Dumplings Are a Good Thing in a Small Package

Dumplings Are a Good Thing in a Small Package

By Erik Olsen

Dumplings to Die For: New and exciting variations on the classic dumpling have recently appeared on menus in New York City. Meet some of the people behind a few of these delicious creations.

IF by chance you are a lover of dumplings (and really, Anthony Bourdain might have to mount a search party to find someone who isn’t), then consider this a very good time to be a New Yorker.

Yes, food trends beg to be quibbled over. We grow weary of cupcakes, of meatballs, of the overwhelming ubiquity of bacon. And yet it’s hard to find fault with the recent ascendancy of Asian dumplings on a lot of city menus, in part because it’s hard to snicker at the simple, plump lovability of this globe-spanning culinary trope: the very form of a dumpling, with a hidden knob of flavor all wrapped up in a bow of dough, calls to mind a tiny present that our species has decided to pass along to itself.

New York has been a dumpling town for a long time. Up and down the streets of Flushing (and at countless stuffed-pouch shrines like Vanessa’s Dumpling House, Joe’s Shanghai, Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Grand Sichuan, Prosperity Dumpling and M Shanghai Bistro & Garden), diners can feast on platters of two-bite delights while sometimes spending less than you’d pay for a morning cup of coffee.

But lately, in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, at spots like Talde, RedFarm, Hakkasan, Danji, the Good Fork, the Hurricane Club, the Rickshaw food truck, Biang and ; (at unpredictable intervals) Mission Chinese Food, classic dumpling forms are being executed with meticulous care â€" and stuffed, pinched and twisted into fresh manifestations.

In Park Slope, Dale Talde has engineered one of the most hunted-down bar snacks of 2012, a beer-friendly, street-cart collision known as the “pretzel dumpling.”

Inside, there’s some slightly cured pork. Outside, a process of boiling, brushing, pan-searing and baking creates a skin with the crust and chew of a hot pretzel. The dipping sauce echoes what you might get at a deli, or in a bag full of Chinese takeout: strong mustard.

For Mr. Talde, who grew up in Chicago and comes from a Filipino background, the goal was to summon a dish that represented a spirited take on what’s Asian and what’s American. “For us, it was a perfect way of blending the two,” he said.

If any place embodies the city’s neo-dumpling ethos, though, it’s RedFarm, whose West Village location has already spawned a forthcoming Upper West Side spinoff. At RedFarm, there are dumplings fashioned to look like Pac-Man characters and horseshoe crabs. There’s also an egg roll stuffed with pastrami.

“I call them whimsical,” said Ed Schoenfeld, the veteran restaurateur behind RedFarm. Spend an afternoon touring the kitchen, and Mr. Schoenfeld will rhapsodize about the artistry of the chef, Joe Ng. Those batter-crusted crabs might look like a cute gag, but there’s culinary precision (and greenmarket produce) inside them.

One day Mr. Schoenfeld pointed to a bowl of stuffing that Xiao Yan Mei, a prep cook, was smearing into sections of dough with a paddle that looked like a tongue depressor. That bowl held tiny cubes of roasted duck and vegetables â€" cut into what the French would call a brunoise, Mr. Schoenfeld said â€" all of which were meant to give the dumpling texture, “rather than having meatloaf inside.”

“This has a mouth feel that’s really special,” he said. “Here you can get individual bits of mushroom or sweet carrot or corn,” as opposed to the meat-and-spice mush often found inside a dumpling. “You might be getting yummy duck mush, but you’re not getting this, and there’s an appreciable difference.”

The current New York dumpling spectrum ranges from hyper-traditionalism to outlandish rule-flouting. Lawrence Knapp, the chef at the Hurricane Club, on Park Avenue South, cranks out unorthodox dumplings that riff on chicken parmigiana, pad Thai, cheesesteak and barbecued pork. “We don’t really strictly follow the guidelines of what makes sense or what a typical quote-unquote Asian dumpling is,” he said. “You can cheat more with the dumplings. You ca
10; have more fun with them, and people aren’t really going to criticize it.”

Or you can go the opposite route, as is done at Hakkasan in Midtown, where a sort of special-forces squadron of dim sum creates traditional dumplings with a level of precision that might be expected at an imperial Chinese banquet (with prices to match).

For Hooni Kim, the chef at Danji in Hell’s Kitchen, and Sohui Kim, the chef at the Good Fork in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the goal is to take a humble example of Korean street food and unpretentiously elevate it.

“Just wanting to perfect something that is really simple” is how Ms. Kim, from the Good Fork, put it. “What can I do to this already amazing food? How can I one-up this a little bit?”

The Island Where People Forget to Die

The Island Where People Forget to Die

Andrea Frazzetta/LUZphoto for The New York Times

Stamatis Moraitis tending his vineyard and olive grove on Ikaria. More Photos »

In 1943, a Greek war veteran named Stamatis Moraitis came to the United States for treatment of a combat-mangled arm. He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

Andrea Frazzetta/LUZphoto for The New York Times

Residents of the island Ikaria in Greece live profoundly long and healthful lives. More Photos »

One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.

Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea. He figured a funeral in the United States would cost thousands, a traditional Ikarian one only $ 200, leaving more of his retirement savings for his wife, Elpiniki. Moraitis and Elp iniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle o 4; two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children co 7;ld visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old â€" according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 â€" and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

I met Moraitis on Ikaria this past July during one of my visits to explore the extraordinary longevity of the island’s residents. For a decade, with support from the National Geographic Society, I’ve been organizing a study of the places where people live longest. The project grew out of studies by my partners, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer. In 2000, they identified a region of Sardinia’s Nuoro province as the place wit ;h the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world. As they zeroed in on a cluster of villages high in Nuoro’s mountains, they drew a boundary in blue ink on a map and began referring to the area inside as the “blue zone.” Starting in 2002, we identified three other populations around the world where people live measurably longer lives than everyone else. The world’s longest-lived women are found on the island of Okinawa. On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we discovered a population of ; 100,000 mestizos with a lower-than-normal rate of middle-age mortality. And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade.

This article is adapted from new material being published in the second edition of “Blue Zones,” by Dan Buettner, out next month from National Geographic.

Editor: Dean Robinson

Rome Journal: Snacking at the Roman Colosseum? Prepare to Pay a Fine

Rome Journal: Snacking at the Roman Colosseum? Prepare to Pay a Fine

ROME â€" Dapper as always in their bleached white shirts and matching caps, members of Rome’s municipal police force were out on the Spanish Steps one warm autumn day, trolling for offenders.

“Stefano, look! There’s another eater,” one officer said to another before sauntering over to a baffled couple who had begun munching on inoffensive-looking meal while sitting on the steps. The culprits, a couple of foreign tourists, had settled down on the landmark, one of Rome’s most famous. In their hands were the offending items: sandwiches.

The officers pounced, and after much waving of hands, the couple wrapped up the sandwiches and slouched away, looking sheepish.

They were in violation â€" unwittingly, in all probability â€" of a municipal ordinance that went into force this month. The measure outlaws eating and drinking in areas of “particular historic, artistic, architectonic and cultural value” in Rome’s center, to better protect the city’s monuments, which include landmarks like the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps. Fines range all the way up to $ 650 for culinary recidivists.

Italian cities, Rome included, have long enacted ordinances and regulations to protect monuments from ill-mannered tourists (and residents). But after a recent stroll through the city center, where he saw several people making themselves at home, literally, Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, decided the rules needed toughening.

“There were people camped out, and we weren’t able to move them,” said Antonio Gazzellone, the municipal council member responsible for tourism, noting that alcohol may have been involved. The new ordinance, which also outlaws camping or “setting up makeshift beds,” will “give monuments back their proper decorum,” he said. “Rome needs to be protected, its beauty respected.”

But there has already been some grumbling around town.

Recently, a salesclerk named Massimo strode off with his lunch after a police officer sharply blew her whistle until he stopped eating a sandwich on the Spanish Steps. “It seems to me that the municipal police have more important things to deal with than people eating sandwiches,” said Massimo, who asked that his last name not be used because, after all, he had just broken the law.

Others fretted that the ordinance is too broad. “From now on, a tourist walking around the Colosseum with an ice cream cone will be fined,” said Angelo Bonelli, a member of Italy’s Green Party, who flagrantly challenged the ban by eating a sandwich in front of the Pantheon while taunting a municipal police officer.

Rome has passed any number of bans during the past five years, against prostitutes, homeless people and men taking their shirts off in parks to sunbathe, Mr. Bonelli noted, often to little effect. “You can’t govern with bans,” he said of Mayor Alemanno. “It’s a sign of his inability to control the city.”

Many Romans agree. One recent Saturday, a few hundred protesters gathered in a flash mob on the steps leading to City Hall, chomping on pizza and panini as police officers registered the offenders. “Panino is not a crime,” one attendee wrote on his Facebook page.

Other Italian cities, where tourists and residents coexist in a delicate balance, have also taken measures to promote civility and good manners. For years it has been illegal in Venice to eat bag lunches while sitting on the steps around St. Mark’s Square, where 25 million tourists converge each year, said Marco Agostini, the city’s director general. “It’s the one place in Venice that all visitors want to see,” he said, “and we can’t have a si tuation where you have to climb over people eating salami sandwiches.”

This summer, Venice â€" along with the square’s business association â€" hired eight people to act as “guardians” of St. Mark’s, answering sundry questions, like “Where do I find the Colosseum?” Mr. Agostini said, and not only politely informing tourists that the Colosseum is in Rome but also directing them to the gardens just around the corner, where munching outdoors is legal.

In Florence, too, rope cordons went up this summer around the steps of the city’s cathedral, where visitors were asked not to sit. Custodians kept watch from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, “but in fact, after hours, people went back to sitting there,” said Ambra Nepi, the spokeswoman for the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, which oversees  6;he cathedral and nearby religious monuments.

Ms. Nepi said she understood that Florence could be expensive for some tourists, hence the bag lunches, and that there was a distinct lack of benches in the city center. But some visitors “abused the situation” and sprawled on the cathedral steps to suntan or nap, she said. “People need to know that after all this is a church,” she added. “It’s a way of educating visitors, and it’s not as though we went out with guns.”

Mr. Gazzellone, Rome’s head of tourism, dismissed concerns that visitors strolling with ice cream or slices of pizza would be fined, “as long as they throw any waste in the trash bins.” It’s more a question of civility, he said: “You wouldn’t eat a pizza and drop tomato sauce all over the steps of the White House in Washington.”

The ban must be renewed at the end of the year, he said, but that is considered pro forma. “We’ll see what the results are,” he said of the new law. “Personally, I hope it is never applied â€" because it means that citizens and guests to Rome have understood how to behave. I hope we don’t make a penny â€" because it means the city is being respected in its beauty.”

De Gustibus: Making a Meal Out of Peanut Butter and Pickles

De Gustibus: Making a Meal Out of Peanut Butter and Pickles

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

LIKE Krazy and Ignatz, Carville and Matalin, Cupid and Psyche or Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, the peanut butter and pickle sandwich is one of those unlikely pairings that shouldn’t work, but does.

That’s how I’ve always felt, anyway. I’ve been happily eating these distinctive little sandwiches for years. The vinegary snap of chilled pickle cuts, like a dash of irony, against the stoic unctuousness of peanut butter. The sandwich is a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic.

My father passed them down to me. Peanut butter and pickle sandwiches got him through law school at the University of West Virginia. I’ve come to consider them the work-at-home writer’s friend. The ingredients are always there for you, waiting loyally in the pantry when more glamorous lunch options (cold cuts, leftovers) aren’t returning your calls.

The PB&P has been a minority enthusiasm in America for generations, lingering just under the radar. The sandwiches appeared on lunch-counter menus during the Great Depression and in exten sion-service cookbooks in the 1930s and ’40s in recipes that generally called for a few spoonfuls of pickle relish. A lot of people’s grandmothers used to eat them.

These days, they’re a cult item. Kinsey Millhone, the fictional private investigator in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series of mysteries, is probably America’s best-known devotee.

Below that, there’s a consistent but low-level Internet buzz about the combination, just as there is about the other unlikely things people like to marry with peanut butter and place between bread slices: mayonnaise, olives, thick onion slices (this was Hemingway’s favorite sandwich), horseradish, bacon, Marmite (in England) and Vegemite (in Australia), to name but a few.

Each of these concoctions has its merits, especially Hemingway’s version, though it gives you breath that will chase away children, pets and all women who aren’t Martha Gellhorn. The Elvis sandwich (peanut butter, banana and bacon) isn’t a calamity, either. But compared with the PB&P, the ne plus ultra of the genre, all I can say about each of these pretenders is, as Elvis himself put it: return to sender.

Why can’t the peanut butter and pickle sandwich get a little respect? A few weeks ago, I began calling and e-mailing smart food people â€" chefs, journalists, cookbook writers, editors â€" to get their take on the combination. I expected to get some high-fives from this crowd, the way I would in book circles if I had unearthed an unjustly neglected writer, another Dawn Powell.

Instead, I got crickets. Long, baffled silences. Not one of the people I spoke with had even tried a PB&P. A few reacted with outright disgust, the way people did when they heard that Julia Roberts had married Lyle Lovett.

“Eew,” e-mailed Virginia Willis, the author of “Bon Appétit, Y’all: Recipes and Stories From Three Generations of Southern Cooking.” Ms. Willis added, “Sounds kind of scary.” A friend of mine, an editor at a major national food monthly, wrote me back to say, “Even at 7 months pregnant, I’ve never had that craving.” Another well- known cookbook writer suggested I talk to Guy Fieri, the Sammy Hagar of TV chefs.

Guy Fieri? That’s harsh, dude.

My desperation increasing, I reached out to two men who, between them, know pretty much everything there is to know about eating in America, at least east of the Mississippi: Ed Levine, founder of the Web site Serious Eats, and John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance an
00; the guru of Dixie eats. (He also contributes regularly to The New York Times.)

Neither of these guys had eaten a PB&P, either. (“Slackers,” I muttered to myself.) Mr. Edge declared that, despite all the uncouth yet awesome preparations Southerners have for pickles (deep-frying them, coloring them with Kool-Aid flavor packets), the peanut butter and pickle sandwich is definitely not a Southern thing. Flipping through his mental Rolodex, he sounded stumped for a bit. He finally sent me to talk to a young chef in Minneapolis who does a peanut butter and grilled jalapeño appetizer, which sounds tasty but is n 1;t the same thing at all.

Unlike Mr. Edge, Mr. Levine volunteered to lose his PB&P virginity, pretty much right on the spot. About the peanut butter sandwich he made with bread-and-butter pickles, he declared, “I could see eating that again.” About a peanut butter with garlic dill pickles sandwich, he said, “Not so much.”

News Analysis: Candidates and the Truth About America

News Analysis: Candidates and the Truth About America

WASHINGTON

IMAGINE a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.

What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 ot&# 104;er countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.

The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare â€" in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times th& #101; rate of Japan; in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.

How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Nowhere fast. Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

Candidates and presidents generally oblige them, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included. It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems â€" but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs. It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world â€" a point made memorably in a tirad e by the dyspeptic anchorman played by Jeff Daniels in the HBO drama “The Newsroom.”

“People in this country want the president to be a cheerleader, an optimist, the herald of better times ahead,” says Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “It’s almost built into our DNA.”

This national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism, may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image. But during a presidential campaign, it can be deeply dysfunctional, ensuring that many major issues are barely discussed. Problems that cannot be candidly described and vigorously debated are unlikely to be addressed seriously. In a country where citizens think of themselves as practical problem-solvers and realists, this aversion to bad news is a surprising feature of the demo cratic process.

“I think there’s more of a tendency now than in the past to avoid discussion of serious problems,” says Allan J. Lichtman, a political historian at American University. “It has a pernicious effect on our politics and on governing, because to govern, you need a mandate. And you don’t get a mandate if you don’t say what you’re going to do.”

American exceptionalism has recently been championed by conservatives, who accuse President Obama of paying the notion insufficient respect. But the self-censorship it produces in politicians is bipartisan, even if it is more pronounced on the left for some issues and the right for others.

For instance, Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare. Republicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences. But both parties, it is fair to say, prefer not to consider either trend too deeply.

Both parties would rather avert their eyes from such difficult challenges â€" because we, the people, would rather avert our eyes. Talk to any political pro about this phenomenon and one name inevitably comes up: Jimmy Carter, who has become a sort of memento mori for American politicians, like the skulls in Renaissance paintings that reminded viewers of their mortality.

Mr. Carter, they will say, disastrously spoke of a national “crisis of confidence” and failed to project the optimism that Americans demand of their presidents. He lost his re-election bid to sunny Ronald Reagan, who promised “morning in America” and left an indelible lesson for candidates of both parties: that voters can be vindictive toward anyone who dares criticize the country and, implicitly, the people.

This is a peculiarly American brand of nationalism. “European politicians exercise much greater freedom to address bluntly the uglier social problems,” says Deborah Lea Madsen, professor of American studies at the University of Geneva. An American politician who speaks too candidly about the country’s faults, she went on to say, risks being labeled with that most devastating of epithets: un-American.

A reporter at The New York Times Washington bureau.

How Lance Armstrong’s Wall Fell, One Rider at a Time

How Lance Armstrong’s Wall Fell, One Rider at a Time

Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images

Floyd Landis, right, was among the first to reveal the culture of doping that brought down his ex-teammate Lance Armstrong.

Floyd Landis, the cyclist who had denied doping for years despite being stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for failing a drug test, went to a lunch meeting in April 2010 with the director of the Tour of California cycling race.

Christine Cotter for The New York Times

Detailed testimony from riders like David Zabriskie helped the United States Anti-Doping Agency's case against Armstrong.

As they sat down at a table at the Farm of Beverly Hills restaurant in Los Angeles, Landis placed a tape recorder between them and pressed record.

Landis finally wanted to tell the truth: He had doped through most of his professional career. He was recording his confessions so he would later have proof that he had blown the whistle on the sport.

“How do you expect people to believe you when you lied for so long?” Andrew Messick, the race director, asked Landis. “Have you told your mother? Have you told Travis Tygart?”

Landis, raised as a Mennonite, said he had not yet told his mother. Nor had he told Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, with whom he had clashed for more than two years as Landis publicly fought his doping case.

But, Landis said, it was time.

“Lance Armstrong never came up,” Messick said in an interview last week. “But he did make a comment on the Mafia. He said, When you’re in the Mafia and you get caught and go to jail, you keep your mouth shut, and the organization takes care of your family. In cycling, you’re expected to keep your mouth s hut when you test positive, but you become an outcast. Everyone just turns their back on you.”

Antidoping officials on multiple continents had pursued Armstrong for years, in often quixotic efforts that died at the wall of silence his loyal teammates built around him as the sport’s global king. Armstrong kept the dark side of his athletic success quiet, investigators and cyclists said, by using guile and arm-twisting tactics that put fear in those who might cross him.

But the lunch conversation between Landis and Messick would eventually be seen as the first significant crack in Armstrong’s gilded foundation, a critical turning point in antidoping officials’ quest to penetrate the code of secrecy that endured in cycling.

It set in motion a series of events that led to the stark revelation that Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner, and his United States Postal Service team were engaged in what antidoping officials called the most sophisticated doping program in history â€" one covered up by cyclists who banded together to protect themselves, one another and the ugly, deceitful underbelly of the sport.

Armstrong, who vehemently denies ever doping, did not fight the charges the antidoping agency brought against him. Last week, in the wake of antidoping officials’ making public their evidence in the case, Armstrong stepped down as chairman of his cancer foundation and lost nearly all his endorsements â€" a decline so unceremonious and severe th& #97;t a precedent in recent sports history is elusive.

On Monday, cycling’s world governing body is expected to announce whether it will appeal the antidoping agency’s ruling, which Armstrong has called unfair and flawed. If the group does not appeal, Tour de France organizers will officially strip Armstrong of his Tour titles.

Interviews with more than a dozen riders, their wives, lawyers involved in the case, antidoping officials and team executives revealed that Armstrong’s undoing was the culmination of an inquiry that played out over more than two years â€" but that dramatically turned over the course of several weeks this summer as more and more cyclists contributed their own damning stories to the in vestigation.

At that point, antidoping officials hardly had an airtight case. Tygart was hurriedly approaching cyclists from Armstrong’s United States Postal Service teams.

“Look, the system of doping in the sport is coming down, and all the riders, including Lance Armstrong, are going to be given an opportunity to get on the lifeboat,” he told them. “Are you on it?”

Rider after rider asked, “Am I going to be the only one?”

It would take months for them to find out.

A Federal Investigation

The antidoping agency knew its case against Armstrong had the potential to be a blockbuster.

Op-Ed Columnist: Pampered Princes Fling Gorilla Dust

Op-Ed Columnist: Pampered Princes Fling Gorilla Dust

EVEN at a dinner dedicated to the Happy Warrior, the president seemed like the Unhappy Warrior.

Barack Obama was elegant in white tie and got off some good gibes at the annual Al Smith charity banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan on Thursday.

But his smile sometimes looked forced as he was goaded by Mitt Romney, whose comic barbs were just as aggressive as his last debate performance.

“President Obama and I are each very lucky to have one person who is always in our corner, someone who we can lean on, and someone who is a comforting presence,” Romney said. “Without whom, we wouldn’t be able to go another day. I have my beautiful wife Ann, he has Bill Clinton.”

It was funny, and it drew blood.

Tremors from the asymmetrical first debate are still reshaping the race and buoying Romney. It has been said that Obama didn’t show up for that contest, but the reverse is true: the real Obama did show up, indulging in flashes of petulance, self-pity and passivity at a treacherous moment for himself, other Democratic candidates and all the people working their hearts out â€" and emptying their wallets out â€" for him.

Will it mean that Obama ends up being the one-term Democratic tunnel between the first black president, as Bill Clinton has been dubbed, and the first female president â€" the organic arugula in a messy, meaty Clinton sandwich?

Much was made of the alpha tone of the second presidential debate. But it was more like a parody of alpha, a couple of pampered, manicured Harvard princes kicking up “gorilla dust,” as Ross Perot calls it. In a truly commanding performance, you don’t jab fingers, invade space, bark interruptions.

Obama put aside his disdain for jousts and woke up from the “nice, long nap I had in the first debate,” as he wryly said at Thursday’s dinner. But he was overcompensating for the first debacle, and he still didn’t have a vision or memorable zingers or a knockout punch for a rival who hides in plain sight.

Obama’s contempt for Romney gleamed through as Mitt got all O.C.D. with Candy Crowley about the rules, and rambled on about his weird retro worldview, where women in binders have to bound home to make dinner, where the problem of too-easy access to assault weapons could be helped if, gosh, we just tell “our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting mar ried to someone.”

As Massachusetts governor, Romney signed a ban on certain assault weapons. But now he has “Romnesia,” as Obama bitingly calls it, so Mitt is always distancing himself from himself.

In some ways, the two rivals are alike: cold, deliberative fish, self-regarding elitists with upbringings out of the norm and trouble connecting at times, as when Obama echoed Jon Stewart’s word “optimal” on “The Daily Show” and sounded aloof about the tragedy in Libya: “If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.” The mother of one of those Americans, Sean Smith, told The Daily Mail of London, “It’s insensitive to say my son is not very optimal; he is also very d ead.”

These candidates are, in some respects, natural antagonists. Their rancor seems especially intense, fueled by jagged ads and a long period of mud-wrestling on the head of a pin.

Barry scorns Mitt as a guy who had it all handed to him and now feels comfortable taking it away from everybody else.

Like the Bushes, the Romneys, another famous Republican political dynasty that grows more conservative with each generation, promote the myth that they are self-made men.

“The danger arises when a family myth intersects with a governing vision, when the stories a presidential candidate tells himself shape the policies he favors for everyone else,” Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, adding that the Romneys can’t fathom that if federal programs are slashed for the less privileged, those people can’t use family connections to help obstacles melt away.

The president joked at the Al Smith dinner about how both candidates had “unusual” middle names â€" Mitt and Hussein â€" noting mock-wistfully, or maybe really wistfully, “I wish I could use my middle name.”

The line summed up Obama’s incredible odyssey, how many barriers he had to leap over with no rich daddy, no daddy at all, to rise to the pinnacle. President Cool hates the fact that the uncool scion is making him descend from the lofty heights of governing and engage in crass politics.

Romney can only do offense, not defense. He expects to be catered to as the smartest guy in the room, and he clearly loathes being patronized by Obama. But some who have worked with Mitt say his teeth-baring is an act, overlaying indifference. Romney, they say, is all about crunching the data, regarding Obama coldly as an impediment to his dream of becoming the first Mormon president.

“Mitt does not express great love, and he does not express hate,” said one Republican strategist who knows him well. “Ledger sheets don’t hate.”

Op-Ed Columnist: Cuddle Your Kid!

Op-Ed Columnist: Cuddle Your Kid!

AS the presidential candidates debate how to strengthen America, maybe they can learn from rats.

A McGill University neurologist, Michael Meaney, noticed that some of the mother rats he worked with spent a great deal of time licking and grooming their babies. Other rat moms were much less cuddly.

This natural variation had long-term consequences. Meaney’s team found that when the rats grew up, those that had been licked and groomed did better at finding their way through mazes.

They were more social and curious. They even lived longer.

Meaney’s team dissected adult rats and found that licking led to differences in brain anatomy, so that rats that had been licked more were better able to control stress responses.

So, could the human version of licking and grooming â€" hugging and kissing babies, and reading to them â€" fortify our offspring and even our society as well?

One University of Minnesota study that began in the 1970s followed 267 children of first-time low-income mothers for nearly four decades. It found that whether a child received supportive parenting in the first few years of life was at least as good a predictor as I.Q. of whether he or she would graduate from high school.

This may illuminate one way that poverty replicates itself from generation to generation. Children in poor households grow up under constant stress, disproportionately raised by young, single mothers also under tremendous stress, and the result may be brain architecture that makes it harder for the children to thrive at school or succeed in the work force.

Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.

Scholars like James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dr. Jack Shonkoff of Harvard have pioneered this field, and decades of fascinating research is now wonderfully assembled in Paul Tough’s important new book, “How Children Succeed.” Long may this book dwell on the best-seller lists!

As Tough suggests, the evidence is mounting that conservatives are right about some fundamental issues relating to poverty. For starters, we can’t talk just about welfare or tax policy but must also consider culture and character.

“There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable,” Tough writes, than grit, resilience, perseverance and optimism.

Yet conservatives sometimes mistakenly see that as the end of the conversation.

“This science suggests a very different reality,” Tough writes. “It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest & #111;f us â€" society as a whole â€" can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”

Here’s an example: the Nurse-Family Partnership, one of my favorite groups fighting poverty in America. It sends nurses on regular visits to at-risk first-time moms, from pregnancy until the child turns 2. The nurses warn about alcohol or drug abuse and encourage habits of attentive parenting, like reading to the child. The results are stunning: at age 15, these children are less than half as likely to have been arrested as kids from similar circumstances who were not enrolled.

Maybe we’re beginning to crack the code of how to chip away at so many of America’s domestic problems. Tough cites evidence that while toxic stress or unsupportive parenting damages the prefrontal cortex in infancy, this damage can often be undone at least through adolescence.

He tells the story of Kewauna Lerma, a girl from Chicago who started high school with a C- average and an arrest. Then a group called OneGoal, which has emerged out of this wave of research, began to work with Kewauna and nurtured her ambitions and talents.

President Obama and Mitt Romney, listen up: Kewauna’s story underscores that strengthening our nation means investing not only in warships but also in America’s children.

On a practice ACT standardized test, Kewauna scored in the bottom 1 percentile. Yet she began to focus on schoolwork, and her grades and test results soared. In her senior year of high school, she didn’t have a grade lower than an A-.

She made it to college, where her toughest class was biology and the professor used words that Kewauna didn’t understand. So she sat in the front row and after class asked the professor what each word meant. Kewauna was short on money, and once when she ran out of cash she didn’t eat for two days. But in biology, she earned an A+.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Obama’s Best-Kept Secrets

Op-Ed Columnist: Obama’s Best-Kept Secrets

ONE thing that has struck me about the debates so far is how little President Obama has conveyed about what I think are his two most innovative domestic programs. While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives wi ;ll be transformative.

His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles â€" raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 â€" is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software. Obama mentioned both briefly in the last debate, but I want to talk about them more, because I think t
04;ey are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.

While it is too scary for Obama to tell people in so many words, his races to the top in schools and cars are both based on one brutal fact: “The high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” as Stefanie Sanford, a senior education expert at the Gates Foundation, puts it. The only high-wage jobs, whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce both more high-skill jobs &# 97;nd more high-skilled workers.

In the Race to the Top in schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has built on the good works of his predecessor, Margaret Spellings, and President George W. Bush, who put in place No Child Left Behind. Though never perfect, No Child Left Behind was still a game-changer for education reform because it gave us the data to see not only how individual schools were doing but how the most at-risk students were doing within those schools. Without that, educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals could never start.

The purpose of Race to the Top, Secretary Duncan explained to me, was basically to say that if we now live in a world where every good high-wage job requires more skill, we need to get as many of our schools as possible educating their students “to college- and career-ready standards,” measured against the best in the world, because that is whom our kids will be competing against. “We have to educate our way to a better economy,” Duncan argues. “The path to the middle class today runs straight through the classroom.”

So, Race to the Top said to all 50 states, we have a $ 4.35 billion fund that Washington will invest in the states that come up with the best four-year education reform plans that have these components: 1) systems for data-gathering on student performance, dropout rates, graduation rates and post-graduation college and vocational school success, so schools are held accountable for what happens to their students; 2) systems for teacher and principal evaluation and support, a s well as systems to reward great teachers, learn from their best practices and move out those at the bottom â€" essentially systems that help elevate teaching into an attractive profession; 3) systems that propose turning around failing schools by changing the management and culture; 4) systems that set college- and career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards for reading and math.

IT is too early to draw any firm conclusions, but Duncan points to some early positives. Some 4,500 state and local teachers’ union affiliates have signed onto their state’s reform proposals, showing they want to be partners. Roughly 25 percent of the turnaround schools, Duncan said, “have already showed double-digit increases in reading or math in their first year and about two-thirds showed gains.” There have also been “huge reductions of discipline incidents.”

Although, over the two years of the program, 46 states submitted reform blueprints â€" and only the 12 best won grants from $ 70 million to $ 700 million, depending on the size of their student populations â€" even states that did not win have been implementing their proposals anyway. And because 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted similar higher academic standards (known as the “common core”) for reading and math, “for th e first time in our history a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi are now being measured by the same yardstick,” said Duncan.

In many cases, we have seen as much reform from those “who did not get a nickel as those who got $ 100 million,” Duncan added. As Jay Altman, the chief executive of FirstLine Schools, which manages the turnarounds of failing schools in New Orleans, put it, “Louisiana ended up not winning Race to the Top, but we got close, and the process stimulated Louisiana and other states to think more broadly ab&# 111;ut educational reform rather than just approach it piecemeal.”

As for Obama’s doubling of vehicle mileage by 2025, led by his Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, it’s already driving more innovation in Detroit, as each car company figures out how it will improve mileage by 5 percent every year. The auto industry’s main newspaper, “Automotive News, used to be a sad collection of stories of failing dealerships and excess inventory,” notes Hal Harvey, the chief executive of Energy Innovation. “Now it is one technology story after another, all aimed at increasing fuel efficiency. Engines, transmissions, electrical systems, advanced materials are all in the midst of new revolutions. Finally the engineers are back at work!”

Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, notes that Mitt Romney rejects Obama’s auto Race to the Top and is vowing to import more oil from the Canadian tar sands through the Keystone XL pipeline. “So Romney wants to throw away our cheapest, cleanest oil â€" the stuff we make in Detroit through greater mileage efficiency â€" and replace it with the world’s most expensive and dirty oil from the Canadian tar sands,” says Pope. “That’s a swap only the Koch brothers could dream up.”

Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection Agency projects families will save $ 1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every day. It will cut six billion metric tons of greenhouse gases over the lifetimes of the vehicles sold throu gh 2025 â€" more than the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the U.S. in 2010.

But remember: It’s all a secret. Don’t tell anyone.