Buying and Selling in Bedbug City

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS NY TIMES
THE elegant two-bedroom co-op in an Upper East Side prewar building had drifted on the market for nine months by the time the first-time buyers laid eyes on it this spring. They fell hard for its original detail, convenient location and friendly price.
The sellers, a family with a third child on the way and a desperate eye cocked toward the suburbs, were eager to move. Two days later, a deal was struck for $50,000 below the $670,000 asking price.
Then came the “due diligence.”
Scattered among notations about routine matters in the co-op’s records lay the exploded fragments of a bombshell.
“The minutes referenced multiple attempts to exterminate bedbugs in the building,” said Steven Ebert, the Manhattan real estate lawyer who represented the buyers.
Complaints about bedbugs have risen sharply over the last few years in New York, according to city officials, and no neighborhood in the city has been spared. While the pests do not pose a dangerous health risk, they inflict considerable psychological distress on their unwilling hosts. Moreover, the uninvited guests can be excruciatingly difficult and costly to evict.
According to the law, sellers and their brokers must acknowledge a problem if asked. But conflicts of interest aside, neither can be expected to know whether an infestation exists elsewhere in the building.
The problem is so pervasive that some lawyers have begun incorporating sellers’ representations about bedbugs into sales contracts, adding to now-standard ones about leaks, mold and noise issues. And buyers are having to determine if the pests are a deal-breaker or just one more headache on the road to a new home.
When the buyers of the prewar apartment on the Upper East Side found out about the infestation, they poured out their story online at StreetEasy.com, wondering whether the pests unsealed the deal.
Although bedbugs hadn’t been detected in the seller’s apartment, a bedbug-sniffing dog — currently in vogue as a helpful if not foolproof detection device — had spotted potential infestations in a third of the co-op’s 90-odd units, though the insects had been seen in only two. A buildingwide extermination effort had been mounted just a few months earlier — but at least 10 owners, including the sellers, had declined to have their homes treated.
The couple’s online circle did not like the sound of this. Many members said the personal suffering and expense of an infestation were simply not worth the risk. One recounted having spent $10,000 on hotel bills and discarded furniture.
Reluctantly, the buyers walked away from the apartment and the $1,000 they had paid their lawyer thus far.
“Before we found out all the details, we thought maybe if it had happened two years ago and had been taken care of, and there had been no complaints ever since, we might feel comfortable,” said the wife.
“The broker said, ‘This is New York City — you have all sorts of things like cockroaches and rats,’ ” she explained, asking that her name be withheld because she was worried about being labeled as a troublemaker by another co-op board. “But it’s very different to have a cockroach than something that sucks your blood and is in your bed. I would rather have rats.”
A growing number of apartment shoppers appear to share her view, according to the real estate lawyers who represent them. Real estate agents — perhaps hesitant to provide people with another excuse not to buy — became unusually press-shy when asked about the subject.
“It’s like the dreaded mold that was killing values for a while,” said Steven Sladkus, a real estate lawyer whose firm, Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, represents 250 co-op and condo boards. “People don’t want to buy into a building if they find out there are bedbugs.”
The bedbug epidemic has smacked around New York City for the past five years or so, a seemingly unstoppable scourge flourishing in the absence of a coordinated city effort to control it. The City Council created a bedbug advisory board in March, but has not yet announced its members. Complaints to the 311 hot line shot up by 19 percent for the fiscal year that ended in June, on top of a 33 percent increase the year before, according to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
These figures probably underreport the problem: Co-op and condo owners, who control about a third of the city’s housing stock, may not always call the city for help because, unlike renters, they can address building infestations themselves. Nor are renters with less-than-legitimate claims on a lease or citizenship phoning in their distress.
“Most residential buildings in New York City have had bedbugs,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a real estate lawyer at Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman who represents 300 Manhattan co-op and condo boards. (Among his most frequently asked questions: Who must pay for extermination?)
Eva Talel, a real estate lawyer at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, said that in the last six months, her firm’s real estate group had received at least two calls a week from boards about infestations.
“The co-op and condo community is just becoming aware that they are victims of this,” Ms. Talel said, noting that “for a lot of years, people thought this was confined to rentals or housing projects or fleabag hotels.”
Meanwhile, the need to inquire into a co-op or condo’s bedbug status is only just beginning to seep into the consciousness of buyers and their lawyers.
“I have yet to hear of a buyer going into the apartment for the preclosing walk-through and picking up the bedspreads and looking at the mattresses,” Mr. Shmulewitz said. “If they do, you’re going to have lots of deals not closing.”
It’s a start that the law requires co-op and condo sellers to disclose a problem if asked, but the representations are hardly foolproof: Sellers can be unaware of problems in their own apartments (not everyone reacts to bedbug bites with itchy red welts) and ignorant of hungry armies massing behind their neighbors’ walls.
So questions are also being lobbed at managing agents, and the response — be it passing the buck or ignoring the inquiry altogether — carefully observed.
Unfortunately for buyers, minutes of board meetings are not the reliable gauge they might seem.
“They’re often incomplete,” Mr. Ebert said. “Some boards are aware that minutes are a public document that can affect resale value, and they sanitize the minutes. If there’s only good news in there, then it’s too good to be true.”
It’s a matter of self-preservation, Mr. Sladkus said. “From my perspective as a board member, I absolutely wouldn’t want it out there that bedbugs are in my building.”
Even when the bugs do show up in the minutes, the references can be vague and details elusive.
“We tried to find out which units had the bedbugs, but the co-op would not tell us,” said another would-be buyer who also asked to remain anonymous to avoid trouble with a future board. “We mainly wanted to make sure the unit we wanted to purchase was not on the same floor.”
The buyer and her husband agonized over whether to walk away from a postwar Greenwich Village one-bedroom listed for $750,000 this summer. After their lawyer learned through the co-op’s minutes that two units in the building had bedbugs, the couple — both infectious-disease specialists who understood that bedbugs, though disgusting, don’t pose much of a health risk — “freaked out.”
The buyers withdrew their offer but continued to press for information through their lawyer, who spoke to the seller’s lawyer and the managing agent.
“It was clear the managing agent didn’t want us to know which units or the extent of the situation because of the stigma associated with the problem,” the woman explained.
Nevertheless, when they were assured that the problem had been addressed a year earlier, they put in a new offer. But they ultimately withdrew after an inspection revealed the presence of asbestos and the sellers would not agree to a $20,000 price reduction to cover abatement.
“My advice to prospective buyers is to make sure you hire a thorough real estate attorney to read the board minutes, and get an inspection, despite what any broker tells you,” she said, alluding to a suspicion that brokers don’t always come clean about bedbugs.
Like the Greenwich Village couple, some buyers are willing to overlook a bedbug issue if they are given assurances that the problem is safely in the past — or will be by the time they move in.
Last summer, Anne Stone and her husband learned that an estate-condition apartment they wanted to buy in a Upper West Side co-op near Columbia University had been afflicted with bedbugs.
A friend who had once lived across the hall from the unit told Ms. Stone that the problem had been detected a year and a half earlier, but seemed to have been dealt with then.
The seller’s broker, Klara Madlin of Klara Madlin Real Estate, explained that the owner’s children had had the apartment exterminated.
“At the time, I didn’t realize the bugs could live without sucking on anyone for one and a half years,” said Ms. Stone, who ultimately agreed to pay $965,000 for the apartment despite learning that it had been the locus of an infestation. “The owner had died six months earlier and we planned to gut-renovate before we moved in. We decided forewarned was forearmed, and we asked the sellers to hold some money in escrow for a bedbug inspection, which we haven’t done yet.”
As things have turned out, the renovation began only this spring and won’t be completed until October, nearly two years after the previous owner’s death. Although the new owner plans to have the apartment inspected before moving in, she is not very concerned.
Most buyers view bugs as a reason to walk away rather than an opportunity to ask for a lower price.
“In a market where there’s a lot more inventory, issues with vermin and infestation and odor become deal killers,” said Jonathan Miller of the Manhattan appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
But there are those who swallow hard and go forward.
Eric Gonchar, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, worked this spring with a pair of first-time buyers who decided to buy a bug-ridden $1 million postwar co-op on the Upper East Side.
The problem surfaced when the sellers would not say in the contract that they were unaware of any bedbug issues. “The clients were a little freaked out,” Mr. Gonchar said, “but the managing agent said there was no buildingwide problem. So the choice was either to lose the deal or get it treated, and they didn’t want to lose the apartment.”
The sellers promised to do a thorough cleaning and extermination before the closing, and to provide the corroborating paperwork.
“We weren’t going to just rely on the seller to tell us — we sent in our own exterminator and made the seller treat where our exterminator found the bugs,” Mr. Gonchar said. “He found it in some of the cracks of the walls, in the floorboards and some of the wall-to-wall carpeting.”
His clients have been living in the apartment for more than two months, so far without problems.

LA Times
Lethal levels of propofol found in Michael Jackson's body

L.A. County coroner's officials found lethal levels of the powerful anesthetic propofol after examining Michael Jackson's body, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed today in Houston.
According to the search warrant, Jackson's doctor, Conrad Murray, told detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department that he had been treating Jackson for insomnia for about six weeks. He had been giving Jackson 50 milligrams of propofol every night using an intravenous line, according to the court records.
But Murray told detectives that he feared Jackson was forming an addiction and began trying to wean the pop star off the drugs. He lowered the dosage to 25 milligrams and mixed it with two other sedatives, lorazepam and midazolam. On June 23, two days before Jackson's death, he administered those two medications and withheld the propofol.
On the morning Jackson died, Murray tried to induce sleep without using propofol, according to the affidavit. He said he gave Jackson valium at 1:30 a.m. When that didn't work, he said, he injected lorazepam intravenously at 2 a.m. At 3 a.m., when Jackson was still awake, Murray administered midazolam.
Over the next few hours, Murray said he gave Jackson various drugs. Then at 10:40 a.m., Murray administered 25 milligrams of propofol after Jackson repeatedly demanded the drug, according to the court records.
[Updated at 12:45 p.m.: Although Murray acknowledged to police that he administered propofol, authorities said they could find no evidence that he had purchased, ordered or obtained the medication under his medical license or Drug Enforcement Administration tracking number. However, police detectives saw about eight bottles of propofol in the house along with other vials and pills that had been prescribed to Jackson by Dr. Murray, Dr. Arnold Klein and Dr. Allan Metzger.
Other drugs that were confiscated in the search included valium, tamsulosin, lorazepam, temazepam, clonazepam, trazodone and tizanidine. They also found propofol in Murray’s medical bag. Murray told detectives that he was not the first doctor to administer the powerful anesthetic to Jackson.
At least two unidentified doctors gave Jackson propofol in Germany. Between March and April 2009, Murray said he called Las Vegas doctor David Adams at Jackson’s request to arrange for Adams to administer propofol. Murray said he was present at a cosmetologist’s office, where Adams used propofol to sedate Jackson. Since he began treating Jackson, Murray said he repeatedly asked the pop star what other physicians were treating Jackson and what drugs they were prescribing. But Jackson declined to provide the information, Murray told authorities.
Murray said he noticed injection marks on Jackson’s hands and feet. When he asked Jackson about them, the pop star told him he had been given a “cocktail” to help him. In addition to Murray, authorities subpoenaed medical records from Dr. Arnold Klein, Dr. Allan Metzger and Dr. David Adams, the affidavit states. They also asked for medical records from Dr. David Slavitt, who conducted the independent medical examination of Jackson for Anschuntz Entertainment Group, Dr. Randy Rosen and nurse practitioner Cherilyn Lee. They also subpoenaed records from Dr. Mark Tadrissi, who stored medical records with Adams. ]
Murray has already acknowledged obtaining and administering propofol to Jackson the morning that the pop star died. In an interview with police, Murray told them that he had left Jackson alone under the influence of the medication to make telephone calls to his Houston office and family members.
When he returned, he discovered Jackson was not breathing. He performed CPR, and one of Jackson’s staff members called 911. The 50-year-old pop star was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center, where he was later declared dead. Much of the investigation has focused on propofol — a drug typically administered by anesthesiologists during surgery — and whether Murray’s decision to give it to Jackson as a sleep aid outside a hospital setting reaches a level of negligence required for an involuntary manslaughter charge.
-- Kimi Yoshino

Tom Brodie, bomb expert who once kept Miami safe.
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER
Miami Herald
Tom Brodie, a Miami-Dade County bomb-squad pioneer whose death-defying exploits earned him international acclaim, died at 78. Thomas Graham Brodie was a Miami-Dade County bomb-squad pioneer whose death-defying exploits earned him international acclaim, a network game-show appearance and some serious burns.
``There's only one trick to this job,'' he told The Miami Herald in 1970. ``You take the bomb apart; don't let it take you apart.''
Brodie died Aug. 13, limbs intact, at age 78.
Afflicted with Parkinson's disease, he'd spent his final year at an assisted-living facility near his childhood home in the Redland, where his grandfather settled in 1920, lending his name to an area called Brodie's Corner.
In 1955, Tom Brodie joined the Dade County Sheriff's Road Patrol. By 1963, that had become the Dade County Public Safety Department and Brodie -- a Miami Senior High School and University of Miami graduate -- its youngest captain.
A U.S. Air Force and Florida National Guard veteran, he helped shape the contemporary Miami-Dade Police Department bomb squad, and was a founding member of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators: IABTI.
He appeared on To Tell the Truth, a bygone game show featuring a celebrity panel that had to determine which of three contestants was the ``real'' Tom Brodie.
Brodie worked many of the high-profile cases that by 1974 had made Miami what he called ``one of the terrorist capitals of the world.''
During the 1960s and '70s, political passions frequently boiled over into violence -- a subject about which Brodie testified before Congress. In 1968 alone, 44 bombs went off in Miami, including one aboard the ship Caribbean Venture docked in Miami during the Republican convention.
During that era, Cuban-American radio host Emilio Milián lost his legs in a car bombing. Explosives detonated at four federal buildings, at the homes of the British consul and a magazine editor who advocated dialogue with Fidel Castro and in a Metro Justice Building restroom.
Saboteurs with various agendas tried to blow up a Bahamasair jet at Miami International Airport, a University of Miami-area apartment, a Jamaican anti-drug official's rented car, a Bird Road shopping plaza, the Torch of Friendship, and an anti-gay rights activist's office.
In nearly every case, Tom Brodie disarmed a dangerous device or investigated an incident's aftermath.
He'd use such low-tech tools as broomsticks, ballpoint pens, pocketknives and string to dismantle deadly devices.
``Every bomb is different, and so is the way you handle it,'' he told The Herald. ``You don't think about the chance of the bomb going off. You just think about defusing it. Otherwise you'd go crazy.''
HONORED BY QUEEN
In 1968, Brodie plunged into Miami's harbor to remove a bomb attached to the English cargo ship Lancastrian Prince's hull. The following year, by diplomatic proxy in Washington, D.C., a grateful Queen Elizabeth II inducted him into the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Brodie was a respected writer on the subject of explosives. His Bombs and Bombings: A Handbook to Protection, Security, Disposal, And Investigation for Industry, Police and Fire Departments, published in 1995, remains in use by law-enforcement departments -- as does a version of the truck-mounted disposal apparatus that he co-invented in the 1960s. Son Steve Brodie, a lieutenant with Miami Fire-Rescue, calls it ``basically a giant cannon.''
When he retired in 1983, police lore has it that he left behind jars of body parts. One hand belonged to a hapless bomber trying to rig a can of black powder with a mouse trap trigger. He took his finger off the spring to answer the phone.
An accomplished pyrotechnician, Brodie produced Fourth of July fireworks displays and incendiary special effects for movies.
In 28 years of handling grenades and gunpowder, dynamite and detonators, torpedoes and time bombs, only one device seriously injured Tom Brodie: two teenagers' homemade firecracker, in 1964.
Its friction-activated ingredients had already injured the boys when Brodie tried to neutralize it at the county dump. Components accidentally touched and detonated.
``It tore his clothes up, ripped up his lower leg, burned all the hair off his face,'' son Steve said. ``But he had to give first aid to a bulldozer operator'' who also was injured.
EFFECTS OF BLAST
The blast burned Brodie over 25 percent of his body, lacerated his hands and ruptured an eardrum. Doctors linked a subsequent lung tumor to the blast.
Brodie's then-wife, the former Charlotte Raye Anderson, was pregnant with their third child when it happened.
``He calls up and says, `I won't be coming home for dinner,' '' according to Steve. `` `I'm in the hospital.' My mother went into premature labor and my sister was born on the Fourth of July.''
The stress of his father's job contributed to his parents' divorce, Steve said. He married and divorced twice more.
He also spent 18 years battling the county for back pay after downgrading job categories to remain in the action.
In 1975, Brodie, ``a health nut,'' according to his son, opened Brodie's Gym at 1871 NW North River Dr. He opened a second one in Miami Springs in 1984, then sold out in 1988.
By then, he had run unsuccessfully as a moderate Republican against the legendary U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper, and finished third in a four-way County Commission race.
After retiring in 1983, Brodie remained active in the IABTI -- which gave him its highest award -- consulted, lectured and conducted research. He took up yoga and joined a Parkinson's support group.
Always ``looking for a new adventure,'' son Steve said, he learned to scuba dive and pilot a blimp. But he drew the line at skydiving.
``He didn't want to use up all of his luck.''
In addition to his son and former wife Charlotte, Brodie is survived by daughters Faith Wheeler, of Brevard, N.C. and Sarah McKinney, of Greenwood, S.C.
The family suggests memorial donations to the Police Officer Assistance Trust, poat.org. Services were held.

Screening Could Lead to More Potent Cancer Drugs

By NICHOLAS WADE NY TIMES
Researchers have discovered a way to identify drugs that can specifically attack and kill cancer stem cells, a finding that could lead to a new generation of anticancer medicines and a new strategy of treatment.
Many researchers believe that tumor growth is driven by cancerous stem cells that, for reasons not understood, are highly resistant to standard treatments. Chemotherapy agents may kill off 99 percent of cells in a tumor, but the stem cells that remain can make the cancer recur, the theory holds, or spread to other tissues to cause new cancers. Stem cells, unlike mature cells, can constantly renew themselves and are thought to be the source of cancers when, through mutations in their DNA, they throw off their natural restraints.
A practical test of this theory has been difficult because cancer stem cells are hard to recognize and have proved elusive targets. But a team at the Broad Institute, a Harvard-M.I.T. collaborative for genomics research, has devised a way of screening for drugs that attack cancer stem cells but leave ordinary cells unharmed.
Cancer stem cells are hard to maintain in sufficient numbers, but the Broad Institute team devised a genetic manipulation to keep breast cancer stem cells trapped in the stem cell state.
The team, led by Piyush B. Gupta, screened 16,000 chemicals, including all known chemotherapeutic agents approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The team reported in the Thursday issue of Cell that 32 of the chemicals selectively went after cancer stem cells. These particular chemicals may or may not make good drugs, but the screening system proves, the researchers say, that it is possible to single out cancer stem cells with drugs that leave ordinary cells alone. Only one of the 32 chemicals is approved as a drug for cancer.
Another approach to concentrating on cancer stem cells, based on the use of antibodies, was reported this month by OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, a company founded by Michael F. Clarke, a Stanford researcher who in 2003 discovered cancer stem cells in breast tumors.
If effective drugs against cancer stem cells can be developed, one obvious strategy would be to use them in combination with standard chemotherapeutic agents, so that all types of cells in a tumor could be attacked. That way, cancer would be attacked as AIDS is now — with a cocktail of chemicals that blocks all escape paths. Both the AIDS virus and cancer cells can change DNA to dodge an effective drug, but are thought to perish if confronted with many drugs at once.
Standard chemotherapy is effective because the chemicals are applied in such large doses that they kill all cells. But this approach is stressful for the patient.
“You could probably lower the doses considerably with a combination of drugs that attacked specific types of cell,” Dr. Gupta said.
Eric S. Lander, director of the Broad Institute, said: “If we make a drug that kills 99.9 percent of the cells in a tumor but fails to kill the 0.1 percent, that is the real problem. It’s a pyrrhic victory.”
Dr. Lander said that given the new screening system and the idea of using combinations of drugs against cancer, there was “a potential for a real renaissance in cancer therapeutics.”
“We have not been able to do that yet with cancer,” he added, “but if we could, it’s a numbers game, and we win.”
The cancer stem cell theory has been thrust into the spotlight in recent years with the discovery of stem cells in many types of solid tumors, including those of the breast, brain, prostate, colon and pancreas. This month, a Stanford team led by Irving Weissman reported finding the stem cells of bladder cancer.
But the theory is not without critics.
“The cancer stem cell hypothesis has in the past year been challenged on many fronts,” said Bert Vogelstein, a leading cancer geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. “For example, a paper on melanomas last year showed that 100 percent of melanoma cancer cells were cancer stem cells.”
If many of a tumor’s cells are stem cells, then existing chemotherapy agents are clearly killing them, Dr. Vogelstein said, and the cancer stem cell theory is not an effective guide to finding new drugs.
The theory has also aroused opposition because, in its extreme, it implies that standard chemotherapy goes after the wrong targets and is ineffective.
“It’s the most amazing polarity that I’ve seen,” Dr. Clarke, the Stanford researcher, said of the debate over stem cells among cancer researchers. “It’s like two religions fighting.”
Some advocates of the idea believe that to dissolve tumors, it would be necessary to go after only cancer stem cells, if such drugs existed. But the Broad Institute team and others take the view that a combination of drugs attacking each of the types of cells in a tumor would be best.
One reason for using a combination of drugs is the suspicion that mature cancer cells may be able to convert themselves back into stem cells, a route that is apparently prohibited to normal mature cells.
“The possibility is that the nonstem cells in a tumor may regenerate de novo new stem cells,” said Robert Weinberg, a leading cancer biologist at M.I.T. and, a co-author with Dr. Lander of the Cell report. “If one had ways of treating both the stem cells and the nonstem cells, then the de novo generation of stem cells would be dealt with.”
The basic insight of the cancer stem cell theory is that there is a hierarchy of cells in a tumor, with the stem cells at the top generating the mature cells that are the majority. Most researchers accept that this is a good description of leukemias because Gleevec, a highly effective drug for chronic myelogenous leukemia, does not kill stem cells, and the leukemia returns if the treatment is stopped.
But with solid tumors, Dr. Vogelstein said, “the jury is out.” If stem cells are common in solid tumors, not just a small resistant reservoir of cells, “then there’s no difference between the stem cells and the bulk cancer — so a screen for drugs to kill melanoma cells is by definition also going to kill the melanoma’s cancer stem cells.”
Still, in Dr. Vogelstein’s view, the Broad Institute’s new screening method is important whether or not the cancer stem cell theory is correct. “Because most of the compounds in use now clearly aren’t doing the job we’d all like,” he said, “then novel methods for screening could be extremely valuable.”
The Broad Institute researchers hope that pharmaceutical companies will use their screening method to begin to develop drugs against cancer stem cells.

Andy Kessler, Skateboard Hero, Dies at 48

By DOUGLAS MARTIN NY TIMES
Andy Kessler, who banded with graffiti artists to help give a distinctively New York spin to the nascent sport of skateboarding and then helped popularize it by designing skate parks, died on Monday near Montauk, N.Y. He was 48.
His sister, Jody Kessler, said he was stung by an insect while surfing off Montauk, had an extreme allergic reaction and suffered cardiac arrest.
Mr. Kessler was an early New York hero of skateboarding, a sport that probably began in California after World War II, when surfers looked for something to do when the waves were flat. It started to catch on in the early 1970s when boards were made with polyurethane wheels, improving traction. When, during droughts, local authorities prohibited the owners of swimming pools from filling them, skateboarders could not resist turning the steep concrete caverns into skating courses.
A little later in the 1970s, the sport tiptoed into New York. Its first adherents were a loose-knit community of skateboarders and graffiti artists known as the Soul Artists of Zoo York. The renegade image developed by California skateboarders using empty swimming pools was more than maintained by New Yorkers, who illegally spray-painted subway trains.
The alliance between skateboarders and graffiti artists was not declared, and in fact first involved two separate groups. But famous graffiti artists like Zephyr also skateboarded; another, ALI, coined the name Zoo York. Not a few youngsters were involved in both activities.
In an article about the scene in 2005, New York magazine called Mr. Kessler “its most prominent rider,” though others might have had at least equal skill.
Seth Affoumado, who skated with Mr. Kessler when almost nobody else was pursuing the sport, said in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Kessler was “the catalyst for skateboarding in New York City.”
Glen E. Friedman, a photographer who has extensively covered skateboarding, said, “He pursued making it something important in New York City.”
But New York skateboarding was never as important in either sport or cultural terms as it was in California, where scrappy, expert skateboarders like Jay Adams and Tony Alva created a style, ultimately a legend, that came to be called Dogtown. Significantly, when such West Coast luminaries came East, it was Mr. Kessler they sought out, Mr. Friedman said. Many plan to attend his funeral.
Andrew Kessler, who was adopted with his sister in Greece, was born in Athens on June 11, 1961. His mother, Ruth, said he asked for a skateboard for his birthday and other gift-giving occasions without fail. She said that she bought him his first when he was 10, and that she gave him at least 50 over time.
“I just remember him always being on a skateboard,” his sister said.
New York magazine said that the loose-knit Zoo York collective skated all over the Upper West Side, where Mr. Kessler grew up. He and a group of youths of various races and income levels pioneered the art of city skating, grinding their axles on flower planters and attempting a complete spin, or a 360.
They particularly liked to skate around the band shell in Central Park, and in the winter would shovel out swimming pools in Brooklyn. They first skated on ramps specifically built for skateboarding in 1976 on Long Island.
Mr. Affoumado said the youths were very conscious of building a new kind of culture, one combining graffiti, skateboarding and hip-hop. “We all dabbled in art,” he said. “We all dabbled in music. We all dabbled in drugs.”
By the early 1980s, the Soul Artists of Zoo York were disbanding, even as the Dogtown riders were becoming professionals and starting companies. For five years, Mr. Kessler worked in fields as diverse as flea markets and massage therapy.
He became seriously caught up in drugs, including heroin. He recovered with the help of Narcotics Anonymous, his friends said, and afterward was dedicated to helping youthful addicts.
Mr. Kessler long nurtured an ambition to build a park for skateboarders and roller-bladers, and in the mid-1990s he proposed the idea of building one in Riverside Park, near where he grew up. The New York City parks department accepted the idea, and Mr. Kessler recruited a group of disadvantaged youths to build it. He later built more parks on Long Island and elsewhere.
Mr. Kessler is survived by his mother and sister.
In 2005, he fell while skating and incurred a $20,000 medical bill. He had no insurance, so friends held a benefit in SoHo to pay for his treatment.
In a 1999 interview conducted by Masha Falkov, a high school student, that was posted on the Internet, Mr. Kessler related what he would want God to say to him at the Pearly Gates: “You’ve done a good job, but you left a few things out, so we’re sending you back.”

Slate books
What's Inside a Big Baby Head?
New research brings surprising revelations.
By Paul Bloom
What's going on inside a baby's bulbous head? We ask the same question about our pets, but the frustrating thing about babies is that we once knew: We all once looked out at the world through those adorably large baby eyes.
In The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik writes that developmental psychologist John Flavell once told her that he would give up all his degrees and honors for just five minutes in the head of a 2-year-old. I would give up a month of my life for those five minutes—and two months for five minutes as an infant.
In the absence of magic, we are left with the imperfect tools of developmental psychology—observation and experiment, hypothesis and guesswork. The science of baby consciousness is a central topic of Gopnik's new book. One of the most prominent researchers in the field, Gopnik is also one of the finest writers, with a special gift for relating scientific research to the questions that parents and others most want answered. This is where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.
Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing gurgling creature. Still, there has to be some point in development when consciousness isn't present, and though it is logically possible that it just switches on in a single instant—boom, the fetus or embryo goes from a parsnip to a person—it fits better with what we know about both development and consciousness that it emerges gradually. Since there is nothing neurologically special about the moment of leaving the uterus, this process most likely continues after birth. Perhaps babies are less conscious than we are or have some features of consciousness but not others. William James, for instance, famously claimed that the mental life of a baby is "one great blooming buzzing confusion."
Gopnik's own view is a clever and counterintuitive twist on James. She argues that babies are more conscious than adults. Her conclusion is based on the study of how attention and inhibition—the capacity to block out distractions—evolve over the course of development. Adult attention is willful and endogenous. Although it can be captured by external events—we will turn if we hear a loud noise—we also have control over what to think about and what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to focus on our left foot, then think about what we had for breakfast, then focus on ... whatever we want. Adults are also blessed, to varying degrees, with the power to ignore distractions, both external and internal, and to stay focused on a single task.
This is all harder for babies and young children. They are largely at the mercy of the environment. Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what's going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it's like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is. It sounds exhausting, which might explain why infants spend so much of their time sleeping or (like some travelers) fussing.
For Gopnik, this lack of inhibition and control is a gift. It makes babies and children ideally suited for the task of acquiring information about physical and social reality. When it comes to imagination and learning, their openness to experience makes them "superadults"—not just smart but smarter than we are. She's particularly interested in the power to think about alternate realities, other possible worlds. In several fascinating chapters, she explores how this power is manifested in children's play and in their creation of imaginary companions, plausibly arguing that the capacity to reason about worlds that do not exist is crucial to children's rapid learning about everything from cause-and-effect relationships to human behavior. Gopnik suggests that their neural immaturity gives them greater imaginative powers than adults have: She proclaims, "Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real."
This is romantic and optimistic, but it is true? Well, not literally: Intellectual and cultural progress does not consist of taking the ideas of children and making them real, and there's no obvious sense in which children are better at thinking up new things than adults. Nor is there any reason to think that they should be. To some extent, a wandering mind is indeed a good thing. You can escape from a rut, make intuitive leaps. But for the most part, the ingredients of creative accomplishment are more prosaic—including the accumulation of knowledge, hours and hours of focused practice, and sustained attention. Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control—if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it. Babies probably can't do this; young children can but with occasional difficulty. Meanwhile, we adults immerse ourselves in the rich and complex worlds of novels, television, and movies and create our own worlds through daydreams and fantasy. The unromantic truth may be that adults are the best pretenders of all, and that children would be better off if the prefrontal cortex matured more quickly.
In fact, there is evidence that before that maturation takes place, children may well avail themselves of something as amazing as the openness Gopnik celebrates: hard-wired systems of understanding that help give structure to an otherwise overwhelming experience of the world. One focus of recent research has been on "naive physics": Studies have shown that babies know that objects continue to exist once out of sight and that those objects are solid and cohesive and subject to gravity. And that's not all: Babies understand cause-and-effect relationships. They can figure out simple addition and subtraction.
There has also been considerable focus in recent years on babies' and toddlers' understanding of other people—"naive psychology" or "theory of mind." For instance, a now classic set of studies found that 15-month-olds know enough about other people to make sense of their false beliefs. Some more recent studies I've done in collaboration with Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn at Yale have found that 6-month-olds, after witnessing people interact with one another, are capable of subtle social evaluation; they prefer to interact with whoever helped the other person achieve his goals than with the person who thwarted the other's goals.
In her zeal to emphasize learning, Gopnik downplays the role of these unlearned systems. For her, theories that emphasize our genetic endowment are incompatible with the fact that humans, as societies and individuals, have the capacity for change. But this is a false dichotomy. Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask. As Gopnik herself points out in her discussion of possible worlds, "knowledge is actually what gives imagination its power, what makes creativity possible."
Nobody knows how much of what babies understand is conscious. But these findings suggest that William James was wrong that the mental life of a baby is a chaotic mess, and they help explain why Gopnik is right to be awed at an infant's creative prowess. Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes—if we could—would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality—a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. His book How Pleasure Works will be published next year.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

"Is Your Bubble Bursting?"

A reader writes:
From Andrew Sullivan
Your obvious shock and dismay at the sheer angry ignorance of the health care teabaggers reiterates my largest problem with your rosy immigrant's view of America. You have often underestimated just how poisonously dangerous the American populist right is.
I don't blame you. You came to America after the rise of Reagan. Most of your life in America, you have lived under different Republican presidents who placated these folks with platitudes and campaign rhetoric. The one period when the populist right didn't feel they had a fellow traveler in charge was when Bill Clinton was elected (thanks to the reactionaries splitting their votes). You remember, no doubt, the level of crazy Clinton had to defuse and dodge, and this was a man who had the advantage of being a Southern bubba who has dealt which such people all his life.
For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush's failed presidency.
So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.
A political and demographic re-alignment is happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and we love you for it. But you didn't grow up around these folks, and you don't realize what a permanent and potent part of the American political landscape they are.
They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.
These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.
I'm always optimistic about America. We're a naturally rich and beautiful place. Every generation we renew ourselves with a watering of immigrants committed to the American dream, immigrants like you. But please, Andrew, do not for a second underestimate the price in blood and tears we've always paid here for progress.
I voted for Obama with my fingers crossed, because I knew that as the populist right lost power, they would become more extreme, more concentrated, and more violent. As to dismissing them as only a quarter or so of America, please remember that it only took a quarter or so of Americans to actively support the Confederacy

Forget the Trash Bag, Bring a Towel By MELENA RYZIK NY TIMES
The only thing cooler than a pool party on a summer night in New York City is a secret pool party.
And the only thing cooler than that, as a few enterprising developers recently discovered, is a secret pool party in a pool made out of a Dumpster on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in industrial Brooklyn.
On a rented lot that’s hidden from the street they have erected what they call a lo-fi urban country club: three connected pools housed in Dumpsters; a boccie court; some lounge chairs, grills and cabanas. On Saturday night just three dozen people got the nod to check it out, at an afterparty for the art journal Cabinet. “Please don’t forward,” the invitation read.
“It’s amazing,” the artist Nina Katchadourian said after taking a dip in the moonlight. “It makes you wonder, as so many things in New York do, what’s behind every wall that you can’t see past.”
Bobbing in the water on a pool toy was “the last thing I expected to be doing tonight,” added Aaron Levy, a curator visiting from Philadelphia.
Since the space opened over the Fourth of July weekend, it has been host to barbecues, photo shoots and a film screening. Lectures and other events are planned for the rest of the summer, but none are open to the public, to the chagrin of the design bloggers and other cool-hunters who have been chattering about it.
The idea, said David Belt, a real estate developer and the president of Macro-Sea, the company behind the pools, was not to create an exclusive party destination but to experiment with underused space and materials, repurposing them with urban renewal in mind.
“It’s a very simple concept,” said Jocko Weyland, Macro-Sea’s project manager. “There aren’t that many places to swim in New York.” And Dumpsters “are everywhere; they’re ubiquitous.”
The concept itself is borrowed. Mr. Belt, Mr. Weyland and Alix Feinkind, Macro-Sea’s creative director, heard about it in April, when they were scouting a project in Georgia. Curtis Crowe, a musician in the Athens band Pylon, had made one.
After Mr. Weyland had a brief phone conversation with him, Macro-Sea decided to make its own. It took about a month to find a suitably out of the way yet accessible space with an agreeable owner. (The pools are insured, Mr. Belt said, and the lot, filled with junk and machinery, is protected by a chain-link fence.)
From there the project proceeded quickly and cheaply, in guerrilla fashion: the Dumpsters were donated by a construction company that suddenly had a surplus (thanks, economic downturn), the designers who helped render the plans were recruited through Craigslist, and members of the small crew that erected it in a week were unpaid.
“They just wanted to be able to use it,” Mr. Belt said.
The garbage containers, which he described as “newish,” were cleaned and lined in plastic, and a filtration system was installed, as on a regular above-ground pool. Mr. Belt’s wife, Antonia, stitched together the coverings for the cabanas; the furniture came from Ikea. The main cost was the wood for the deck and the water: about 18,000 gallons, delivered from a New Jersey aquifer for $1,200.
“I tried to do it so that even if you had to rent one, you could do a stand-alone Dumpster, a grill and chair for under $1,000,” Mr. Belt said. Copycats are welcome, because Macro-Sea itself is using the project as a template for a larger idea: turning eyesore strip malls into artsy community destinations, with Dumpster pools and other indie attractions.
“I thought if we could get people to come here and swim in a Dumpster, I could probably use the same aesthetic sensibility” to get people — and, not incidentally, better retailers — to come to a dingy strip mall, Mr. Belt said. The company hopes to open its first repurposed shopping center in Atlanta this fall, ideally with dozens of pools in the parking lot that visitors can rent for the day.
While the project is conceptually simple — get a bunch of trash containers, clean and seal them, fill with water, jump in — there were a lot of details to finesse. The coarse edges inside the containers were filed down, and underneath the liners, the bottoms were covered in sand, for soft landings. Tightly packed sandbags double as benches along the walls, and pool toys and kid-friendliness provide an intentional counterpoint to the neighborhood grit.
With brightly colored lanterns crisscrossing overhead and music piped in from an iPod connected to a boombox, the feel is of a do-it-yourself urban oasis.
“The water’s amazingly fresh, for swimming in a Dumpster,” said Alexis Bloom, a documentary filmmaker from TriBeCa, after doing a few laps. She compared it favorably to the pool at Soho House, an actual urban country club.
The problem, of course, with having such a sexy space — especially a sexy private space — is that everyone wants to come.
After Mr. Weyland gave an interview to ReadyMade, the D.I.Y. design magazine, two weeks ago, breathless coverage and links began appearing all over the blogosphere. Soon the location was decoded. One post led to people standing on the roofs of cars in a nearby lot, snapping photos, Mr. Weyland said with an eye roll.
Though they’re certainly aware that there’s nothing more tantalizing to some New Yorkers than a party to which they weren’t invited, the creators profess surprise at the level of attention their project has received. “I’m glad that people like it,” Mr. Belt said. “But it’s not the end all, be all.”
They hope that visitors will be as chill as the Cabinet magazine partygoers, who somehow resisted the temptation to text all their friends the minute they got there. “It’s so easy to ruin something,” one sighed.
The pools are supposed to be open through August or until the coolness wears off. “If it gets really crowded,” Mr. Belt said, “I’ll shut it down.”