy nào để dự thi. “Hành lý tôi mang đến Miss Earth 2010 là 9 bộ váy dạ hội cho các đêm thi và 20 bộ áo váy truyền thống. Tôi đã cân nhắc nhiều và quyết định mặc bộ váy trắng mà nhà thiết kế Kein Piedrahita chuẩn bị cho tôi. Thật vui là tôi đã chọn đúng và chiến thắng này là dành cho ông ấy”, cô nói với VnExpress.net. Phần thưởng dành cho người đẹp Ecuador là bộ trang sức trị giá 30.000 USD cùng nhiều tặng phẩm khác.
Trước đó, tại phần thi Trang phục truyền thống tại Phan Thiết, cô gái 22 tuổi này cũng lọt vào top 5 người đẹp nhất đêm thi với bộ áo độc đáo màu xanh được kết vô số vỏ sò ốc, thể hiện hệ sinh vật biển phong phú của đất nước cô.
Đêm thi phụ tối 17/11 của Miss Earth kéo dài hơn 2 giờ đồng hồ. Mở đầu, 79 thí sinh có màn trình diễn những kiểu áo dài của thương hiệu ABC với màu sắc rực rỡ. Sau đó, các cô được ban giám khảo chia làm hai nhóm khác nhau. Nhóm thứ nhất gồm 39 thí sinh thi trình diễn áo dài. Nhóm còn lại có 40 người thi diễn áo dạ hội.
Người đẹp Serbia (trái) và Ecuador chung niềm vui đoạt danh hiệu cao. Ảnh: Hoàng Hà
Sau phần thi của hai nhóm, ban giám khảo chọn ra top 5 người đẹp áo dài gồm: thí sinh Hàn Quốc, Philippines, Nicaragua, Serbia, Đài Loan. Top 5 người đẹp dạ hội có: thí sinh Thái Lan, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador và CH Czech.
Hoa hậu Lưu Thị Diễm Hương được chọn nằm trong nhóm thí sinh thi trang phục dạ hội. Cô thể hiện kém tự nhiên trên sân khấu và không vào được top 5. Thậm chí, ở màn mở đầu phần thi, khi các thí sinh cùng ra chào khán giả, Diễm Hương bị vấp chiếc váy dạ hội màu cam đang mặc và suýt té. Nhiều người thông cảm cho cô khi biết trước đó một ngày, trong buổi tập luyện cùng các thí sinh, người đẹp bị ngã trật chân. “Tôi phải cố gắng nén đau để hoàn thành phần thi của mình”, Diễm Hương cho biết.
Trong đêm này, ban tổ chức Miss Earth 2010 cùng công ty Vinpearl Land, Nha Trang gửi tặng đồng bào miền Trung hơn 2 tỷ đồng. 79 người đẹp của cuộc thi cũng cùng nhau chung tay bỏ phong bì quyên góp vào thùng cứu trợ. Nghĩa cử của các cô đã kêu gọi được nhiều khán giả ủng hộ tiền trực tiếp tại sân khấu.
Tối 18/11, tại Banquet Hall của Diamond Bay, Nha Trang, các người đẹp Miss Earth tiếp tục có buổi Gala Dinner gây quỹ từ thiện mang chủ đề: “Con người cần được yêu thương - Trái đất cần được bảo vệ.”
Ảnh
* Top 5 người đẹp trình diễn áo dài và áo dạ hội
* Người đẹp vui mừng nhận giải
Thoại Hà
Theo dòng sự kiện:
Người đẹp da màu tâm sự chuyện thi Miss Earth (17/11)
Miss Earth Nhật đoạt giải Trang phục truyền thống (14/11)
Bộ linh vật do Ngọc Hân đại diện thu gần 48 tỷ đồng (12/11)
Ronan Keating hát trong chung kết Miss Earth 2010 (11/11)
Thí sinh Ấn Độ đoạt giải Người đẹp tài năng Miss Earth (10/11)
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Tin mới
Thí sinh VN's Next Top Model học cách giao tiếp (18/11)
'Chân dài' Miss Earth trổ tài trên sân golf (18/11)
Trali tặng phiếu mua hàng 100.000 đồng (18/11)
Dự đoán giải Hội đồng nghệ thuật SMĐH để nhận quà giá trị (18/11)
Quảng cáo của Beyonce bị cấm vì quá 'nóng' (18/11)
Các tin khác
[Trở về]
Người đẹp da màu tâm sự chuyện thi Miss Earth (17/11)
Hoàng Gia Ngọc sẽ mặc áo dài thêu rồng vàng (17/11)
Người đẹp Trái đất đốt lửa trại, nhảy múa bên bờ biển (17/11)
Bóng hồng có làn da đen nhất Miss Earth 2010 (17/11)
Gia Ngọc có số bình chọn qua mạng bằng 0 (16/11)
Thí sinh Miss Earth khoe sắc với áo dài (16/11)
Ngọc Thạch tiếp tục tỏa sáng (16/11)
Người đẹp Miss Earth vất vả tập đi mềm mại (16/11)
Diễm Hương dẫn đầu bình chọn qua mạng (15/11)
Người đẹp Trái đất thư giãn với nắng gió Nha Trang (15/11)
Miss Earth nhặt rác bãi biển, trồng cây trên sân golf (15/11)
Hoàng Gia Ngọc hội ngộ người mẫu quốc tế (13/11)
Cuộc thi sắc đẹp nam giới đến Việt Nam (13/11)
Người đẹp Australia mặc áo dài tím Huế (12/11)
Ngọc Thạch được khen đẹp nổi bật (12/11)
18/11 An ninh sân bay Mỹ: 'Sờ nắn' hay 'khoả thân'
Mỹ đang áp dụng các biện pháp kiểm tra hành khách đi máy bay được thừa nhận là xâm phạm thân thể hơn biện pháp cũ, như dang hai tay để khám người hoặc máy quét hình ảnh toàn thân.
Hành khách tại sân bay Mỹ sẽ phải dang hai tay để nhân viên kiểm tra bằng tay. Ảnh: Life
Giám đốc Cơ quan quản lý an ninh vận tải Mỹ John Pistole hôm qua cho biết, ông hiểu lo ngại về sự riêng tư và những lời phàn nàn về việc bị kiểm tra tại những vùng nhạy cảm trên thân thể của biện pháp an ninh sân bay mới, nhưng khẳng định an ninh là trên hết. Quan chức này thừa nhận việc yêu cầu hành khách dang rộng hai tay để khám người là mang tính xâm phạm thân thể hơn các biện pháp cũ.
Trong khi đó, trên mạng Internet đang lan truyền đoạn phim quay cảnh một người đàn ông từ chối làm theo yêu cầu của an ninh sân bay San Diego về việc dang rộng cả hai chân để kiểm tra. Người đàn ông có tên John Tyner, 31 tuổi, trong đoạn video này tức tối đe nhân viên kiểm tra: "Nếu ông chạm vào cục thịt thừa của tôi, tôi sẽ khiến ông bị bắt đấy!"
Chấp nhận bị "sờ nắn" hay "khoả thân"
Trên thực tế, biện pháp "sờ nắn" để kiểm tra bằng tay tại các sân bay Mỹ nói trên là sự lựa chọn cho những hành khách nào từ chối đi qua chiếc máy quét toàn thân mới đưa vào sử dụng. Những người không muốn hình ảnh của mình bị loại bỏ toàn bộ quần áo hiện lên màn hình của nhân viên an ninh sẽ phải chấp nhận bị kiểm tra bằng tay, bao gồm việc bị đụng chạm vào cả phần kín và ngực.
Ông John Pistole hôm qua đã phải điều trần trước Thượng viện Mỹ về biện pháp an ninh sân bay mới. Trong phiên họp này BBC dẫn lời Thượng nghị sĩ Cộng hoà George LeMieux nêu quan điểm: "Tôi thấy thực sự phiền toái bởi việc dang tay kiểm tra. Tôi đã tận mắt nhìn thấy cảnh này ở các sân bay bang Florida. Tôi sẽ không muốn vợ mình bị đụng chạm theo cách đó và tôi cũng cũng không muốn bị thế. Tôi nghĩ chúng ta phải tập trung vào sự an toàn nhưng cần có sự cân bằng".
Trong khi đó, người đứng đầu cơ quan giám sát các hoạt động an ninh sân bay Mỹ John Pistole thừa nhận việc cân nhắc cả an toàn và sự riêng tư đều cần thiết. Nhưng ông nói thêm phần lớn hành khách đều muốn bay trên chiếc phi cơ mà người khác đều đã trải qua quá trình kiểm tra an ninh chi tiết.
Cũng theo Pistole, việc phải áp dụng biện pháp an ninh xâm phạm thân thể hành khách bằng cách sờ nắn bằng tay được thực hiện sau vụ tấn công hụt của một thanh niên Nigeria trên chiếc máy bay hồi năm ngoái. Người này đã giấu thuốc nổ trong quần lót và chui vào toilet trên máy bay để ráp thành bom. May mắn âm mưu tấn công này đã bị hành khách ngồi cạnh chặn đứng kịp thời.
Một cuộc thăm dò đầu tuần này cho thấy cứ 10 người Mỹ thì có 8 người ủng hộ máy quét X-ray toàn thân đang được lắp đặt tại hơn 60 sân bay Mỹ. Một hành khách đang đợi chuyến bay tại sân bay quốc tế Los Angeles là Mark Spitzler nói với Telegraph: "Máy quét toàn thân khiến tôi cảm thấy an toàn hơn khi bay. Tôi không nghĩ họ xâm phạm sự riêng tư của tôi, những hình ảnh trên màn hình xuất hiện trong một căn phòng đóng kín và đây là điều phải làm để đảm bảo mọi thứ an toàn".
Máy quét toàn thân đang được áp dụng tại các sân bay Mỹ, cho phép nhân viên an ninh nhìn toàn bộ thân thể hành khách trong tình trạng không quần áo để phát hiện vũ khí. Ảnh: AP
An ninh sân bay Mỹ khó chịu cỡ nào
Bất cứ hành khách nào thường xuyên di chuyển bằng máy bay cũng quen với cảnh phải kiên nhẫn xếp hàng dài để đi qua cửa kiểm soát an ninh. Còn khi chuyến đi của bạn phải qua nước Mỹ, nơi mà tiêu chuẩn về an ninh hàng không còn được thắt chặt hơn nữa kể từ sau vụ 11/9, thì sẽ phải chuẩn bị tinh thần để chứng kiến thủ tục kiểm tra an ninh mất thời gian và phiền toái hơn nhiều.
Hàng loạt hình thức đe doạ an ninh hàng không mới nảy sinh dẫn đến việc các hành khách đặt chân tới những quốc gia "nhạy cảm" với chủ nghĩa khủng bố như Mỹ và châu Âu bị buộc phải tháo giày trước khi đi qua cửa rò kim loại của sân bay, cũng như bị giới hạn chất lỏng mang theo trong hành lý xách tay. Hành khách còn bị yêu cầu đưa laptop ra khỏi túi đựng trước khi đặt lên băng chuyền của máy quét hành lý, một yêu cầu khiến nhiều người thấy phiền toái vì mất thời gian.
Nhưng nhìn chung đa phần hành khách đều tỏ ra ủng hộ các biện pháp kiểm tra an ninh triệt để như sờ nắn bằng tay hoặc đi qua máy quét "khoả thân" mới áp dụng. Một cuộc điều tra do Unisys Security Index thực hiện cho thấy 93% người Mỹ chấp nhận hy sinh sự riêng tư của mình để nâng cao độ an toàn khi đi máy bay. Tại Anh cũng có hơn 90% số người được hỏi chấp nhận đi qua các máy quét toàn thân nói trên.
Đình Nguyễn
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Tin mới
Biểu tình trong máy bay (18/11)
Chiến đấu cơ Mỹ bị rơi tại Alaska, phi công mất tích (18/11)
'Sẽ không có ai đến nhận giải Nobel Hòa bình' (18/11)
Cứu bé gái dưới giếng sâu 30 m (18/11)
Nhật tóm trùm mafia khét tiếng (18/11)
Các tin khác
[Trở về]
Hai người phụ nữ trong cuộc đời hoàng tử Anh (17/11)
Chuyên cơ mới của tổng thống Pháp 'chào sân' (12/11)
Một tuần 'vận hạn' của các siêu máy bay (11/11)
Máy bay và cơn ác mộng mang tên núi lửa (08/11)
Bay bằng siêu phi cơ Airbus A380 có an toàn? (05/11)
Chân dung 10 người quyền lực nhất thế giới (04/11)
'Thần núi lửa' Indonesia cũng chết vì núi lửa (28/10)
Các dấu mốc quan trọng trong sự phát triển ASEAN (26/10)
Toàn cảnh 'nội chiến' vì chính sách hưu trí tại Pháp (25/10)
Sự trỗi dậy của xe đạp ở 'vương quốc xe hơi' Mỹ (22/10)
Phu nhân tài sắc của phó chủ tịch Trung Quốc (22/10)
Mỹ từng suýt có hai tổng thống bị bắn chết liên tiếp (21/10)
Những sân bay kỳ lạ nhất thế giới (20/10)
Tập Cận Bình - 'Lãnh đạo tương lai' của Trung Quốc (19/10)
Nhật - Trung tranh chấp biển đảo như thế nào (18/10)
Hành khách tại sân bay Mỹ sẽ phải dang hai tay để nhân viên kiểm tra bằng tay. Ảnh: Life
Giám đốc Cơ quan quản lý an ninh vận tải Mỹ John Pistole hôm qua cho biết, ông hiểu lo ngại về sự riêng tư và những lời phàn nàn về việc bị kiểm tra tại những vùng nhạy cảm trên thân thể của biện pháp an ninh sân bay mới, nhưng khẳng định an ninh là trên hết. Quan chức này thừa nhận việc yêu cầu hành khách dang rộng hai tay để khám người là mang tính xâm phạm thân thể hơn các biện pháp cũ.
Trong khi đó, trên mạng Internet đang lan truyền đoạn phim quay cảnh một người đàn ông từ chối làm theo yêu cầu của an ninh sân bay San Diego về việc dang rộng cả hai chân để kiểm tra. Người đàn ông có tên John Tyner, 31 tuổi, trong đoạn video này tức tối đe nhân viên kiểm tra: "Nếu ông chạm vào cục thịt thừa của tôi, tôi sẽ khiến ông bị bắt đấy!"
Chấp nhận bị "sờ nắn" hay "khoả thân"
Trên thực tế, biện pháp "sờ nắn" để kiểm tra bằng tay tại các sân bay Mỹ nói trên là sự lựa chọn cho những hành khách nào từ chối đi qua chiếc máy quét toàn thân mới đưa vào sử dụng. Những người không muốn hình ảnh của mình bị loại bỏ toàn bộ quần áo hiện lên màn hình của nhân viên an ninh sẽ phải chấp nhận bị kiểm tra bằng tay, bao gồm việc bị đụng chạm vào cả phần kín và ngực.
Ông John Pistole hôm qua đã phải điều trần trước Thượng viện Mỹ về biện pháp an ninh sân bay mới. Trong phiên họp này BBC dẫn lời Thượng nghị sĩ Cộng hoà George LeMieux nêu quan điểm: "Tôi thấy thực sự phiền toái bởi việc dang tay kiểm tra. Tôi đã tận mắt nhìn thấy cảnh này ở các sân bay bang Florida. Tôi sẽ không muốn vợ mình bị đụng chạm theo cách đó và tôi cũng cũng không muốn bị thế. Tôi nghĩ chúng ta phải tập trung vào sự an toàn nhưng cần có sự cân bằng".
Trong khi đó, người đứng đầu cơ quan giám sát các hoạt động an ninh sân bay Mỹ John Pistole thừa nhận việc cân nhắc cả an toàn và sự riêng tư đều cần thiết. Nhưng ông nói thêm phần lớn hành khách đều muốn bay trên chiếc phi cơ mà người khác đều đã trải qua quá trình kiểm tra an ninh chi tiết.
Cũng theo Pistole, việc phải áp dụng biện pháp an ninh xâm phạm thân thể hành khách bằng cách sờ nắn bằng tay được thực hiện sau vụ tấn công hụt của một thanh niên Nigeria trên chiếc máy bay hồi năm ngoái. Người này đã giấu thuốc nổ trong quần lót và chui vào toilet trên máy bay để ráp thành bom. May mắn âm mưu tấn công này đã bị hành khách ngồi cạnh chặn đứng kịp thời.
Một cuộc thăm dò đầu tuần này cho thấy cứ 10 người Mỹ thì có 8 người ủng hộ máy quét X-ray toàn thân đang được lắp đặt tại hơn 60 sân bay Mỹ. Một hành khách đang đợi chuyến bay tại sân bay quốc tế Los Angeles là Mark Spitzler nói với Telegraph: "Máy quét toàn thân khiến tôi cảm thấy an toàn hơn khi bay. Tôi không nghĩ họ xâm phạm sự riêng tư của tôi, những hình ảnh trên màn hình xuất hiện trong một căn phòng đóng kín và đây là điều phải làm để đảm bảo mọi thứ an toàn".
Máy quét toàn thân đang được áp dụng tại các sân bay Mỹ, cho phép nhân viên an ninh nhìn toàn bộ thân thể hành khách trong tình trạng không quần áo để phát hiện vũ khí. Ảnh: AP
An ninh sân bay Mỹ khó chịu cỡ nào
Bất cứ hành khách nào thường xuyên di chuyển bằng máy bay cũng quen với cảnh phải kiên nhẫn xếp hàng dài để đi qua cửa kiểm soát an ninh. Còn khi chuyến đi của bạn phải qua nước Mỹ, nơi mà tiêu chuẩn về an ninh hàng không còn được thắt chặt hơn nữa kể từ sau vụ 11/9, thì sẽ phải chuẩn bị tinh thần để chứng kiến thủ tục kiểm tra an ninh mất thời gian và phiền toái hơn nhiều.
Hàng loạt hình thức đe doạ an ninh hàng không mới nảy sinh dẫn đến việc các hành khách đặt chân tới những quốc gia "nhạy cảm" với chủ nghĩa khủng bố như Mỹ và châu Âu bị buộc phải tháo giày trước khi đi qua cửa rò kim loại của sân bay, cũng như bị giới hạn chất lỏng mang theo trong hành lý xách tay. Hành khách còn bị yêu cầu đưa laptop ra khỏi túi đựng trước khi đặt lên băng chuyền của máy quét hành lý, một yêu cầu khiến nhiều người thấy phiền toái vì mất thời gian.
Nhưng nhìn chung đa phần hành khách đều tỏ ra ủng hộ các biện pháp kiểm tra an ninh triệt để như sờ nắn bằng tay hoặc đi qua máy quét "khoả thân" mới áp dụng. Một cuộc điều tra do Unisys Security Index thực hiện cho thấy 93% người Mỹ chấp nhận hy sinh sự riêng tư của mình để nâng cao độ an toàn khi đi máy bay. Tại Anh cũng có hơn 90% số người được hỏi chấp nhận đi qua các máy quét toàn thân nói trên.
Đình Nguyễn
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