Madness Writers: 2010

This Droid is awesome. Computer in my hand. Irecommend one. Only problem is keyboard but not that bad . 1 gHz with 768 mb RAM
Playing cod w,,heather . Be more fun w someone good . Video calls. Fast internet. It can connect 5 computers to internet ad a WiFi hotspot but only 2gb limit,, unlimited on phone. I'm not gonna bother w real internet anymore. Book reader. Mp3 everything man.apps no limits by apple Even heather noticed a huge difference from iPhone. Apple sucks. Girl st Verizon was sexy. Black and hot. Waitress at appkebees was hot too.

On Dec 27, 2010 8:58 PM, "Madness" <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, so I wasn't happy about people tryin' to play with each other..
> If you're good, you don't need your "team" to be good.. Just go out and
> play. Nobody else was doing it. That's the problem when you get new
> people .. they wanna change things up to suit their needs when the
> custom has been the same for months. Change isn't bad, but you can't
> walk in expecting things to go your way the first time. When it took
> somewhere between 30-45 minutes to get the game goin', that's when I
> said "screw it" and went to play with the high school kids.
>
> I got pushed hard one time, never even threw me off balance.
>
> One time, I was crossing over to my left to stop the puck holder from
> attacking the zone.. he has his head down looking at the puck the whole
> time. Dumb. I was really low 'cause I was doin' cross-overs and I
> purposely ran into him. My left shoulder went right into his head, I
> didn't feel anything but it was a hard hit. He immediately said "Hey
> buddy!" like he was upset .. I turned around and said "sorry, man"
> thinking to myself, "next time, don't skate with your head down." I
> don't mean to cause harm, can't help it.
>
> I didn't play that well. That's another reason why I felt like i wasted
> my time. I'd put the puck between players' legs to go around them which
> works out really well. Can't do it all the time, but it throws them
> off. THere wasn't much passing going on.. IN fact, if I recall
> correctly, I think maybe every 5 rushes there was one pass. Makes for a
> lame experience.
>
> My skating is at the point where I'm just ready to play hockey..
> Skating around gets old quickly anymore, nothing to really progress on.
> Backwards crossovers maybe, nothing I'll really ever need to do. When
> the 4 kids were messin' around while we were playing, I started just
> skating around instead of playin' 'cause we couldn't do much with 20
> skaters out there, I quickly lost interest.
>
> My hands aren't that great. I can dangle but not fast enough to make it
> effective. Compared to most of the high school kids, I'm not very good.
> They play a lot, though.
>
> I was all over the place shutting down the other team. Other kids
> just .. I dont know, they take it easy or something.. I play wtih
> heart. I scored a few goals on the goalies, but they weren't very good.
> My last goal was poking the puck on the forecheck, gettin' the easy
> breakaway, and shooting shortside from the hash marks. Goalie never
> moved.. wasn't even a challenge.
>
> Wednesday night will be worth it. Only adults will be there, and they
> are definitely faster and more serious about it all.
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 12/27/2010 06:58:00 PM

hockey today

Yeah, so I wasn't happy about people tryin' to play with each other.. If you're good, you don't need your "team" to be good.. Just go out and play. Nobody else was doing it. That's the problem when you get new people .. they wanna change things up to suit their needs when the custom has been the same for months. Change isn't bad, but you can't walk in expecting things to go your way the first time. When it took somewhere between 30-45 minutes to get the game goin', that's when I said "screw it" and went to play with the high school kids.

I got pushed hard one time, never even threw me off balance.

One time, I was crossing over to my left to stop the puck holder from attacking the zone.. he has his head down looking at the puck the whole time. Dumb. I was really low 'cause I was doin' cross-overs and I purposely ran into him. My left shoulder went right into his head, I didn't feel anything but it was a hard hit. He immediately said "Hey buddy!" like he was upset .. I turned around and said "sorry, man" thinking to myself, "next time, don't skate with your head down." I don't mean to cause harm, can't help it.

I didn't play that well. That's another reason why I felt like i wasted my time. I'd put the puck between players' legs to go around them which works out really well. Can't do it all the time, but it throws them off. THere wasn't much passing going on.. IN fact, if I recall correctly, I think maybe every 5 rushes there was one pass. Makes for a lame experience.

My skating is at the point where I'm just ready to play hockey.. Skating around gets old quickly anymore, nothing to really progress on. Backwards crossovers maybe, nothing I'll really ever need to do. When the 4 kids were messin' around while we were playing, I started just skating around instead of playin' 'cause we couldn't do much with 20 skaters out there, I quickly lost interest.

My hands aren't that great. I can dangle but not fast enough to make it effective. Compared to most of the high school kids, I'm not very good. They play a lot, though.

I was all over the place shutting down the other team. Other kids just .. I dont know, they take it easy or something.. I play wtih heart. I scored a few goals on the goalies, but they weren't very good. My last goal was poking the puck on the forecheck, gettin' the easy breakaway, and shooting shortside from the hash marks. Goalie never moved.. wasn't even a challenge.

Wednesday night will be worth it. Only adults will be there, and they are definitely faster and more serious about it all.

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Placebos Work Even if You Know They're Fake: But How?
By Maia Szalavitz<http://healthland.time.com/author/maiasz/> Monday, December 27, 2010 | 56 comments<http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/27/placebos-work-even-if-you-know-theyre-fake-but-how/#comments>
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Physicians have long believed that some form of deception is essential to the placebo effect: after all, if you tell people that you're giving them a fake drug, why would they respond by getting better? But new research suggests that it may one day be possible to use placebos in everyday medicine without misleading patients into thinking they might get active treatment.The study<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015591>, which was published in the journal PloS One, included 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a condition that causes abdominal pain, bloating and frequent bouts of either constipation, diarrhea or cycling between the two. There is no specific treatment other than managing symptoms, which can range from mild to severe. (More on Time.com: Adderall May Not Make You Smarter, But It Makes You Think You Are<http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/21/adderall-may-not-make-you-smarter-but-it-makes-you-think-you-are/>)

Participants — who were mainly on the severe end of the spectrum — were randomized to receive either a placebo or no treatment. Those given the placebo were told that they would be taking "placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes."

They were instructed that taking the medication at the times and doses prescribed was "critical." In essence, the researchers revealed that they were using placebos — but, unlike the approach used in typical trials, they told patients that the pills work. The no-treatment group simply interacted with the medical staff in appointments of the same length as those given the placebo. All patients stayed on medication schedules or diets they were already following — no changes were allowed during treatment. (More on Time.com: Explaining Why Meditators May Live Longer<http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/23/could-meditation-extend-life-intriguing-possibility-raised-by-new-study/>)

Study co-author Ted Kaptchuk, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School<http://www.hms.harvard.edu/>, was astonished by the results. "The effect size is astronomical," he said, explaining that "59% on placebo got better versus 35% on no treatment. The magnitude of that effect compares to [those of] the most powerful drugs ever tested for IBS and they have terrible side effects and are very rarely used."

So what could explain these results? Jon-Kar Zubieta, research professor at the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute<http://www.mbni.med.umich.edu/mbni/index.html> of the University of Michigan, has studied the effects of placebos on the brain. He says, "There are some conditions where placebos can be very effective, one is pain, another is depression, another is Parkinsonism and probably IBS."

Zubieta has studied the chemical responses of the brains of participants who were told they might receive either a new painkiller or a placebo while they underwent a procedure that induced muscle pain. Researchers told participants that, "they 'may or may not receive active medication and that this will enhance your body's ability to counter pain.' It's kind of the same thing they did in this paper, but we didn't [outright] tell them it was placebo." says Zubieta. (More on Time.com: Spend Too Much For Those Shoes? Blame Your Genes<http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/21/spend-too-much-for-those-shoes-blame-your-genes/>)<http://healthland.time.com/category/mental-health/body-mind/#ixzz19LUcUGeA>

In patients who saw significant pain relief on placebos, Zubieta's research found increased firing of dopamine neurons in brain regions linked to the expectation of pleasure and relief, particularly the nucleus accumbens. There was also increased activation of the brain's natural morphine-like painkillers, the endogenous opioids. Both circuits make sense as places placebos might act, one in producing expectation of relief, the other in reducing pain and anxiety. Other conditions involving pain and depression that tend to respond to placebos have been shown to affect these brain regions as well.

Interestingly, in Zubieta's studies there were also patients who reported that their pain got worse when they were given the unlabeled placebo. "About 15% of the volunteers not only didn't respond [to the placebo but said] they actually had more pain," says Zubieta, "When we looked at those with respect to [neurotransmitter activity] dopamine and opioids went in exactly the opposite direction [compared to those who saw pain relief]." (More on Time.com: Perspective: Kicking Drugs After Columbia Bust<http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/10/perspective-kicking-drugs-after-columbia-bust/>)

Still, with a possible mechanism suggesting that in the majority of people placebos can be used without lies, should doctors start introducing them to treat conditions that are known to be responsive? Even Kaptchuk is cautious. "This is just the first step to see whether there are ethical ways to harness the placebo effect," he says, "In order to be clinically applicable, it would have to be replicated in a much larger sample and continued for a much longer period of time."

Zubieta adds some additional caveats, noting that the study participants were recruited through advertisements that sought people to test a "novel mind body management" treatment for IBS. Such advertising could select participants who were most susceptible to placebo effects, thereby skewing the results. He also notes that the patients' recovery was based on self reported subjective effects. "That should be checked against objective measures like heart rate, skin conductance, functional changes in the brain, then you can really quantify what's going on," he says. (More on Time.com: Does Suffering From Withdrawal Really Mean You're Addicted?<http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/06/does-suffering-withdrawal-really-mean-youre-addicted/>)

Indeed, a recent Cochrane review<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554> examining the impact of placebos across multiple conditions found that in most cases, placebos did not produce useful effects — except, as Kaptchuk notes in his paper — in studies that were specifically looking for placebo effects. And despite all the advances in research on the placebo effect, many of its aspects remain mysterious and confounding. For example, Zubieta is currently investigating why heroin addicts who buy fake drugs but believe they're the real thing don't get a placebo high. "They become very well trained at differentiating between their drug and something else," says Zubeita.

Determining how that works could shed further insight on how to best produce a placebo effect — and no, the idea is not to save addicts money by allowing them to get high without real drugs. Rather it is to delve deeper into the workings of the brain, and use what's learned to treat pain and illness in new and untapped ways.

Note by Note
Marnie Stern's rapturous guitar.
by Sasha Frere-Jones<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/sasha_frere-jones/search?contributorName=sasha%20frere-jones> January 3, 2011
[http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/01/03/p233/110103_r20378_p233.jpg]

"The idea of potential and possibility is the only thing that drives me to keep going with music." Photograph by Alexandra Catiere.

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Marnie Stern, a virtuosic guitar player who favors the finger-tapping technique associated with male players like Eddie Van Halen, was a late bloomer. Her interest in the instrument began in her teens, but music did not become a profession until well into her twenties. Over three albums, her work has passed through the indie and punk canons, becoming marginally more refined. It's still as chaotic and lumpy as it is mathematical, but on "Marnie Stern," her new record, her ability to write songs matches her instrumental dexterity. The album feels like a single emotional eruption, even when melodic lines pile up in dizzying aggregate, like film spooling onto the floor.

Stern's music is part of a continuum that began in the late sixties with progressive-rock bands like King Crimson (whose continuing influence might surprise even their deeply confident leader, the guitarist Robert Fripp). The simplest way to characterize the movement is people playing a lot of notes all at once. The impulse to marry the force of rock with advanced technique brought about many variations, including some less critically popular acts, like the mock-classical Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

With the advent of punk, epic, virtuosic music was seen as both formally pompous and politically élitist. But instrumental prowess is no more or less primal than a three-chord crunch. Stern and her inspirations, like the drums-and-guitar cascade of the nineties indie-rock band Don Caballero, have rescued the exuberant excess of progressive rock by filtering it through punk's dissonance and speed. It was an elegant leapfrog—now bands like King Crimson are more relevant and widely referenced (by musicians as unlikely as Kanye West, who sampled Crimson on "Power") than formerly dominant post-punk figures such as Elvis Costello and Paul Weller.

Stern's work and her background have a narrow focus. She grew up in New York, attended New York University, and now lives on the Upper East Side, with a small, loud dog. There isn't a voracious, synthetic quality to her music or her interests: many of her inspirations are musicians of the past decade of indie rock, some of whom she now plays with. For another musician, this insular quality might represent a lack of curiosity and range. For Stern, it only helps explain the intensity of her work. Her biggest musical influence, you could say, is herself.

She learned her finger-tapping technique, in which both hands hit notes on the fretboard, instead of leaving one free to strum, not from the better-known big-haired heroes of the eighties but from Don Caballero's original guitarist, Ian Williams. "Tapping is actually a way of cheating, since you're using both hands," she told me. "It makes things a lot easier!"

Stern's main collaborator has been the gifted drummer Zach Hill, who has appeared on all of her albums, though he doesn't generally tour with her. Hill's playing often feels like two drummers working together to destroy the concept of dull and obvious time signatures.

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One of the songs on "Marnie Stern" is called "Female Guitar Players Are the New Black," which Stern describes as a tongue-in-cheek response to the question "What's it like being a girl playing the guitar?" She was likely anticipating that many articles about her would mention peers like Marissa Paternoster and Annie Clark. Women who play indie rock do seem more invested now in pushing the bounds of their instrument than do their male counterparts (who seem preoccupied with samplers), but that tendency surfaces in divergent ways. Paternoster, of Screaming Females, plays rapid, woolly solos so familiar that I don't know what to call it other than Rock Soloing. Annie Clark, who records as St. Vincent, studied composition. Her guitar parts are delicate and interlocking, and she has performed in ensembles with as many as twelve members. By contrast, Stern is a self-taught player who sings in a high, sharp voice, works largely inside a trio format, and tends toward surges of volume and chanting to punctuate her songs.

The three main elements of Stern's songs are typically her rippling, quick guitar lines, her barking vocals, and the overwhelming thrum of Hill's drums. The combination produces a racket. Like Stern, who is prone to bouts of insomnia, the music seems anxious, as if it contains an urgent message that will expire before a certain date. That nervy quality makes her technically accomplished music seem unusually accessible. If Stern's songs are frantic, it rarely seems to be in order to dazzle her listeners with tricks, or even to entertain them. Her music pulses with the energy of a mind and a soul that won't leave well enough alone. "The idea of potential and possibility is the only thing that drives me to keep going with music," she told me.

One song on "Marnie Stern" was inspired by the death of an old love, another by a recent breakup. This would appear to make the album more emotionally direct than her début, "In Advance of the Broken Arm," whose title was inspired by a readymade snow shovel by Marcel Duchamp, and her second album, "This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That," a phrase borrowed from the British philosopher Alan Watts. But in Stern's music, her voice is subordinate to her power chords and her finger tapping. That isn't to say the lyrics don't matter, but even though the vocals are almost always double-tracked they are set way below the guitars, the sound of which you will likely remember long after the scraps of language that emerge from the noise.

The song "Transparency Is the New Mystery" passes for simplicity in Stern's world, and features clearer lyrics than past tracks. Without much interference from a recurring guitar motif that moves around in multiples of three, Stern sings, "In order to see it, you've got to believe it—I do," swooping up high on "I," as if she were bending a note with a whammy bar. When we get around to something like a chorus, a satisfying series of chords that causes the cross talk to die down momentarily, Stern sings out—her voice beginning to slip beneath the volume of the guitars—"It's not enough, I'm not enough." Hill continues to rumble around in accord with a time signature that only he seems to know, though it fits with the rhythms around him. Stern's recorded music is largely a successful duet with Hill; without him, this level of excitement would be very hard to maintain.

Stern's claustrophobia is the kind that channels—there isn't a slack moment on this album. "Gimme" is an example of how magnificent she can make her fidgety energy. The song starts with several guitar figures slapping against a Hill beat that seems simpler than his others—or maybe the snare is just louder for a moment. (If these albums were mixed differently, the outcome would be chaos, and not the fun kind.) There is a brief ascending phrase and then a drop into a lurching figure, as Stern sings something that I would feel uncomfortable transcribing, as I could not make out a single word without the Internet's help.

It's better to notice how the song repeatedly builds, and that when it goes into the chorus it has the ferocious presence of the most basic rock. Stern seems to want to mimic physical forces, and, with Hill behind her, she can. A "Marnie Stern" could easily be a vintage sports car, capable of accelerating, skidding, and coming to a full stop over and over. The suspension's a little shaky, but the car gets to a hundred and forty without much trouble. ♦

The Jobs Crisis
by James Surowiecki<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/james_surowiecki/search?contributorName=james%20surowiecki> January 3, 2011
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Unemployment<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Unemployment>;
Recession<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Recession>;
Jobs<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Jobs>;
Beveridge Curve<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Beveridge%20Curve>;
Barry Bluestone<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Barry%20Bluestone>;
Recovery<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Recovery>;
Economy<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Economy>

The recession has been over for more than a year now, but so many people are out of work that it doesn't feel like much of a recovery. In November, the economy added just thirty-nine thousand jobs. The failure to translate G.D.P. growth into job growth has given us an unemployment rate that remains near ten per cent (twice what it was in 2007), and has swelled the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Why have new jobs been so hard to come by? One view blames cyclical economic factors: at times when everyone is cautious about spending, companies are slow to expand capacity and take on more workers. But another, more skeptical account has emerged, which argues that a big part of the problem is a mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skills that people have. According to this view, many of the jobs that existed before the recession (in home building, for example) are gone for good, and the people who held those jobs don't have the skills needed to work in other fields. A big chunk of current unemployment, the argument goes, is therefore structural, not cyclical: resurgent demand won't make it go away.

Though this may sound like an academic argument, its consequences are all too real. If the problem is a lack of demand, policies that boost demand—fiscal stimulus, aggressive monetary policy—will help. But if unemployment is mainly structural there's little we can do about it: we just need to wait for the market to sort things out, which is going to take a while.

The structural argument sounds plausible: it fits our sense that there's a price to be paid for the excesses of the past decade; that the U.S. economy was profoundly out of whack before the recession hit; and that we need major changes in the kind of work people do. But there's surprisingly little evidence for it. If the problems with the job market really were structural, you'd expect job losses to be heavily concentrated in a few industries, the ones that are disappearing as a result of the bursting of the bubble. And if there were industries that were having trouble finding enough qualified workers, you'd expect them to have lots of job vacancies, and to be paying their existing workers more and working them longer hours.

As it happens, you don't see any of those things. Instead, jobs have been lost and hiring is slow almost across the board. Payrolls were slashed by five per cent or more not just in the bubble categories of construction and finance but also in manufacturing, retail, wholesale, transportation, and information technology. And take hiring: one of the industries that have been most cautious is the hotel and leisure business. Needless to say, there's no shortage of people with the skills to be maids or waiters; there just isn't enough work. Another sure sign of weak demand is that people with jobs aren't deluged with overtime; hours worked have barely budged in the past year.

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Believers in the structural argument refer to something called the Beveridge Curve, which measures the historical relationship between job vacancies and unemployment. They argue that the curve currently shows more job openings than there should be, given the current unemployment rate—implying that businesses are having a hard time finding qualified workers. But a careful analysis of Beveridge Curve data by two economists at the Cleveland Federal Reserve shows that it's behaving much the way it has in previous recessions: there are as few job vacancies as you'd expect, given how desperate people are for work. The percentage of small businesses with so-called "hard-to-fill" job vacancies is near a twenty-five-year low, and open jobs are being filled quickly. And one recent study showed that companies' "recruiting intensity" has dropped sharply, probably because the fall-off in demand means that they don't have a pressing need for new workers.

Don't expect the structural argument to go away, though. It's a perennial: nearly every recession leads pundits to proclaim that the job market is facing structural challenges, and that higher unemployment is here to stay. During the 1981-82 recession, now seen as a classic cyclical recession, the economist Barry Bluestone warned that, as a result of structural issues, there might not be "much recovery in terms of overall employment in the United States." Yet, by 1984, unemployment was back to where it had been before recession hit. A 1964 survey of economists found that more than half believed structural issues were playing a significant role in limiting the number of jobs; three years later, unemployment was below four per cent. And, during the Great Depression, even F.D.R. thought that unemployment might well be stuck at a permanently higher level. Recessions are, among other things, crises of confidence, and one manifestation of lack of confidence is the conviction that this time we're not going to be able to climb our way out.

Structural issues aren't irrelevant, of course; there are certainly plenty of construction workers who are going to have start plying a new trade. But what defined the recent recession was the biggest decline in consumption and investment since the Depression. Dealing with that is the place to start if we want to do something about unemployment. The structural argument makes government action seem irrelevant. But if we don't do more to get the economy back up to speed, it won't be because stimulating demand won't work. It will be because we've chosen not to do it. If we can't find the way, it's because we don't have the will. ♦

Notes of a Gastronome
Sweet Revolution
The power of the pastry chef.
by Adam Gopnik<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/adam_gopnik/search?contributorName=adam%20gopnik> January 3, 2011
[Albert Adri]

Albert Adrià's falling chocolate trunk filled with frozen chocolate powder, on a forest floor of lime-and-mint yogurt, with almond praline, puffed quinoa, and green-pistachio streusel.

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Audio: Adam Gopnik on the state of dessert.<http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/01/03/110103on_audio_gopnik>

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Desserts<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Desserts>;
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Just a year ago, I gave up sweets. I was in a restaurant in San Francisco, and, for the first time that I can recall, when the waiter said, "Dessert?," in that conspiratorial, perky way waiters have, I said . . . nothing. And then the next night, at another place, I did it again.

The usual reasons that move men and women as they age moved me: I was self-conscious about gaining weight, crossing into the world where you slowly become doughier and wake up as a middle-aged man with a paunch. So I decided to stop eating desserts, to see if that would help. Like all diets, both the reducing kind and the religious kind, mine had an element of logic (lose those calories neatly, and at once!) and an element of magic, too (give up the thing you like best and you will appease the gods of aging). I love desserts. I think of my mother and I taste desserts. My mother, though a scientist with an academic career, made a different dessert every night of my childhood: lemon tart and chocolate cake, wonderful coffee custard with bittersweet chocolate hardened like a winter lake on top, and hot apple pie with light custard sauce.

I am aware that pies and cakes and cupcakes are the more usual thing to love from Mom's Kitchen. But she was a Francophile, and made soufflés, and those I loved best of all. Yet they were the one dessert of hers that I couldn't make for my own children. When I left home, she gave me a self-published recipe book that included her formula for apricot and grand-marnier soufflés. I had followed it dutifully over the years, and never got it quite right. There was a moment when you were supposed to know that the egg whites were beaten—a zone of beaten egg whites, with danger and failure on either side. "DO NOT OVERBEAT/ DO NOT UNDERBEAT!" she had written, and although I had seen the proper moment, the true loft, countless times, the presence of the words somehow froze the operation, made the right state of beaten egg whites an unobtainable condition. I could never find the zone.

The curious thing was that, while it was hard to do without sweets at home, it wasn't nearly as hard when we went out to eat, and especially not when we went out to eat fancy food. It was as if the dessert chefs had given up on dessert, too, and produced something else in its place. At even a moderately upscale establishment, you would invariably get what I had come to think of as the Portman Plaza plate, since it so closely resembled the model that a developer would have proposed for the center of a crime-wracked mid-sized city in the seventies: three upright cylinders—small towers of something wrapped in something—with the tops sliced at an angle; a crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge. The plate would be advertised as, let's say, a chocolate-peanut-butter mousse cake with walnut-balsamic crumble and a sesame sorbet with Concord-grape foam. But the effect was always the same: not enough of a cakey cylindrical thing, too much of a crumbly thing, far too much of a gelatinous thing, and an irrelevance of an off-key runny thing. Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.

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Leafing through books at the neighborhood cookbook store, I slowly became aware that our dessert modernism sprang from somewhere else, and had a more revolutionary purpose than I knew—that the Portman plates were to a European movement what the Portman towers had been to the Bauhaus, the American domestication of something austere and rigorous. Here in New York, the true, uncompromised revolution was limited to a handful of places, and I went to one of them, Wylie Dufresne's WD-50. I broke my sweet fast, and had a full roster of the pastry chef's delicious devisings: cheesecake with dried pineapple, pineapple purée, and pineapple tuiles; lemongrass mousse with lemongrass foam. The chef, Alex Stupak, turned out to be an intense intellectual, clear and dry in his judgments.

"I happen not to like sweets," he said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. "It's an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you're conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn't occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it's less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food." He looked at me sternly. "Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth."

When I asked him who had influenced him, his eyes, which had been narrow slits of purpose, suddenly shone bright. "I admire Albert Adrià more than any other cook in the world," he said, referring to the younger brother of Ferran Adrià, of the legendary (and soon to close) restaurant elBulli, in Catalonia.

Everywhere I went, I heard similar talk of him and other Catalan dessert wizards. Dan Barber, of the restaurant Blue Hill, spoke reverently of Jordi Roca, whose restaurant, run with his two brothers and situated not far from elBulli, had recently been voted one of the five best in the world; on a visit to New York, Rene Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, had in the same poll been named the best restaurant in the world, spoke of both Adrià and Roca with the same quiet awe.

In search of the truth about the new sweets, I even went to the White House, whose pastry chef, Bill Yosses, I had been made to understand, was the Great Still Center of the American dessert. Yosses turned out to be a smiling, vaguely seraphic presence—at one point, he neatly, calmly distinguished caramel, mere burnt sugar, from butterscotch, brown sugar mixed with butter, for the benefit of his sous-chefs. (Though, as we walked through the White House, it did occur to me that, from the point of view of a caterer, the White House might seem less like the nerve center of the free world than like a medium-sized, slightly shabby charming resort hotel in Virginia, the kind where your best friend from college puts everyone up when he marries that horsy girl you all have doubts about.)

"Dessert is aspirational," Yosses said, laying out his philosophy. "It's the one part of the meal you don't have to eat. It's the purest part of the meal: the art part. But it's also the greediest part, the eat-it-in-a-closet part. We don't have to have it, and we do. When I was a kid, I would stuff my face with éclairs. I still would, I guess . . ." His voice trailed off. "The real question is this," he said. "How did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness? Why do we use it to end the meal? Those are the big questions." I asked if I should go to Spain. He gave a Yoda-ish smile, and said, "Oh, yes. That's a trip you ought to take." When I consulted Dan Barber again, he was still more emphatic. "Go there!" he said. "That's where it's all happening. Go!" And so I went.

On the plane over, I felt like Paul Newman or Michael Caine in a Cold War spy movie of the sombre, le Carré or Len Deighton kind: a black-and-white film, with a jazz score and a grimly ambiguous ending. I was crossing the salt-caramel curtain, and no turning back.

When I got to Barcelona, there was, just as there ought to be in such a movie, a cool, efficient beauty, in a black frock and a sports car, waiting for me. This was Lisa Abend, an American writer who lives in Spain, and who was to be my companion in Barcelona. She had spent the past season observing the innards at elBulli, while writing a book about the Oompa Loompas of the operation.

It was twilight, and we sped through the dark, narrow streets of the Old City on the way to our first stop, the EspaiSucre. This "Sweet Space" was, Lisa explained, a working research laboratory and school, where new desserts are regularly conceived and experiments made, with the results exhibited, and eaten, at a nearby restaurant. As we drove, the almost kinetic energy of the Catalan capital was evident, as it had been the last time I was there, twenty years before. At the time, the only dessert seemed to be flan, with a distinct salty taste that I associated with the local café con leche. I asked what had happened in the twenty years since.

"I've been doing a lot of research, and it really seems to be the case that the legend is the truth," Lisa said. "Twenty years ago, the Adrià brothers took over a struggling French restaurant up in Roses, and in the nineties they began to collaborate with a chemist here at the university. And, being isolated and inexperienced, they began to do new things. It really did come from two intense brothers who didn't care what the rules were supposed to be."

We pulled up in the darkness to a modern glass storefront amid the medieval buildings and parked on the sidewalk. Inside, Jordi Butrón, the chief scientist-cook of the research center, greeted us solemnly and led us into his classroom. On the blackboard behind his head was a series of abstruse-looking diagrams. With a close-shaved beard and mustache, he had more the look of a severe French sociologist than of a happy Spanish cook. I explained that I was on a quest to find out what desserts really were and where they were going. He held up a hand and began to speak, in rapid, accented French.

"In retrospect, they're disgusting, many of the things we used to do—too much fat and too much sugar, and a series of clichés taught while being rationalized," he said. "The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, 'Apple and cinnamon,' you would click in immediately. 'Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!' The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say 'Apple, asafetida'? Nothing! You have nothing stored there." He added slyly, "Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don't like it you think there's something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don't like it there's something wrong with you." He laughed briefly, professionally. "The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth." He went on placidly, "It is to avoid these errors that we do so much of our teaching and learning blindfolded."

"Blindfolded!" I said, wondering if I had misunderstood.

"Yes, blindfolded," he repeated. He went to a drawer and took out a handful of silken eye masks, which he threw on the desk. "It is important to be able to work with the sensations of the nose and mouth alone, so we spend hours in the dark, tasting. Of course, appearance matters, but it is the last part of the equation. Taste, taste, taste—that is what matters. So I keep people blindfolded for much of the work, which is devoted to the marriages of taste."

Then he opened the door to an immense, pristine kitchen, dominated by a great length of polished black stone. Here, he said, "as many as fourteen young chefs can work, blindfolded, to discover the taste and enlarge their flavor libraries."

I noticed various pieces of space-age-looking machinery littering the beautiful, dark kitchen, and I asked how the new technology contributed to his work.

"It is useful as tools," he said crisply. "If I want to capture the flavor of a raspberry meringue, I use a powdered egg white, and then I have a true raspberry in the form of a meringue, instead of a super-sweet meringue overwhelming raspberries." He shrugged. "Nothing we do with new equipment does more than allow us to reinsert flavors."

We sat down for dinner in the nearby restaurant, and had a meal of five courses, all sweet, or at least sweetish, yet all beginning with a savory theme. First, there was cucumber-ginger-pineapple-tarragon sherbet, then olive-oil cake with San Simón cheese and a perfect white-peach sorbet. "The combination is a classic conception of the savory kitchen: cheese and olive oil," Jordi observed. Then came an Idiazábal-stout-beet-cherry cake, too various to make much sense. Then a green-apple granita with bay leaf, as fresh and acid as a winter morning, and, finally, truffle-hazelnut-toast cream pudding. The genius showed in the details: a curry-and-salt cookie, thrown in as an extra but a study in itself. There was something perfectly modulated in the transition from savory herbs (tarragon and bay) and savory tastes (salt and curry, particularly) into sweet dishes.

"This is kind of amazing," I said to Lisa, as I scraped the plate of truffle-toast pudding and grabbed another curry-and-salt biscuit. Lisa gave me a seraphic, you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet smile, and said, "You'll meet Albert tomorrow."

I sat in my little hotel room in Barcelona, jet-lagged and sugar-satiated, and read about the history of sugar. Primates, I learned, love sweets for reasons that are simple enough to explain: sweetness is the natural sign of ripeness, and the best assurance, especially when balanced with just enough acids, that the thing you're eating is good to eat. Yet the picture is more complex. The primate instinct for sugar is particular, adjustable, and sometimes seasonal. The lesser mouse lemur of Madagascar, a gourmand among monkeys, raises its threshold during the rainy season so that, when sugars are less abundant, it requires less sweetness. Yet this may be why the lesser mouse lemur has always remained so deeply lesser. Our nearest relations among the primates, particularly chimps, have a "supra threshold": they love sweets and will practically die to get them—and this, the theory goes, is one of the things that make them forage over extremely large territories, outside the forest. They strolled on all fours, then walked, then ran, just to have dessert.

As both the anthropologist Sidney Mintz and the historian Jean-Louis Flandrin have documented, it was only recently that the instinct for devouring sweets met the availability of abundant sugar. In pre-Crusades medieval European diets, only honey and fruit and other "natural" sweeteners were available, and they were mostly used in savory dishes. For centuries, sugar was a spice as rare as myrrh and as precious as saffron: an expensive extra used to give food taste and color. Only in the Renaissance did sugar slowly, through the New World, become widely current. ("Sweet" became one of Shakespeare's favorite adjectives: it appears seventy-two times in the sonnets alone, and the first writer who mentions them refers to his "sugar'd sonnets.")

Then, in the late seventeenth century, the price of sugar plummeted, never to recover, largely as a consequence of that hideous invention the West Indies sugar plantation. The cheap-sugar revolution took different paths in different places. In England, sugar combined with tea became the staple drink of the masses. In France, a full-blown dessert cuisine emerged, with the pastry chef as its hero. Soufflés rose; egg whites lifted up; aerated egg yolks combined; cheaper chocolate was blended with butter to make buttercream; and egg yolks were kept from cooking while allowed to thicken.

Reading the primatologists and the anthropologists, I got the sense that the double life of sweets ever since the sugar revolution—as a thing we universally crave, and as a highly specific, French-derived cooking culture—has led to a strange fight between disciplines. The primatologists insist that we eat sugar because our genes scream for it, while their humanist colleagues insist that sugar is above all a cultural symbol—we eat as many sweets as we can in order to emulate the rich, who usually get to eat more. Yet surely an artifact and an appetite are not opposites to be reconciled but the same thing seen at different moments in its history. The lesser mouse lemur would doubtless devour a crème caramel and a butterscotch pudding indifferently; it takes a pastry chef trained in France to state the difference. The artifact gives the appetite shape; the appetite makes the artifact shine.

The next morning, I met Albert Adrià at the workshop that the Adrià brothers keep in the old quarter of Barcelona. In jeans and a work shirt, Albert had the stocky, proletarian look of a young Braque or Léger. He is a classic younger brother—earnest, hardworking, self-critical—and he explained the rise of the Barcelona dessert as a series of accidents disciplined by labor.

"Postres?" he asked. "Why me for postres? First, because the pastry chef left. I had just finished moving through all the other stations, and I was due to be at the dessert. And I also have a severe allergy to shellfish, which limits my movement. But the real reason was that pastry seemed much more interesting—a world without limits. Meat cook? Fish cook? What are you going to do with it? And also there was a lot more to learn in pastry—just the techniques! My question was, Why can't you serve main dishes that are sweet, and why can't you have savory tastes during the dessert time period?"

I asked when the new style had first appeared. He furrowed his brow, trying to recollect something that had clearly not been the result of a deliberate plan. "It was an accident of the kitchen, really. I suppose we first made an ice cream with saffron in 1985. My first step is, I have to draw it. I have to sketch it, get it down on paper, and then do the explanatory texts." He began to draw on paper. "This one I wanted to take up, this dirt—one of my most famous desserts involved dirt. A sweetened illusion. The idea came when it was winter at elBulli and I was going up the hill to get my car, and stuff was falling down, and I thought, Shit, that's good! I can use that! It's a dirt road, and, in the course of the fall, I noticed not only how the leaves changed color but also how they changed the color of the ground." The dessert, as it was eventually plated, included cherry sorbet, salted honey yogurt, frozen chocolate powder, and spice bread, all evoking one fall moment: a dessert of frozen time.

Struggling to find words for his inventions, he began to speak about his most recent work: two desserts for the upcoming "Cook It Raw" conference, in Lapland, which would emphasize low-energy techniques, uncooked food. "Elemental, elemental," he said. "That's what I want. The really new idea I have for Lapland is—you see, I was thinking, if you were thirsty there you would eat the snow or the ice, and if you're hungry you're going to kill the reindeer. So: blood! The most basic thing is to drink the reindeer's blood and eat the snow. So we made sweet snow and sweet blood. The key for the blood is your belief that it is. It looks like real blood only at forty degrees—it's a beet-and-orange reduction, and the texture, I promise, is exactly the same as blood. So we're not telling people that it's not real blood. It's meant to be provocative. But it's very delicious."

"Is there anything that didn't work out?" I asked. "Something that you tried and failed at?"

"A lot," he said. "One of the first things that Ferran asked me to do is create hot ice cream."

Hot ice cream! He nodded gloomily. "You would look at it—ice cream—and then you would taste it, and it would be hot. Every year I thought I had it! But I never had it. What we discovered was to use an ice-cream machine but invert it, so that it was pumping in hot air, and to use gelatin to get the form. That was as close as we could get. It's still this idea that we have." He shook his head. "A sort of dream. I have a lot of them."

By now, the story of elBulli has become part of modern cooking lore: how the combination of science and culinary curiosity created a real revolution in cooking, with high-tech equipment borrowed from the mass-produced-food industry for the purpose of wild, semi-surrealist picture-making. And how, at the height of this fame, Ferran announced that he would close the restaurant in 2011 and devote himself to "a foundation for pure research in cooking." (What admirers of elBulli often forget to tell you is that it is a very hard place to get to. You weave your way there on narrow, winding cliff roads along the Spanish coast. The terror of the ascent surely adds to the delight of the arrival.)

If Albert is a Braque—a stolid man with a poetic imagination—Ferran is very much a Picasso, a grand maître who knows it. Like every first-rate artist, he has the kind of immense egomania that is oddly impersonal: his greatness is so uncontroversial to him that it is an act of generosity to try to limit it in words and dates. There is a certain kind of artistic egotism that is enveloping rather than narrowing: less "All I care about is my work" than "If you only cared about my work as much as I do, you would be as routinely elated as I am."

I asked dutiful questions about the history, and the future, of desserts, and Ferran responded instantly, in Spanish, not with the guarded caution of his younger brother or the academic certainty of Jordi Butrón but with eager, nodding, flowing eloquence. His guttural, consonant-driven Catalan accent made everything he said sound as though he were murmuring a list of Jewish holidays. "Let us go all the way back to Carême and then come forward to us! Hmm. The problem! The problem! The phrase 'molecular gastronomy' I don't like. 'Techno-emotional'?—I'm not crazy about it, but let's use it. Now let's look at the history of desserts."

He called for paper and pen from one of the countless earnest, eager apprentices, and began to draw floridly and actively, making swooping charts of the history of cuisine, filled with Venn-diagram-like circles enclosing famous names and long arcs and arrows connecting one significant moment with the next. He drew as he talked—I realized that he was the inventor of the Barcelona diagram—and soon turned to sketching boxes and vectors on a large sheet of white paper.

"Carême, you see, was a pastry chef," he said. "Everybody thinks of him as a cook, but he was actually a pastry chef. Sugar?" He took two for his coffee. "He was the best pastry chef in France. Now, come to our own time, who's the great innovator?" Dramatic pause. "Michel Guérard!" He trumped with the name of the chef best known as a father of nouvelle cuisine, in the nineteen-seventies. "And he was a pastry chef, too. Very interesting that two revolutionaries have been pastry chefs. Whatever they've tried to do, they've tried this symbiosis of the savory world and the sweet. Escoffier more than being a cook was a codifier. I don't know why it played out this way, but it did. Since then, Gaston Lenôtre and Pierre Hermé. And, after that, nothing, really. It's been consolidated, but nothing very new came out of it in France. Why did Michel Guérard begin this revolution? Because he was a pastry chef, and the pastry chef was the second-class citizen of the kitchen. He did it to show 'I am a cook.' It's the thinking of a pastry chef that initiated the revolution of nouvelle cuisine!" He looked at me keenly, to see if I was following.

He was, in truth, speaking so quickly, and mentioning so many names and concepts, that I was a bit confused by the argument—until I looked down at the paper where he had been drawing the complex flowchart of French dessert-making. The point it conveyed was simple: there had really been just two hinge points in French cooking—Carême's early-nineteenth-century revolution, and Michel Guérard's twentieth-century one—and both had come from pastry cooks escaping the limits of pastry. Pastry-makers were natural magicians, and magic in cooking would always come from them.

"So, now, here's elBulli!" He drew some more. Then he called for one of the many illustrated books that document the ascension of elBulli, and flipped through its pages for examples. "We started taking things from the sweet world and moving them to the savory: a sorbet, or a savory ice cream," he said. "One early savory ice cream was a Parmesan ice cream, in 1994. It extends an incredible dialogue between me and Albert. One of the important themes for us was about construction: how do you construct a dessert? This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisù—opened an incredible world to us. Deconstruction began here. Black Forest cake. This is mythical."

Turning the pages of the book while drawing rapid diagrams and speaking in even more rapid Spanish, Ferran went on to explain that the true point of the deconstructed dessert was to create a kind of analytic Cubism of the pastry plate. It wasn't that Black Forest cake was broken down into bits but that, if you're possessed by the urge to break things down into bits, it's more obvious that you're doing it when you do it to a Black Forest cake. The Cubists used guitars and tables, ordinary still-life objects, for the same reason: you knew what a guitar or a table looked like, and so could see when it didn't look that way. Once the fracture was achieved and accepted, you could move on to your own mythology. "If we make a curry ice cream, and you put mushrooms there, and eel—strange!" he said. "But if you put chicken stock, and coconut, then it's curry."

Were we, I asked, on the verge of entirely breaking down the line between sweet and savory?

He looked at me with delighted triumph. "It can't be that an American is asking me that!" he said. "A hamburger with ketchup and Coca-Cola? That's the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savory imaginable. It's your cultural theme."

As Lisa and I approached the door, Ferran grabbed the pages of diagrams and handed them to me for further study. He continued brooding on the subject of dessert, explaining that for him the big question was not that of sweet and savory but that of sequence. "What matters is how we end the meal. With a surprise? A flourish? Reassurance? That's the big question about dessert: how do we close out dinner? How do we finish the meal?"

He had a pensive look, and I couldn't help asking him about Albert's unmade dream. His face came alive again. "You mean hot ice cream? Yes. Yes! But . . . it's hard! Ice cream is ice cream because it's cold. But gelatin is the same way: gelatin used to be both gelatin and cold. There must be some way. We'll solve it. We will." Then he signed the historical diagrams "FERRAN ADRIÀ."

A meal at elBulli—sweet-and-spicy flash-fried shrimp tortilla, wild strawberries in wild-hare bouillon—showed that the French line setting off savory from sweet could be entirely bypassed, like other French defensive lines in history, by mechanical ingenuity, speed, and superior strategic thinking. But I was still interested in desserts as such, pure desserts, desserts that always ended sweetly. And so the next morning Lisa and I travelled to meet with the young Mozart of pastry, Jordi Roca, at the restaurant he runs with his brothers, in Girona, in northeast Catalonia, about an hour from elBulli.

Where elBulli is old-fashioned and even a little run-down, as though to frame the hyper-modernity of its plates all the more sharply, El Celler de Can Roca, to give the full name of the Roca brothers' three-star place, is of exquisitely contemporary design, with small groves of poplar trees contained within the zigzagged green-glass walls of the restaurant proper. A long, low-lying wine cellar sits just across an allée of trees from the restaurant, and in it Josep Roca, the second, sommelier brother—the oldest brother, Joan, is in the kitchen—keeps his wines in tenderly nourishing musical environments, playing recorded melodies in the caves: Bach for the champagne, romantic cello music for the Burgundys, and local guitar music for the Spanish wines.

Jordi, the baby brother, is still young-looking—startlingly so, at thirty-two. Dreamy of visage and gentle of voice, he came out of the kitchen before lunch, tentative and eager and even a little wide-eyed in his chef whites, to talk about his dessert work. He had inherited the pastry station, he admitted, because it was the younger brother's station, but he thought that there was room to grow there. "Desserts in Catalonia don't have the weight of the past," he explained, in the French he had learned during several stages. "We had Crema Catalana. A cake or two or three. So we felt free to invent and compete."

After an apprenticeship at elBulli, he realized that his preoccupation was with scent. "That was something that hadn't really been realized enough in desserts, I thought: the power of aromas. We had this new machine that could extract essential oils, and I began to play with it. I began making perfumed desserts." He laughed. "I went to Sephora and found the most wonderful aromas in all the women's perfumes. And I started making desserts built around their smells. Calvin Klein-like aromas. I wanted to make something as wonderful to taste as Chanel perfume was to smell. For me, that's where all that new chemistry and equipment help. We have the machine to extract essential oils. Another just for smokes. Working with smokes and smells, this has a—fragile aspect? Sense memory extends to the heart of who we are. I think that there's a freedom there, for a certain delicacy." He shrugged. "You'll see," he said.

Did he have a dream dessert that he had tried and failed to perfect? He nodded. "Yes, there's one I'm working on. I haven't really . . . perfected it yet. You see, I'm a big fan of F.C. Barcelona"—the soccer team—"and I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal." Messi is the great Argentine striker who stars for Barcelona. "I feel I'm close. Could I try it out on you at the end of lunch?"

The desserts came around. And here was the real thing, here were true desserts: not dancing nimbly on the edge between sweet and salty, like Albert Adrià's, but plain old-fashioned sweets touched by the invention and audacity of a liberated imagination. There was watermelon rind with bitter almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured, solidified into a small, sweet iceberg. Then lemon custard and granita, with the floral scents in a small cup alongside: you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest, pure distilled mint flowers. And then an apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-sugar shell and apricot foam inside and an apricot sabayon inside that.

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the "grass" is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer's voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. "Messi turns and spins!" the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

"Messi is alone on goal!" the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. "Messi shoots!" A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

"MESSI! GOOOOOAL!" The announcer's voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he's a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

In those le Carré and Deighton thrillers, the things the antihero learns on the other side of the curtain tend to be brooded on stoically rather than applied with spirit. What you saw on the other side of the curtain stays there. What I learned in Barcelona was that genius can produce what it chooses—but not much of it was really applicable to the table I sit at or the kitchen I cook in. It wasn't just that you can't do this at home; it's that home is the last place you were ever meant to do this. The earlier great changes in cooking were a kind of baroque template, suitable for simplification—you made haute cuisine with cream and butter, nouvelle cuisine by leaving them out—but "techno-emotional" cooking was created only for the three-star stage. It was pure performance, cabaret cooking, the table as stadium show. As often happens with the avant-gardists, by advancing the form they had only deepened the crisis. There was nothing that you could do with what I had learned, other than serve cake and ice cream while the soccer game was on, which we knew how to do already.

And yet something, at least, came out of the quest. I invited Bill Yosses, the White House chef, over for dessert, and laid a small trap for him: I was going to make the apricot soufflé, and see if I could achieve the zone. Over dinner, we talked desserts some more: the mysteries of plating, the needs of family life.

Then I led him into the kitchen, showed him the apricot-purée base, the transparent egg whites in the unlined copper bowl, the five soufflé dishes waiting to be buttered. He murmured instruction. "Butter around the outer edge, too," he urged. "All the way around the outer rim like this. Make a small space—climb up to grow up. And then put the dishes in water: not a bain-marie or anything deep, just a shallow tray of water. You don't want to lower the temperature too much."

He watched as I beat the egg whites and they thickened and turned opaque. "Do you know why you use unlined copper?" he asked. "It's for the static electricity. A small electrical storm going off in the bowl." An act of God, making clouds of white.

We approached the zone, the perfect moment of stiff-but-not-too-stiff peaks. ("DO NOT UNDERBEAT/ DO NOT OVERBEAT!") I beat. He waited. I beat some more. He nodded—go on. I went on, far longer than I usually would, and then he tapped my shoulder. There! That was it. The zone was there: not the gauzy, moist shiny area where I used to stop but a step above.

"I remember how there was one kid at Le Cirque back when who just did this," Yosses said. "Starting around five-thirty, he had the bouilli or the soufflé base, and he beat egg whites all night."

As we put the soufflés in the oven, he said, "Fifteen minutes," and when fifteen minutes had passed he held his hand above them, to measure the heat rising, as much as the texture firming, and nodded one last time.

They were perfect. The apricot intensity shone; the egg whites' neutrality and airiness softened and lifted it; the hotness gave an edge of taste delight that is always allied to danger, even tiny danger. A thousand small adjustments turn rules into skills, and then three smaller ones turn real skills into art. With Yosses's help, I had taken something elaborate and made it something that seemed elemental. The primate instinct—get sweets at any price—had been turned into this polished performance. The virginal egg whites, the electric storm that whitened them and made them stiff: the perfect zone was drier and older than I had imagined. You could beat them more and they would be better.

Ferran's question still counts: How do we finish the meal? But then how do we finish anything? At least I know now that if we beat hard enough, and long enough, and do both more than we ever thought we would have to, we might yet arrive at a lighter end.

What's Really Going on at the Arcade
By DANIEL HAMERMESH<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/author/daniel-hamermesh/>

A student described her summer job at an arcade. In the "crane" game you win prizes by manipulating a claw to grab stuffed animals or basketballs, but the arcade owner can and does manipulate the odds of winning. If a new crane machine is played rapidly, the crane is automatically adjusted from its normal settings to make the odds longer because the player is signaling an addiction to the game. If the machine lies idle for a while, the odds are made more favorable than normal. This three-tier price discrimination takes advantage of implied differences in players' demand elasticities. This is the first example I've come across of price discrimination based on manifestations of individual-specific differences in demand elasticities rather than those based on the demographic or timing characteristics of demand. (HT: S)

________________________________

Dan Hamermesh is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow @freakonomics<http://twitter.com/freakonomics> on Twitter.

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8 Comments

1.
1. December 27, 2010 2:45 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611039>

I would love to read more about this. Was this a paper your student wrote, or just an oral report?

In either case, perhaps arcades would be a good topic to include in the next freakonomics book?

— Kaydiv
2.
2. December 27, 2010 2:45 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611041>

Really? Video games have really come a long way since I was a kid. Fascinating stuff-it would seem that if this became common knowledge it would actually hurt the arcades in the end so seems penny wise pound foolish. Either way, interesting application of learning in the video game industry. Great article – Adrian Meli

— Adrian Meli
3.
3. December 27, 2010 2:46 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611045>

The World's first Robot Carney, with Auto-Fishing for Suckers.

Give them shiny bait, easy money, attractive prizes. Let them bite and reel them in when the barb embeds.

— Drill-Baby-Drill Drill Team
4.
4. December 27, 2010 3:01 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611051>

I've won a lot of toys through these crane games, and one of the ways to do it is to watch someone else pay out to see how hard the crane grabs – if a machine is ready to give a toy away it grabs harder.

— Jeremy Miles
5.
5. December 27, 2010 3:04 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611053>

I think that perhaps motel pricing would be another case of pricing based on individual-specific differences. A friend of mine who worked the front desk of a motel told me that he basically could charge whatever he wanted (from a minimum to a maximum) for a room. Thus, if someone drove up in a red Corvette, he charged the maximum–or perhaps if he just didn't like the looks of them. On the other hand, if someone came in and built rapport, he gave them the best price.

Same with magazine sales. When I worked in the industry, I could give a customer any price between the student price (lowest) and the newstand price (highest). It was completely arbitrary (though we didn't advertise that). I heard customer service reps lie through their teeth about "not being able to give you that price." Me? I just kept the customer–after all, over a lifetime, we'd surely make back in advertising revenue and magazine revenue all that I saved the customer.

Just some thoughts.

— AaronS
6.
6. December 27, 2010 3:49 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611059>

Wow, this is really similar to the effect video games have on players. The addiction leaves players thirsty for more, thus video games get more and more challenging, and kids keep on playing them even though they know they have a really small chance to win. So, the arcade, if it has a chance, will use this technique of taking advantage of the elasticity of addictive players with one of their games. In this case, the crane machine. I think this a wrong thing to do yet there is nothing we can do about it because the owner of the arcade will keep doing it to increase profit. But, consumers must be aware that those types of games where the odds are winning are so low have some kind of trick put in them. Any game that could be addicting has a trick for the consumer to keep on playing and paying for it. So, consumers need to be more aware when they play that crane machine.

— MariaCMS
7.
7. December 27, 2010 4:50 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611075>

I'd be curious as to how the odds are manipulated (I'm guessing less refined movement in the motors so you can't be as precise), since the crane game is generally considered to be more skill (at picking what types of prizes can be collected as some can be held easier than others, and where the prize is located i.e. is it blocked by another prize) and less a game of chance.

I know other group based race carnival games (think shoot water in the clowns nose, and a stuffed animal races up a track – the first one to the end wins) have been "tweaked" so that all players finish within a certain range. So as the leader nears the finish line, if someone else is too far back, the leaders move doesn't go as far per turn, so the race is closer – and everyone feels like they could have won.

— Walter Wimberly
8.
8. December 27, 2010 5:43 pm Link<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/whats-really-going-on-at-the-arcade/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FreakonomicsBlog+%28Freakonomics+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#comment-611089>

Don't know if it's true, but anecdote (personal) says slots are set the same way. Never won unless it sat idle for some time prior to my playing. (Oh yeah, they're regulated by the "gaming" commission…)

— hal

All Alike
by Adam Gopnik<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/adam_gopnik/search?contributorName=adam%20gopnik> January 3, 2011
[http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/01/03/p233/110103_talkcmmntillus_p233.jpg]

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Keywords
Snowflakes<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Snowflakes>;
Winter<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Winter>;
Snow<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Snow>;
Wilson (Snowflake) Bentley<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Wilson%20(Snowflake)%20Bentley>;
Snowflake-ologists<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Snowflakeologists>;
New York Public Library<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=New%20York%20Public%20Library>;
Identical<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Identical>

It's been cold out. Really cold, not just normal New York, scarf-and-overcoat December cold but Canadian cold, Arctic cold—the kind of cold that insinuates its way through window frames, and whispers under doors, and chills even perpetually overheated New York apartments. The city may have missed the big snows that have been falling elsewhere in America, crushing the roof of the Metrodome and forcing the Giants into a game in Detroit, but, with the weather this cold, can the snow be too far off?

All this makes the people who cackle with derision at the notion of global warming cackle even more, and though we like to shake our heads at the folly of those who choose to ignore the inarguable proof that this year is one of the hottest years on record—still, at the bone, the human genome does seem to conspire against the truth. In this kind of cold, it is hard to imagine that we will ever be warm again, as though a little genetic amnesia trap had been designed by nature to make us work for the spring to come—to make us plant bulbs and wrap bushes with burlap and light Yule logs and sacrifice virgins, whatever it takes.

In the cold, thoughts turn to snowflakes, heralds of winter. For the past three decades, at this time of year, a twinkling snowflake has been hoisted above the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. It's a giant, galumphing thing, which makes the crossroads of the world resemble the main intersection of a Manitoba town. Closer to the office, the local hearth, Starbucks on Forty-second and Sixth, even has a sign that reads, "Friends are like snowflakes: beautiful and different." This thought seems so comforting, so improving and plural-minded, that one begins to wonder whether it is truly so. Are snowflakes really different—or, rather, how different are they, really?

A quick trip to the New York Public Library and a few request slips (and, let it be said, a little Googling) later, one arrives at the compelling figure of Wilson (Snowflake) Bentley, the great snowflake-ologist, hero of the best movie Frank Capra never made. Bentley was a Vermont semi-recluse who had a lovely and inexplicable devotion to snow. In 1885, at the age of nineteen, he photographed his first snowflake, against a background made as dark as black velvet by long hours spent scraping the emulsion surrounding the snowflake images from the glass-plate negatives. His motives, more than scientific, seem artistic, like those of James Audubon, with his birds, or of Joseph Cornell, with his boxes. On the one hand, there was an urge to document a hidden universe of form and feeling; on the other, a fixation on a small and exquisite world that seemed blissfully different from the workaday one in which Bentley, in Vermont, like Cornell, in Queens, found himself. (Both men were loners, perhaps not coincidentally, who cared for an ailing relative: Cornell for his brother, and Bentley for his mom.) Bentley, over his lifetime, took portraits of five thousand three hundred and eighty-one snow crystals (to give them their proper scientific name; flakes are crystals clumped together) and inserted into the world's imagination the image of the stellar flower as the typical, "iconic" snowflake, along with the idea of a snowflake's quiddity, its uniqueness. It is to Bentley that we owe the Fifth Avenue-style snowflake and all those others falling in our minds.

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It turns out, however (a few more slips, a bit more Googling), that Bentley censored as much as he unveiled. Most snow crystals—as he knew, and kept quiet about—are nothing like our stellar flower: they're irregular, bluntly geometric. They are as plain and as misshapen as, well, people. The Fifth Avenue snowflakes are the rare ones, long and lovely, the movie stars and supermodels, the Alessandra Ambrosios of snow crystals. The discarded snowflakes look more like Serras and Duchamps; they're as asymmetrical as Adolph Gottliebs, and as jagged as Clyfford Stills.

But are they all, as Starbucks insists, at least different? Another flurry of catalogue searching reveals a more cheering, if complex, truth. In 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—let's not defund it) took a plane up into the clouds over Wisconsin and found two simple but identical snow crystals, hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one twin to another, as Cole Sprouse is like Dylan Sprouse. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike; they usually start out more or less the same.

Yet if this notion threatens to be depressing—with the suggestion that only the happy eye of nineteenth-century optimism saw special individuality here—one last burst of searching and learning puts a brighter seasonal spin on things. "As a snowflake falls, it tumbles through many different environments," an Australian science writer named Karl Kruszelnicki explains. "So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc, that it has experienced on the way." Snowflakes start off all alike; their different shapes are owed to their different lives.

In a way, the passage out from Snowflake Bentley to the new snowflake stories is typical of the way our vision of nature has changed over the past century: Bentley, like Audubon, believed in the one fixed image; we believe in truths revealed over time—not what animals or snowflakes are, but how they have altered to become what they are. The sign in Starbucks should read, "Friends are like snowflakes: more different and more beautiful each time you cross their paths in our common descent." For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall—that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever more strange and complex patterns, until, at last, like us, they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt. ♦

Vacation Robo-Post: In Which I Surrender To the iPad
Posted by James Poniewozik<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/author/jponiewozik/> Monday, December 27, 2010 at 9:02 am
4 Comments<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/12/27/vacation-robo-post-in-which-i-surrender-to-the-ipad/#respond> • Related Topics: ipad<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/tag/ipad/>, tech<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/tag/tech/>, TV technology<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/tag/tv-technology/>
[http://timetunedin.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/apple_ipad.jpg?w=204&h=300]<http://timetunedin.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/apple_ipad.jpg>

My new master.

When the iPad was first announced early this year, I wrote a post explaining why, media junkie and Apple acolyte that I am, I was not running out yet to buy one<http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/04/03/irefuse-why-i-am-not-buying-an-ipad-yet/>. If you had "eight months" in your betting pool as to how long it would take me to finally cave, you win.

I had my reasons. I was taking a trip (the trip I am on right now) to visit my Internet-shunning mother, and wanted a way to get online without driving to the local Panera. Also, as someone who writes about media, I thought there were enough outlets using the iPad that I really needed to become familiar with it. Also, I didn't have an e-reader. Also, they went on sale. Also get off my back! Why can't I have one nice thing! I am a good person! [Sobs.]

Ahem. Anyway, I'll spare you the reviews you've heard a million times already, save to say that most of the things you've heard are true, positive (it's a tremendously more satisfying way of reading, interacting and playing than a desktop or laptop) and negative (it's too heavy; shave a half-pound off and it would be just right). I think of it now pretty much as I think of my iPhone. That is, viewed as a specific-purpose tool (an e-reader, a phone), they're flawed; viewed as portable touch computers, they're pretty awesome—not necessary, just a good thing to have.

More to the point of this blog, I can see it becoming my preferred medium for watching video, at least solo. The Netflix, YouTube and Hulu Plus apps are crystalline, of course (the main limitation is not the speed but my home Internet speed). But maybe more significant is how it introduces the possibility of using video in anything—accompanying a recipe in the kitchen, for instance. The possibilities will only grow as these devices (whether made by Apple or someone else) become cheaper and more ubiquitous, and we basically have Magic Picture Frames throughout our homes, workplaces and classrooms. For better or worse, if we are moving from being a text-based to a video-based culture, this is the kind of device that will do it.

That, and you can play Cut the Rope<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cut-the-rope/id380293530?mt=8> on it! We're past Christmas now, so let us know: what gadgets have you gotten this holiday season? And how have gadgets changed the way you experience (and pay for) TV or other media?