Documentary:

Farther than the eye can see

_______________

 

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 19th 2007


Power to Soothe the Savage Breast and Animate the Hemispheres

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino.

In his latest book, “Musicophilia,” Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.

Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.

He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information — a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of.

And he writes about the power of rhythm to help coordinate and energize basic locomotive movement, a power that explains why music can help push athletes to new levels and why the right sort of music (generally, legato with a well-defined rhythm) can help liberate some parkinsonian patients from “their frozenness.”

Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy. In Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”

Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.”

As he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in affliction, and to adapt to loss and deprivation. Among the people who appear in this book are children with Williams syndrome, who have low I.Q.’s and extraordinary musical and narrative gifts (one young woman learns to sing operatic arias in more than 30 languages), and elderly dementia patients who develop unexpected musical talents.

Dr. Sacks notes that there are stories in medical literature about people who develop artistic gifts after left-hemisphere strokes, and he suggests that “there may be a variety of inhibitions — psychological, neurological and social — which may, for one reason or another, relax in one’s later years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.”

The composer Tobias Picker, who has Tourette’s, tells Dr. Sacks that the syndrome has shaped his imagination: “I live my life controlled by Tourette’s but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy — I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way.”

Dr. Sacks notes that while the composer’s newest piano concerto “is full of turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls” in sections, Mr. Picker is able to write in every mode — “the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and stormy” — and can move “from one mood to another with consummate ease.”

Although this book could have benefited from some heavy-duty editing that would have removed repetitions and occasional patches of technical jargon, these lapses are easily overlooked by the reader, so powerful and compassionate are Dr. Sacks’ accounts of his patients’ dilemmas. He has written a book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.


MUSICOPHILIA

Tales of Music and the Brain
By Oliver Sacks


----------

 
Good documentary:

500 Years Later

 


BIG BANG, DARK MATTER, EDWIN HUBBLE & THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE THEORY

 
Great Korean Restaurant:

SHIK DO RAK
2501 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006
Link to Restaurant

Great ice cream place:

SCOOP
712 N. Heliotrope Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90029

 


SALISH INN AND SPA (Twin Peaks Great Northern Hotel)

 

WHEN THE TOASTS STOPPED BEING FUNNY

by Steve Almond

This was in an airport bar, the four of them squared off and late to somewhere else, on holiday from offices, files, throwing toasts like punches: to leather jackets and chardonnay and potato skins and snow delays and new friends and old flames and every sin rearranged to seem romantic, less mistaken.

Their stems swung forward and their glasses clanked, and when the drunkest of them, a loud blond, belted out her appreciations to valium and vibrators, all four howled and clanked again and tried to remember the last time their naked bodies felt a part of God.

It was nothing like grace, this sorrow.

Then they drifted off to be swallowed by gates and planes that were dreams they would never see from the ground.

+++

 
NY TIMES article: 9/20/2007

In Egypt, a Rising Push Against Genital Cutting

KAFR AL MANSHI ABOU HAMAR, Egypt — The men in this poor farming community were seething. A 13-year-old girl was brought to a doctor’s office to have her clitoris removed, a surgery considered necessary here to preserve chastity and honor.

At a symposium on female circumcision in Tanta, Egypt, a poster reads, "The Beginning of the End, No to Female Circumcision."
The girl died, but that was not the source of the outrage. After her death, the government shut down the clinic, and that got everyone stirred up.

“They will not stop us,” shouted Saad Yehia, a tea shop owner along the main street. “We support circumcision!” he shouted over and over.

“Even if the state doesn’t like it, we will circumcise the girls,” shouted Fahmy Ezzeddin Shaweesh, an elder in the village.

Circumcision, as supporters call it, or female genital mutilation, as opponents refer to it, was suddenly a ferocious focus of debate in Egypt this summer. A nationwide campaign to stop the practice has become one of the most powerful social movements in Egypt in decades, uniting an unlikely alliance of government forces, official religious leaders and street-level activists.

Though Egypt’s Health Ministry ordered an end to the practice in 1996, it allowed exceptions in cases of emergency, a loophole critics describe as so wide that it effectively rendered the ban meaningless. But now the government is trying to force a comprehensive ban.

Not only was it unusual for the government to shut down the clinic, but the health minister has also issued a decree banning health care workers— or anyone — from conducting the procedure for any reason. Beyond that, the Ministry of Religious Affairs also issued a booklet explaining why the practice was not called for in Islam; Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, declared it haram, or prohibited by Islam; Egypt’s highest religious official, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, called it harmful; television advertisements have been shown on state channels to discourage it; and a national hot line was set up to answer the public’s questions about genital cutting.

But as the men in this village demonstrated, widespread social change in Egypt comes slowly, very slowly. This country is conservative, religious and, for many, guided largely by traditions, even when those traditions do not adhere to the tenets of their faith, be it Christianity or Islam.

For centuries Egyptian girls, usually between the ages of 7 and 13, have been taken to have the procedure done, sometimes by a doctor, sometimes by a barber or whoever else in the village would do it. As recently as 2005, a government health survey showed that 96 percent of the thousands of married, divorced or widowed women interviewed said they had undergone the procedure — a figure that astounds even many Egyptians. In the language of the survey, “The practice of female circumcision is virtually universal among women of reproductive age in Egypt.”

Though the practice is common and increasingly contentious throughout sub-Saharan Africa, among Arab states the only other place where this practice is customary is in southern Yemen, experts here said. In Saudi Arabia, where women cannot drive, cannot vote, cannot hold most jobs, the practice is viewed as abhorrent, a reflection of pre-Islamic traditions.

But now, quite suddenly, forces opposing genital cutting in Egypt are pressing back as never before. More than a century after the first efforts to curb this custom, the movement has broken through one of the main barriers to change: It is no longer considered taboo to discuss it in public. That shift seems to have coincided with a small but growing acceptance of talking about human sexuality on television and radio.

For the first time, opponents said, television news shows and newspapers have aggressively reported details of botched operations. This summer two young girls died, and it was front-page news in Al Masry al Yom, an independent and popular daily. Activists highlighted the deaths with public demonstrations, which generated even more coverage.

The force behind this unlikely collaboration between government, nongovernment organizations, religious leaders and the news media is a no-nonsense 84-year-old anthropologist named Marie Assaad, who has been fighting against genital cutting since the 1950s.

“I never thought I would live to see this day,” she said, reading about the subject in a widely circulated daily newspaper.

Dr. Nasr el-Sayyid, assistant to the minister of health, said there had already been a drop in urban areas, along with an aggressive effort in more than 100 villages, mostly in the south, to curb the practice. “Our plan and program over the next two years is aiming to take it down 20 percent nationwide,” he said.

The challenge, however, rests in persuading people that their grandparents, parents and they themselves have harmed their daughters. Moreover, advocates must convince a skeptical public that men will marry a woman who has not undergone the procedure and that circumcision is not necessary to preserve family honor. It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.

And it will be a challenge to convince influential people like Osama Mohamed el-Moaseri, imam of a mosque in Basyoun, the city near where the 13-year-old girl lived, and died. “This practice has been passed down generation after generation, so it is natural that every person circumcises his daughter,” he said. “When Ali Gomaa says it is haram, he is criticizing the practice of our fathers and forefathers.”

But the movement against genital cutting has matured and is increasingly prepared for these arguments. At first, Ms. Assaad and a group of intellectuals who together created a task force simply lectured their neighbors, essentially calling the practice barbaric.

“At the beginning we preached and said this is wrong,” she recalled. “It didn’t work. They said, ‘It was done to our mothers and grandmothers, and they are fine.’ ”

She and her colleagues sounded like out-of-touch urban intellectuals, she said. But over time, they enlisted the aid of Islamic scholars and health care workers, hoping to disperse misconceptions — like the idea that cutting off the clitoris prevents homosexuality — and relate to people’s lives.

“Circumcision is a very old custom and has absolutely no benefits,” Vivian Fouad, who helps staff the national hot line, said to a caller wondering what to do with her own daughter. She continued: “If you want to protect your daughter, then you have to raise her well. How you raise your child is the main factor in everything, not mutilating your daughter.”

Egypt is a patriarchal society, but women can be a powerful force. So Ms. Assaad helped persuade two important women, elite and privileged, who like herself could not believe the practice was as widespread as it was, to join her battle.

The first was Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of President Hosni Mubarak and a political force in her own right. The second was an ally of Mrs. Mubarak, Mosheira Khattab, head of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, a government agency that helps set national health and social policies.

Mrs. Khattab has become a force in pressing the agenda. Her council now has a full-time staff working on the issue and runs the hot line. She toured the Nile Delta region, three cities in one day, promoting the message, blunt and outraged that genital cutting had not stopped.

“The Koran is a newcomer to tradition in this manner,” she said. “As a male society, the men took parts of religion that satisfied men and inflated it. The parts of the Koran that helped women, they ignored.”

It is an unusual swipe at the Islamists who have promoted the practice as in keeping with religion, especially since the government generally tries to avoid taking on conservative religious leaders. It tries to position itself as the guardian of Islamic values, aiming to enhance its own wilted legitimacy and undercut support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned but popular opposition movement.

But the religious discourse concerning genital cutting has changed, and that is credited to Ms. Assaad’s strategy of reaching up to people like Mrs. Mubarak and out to young women like Fatma Ibrahim, 24. When Ms. Ibrahim was 11 years old, she said, her parents told her she was going for a blood test. The doctor, a relative, put her to sleep and when she woke, she said she could not walk.

The memory haunts her now, and though she says that her parents “will kill” her if they find out, she has become a volunteer in the movement against genital cutting, hoping to spare other women what she endured.

“I am looking to talk to the young, the ones who will be parents in 10 years,” she said. “This is my target group. I talk to the young. When I get married, inshallah, I will never, ever circumcise my daughter.”

 
TUVIX:

Star Trek Voyager Season 2 Disc 6

Teleplay by:
Kenneth biller

Story by
Andrew Shepard Price
Mark Gaberman

 
"Love, American Style"

"Dreaming Arizona"

"Dreaming Nevada"

 
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (1972)
Director: Kinji Fukasaku

"Sachiko Hidari stars as a widow seeking the truth behind her husband's court-martial and subsequent execution at the close of WWII. Determined to clear his name, she interviews survivors of his garrison, uncovering tangled testimoniest hat form a tapestry of atrocity, heroism, cowardice, survival and chaos."

___________________

 
Homicidal Triad
35-37% of serial killers... suffered from the homicidal triad

Bed-wetting (beyond age 12)
Nuisance arson (setting fires in garbage cans, dumpsters, etc)
Cruelty to animals (torturing small animals)

______________

 
"The first recorded war occurred in c. 2700 B.C. It was between Sumer (in modern Iraq) and Elam (a region that is now part of Iran), and was fought in the area around Basra (just like the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s). Of course, tribes, cities, etc., had been fighting each other for thousands of years before that, but there are no records of these earlier conflicts as writing wasn't invented until a little before 3000 B.C. "

--------------

 
Great Henna


www.hennacrone.com


_______

 

Willie Barcena

Funny!

 
"...the ratio of collaborators in relation to the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories is 'less than in the case of any other people who have lived under occupation.'" --Mohammed Milhim, P.L.O Executive Committee member

 
Story here:


By Jerry Adler
Newsweek


May 7, 2007 issue - Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a "cardioplegic" blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent.

Becker also endorses hypothermia—lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius—which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit. "In an emergency department, you work like mad for half an hour on someone whose heart stopped, and finally someone says, 'I don't think we're going to get this guy back,' and then you just stop," Becker says. The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

_______

 
"Any honest neurotic could probably tell you: the emotional payoff of an obsession is not attaining some longed-for goal—it's the obsession itself, which fulfills certain needs. If it didn't, it wouldn't be an obsession." --Taking Sides, David Denby (The New Yorker)

+++

 
One Night Only

You want all my love and my devotion
You want my loving soul right on the line
I have no doubt
That I could love you forever
The only trouble is
You really don't have the time

You've got one night only
One night only
That's all you have to spare

One night only
Let's not pretend to care

One night only x2
Come on, big baby, come on

One night only
We only have till dawn

In the morning this feeling will be gone
It has no chance going on
Someting so right has got no chance to live

So let's forget about chances
It's one night I will give

One night only x2
You'll be the only one

One night only
Then you have to run

One night only x2
There's nothing more to say

One night only
Words get in the way

 


NOTABLE QUOTABLES
Is there anything that is not a quotation?
by LOUIS MENAND



_______

 
It's all coming back to me now
--Meatloaf

There were nights when the wind was so cold
That my body froze in bed
If I just listened to it
Right outside the window

There were days when the sun was so cruel
That all the tears turned to dust
And I just knew my eyes were
Drying up forever

I finished crying in the instant that you left
And I can't remember where or when or how
And I banished every memory you and I had ever made

But when you touch me like this
And you hold me like that
I just have to admit
That it's all coming back to me

When I touch you like this
And I hold you like that
It's so hard to believe but
It's all coming back to me

(It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now)

There were moments of gold
And there were flashes of light
There were things I'd never do again
But then they'd always seemed right

There were nights of endless pleasure
It was more than any laws allow
Baby Baby

If I kiss you like this
And if you whisper like that
It was lost long ago
But it's all coming back to me

If you want me like this
And if you need me like that
It was dead long ago
But it's all coming back to me

It's so hard to resist
And it's all coming back to me
I can barely recall
But it's all coming back to me now
But it's all coming back

There were those empty threats and hollow lies
And whenever you tried to hurt me
I just hurt you even worseAnd so much deeper

There were hours that just went on for days
When alone at last we'd count up all the chances

That were lost to us forever


Thought you were history with the slamming of the door
And I made myself so strong again somehow
And I never wasted any of my time on you since then

But if I touch you like this
And if you kiss me like that
It was so long ago

But it's all coming back to me
If you touch me like this
And if I kiss you like that
It was gone with the wind

But it's all coming back to me

(It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now)

There were moments of gold
And there were flashes of light
There were things we'd never do again
But then they'd always seemed right

There were nights of endless pleasure
It was more than all your laws allow
Baby, Baby, Baby

When you touch me like this
And when you hold me like that
It was gone with the wind
But it's all coming back to me

When you see me like this
And when I see you like that
Then we see what we want to see
All coming back to me
The flesh and the fantasies
All coming back to me
I can barely recall
But it's all coming back to me now

If you forgive me all this
If I forgive you all that
We forgive and forget
And it's all coming back to me

When you see me like this
And when I see you like that
We see just what we want to see
All coming back to me

The flesh and the fantasies
All coming back to me
I can barely recall but it's all coming back to me now

(It's all coming back to me now)

And when you kiss me like this

(It's all coming back to me now)

And when I touch you like that

(It's all coming back to me now)

If you do it like this

(It's all coming back to me now)

And if we...

_______

Labels: It's all coming back to me now

 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

WHAT’S THE TROUBLE?
How doctors think
by JEROME GROOPMAN

MYSTERY TRAIN
Martín Ramírez, outsider
by PETER SCHJELDAHL

Artists:
Martin Ramírez
Swiss Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)
Reclusive Chicago janitor Henry Darger (1892-1973)


BRAZILIAN MUSICIAN CAETANO VELOSO

 

Interview with director Justin Lin

_______

 
National Geographic documentary: Relentless Enemies
Director: Dereck Joubert and Beverly Joubert
Narrator: Jeremy Irons

_______

 
WHERE TO STAY

Castello di Vicarello, in Tuscay
(chicretreats.com)

Albergo Diffuso Santo Stefano di Sessanio
(sextantio.it)

Champ de Bataille, Normandy
(duchampdebataille.com)

Off Brazil's northeast coast, the island of Fernando de Noronha
Pousada Maravilha
(pousadamaravilha.com.br)

beach town of Jose Ignacio
La Posada del Faro
(posadadelfaro.com)

 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

SYNERGY WITH THE DEVIL
"The paradox is that Chávez’s anti-Americanism is central to his global appeal, while American consumers and companies are central to the economic performance of his regime. So, while he’s going around the world giving speeches about how the goose should be killed, he relies on the golden eggs to keep himself in power. This may seem like a state of affairs that can’t last, and Chávez’s supporters and detractors alike assume that, soon enough, his deeds will begin to live up to his rhetoric: he’ll cut off oil supplies to the U.S., or the like. But deep-seated ideological and political hostility between countries is often less of an obstacle to trade than you might think. Japan, for instance, is South Korea’s second-largest trading partner, despite the fact that Korean resentment toward Japan runs very high, thanks to a long history of Japanese imperialism in the region. China, meanwhile, treats Taiwan as a rebel province, and has threatened military action if it attempts to declare independence, but foreign trade between the two countries totals nearly sixty-five billion dollars. Trade does not, as Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine believed, always bring peace in its wake, “operating to cordialize mankind.” (Think, after all, of the First World War.) But the benefits of trade often excuse even the most grievous of sins. Sometimes, it just makes sense to deal with the devil.

— James Surowiecki

Read article
here


+++

 
FROM THE NEW YORKER

CRIMINAL JUSTICE DEPT.
RAP MAP
Issue of 2007-01-08
Posted 2007-01-01


From water pipes to porn shops, cartographers have charted almost every aspect of local urban life, giving rise to a sort of cottage industry: the New York City specialty map. The latest—and one you are not likely to see unless you run in criminal-justice circles—is a rendering of the city that breaks down, block by block, the home addresses of all New Yorkers incarcerated in a given year. This map won’t get you from Century 21 to the Met. But it does reveal that more prison-bound Bronx residents lived in walkups than in any other type of building, that Staten Island is the most law-abiding borough, and that Brooklyn—nicknamed “the borough of churches”—ran up the state’s highest bill in prison costs.

Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, co-founders of the Brooklyn-based Justice Mapping Center, collaborated on the project with an architect named Laura Kurgan, at Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab. “What started out as a scholarly inquiry has turned into a national initiative,” said Cadora, whose team has mapped twelve cities so far. Their New York is a digital crazy quilt of “bright-against-black”: the areas least touched by incarceration in 2003, the year they chose to study (Riverdale, Bay Ridge, the West Village), appear black and gray; those more so (Coney Island, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hell’s Kitchen) neon orange.

Recently, the mapmakers gathered at Columbia, and Cadora, a substantially built man with a fondness for Camel Lights, turned the face of his laptop to reveal the map. “Zero-value areas”—places where no one went to prison—were shaded black. “You see them crop up all across the city, but they never make up an entire neighborhood,” he said, invoking what might otherwise be a bragging point among New Yorkers: “There is always something going on somewhere.” The exceptions? “What I jokingly call ‘the Mafia neighborhoods’ of South Brooklyn,” he said, “where you’ve got one or two guys going away from an entire neighborhood. Also, this.” He pointed to a dark strip of the Upper East Side—the blocks in the Seventies and Eighties that border Central Park.

Just above was Harlem, the area with the highest rate of incarceration in the city: forty-four people from a single block along East 120th Street headed upstate. Such high-density spots are known as million-dollar blocks, because it takes upward of that in state expenditures to pay for their residents’ lockups. They are, unfailingly, in the city’s poorest neighborhoods—Brownsville, the South Bronx, and South Jamaica among them—great splashes of orange, by the map’s gauge.

Cadora and his team calculated every block’s prison costs by multiplying the minimum sentence of each incarcerated person by his estimated annual prison fees ($32,400), then adding these numbers together. By this logic, a serial killer on Fifth Avenue who gets a life sentence could make up his own million-dollar block. The borough with the most million-dollar blocks is Manhattan (“mainly because the blocks are so small”); the city’s most expensive block in 2003, a housing project along Harlem River Drive, not far from Yankee Stadium, cost the state $6.2 million and had forty-nine of its six hundred and eighty-nine male residents put behind bars.

The map’s data are largely gleaned from prison entry forms. Early in the study, Cadora noticed that an inordinate amount of people gave the same home address, in Queens. Curious, he looked up the address and found not a residential building but an institution: Rikers Island. Why so many New Yorkers would call a jail known as the House of Pain home is “a whole ’nother story,” Cadora said. “A lot are probably homeless, and one of the hugest problems for anyone coming out of prison is finding a place to live.” Cadora and his team believe that their map depicts a system spending millions to imprison people but little on the communities to which they return.

Cadora clicked on a map of New York State that charted the migration patterns of Brooklyn criminals: thousands of lines sprang from Kings County to prisons all over—Attica, Watertown, Great Meadow. The image was striking, like a bird’s spread wing. (“We’ve had art galleries ask to exhibit the maps,” Kurgan said.) Cadora has been pleased by the reaction of legislators. “It’s no longer just about getting tough or being soft on crime,” he said. “It’s ‘What are we going to do about Bed-Stuy?’ ”

+++

See the article

here