Unpopular Science

For twenty-three years Sabin Russell worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. A top medical writer specializing in global health and infectious diseases, Russell covered subjects ranging from bioterror threats to the risk of avian flu and traveled throughout Africa to report on the AIDS epidemic. He won numerous accolades, including a 2001 Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers for his reporting on the flaws of the flu vaccine industry.

This article is partly based on Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

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Then came March 30, 2009--his last day on the job. Russell was at MIT, on leave from his paper for a fellowship. The struggling Chronicle had been cutting staff and now suddenly forced many older career journalists to either take a buyout or risk a reduced pension. At 56, Russell was at the peak of his game, but for him, as for many of his colleagues, there was really just one option. "We have not left journalism; journalism has left us," Russell remarked recently from San Francisco, where he is setting up a freelance office and looking for work.

Now the painful irony: Russell was pressured out of his job just as swine flu murmurs began to emerge from Mexico. This was his beat; few reporters are better equipped to tackle such a difficult yet urgent story, one so rife with uncertain but potentially severe risk. Russell even tipped off his old employer that the paper might want to get a jump on what was happening in Mexico City. "If I was covering this story now," he says, "I'd be all over the Southern Hemisphere. It's flu season there. How is Australia? How is the infrastructure to respond to a new strain holding up?"

Those are stories Russell won't be writing.

It's no secret the newspaper industry is hemorrhaging staff writers and slashing coverage as its business model collapses in the face of declining readership and advertising revenues. But less recognized is how this trend is killing off a breed of journalistic specialists that we need now more than ever--science writers like Russell, who are uniquely trained for the most difficult stories, those with a complex technical component that are nevertheless critical to politics and society.

We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you'd expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

Take Mark Carreau, until recently the space reporter for the Houston Chronicle. He spent more than twenty years covering NASA, whose Johnson Space Center (JSC) lies in the Chronicle's backyard. Such expertise, however, failed to outweigh the need for newsroom cuts, and Carreau was laid off earlier this year. As one space wonk lamented on a blog on the occasion of Carreau's departure: "I'm guessing there are now more people in space than there are reporters in the JSC newsroom."

Or take the ailing Boston Globe, situated in a global center of science that leads the biotech industry. In March the paper dumped its specialized Monday "Health/Science" section, transferring health coverage to its arts and lifestyle pages and folding science reporting into its Monday business section. Soon after, the paper reduced staff significantly on its science desk. The Globe's decision wasn't about the relevance of science to readership; it was about the underlying economics.

The death of specialized newspaper science sections like the Globe's is a long-term trend--one that appears to be accelerating. From 1989 to 2005, the number of US papers featuring weekly science-related sections shrank from ninety-five to thirty-four. Many of the remaining sections shifted to softer health, fitness and "news you can use" coverage, reflecting the apparent judgment that more thorough science or science policy coverage just doesn't support itself economically.

And the problem isn't confined to newspapers. Just one minute out of every 300 on cable news is devoted to science and technology, or one-third of 1 percent. Late last year CNN cut its entire science, space and technology unit. The most prominent departure: Miles O'Brien, who covered the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster for the network.

How did the US media--serving a country that leads the world in virtually every aspect of science--reach this point? Certainly it wasn't always this way.

Science journalism began as a specialized beat in the early twentieth century but burgeoned in the United States after World War II. The 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik was an especially galvanizing event; in response, US newspapers ramped up their science content, and a generation of writers cut their teeth covering the "space race." Another boom came in the late 1970s and early '80s, when Carl Sagan's Cosmos series reached 500 million people globally, and fifteen new science magazines, eighteen new newspaper science sections and seventeen new science TV shows were launched in the United States.

This "popular science" movement sought nothing less than to bring science to the entire public, to mediate between the technical and the lay, the wonky and the approachable. The thinking was that translating scientific knowledge into a form everyone could understand would help forge a more enlightened citizenry and, ultimately, a stronger democracy.

That ambition didn't last: deregulation and technological change would soon dramatically reshape the media industry. Policy moves during the Reagan and Clinton years, epitomized by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, helped foster mass media conglomeration, as a relatively small number of corporations began to pull together diverse media sectors--movies, television, book publishing, music, magazines, radio and many newspapers--and cram them into massive firms. Serious science journalism often fared poorly in this climate. Producing it required seasoned, highly trained journalists who expected to receive salaries commensurate with their experience and expertise. The conglomerates had a different plan--more revenue, less cost, rising stock prices.

Even as science coverage became squeezed in service to the bottom line, another trend emerged that made it increasingly difficult to reach broad swaths of America with scientific information--the loss of common media sources shared by large segments of the populace. During television's so-called golden age, the broadcast networks--ABC, CBS and NBC--provided a shared cultural experience and news environment and featured plenty of science. PBS joined them: Carl Sagan's Cosmos, its greatest science program, was a product of this era.

Then along came cable TV, providing myriad channel alternatives for those who wanted to detach from serious news, and increasingly politicized platforms like Fox News and MSNBC for those who remained plugged in. And already the Internet's transformative powers seem likely to make cable's impact on the media seem trivial by comparison. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction, but we have millions of blogs to suit every interest and political persuasion, Google News to sift our headlines and Twitter to titillate.

In this context, science media outlets like the Discovery Channel still exist, as do programs like PBS's NOVA--but only as one niche among many. Even the pinnacle of newspaper science journalism, the New York Times's Tuesday science section, reaches only perhaps a million people once a week, a small slice of America.

The problem with the decline of science journalism is not just that there is less attention overall to science; it's that the remaining science coverage is less illuminating. Instead, it indulges in a variety of journalistic pathologies that thwart an improved public understanding of science.

As a rule, journalists are always in search of the dramatic and the new. When it comes to science, however, this can lead them to pounce on each "hot" new result, even if that finding contradicts the last hot result or is soon overturned by a subsequent study. The resulting staccato coverage can leave the public hopelessly exasperated and confused. Should you drink more coffee or less? Does global warming increase the number and intensity of hurricanes or not? Are vaccines safe, or can they cause an autism epidemic? Experienced science journalists know how to cover such topics by contextualizing studies and deferring to the weight of the evidence. Inexperienced journalists, though, are likely to leave audiences with a severe case of media whiplash.

Then there's the problem of "balance"--the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different "sides" of a controversy. When applied to science, especially in politicized areas, this media norm becomes extremely problematic. Should journalists really grant equal time to the small band of scientists who deny the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS when the vast majority of researchers accept the connection between the two? Should they split column space between the few remaining global warming "skeptics" and scientific experts who affirm the phenomenon's human causation? Again, experienced science journalists will know best how to cover such stories and will be aware of the scientific community's very justifiable abhorrence of unthinking "balance."

For a disturbing glimpse of what to expect from a media world with vastly fewer trained science journalists, we need only recount how much of the press managed to bungle the most important science-related story of our time: global warming. We were warned and warned again about climate change, yet for decades did nothing as the problem steadily worsened. In large part, that's because the US public continues to rate global warming as a low priority, and politicians respond to that public. Both have been getting their cues about what matters from the media.

The mass media, however, got the climate story wrong in multiple ways--first, by covering it as a "he said, she said" controversy during the 1990s (bowing to pressure from special interests and their pet scientists, who strategically attacked the scientific consensus) and then, even after moving away from such "balanced" coverage, by providing far too little attention to the story overall--hardly proportionate to the grave planetary danger it poses. Climate change keeps worsening, yes, but how often is it the kind of news that can trump all the other urgent matters demanding media attention?

In fact, though coverage of climate change in the worldwide newspaper media rose sharply in 2005 and 2006, it declined after that, apparently overshadowed by the economic collapse. But scientists are growing increasingly terrified of what global warming could do--among other things, submerge coastal cities--and are now contemplating further meddling with the climate system (so-called geoengineering) as a last-ditch effort to reverse it. We may yet escape such worst-case scenarios, but if we do, it won't be thanks to the press.

Here an obvious question arises: if the Internet is most directly responsible for the decline of newspapers, then can science blogs and science-infused websites fill the gap?

Science content on the web is certainly booming. It's estimated that there are some 1,000 science blogs, and that's undoubtedly a very conservative figure. Science blogs often focus on hot-button topics such as vaccination, the teaching of evolution and the politics of climate change, and devote considerable time to parsing new research findings. Often written by scientists or science journalists, they're highly attuned to the many problems that have plagued the coverage of science, like phony "balance," and tend to avoid or even denounce them--with verve and attitude.

In other ways as well, the Internet has become the go-to place for science. According to the National Science Foundation, it ranks second only to television among the leading sources of science information for the average citizen and is leaving other, older sources far behind. In particular, when Americans want to find information about a specific scientific topic, they go to the web far more often than they open a research book.

Undoubtedly, one can find excellent science information on the web, but the question is whether most people will find it. Newspaper science journalists in their heyday wrote for a broad and diverse slice of the public. On the Internet, though, it's all about finding your particular micro-community. The web atomizes us--and while it certainly empowers, it empowers good and bad alike. Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side--anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.

This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers's Pharyngula (scienceblogs.com/pharyngula), the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That (wattsupwiththat.com), written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.

In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The "science" contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.

That's not to say blogs lack any benefits; they have many. But the Internet is not unifying our culture around a comprehensive or even reliable diet of scientific information, and it isn't replacing what's being lost in the old media. Perhaps Sabin Russell put it best, on the very day he took his buyout from the San Francisco Chronicle. At 4:44 pm he posted his second entry on a social networking site that some tout as journalism's future. It read: "This is the way my career ends. This is the way my career ends. Not with a bang, but a Twitter." Russell had fourteen followers at the time.

Given that the decline of science journalism is being driven by overwhelming technological and economic forces, it might seem unstoppable. But perhaps instead, the answer lies outside the free market: with the creation of not-for-profit sources of science journalism and commentary, meant to last for long periods safely insulated from market upheaval. An example might be Climate Central, a new nonprofit that supplies a variety of journalistic content relating to climate change, including footage for television programs like PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.

Another group of nonprofits--universities--can take the lead in institutionalizing new priorities so that communication, a subject given notoriously short shrift among scientists in the past, becomes a focal point. Especially among the youngest generation of researchers--graduate students, recent PhDs and postdocs--there's a hunger for training in media outreach. These scientists want to obtain the skills that can help them explain their work to a broader public, and there is hardly a time when they will have greater need for them than now, when the journalists who might once have been expected to do this work simply don't have jobs any longer.

For such communication training to become more common, however, we'll need a paradigm shift among the nation's population of brilliant scientists. Immersed in vital research, they have paid relatively little attention to the business side of the media and how it affects them. They've tended to view the press as having a high moral "responsibility" to cover research--period. In some sense, they still think we're in the age of Edward R. Murrow. In fact, it's the age of Bill O'Reilly.

In light of the media upheaval, scientists can no longer assume that a responsible, high-minded press will treat their ideas with the seriousness they deserve, delivering them to policy-makers and the public for sober consideration. Instead, partisan media will convey diametrically opposed versions of where science actually stands on any contentious subject--consider, for example, the difference between how Fox News and NPR cover climate change--even as most of the public (and many policy-makers) will tune out science more or less completely, besieged by other information options.

That's the media reality we live with, and facing it head-on is necessary not only for scientists but for everyone who cares about the impact of science and good information on public policy. We must stop assuming today's media will dutifully carry the best and most reliable knowledge to policy-makers and the American public. Rather, it falls to us to shift gears and carry that knowledge to the entirety of the remaining media, and well beyond. In the latter endeavor, we may have to create media of our own.

About Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and the author of The Republican War on Science, Storm World and, with Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. more...

About Sheril Kirshenbaum

Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist at Duke University working to improve communication between scientists, policymakers and the public, is the co-author, with Chris Mooney, of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. more...

A Gross Unfairness: The Workings of the Straight State

A report issued in 2006 by two nongovernmental organizations, Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality, describes the written response made in 1975 by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to an American citizen's petition to sponsor a foreign same-sex partner for legal residency in the United States. The INS denied the petition for the following reason: "You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots." Except perhaps in the explicitness of language, federal policy toward same-sex binational couples has changed little since then. On June 3 of this year, Congress held its first-ever hearing on the plight of such couples and brought attention to the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA), sponsored in the Senate by Patrick Leahy and in the House by Jerrold Nadler (and subsequently folded into a larger immigration reform bill). Introduced repeatedly in various forms since 2000, the legislation would add the United States to the ranks of sixteen other countries--including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Israel and South Africa--that draw no distinction between gay and straight binational couples for immigration purposes. In the words of a supportive Washington Post editorial, passage of UAFA would "right a gross unfairness."

The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

by Margot Canaday

Buy this book

The restriction on the immigration rights of same-sex noncitizen partners is relatively obscure, but the harm done to those it affects is no less than that caused by the widely debated federal laws and policies that render gay people second-class citizens, like the Defense of Marriage Act and the military's disastrous "don't ask, don't tell" policy. And the scope of the injury is not small. According to the report by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality, census data suggest that more than 35,000 binational same-sex couples live in the United States. No one knows how many others live separated by national borders or have emigrated elsewhere in order to remain together. The existence of such an immigration policy, and the uphill battle to eliminate it, demonstrate just how solidly a formal preference for heterosexuality is built into the legal architecture of the state.

It is not really news that inhabitants of the United States are governed by what historian Margot Canaday calls, in the title of her excellent book, a "straight state." For some time now, scholars of sexuality (following in the footsteps of those who have studied and challenged the race and gender hierarchies embedded in state policies and actions) have professed the analytical goal of what historian Lisa Duggan, writing in 1994, called "queering the state." These scholars have argued that the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple, and the unnaturalness of alternatives, is presumed and reinforced in the ordinary workings of government. Canaday's substantial contribution is to trace, in gripping and at times horrifying detail, exactly how the United States came to operate in this fashion over the course of much of the twentieth century. The Straight State provides a compelling history of the designation of "the homosexual as the anticitizen."

Through a sustained focus on three specific and consequential areas of bureaucratic rule--immigration, the military and welfare, each the topic of two chapters in the book--Canaday demonstrates how anticitizenship has been established and enforced as government officials, courts and politicians have struggled to make sense of sexual nonconformity. Although her scholarship emphasizes the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, it could not be more timely in its lessons. Only by accurately mapping the sedimentation of exclusion in policies and decrees laid down by bureaucrats over time, Canaday insists, can we continue, step by necessary step, to dismantle the formal barriers to full citizenship--a process that, she notes, really began succeeding only in 1990 with the lifting of a uniform federal ban on homosexual immigrants to the United States.

The Straight State is a captivating, engagingly written work of social, political, legal and sexual history, and the fruit of an extraordinary attention to archival documents. As a sociologist, I confess with only slight embarrassment that I have on more than a few occasions skimmed over the minutiae of historians' accounts in order to get more quickly to the big-picture analysis and bottom-line conclusions. I felt no such impatience here, in part because the fine points of the story are endlessly fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking, and in part because Canaday is so skillful (despite this being her first book) at illuminating the big picture with every close-up. The trail cut by The Straight State traverses a swath of eras and institutions. One story Canaday tells about the Depression concerns the Federal Transient Program, whose administrators sought to house the men displaced by economic misfortune in encampments but ran up against the widespread perception that such camps were breeding grounds for "unnatural" sex. (An article in this magazine in 1934 commented on the perceived gap between the workings of the camps and the dictates of good citizenship: "It is hard to see how it is possible to prepare people for normal living by adjusting them to the abnormal...life in a congregate camp.") Another story revolves around the GI Bill of 1944, an enormous welfare program that, by 1948, represented 15 percent of the federal budget, with veterans making up half the student body at colleges and universities. Canaday explains that this was "the first federal policy to directly exclude persons identified as homosexual from the benefits of the welfare state."

For Canaday, "the state" is no abstraction. Taking a fine-grained approach, she insists that the state is "what officials do," whether it's worrying about what transient men get up to when the lights go out or deciding which men and women who served in World War II should be issued the "blue discharges" that made them ineligible for benefits. (There were about 9,000 cases of the latter.) In particular, it seems, what officials did was develop elaborate screening mechanisms to police the boundaries of belonging. Early twentieth-century immigration inspectors were warned to watch for what were described as "striking particularities in dress, talkativeness, witticism, facetiousness...flightiness...unnatural actions, mannerisms, and other eccentricities" that might serve as the telltale signs of sexual perversion to be excluded at the port of entry. (The all-too-common "hidden sexual complexes among Hebrews" merited special vigilance, according to the Marine Hospital Service doctors who lent their expert gaze to the task; they also pointed to the "beardless face [and] the high pitched feminine voice" that were so often found among Italian men.) Around the same time, examiners of military recruits were instructed to screen out those males who "present the general body conformation of the opposite sex, with sloping narrow shoulders, broad hips, excessive pectoral and pubic adipose deposits, with lack of masculine [hair] and muscular markings." Especially in these early years of state attention, the array of suspect perversions was diverse and diffuse, but the markers of excludability were written on the skin for the trained observer to detect at a glance. As the bureaucracy grew and officials adopted more varied and sophisticated tools for what anthropologist James Scott has called "seeing like a state," officials strove to recognize forms of abnormality unbecoming to citizens that only gradually came into focus as what are now taken to be gay and lesbian practices and identities.

Canaday's argument is that in the United States, the processes of state-building, the exclusion of sexual minorities from the ranks of citizenship and the definition of a modern concept of homosexuality were mutually reinforcing. In the early years of the twentieth century, the federal state was still quite weak and limited, either by today's standards or by comparison with European nations of the time. As the state grew in size and reach and began to oversee the life of the society more fully, it also gained the capacity to police the boundaries of citizenship more systematically. And as the rewards conferred by citizenship became more ample, the presumed necessity for such policing also increased. At the same time, homosexuality was not just any old instance of otherness that state officials felt obliged to penalize. Canaday makes a good case that the encounter with, and management of, homosexuality was surprisingly central to the broader project of state-building and the definition of citizenship throughout this period. By World War II, for example, the purging of lesbians from the military required "a huge expansion of the state's investigatory power," as authorities generated thick files tracing "an expansive web of friends and acquaintances that sometimes extended far beyond a single base or unit."

Modern notions of homosexuality and the modern US bureaucratic state grew up together, Canaday argues. And this coincidence of timing, she suggests intriguingly, may even help explain why the state became, and remains, more officially homophobic than many of its counterparts in Europe, where the bureaucracy was already consolidated before homosexuality emerged as a concern to be reckoned with. "Homophobia" is the term Canaday uses throughout, though its roots in psychology make it less than ideal to describe what officials might do regardless of their personal sentiments or unconscious fears. Queer theorists speak instead of "heteronormativity"; but this term is not quite right either, or at least it would be insufficient for Canaday's purposes, because an emphasis on cultural norms and regulatory ideals fails to capture the grounding of antigay sentiments in the concrete and mundane practices of governance. The sociologist Steven Seidman recently wrote of a midcentury "state-driven nationwide politic aggressively enforcing institutionalized normative heterosexuality"--which is more to the point but a bit of a mouthful.

The larger argument, however, is that a history of the modern American state is simultaneously a genealogy of what we now take to be homosexuality. In the early period covered by the book, immigration and military personnel spoke not about homosexuals but about perverts, mannish women, men who displayed (in a curious turn of phrase) "feminism," "wolves" who preyed on younger men and the "lambs" who were their prey. This mix of bureaucratic, medical and colloquial lingo described a hodgepodge of varieties of gender inversion and nonnormative sexual practices. Over time, though, homosexuality took shape in its modern guise, defined less exclusively by gender roles and more by what psychoanalysts called "sexual-object choice": the sex of the desired partner. At the same time, "the homosexual" stabilized as a type of person defined by a knowable preference or orientation that was manifested in its "tendencies" even when behavior was absent. The story of this shift has been told before, but Canaday's innovation is to emphasize the role of the state, and not just medical and psychiatric experts, in these redefinitions. As she nicely puts it, "There was at first neither chicken nor egg. (As in: What came first? Homosexuality, or its regulation?) State-building itself was instrumental in helping to produce the category that an expanding state would then see as its function to police."

Importantly, though, Canaday does not imagine that the state was in a position simply to etch its categories and meanings onto individuals, as if the latter were blank slates. Instead, she describes a complex process of mutual reinforcement and resistance, similar to what the philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls "looping effects," whereby powerful institutions categorize what they see people doing and present those understandings to the categorized, who may then internalize them, change them or reject them in ways that influence categorization down the line. Canaday describes how many of those caught in the spotlight of state scrutiny ended up reconceiving who they considered themselves to be. This was true of women in the military who had never given much thought to the deeper meanings of the affinities they felt with other women but who, in the wake of hostile interrogations and career-destroying witch hunts, put a name to those inchoate sensibilities. "Knowing about [homosexuality] now," one female victim of the midcentury military purge commented, "I look back into my childhood and feel that I have been gay all my life." But it was also true of the men who, over time, became obliged to accept a new understanding of homosexuality that broke with the earlier model of gender inversion, which reserved stigma only for the passive, "feminized" sexual partner. Back in 1917, a certain Private O'Dell, when caught in the act of sex with another man, could protest in honest confusion: "I am doing nothing wrong.... Johnson is my punk." But as the military increasingly sought to weed out all those with homosexual tendencies, regardless of their roles during sex, it enforced and helped to spread the object-choice model of sexuality, which has become central to the definition of mainstream gay identity and community.

It's worth underscoring the novelty of Canaday's approach. Much recent LGBT history, following in the footsteps of historian George Chauncey's pioneering book Gay New York, has been resolutely local. This work has impressively chronicled the texture of gay life in places like Philadelphia, Fire Island, San Francisco and Buffalo, but by and large it has ignored the federal government. Yet as Canaday reminds us, citizenship is first and foremost a national status, and activities at the federal level are consequential for how these lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn. To the extent that histories of gay life have focused on the state, they have tended to examine one administrative realm alone, such as immigration policy or the military, rather than juxtapose several of them, as Canaday does here. Scholars have been drawn particularly to the military's policing of sexuality in World War II (a story told well by Allan Bérubé in Coming Out Under Fire) and to the antigay hysteria of the McCarthy era afterward. But Canaday makes an excellent case for starting the story much earlier, showing how the midcentury preoccupation with homosexuality presupposed "an expanding state's steady accretion of tools, knowledge, and experience" that dated all the way back to the early years of the century. Finally, a focus on the state also allows Canaday to go further in linking the politics of sexuality to those of gender and race. On the one hand, she suggests how state administration of sexuality both resembled and differed from its management of gender and racial categories. On the other hand, she is attentive to the intersections, analyzing, for example, how the treatment of queer immigrants by federal authorities varied according to the immigrants' race or national origin, and considering how the attempts to drum lesbians out of the military accelerated precisely as women began making stronger claims for inclusion in the institution.

Who gets extended the entire complement of citizenship rights? The question is an important and vexing one. The saga of George Fleuti, a Swiss immigrant who successfully sued to prevent his deportation for "moral turpitude" in the early 1960s, is instructive. In a case that rose all the way to the Supreme Court, the Board of Immigration Appeals eventually conceded that Fleuti could stay in the United States because it had not been proven that he was a homosexual at the time of his entry into the country. Fleuti, in fact, had been convicted subsequently--once for being "a lewd and dissolute person" and another time for an act of oral copulation--which more typically would have sufficed to ensure deportation. Yet as Canaday observes and as Fleuti's lawyers also maintained, Fleuti "exhibited many of the traits of a good citizen--he was productively employed, a responsible family member...well thought of by his associates, and not least, both northern European and male." What is noteworthy is that these mitigating factors did not thereby establish Fleuti's credentials as a "good homosexual," worthy of US residency. Instead, in a policy environment in which "the homosexual" and "the citizen" were antithetical, the state drew the logical conclusion that Fleuti "was not a homosexual at all."

Fleuti's "victory" was anomalous, and it stands out among Canaday's many stories of lives torn apart by a state insistent on defining citizenship in ways that made queer people into an other. A crucial question to ask, however, is, What impact did all of this policing have on those who were not caught directly in its web? After all, most gay people (or people who engaged in homosexual behaviors) never brushed against it, and many of those who could have been trapped were never even spotted by military, immigration or welfare authorities. As historian Eithne Luibhéid has described, some even figured out how to beat the state at its own game, like the lesbians who learned to "straighten up" when confronting immigration officials by growing out their hair and nails, putting on makeup and accessorizing.

What were the ripple effects of state action? Canaday argues, plausibly enough, that what is "individually devastating" can also be "broadly powerful"--that policies about immigration, military service and welfare eligibility sent clear messages that permeated the whole society. Yet she misses opportunities to prove the point or analyze this saturation in any detail. She notes, for example, that one of the pivotal, later court battles over gay immigrants--the Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service case of the late 1960s--"was widely reported in the mainstream and homophile press." But she doesn't tell us what reporters had to say about the case (which affirmed the INS's ability to declare homosexuals to be psychopaths by definition), still less what sense ordinary gay or lesbian readers of those articles made of them. Canaday keeps her attention trained on the paper trail left by courts, legislators and bureaucrats, rarely venturing too far into the broader world whose contours, she claims, were being reshaped by the state. The result is that the last chapter before the conclusion, on immigration battles from 1952 to 1983, reads more like a recap of a string of court cases than a history of a society that was brimming with changes on many fronts--political, cultural and religious, among others--in ways that surely mattered for how gay people imagined whether, where and how they belonged in society.

A certain narrowing of focus is essential for a tight argument, but conclusions should then be moderated correspondingly. Near the end of the book, Canaday instead goes out on a limb. She claims, "It is precisely because citizenship is a national category that the federal government (rather than states or localities) has played the predominant role in defining homosexual personhood" (my emphasis). Of course, she has no way of proving that this is true. Indeed, the earlier wave of histories that tell the stories of gay life in individual cities suggest that "homosexual personhood" has often been defined locally to a significant degree. Does it not change one's sense of oneself and of one's possibilities to live in a city that has a nondiscrimination ordinance or that has more than one gay bar? Canaday argues quite rightly that "states and localities can certainly make life better for LGBT people, but they cannot bestow equal citizenship upon them. Only the national government can do that." Yes, and that is why, for example, the federal Defense of Marriage Act weighs heavily on the proponents of marriage equality, no matter how many states legalize same-sex marriage. But establishing the centrality of the federal government to definitions of citizenship is different from proving that federal practices overwhelmingly shape everyday meanings of gayness.

And what about other actors? Perhaps the state appears to have such unobstructed power to define meanings and identities in Canaday's account in part because she consistently juxtaposes this mighty machine with the fortunes of isolated individuals. Her reliance on court cases reinforces this perception: the world narrows to uneven duels like United States v. Roberto Flores-Rodriguez and Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Yet the individuals involved in these cases were not always left to fend for themselves. Canaday notes in passing that in 1967 something called the Homosexual Law Reform Society of America filed an amicus brief in Boutilier; subsequently she mentions that the Mattachine Society, an important early gay-rights group that was active throughout the 1950s and '60s, was also involved in the Boutilier case. It seems that by the later moments of Canaday's historical account, a social movement has emerged--mysteriously, as if out of some crevice that the scorching brightness of the federal searchlight somehow failed to penetrate. And while it's certainly outside the scope of Canaday's analysis to trace the emergence or track the trajectory of this movement, I wish she had paused briefly to reflect on its implications for the question of how identities come into being. Canaday cites the sociologists Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper on the power of states to define identities. But while Brubaker and Cooper importantly observe that states possess "the material and symbolic resources to impose the categories, classificatory schemes, and modes of social counting and accounting with which bureaucrats, judges, teachers, and doctors must work and to which non-state actors must refer," they are more attentive to context than Canaday. "The state is not the only 'identifier' that matters," they write. For example, "the literature on social movements...is rich in evidence on how movement leaders challenge official identifications and propose alternative ones."

Of course, gay movements were simply absent from much of the era that Canaday surveys, certainly for the first half of the twentieth century. But for the more recent period, the state's definition of the homosexual as the anticitizen should be studied alongside the organized opponents of such injustice and not just in terms of its victims. Among other things, doing so would sharpen our understanding of all the present-day struggles for sexual citizenship in which LGBT and queer movements are central players, as well as the right-wing countermovements that have arisen to derail them. Although Canaday misses some aspects of this larger story, a great virtue of her thoughtful, accomplished and beautifully written book is that it lays the necessary foundation for just such an understanding.

About Steven Epstein

Steven Epstein is the John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities and a sociology professor at Northwestern University. He is the author of Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California) and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago)

Greetings From California: Letter From a State in Crisis

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.--Edward Abbey

Duroville, California

Poking around this jumble of ramshackle trailers lined up along a dozen dusty, unpaved roads on the outskirts of the Torres-Martinez Indian reservation, surrounded by the barren and baking Southern California desert on three sides and a fetid, smoking rubbish dump on the fourth, you'd think naming this place Duroville was nothing short of a cynical, deliberate joke. Duro, in Spanish, means "hard" or "tough." Duroville. You know, Hard Times Town.

Instead, it's just a cutting coincidence. A decade ago, sensing opportunity amid a severe housing shortage for Mexican-born farmworkers who toil in the nearby fields, local resident Harvey Duro opened up this land for any campesino willing to park his trailer for about $500 a month. So what if there was no running water, no plumbing, no health regulation of any sort and if, in general, Duroville was really no better than the Dust Bowl-era labor camps described in The Grapes of Wrath?

Yet the 3,000 or so mostly Purépecha Indians (from the Mexican state of Michoacán) who populate this outpost between posh Palm Springs and the near-dead Salton Sea have fought relentlessly--and successfully, thanks to a recent court order--for the right to keep building this hardscrabble hamlet and are adamantly grateful for the modest haven it offers them and their families. Especially on a summer day like this, when the mercury tops 112. "Thank God for Duroville," said 45-year-old farmworker Elias. "Without this, where would we have to live?"

Elias knows of what he speaks. Just a few miles up the road, in the preposterously named flyspeck town of Mecca, several dozen of his co-workers simply sleep in their cars in the parking lot of El Toro Market. Riverside County officials, resigned to this degradation, are caring enough, or at least are realistic enough, not to evict them and instead provide toilets and weekly portable showers. "Things here are worse, worse, worse than ever," said Emanuel Benitez, a community outreach worker at the local office of California Rural Legal Assistance. "These people make about $13,000 a year. They have no money for rent. And anyway, there are no places here to rent."

All this, a mere two hours southeast of 90210.

As recently as a few years ago, it would have been an easy reporter's trick to juxtapose the Fourth World conditions of Mecca and Duroville with the lush golf courses, seven-figure mansions and glittering casinos thirty minutes away in the Palm Springs valley in order to prove that two very different Californias coexist, blithely ignorant of each other.

Nowadays, that seems too facile. Certainly, the socioeconomic distance between the two extremes remains vast, if not immeasurable. But now we are talking about degrees of pain and comfort rather than separate social universes. The city of Cabazon, for example, home to one of those mega-rich casinos, recently clocked in with a 30 percent unemployment rate. The wealthiest enclaves of California have hardly been driven into misery, but no social stratum is exempt from the crash of The Dream. A morning's ride west of Palm Springs, on the shimmering Orange County coast, the $500-a-night St. Regis-Monarch Beach resort, where AIG sponsored a free-spending bash last fall, just days after getting a federal bailout, has been seized by Citigroup. Like a record number of properties in California, the St. Regis has an "underwater" mortgage, owing $300 million on a hotel now worth maybe a third of the debt. Up the same coast, the ritzy San Francisco Four Seasons resort just defaulted on a $90 million loan. The rich, it turns out, aren't that different from us anymore. Even they are traveling less and cutting back on hot stone massages.

Let's make it easy to understand. California might be suffering its worst drought in decades, but the entire Golden State is underwater. Goodbye to those timeworn, bubble-gum-colored fantasies of the Endless Summer, California Girls and gleaming, pool-pocked suburbs. Hello to a new set of descriptors: "Bankrupt." "Ungovernable." "California Nightmare." "Failed State."

You know something is radically wrong when the mere act of the governor and the legislature agreeing on a budget to close a $26 billion deficit after months of haggling is hailed in bold headlines. Or maybe you get the message when you're a state contractor and you get an IOU instead of a paycheck and then find out the banks will no longer honor your scrip. Or you see that state unemployment rates are nudging 12 percent; that in LA County the poverty rate hovers near 20 percent; that some of the thousands of teachers who received pink slips are on hunger strike, while California schools are ranked forty-seventh in the nation; that the state college system has suspended admissions for spring 2010, raised fees 20 percent and forced its faculty to take unpaid leave two days a month; that thousands of state workers are being laid off and those who remain must take three furlough days a month for the rest of the year; that protesters in wheelchairs are blocking the halls of the Capitol; that a number of state parks are being closed; that California's bond rating is just above junk level; that Southern California had its highest peak in personal bankruptcies last year and that so far this year they're up 75 percent over that; and that one in four capsized mortgages in the United States is in California.

Recently, two Democratic representatives from the Central Valley appeared before a Congressional committee and, comparing their region's economic devastation to Katrina, asked to be declared a federal disaster area eligible for emergency relief. According to a Brookings Institution report, among twenty of the economically weakest metro areas in the country, four are in the Central Valley. One of them is the capital, Sacramento. In another, the Merced-Stockton area, the 70 percent drop in housing prices is so steep that homes there don't even qualify for federal recovery assistance. That's on top of the estimated 5 million impoverished Californians who have no cash assistance whatsoever.

Those east of the state line tempted by the allure of schadenfreude ought to think twice. California has the eighth-largest economy in the world and produces 12 percent of the national GDP. There can be no solid national economic recovery without a resurrection of California--something not very likely in the short term.

"It's a perfect storm," said veteran political consultant Allan Hoffenblum, co-editor of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which tracks all of the state's political districts. With the high tide of the Great Recession battering the Left Coast, state government, instead of shoring up what it could, melted into what Hoffenblum calls "total dysfunction."

"During this crisis, no individual or institution has been able to assert any real leadership and bring people together for a common cause," he added. "This has created a power vacuum, allowing everyone to have a veto over everyone else. A weak Assembly speaker. A weak Senate leader. A weak governor. Arnold has flip-flopped so many times that there's nobody in Sacramento who trusts his word."

Nor is this by any stretch a strictly partisan issue. California is solidly blue. And although its Democrat-dominated legislature has a miserable 14 percent overall favorability rating, that rating rises to only 19 percent among Democratic voters. Californians are as liberal as anybody "at the federal level," said Mark DiCamillo, director of the respected Field Poll. "They're more supportive of national healthcare than the national average. But it's also true that Californians remain somewhat tightfisted when it comes to increasing state taxes."

California's political and economic crisis didn't begin with the current economic slump but has been brewing for decades. "You could go back to 1933, with the requirement approved by voters that you need a two-thirds majority to approve the budget," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a USC-based political scientist. "Obviously there's Prop 13, which made things worse; there's the ballot-box budgeting--earmarking money for specific programs--that everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Rob Reiner has used. And the runaway gerrymandering. It all makes flexibility impossible, and it empowers the special interests."

"No question the system is broken," said liberal Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who recently decided not to run for governor next year and whose city is grappling with a $530 million deficit. "It's a state on the brink, families falling through the cracks with IOUs as a safety net. It's mind-boggling to me how little controversy there is over the IOUs."

Maybe it's because Californians are so used to failure from Sacramento. For almost every one of the past twenty years, the state government failed to reach a budget agreement by the July 1 fiscal deadline. Indeed, in 1992 Governor Pete Wilson had to resort briefly to issuing IOUs. But this season's deadlock, finally (or more probably, temporarily) resolved after a near twenty-four-hour session of the legislature on July 24, took on high drama. "I don't know if it's fair to say, but it was like Arnold thought he was starring in his own Gunfight at the O.K. Corral movie and didn't give a damn that the movie house was burning down around him," said one LA City Council staffer.

In February the Democratic majority proposed to-the-bone budget cuts, but their offset measures to increase taxes on oil extraction, vehicle registration and tobacco enraged Republicans and evoked veto threats from the governor. Because California is one of only three states that require a two-thirds majority to approve a budget or even a tax increase, the small GOP minority had just enough votes to block passage. And entrenched gerrymandering makes their seats invulnerable, allowing them to take the most extreme positions. "For me it has been heartbreaking," said Democratic Assemblyman Kevin de Léon, one of ten conferees on the budget. "Back in February we came up with a good budget but with those two minor taxes--on oil and tobacco. That money would have gone right into education. But because of the two-thirds rule, and even though a majority wants it, we get handcuffed by a small group."

Aggravating matters, Governor Schwarzenegger took an intractable "no new taxes" position and then went a step further, saying the crisis was an opportunity to make "structural reforms." Translation: the governor demanded radical shrinkage of the public sector, including virtual abolition of CalWorks, the state welfare program, and a rollback of state employee pensions. He even threatened the "nuclear option": suspension of Prop 98, which requires that 40 percent of state revenues be channeled into schools. Four years ago, when Schwarzenegger attempted to impose a similar far-reaching conservative agenda through a set of referendums, he was mightily slapped down by voters and forced to apologize. Now, it seemed, he was trying to hold the state hostage to these draconian changes as the price of a budget deal. "He just got it in his head that his time is up and his legacy must be long-term reform," said Bebitch Jeffe. "So he's using the short-term budget as leverage. Either he doesn't understand, or he's taking a mammoth risk."

"Some of the cuts proposed by the governor are unimaginable," said Barbara O'Connor, political analyst at Cal State, Sacramento, a few days before the budget deal was reached. "In the end," she predicted, "it will be declared a win-win. No one will love it. Everyone will accept it."

Maybe. Because in the end, while Schwarzenegger was proposing Armageddon, the Democrats settled for mere catastrophe. When the budget details were unveiled, it was like viewing the emaciated corpse of a once great state. There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years. The deal called for almost $8 billion to be taken from education; more than $1 billion from state worker pay; an equal amount from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program; $375 million from CalWorks; $226 million from home healthcare, in which patients and caregivers will now have to be fingerprinted; $124 million from Healthy Families health insurance, which means thousands of children will be wait-listed for coverage; and more than $4 billion confiscated from local governments, which will create a ripple effect of collateral damage. The proposed taxes on oil extraction, tobacco sales and vehicle registration were penciled out; the budget was balanced only through a set of accounting gimmicks, which merely kicked the crisis down the road a few months. The only winners in this deal were felons, who won a $1.2 billion cut in prison funding, which would reduce the prison population by some 27,000.

"It was like a suspense movie," said a jubilant governor, who later showed up in a web video happily brandishing a carving knife. "But we have accomplished a lot." Said Democratic Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, "We have cut in many areas that matter to real people, but I think we have done so responsibly. This is a sober time."

Other reactions were less sanguine. The second-largest public employees union, the Service Employees International, whose members have taken a 15 percent pay cut, has mailed out strike authorization forms and is threatening a statewide shutdown to forestall more cuts. SEIU Local 1000 president Yvonne Walker sent a letter to Schwarzenegger saying, "Governor, we've sacrificed. And now we've reached our limit."

The threat of an immediate lawsuit by more than 180 city and county governments forced the legislature to reduce the $4 billion confiscation of local revenues to a $2 billion "loan" in its final version. LA Mayor Villaraigosa, who called the budget "highway robbery" on his official blog, says the suit might still go forward. Pressure from environmentalists successfully excised an agreement to resume offshore oil drilling. And GOP objections kept the 27,000 inmates locked up pending a separate vote later this year. But in the end, the budget deal killed off any lingering notion of California as a land of plenty.

"When Democrats agree to a budget that is counter to why they are Democrats, it's time to hit the reset button," said Rick Jacobs, head of the 700,000-member California-based Courage Campaign. The liberal advocacy group has launched an ad protesting the budget, saying the state has been "closed."

But it's difficult to see how pressure from unions or progressive activists is going to be able to reverse or modify this budget in the short term--especially when it was approved by a liberal Democratic leadership. More likely, it will be revised--for the worse--if some of the projected revenues fall short. This is quite possible, given that economic analysts are predicting a second shattering wave of California home foreclosures, this time centered more on middle-class and high-end properties, while forecasters see unemployment rising through next year. Everyone knows the odds are that just a few months from now, the state will be right back in a sea of red ink, forcing even deeper cuts.

The state does need structural reform, if not exactly the way Schwarzenegger envisions it. What seemed like a fringe idea a year ago, when it was first floated in an op-ed piece, is gaining momentum: a constitutional convention of ordinary citizens that would rework the state structure. Its motor force is an unlikely suspect--a Northern California business group known as the Bay Area Council, whose scores of members span from the University of California, Davis, several media companies and banks to Hewlett-Packard, Google and Yahoo. The council is just one of a quickly multiplying array of bipartisan establishment groups pushing for a constitutional convention or similarly urgent structural reforms, including Forward California, which is led by former Democratic Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and whose board includes AFL-CIO officials. "This movement is getting very real with every passing day," said Council CEO Jim Wunderman, who wrote the op-ed last summer. "New leaders and groups are coming to us, asking how to get involved. There is real momentum here."

And that's not just self-promoting hype. On the weekend before the budget deal, several hundred Californians joined Wunderman at a USC conference hall to endorse and start planning for a convention, which could be mandated through the initiative process. Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign was on the dais balancing out any notion that this was strictly an initiative of the business community. So were LA Mayor Villaraigosa, who says he "absolutely endorses" the call for a convention; the LA city controller; the progressive president of the LA City Council; reps from the Mexican American Political Association; Common Cause; and several other activist groups. It was a clear manifestation of at least the germ of a nonpartisan, broad-based reform coalition. "We want this to be dispassionate and deliberate," said Wunderman. "Not done overnight. That's why we think a constitutional convention is the best way to go."

No one involved in the movement wants to take an overtly partisan position. But there's general agreement on what needs fixing: the two-thirds budgeting rule has got to go; the once progressive initiative process, which has been "hijacked by special interests," as Wunderman put it, has to be reformed; gerrymandering must end; term limits, which have crippled the legislature, must be stretched; open primaries must be considered; and, most important, something has to be done about that third rail of California politics, Prop 13 and the taxation system.

The 1978 measure reduced property tax to a painless 1 percent a year, but it skewed the rest of state revenue. With property taxes so low, 55 percent of revenue comes from personal income tax; 45 percent of that comes from the top bracket (most states like to keep personal income tax to one-third of revenue). The state is far too dependent on income tax: when times are good, there's plenty of money; when they're sour, California goes bust. In just the first five months of this year, revenues from this tax plummeted 34 percent.

In addition, more than 30 percent of Californians pay little or nothing in personal income tax. And the bottom 85 percent of taxpayers contribute only 16 percent of income tax. This is an uncomfortable reality; progressives who say "tax the rich" don't always realize that in California, wealthy individuals (if not corporations) are the tax base. Conservatives, meanwhile, won't admit that intransigent defense of Prop 13 has turned California into a second-rate state. Even sectors of the business community are worried about the future.

While Prop 13 attracts new critics daily, few are confident it can be repealed. When Schwarzenegger ran for governor in 2003, he showcased Warren Buffet as his economic adviser. "Buffet said we had to get rid of Prop 13 and poof! we never saw him again," laughed political analyst O'Connor. More realistic than repeal is a "split roll," which would raise business property tax and close gaping loopholes that allow large corporations to pay less property tax than Ma and Pa. "Prop 13 has been a sacred cow, but it's time to look at it again," said Villaraigosa. "When people voted for it, they never expected the real beneficiaries were going to be big corporations." The San Francisco Assessor, Phil Ting, and the nonprofit California for Tax Reform are now preparing a ballot initiative, perhaps in 2012, to amend Prop 13 to tax commercial property, which some analysts believe could produce more than $7 billion in additional annual revenue.

What Californians really don't want is a permanent parlor game. In a show of defiance in May, they overwhelmingly voted down a package of initiatives backed by the governor and legislature that would at least have forestalled the current crisis. Everyone has his own interpretation. "Forget about eliminating term limits and the two-thirds requirement," darkly predicted analyst Hoffenblum. "The voters will never go for it. They are too distrustful of the politicians." DiCamillo of the Field Poll is also pessimistic about the possibility of structural tax reform. "Only sin taxes are palatable," he said. "Our polling shows no inclination toward shared sacrifice, because the voters themselves are already hurting too much. They're so worried about their own pocketbooks that there isn't much sentiment toward looking at this in a more mutual way."

California has always been as much a state of mind as a physical reality. The state's natural resources, along with its inhabitants' capacity to exploit them, made The Dream more likely than not. But now it's time to stop dreaming, says D.J. Waldie, who has the unique experience of living through this crisis as both an official of an LA suburb and a prizewinning author who plumbs the Golden State zeitgeist. "The middle class and the near middle class have been missing in action in paying for the sort of life they think California owes them," he said. "Instead, they believe that someone else should pay for the California Dream. Smokers. Drinkers. Gamblers. Millionaires. But not me.

"We have sold ourselves a vision of California, but we are not psychologically or emotionally prepared to make the hard choices. We prefer to point our finger at 'waste, fraud, immigrants.' Those are all straw men. It conveniently avoids the question of what we want and what we want to give up."

About Marc Cooper

Marc Cooper is a Nation contributing editor and a contibutor to The Notion. He is a visiting professor of journalism and associate director of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

His books include Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir and Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical Reporter. His work has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, PEN America and the California Associated Press TV and Radio Association.

Urban Animal Husbandry

Nigerian dwarf goats grow to only 21 in. tall, about equal to a medium-size dog. "But they have giant udders," says Novella Carpenter. She should know: she has six goats that together provide a quart of milk a day, which she drinks and uses to make cheese and butter. And when the bleating beauties are not grazing in her 1,000-sq.-ft. yard, they're hanging out on the porch of her second-floor apartment in the middle of Oakland, Calif.

Carpenter, a city dweller who in recent years has tried her hand at raising turkeys (she got three day-old poults for $2 each) and pigs (which she fattened to 300 lb.) for dinner, says she turned to milk-producing goats because "I decided I needed a more long-term relationship." The author of the new Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, she is eager to help others get into what she describes as a "hobby that involves sex and birth and death and life." (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)

There have been lots of stories lately about chicken coops' becoming a new urban and suburban accessory. But Carpenter considers the squawking hen "the urban-farming gateway animal," the first occupant of a big metropolitan menagerie. Among eco-foodies, the hottest urban livestock bleat, quack, gobble, oink, buzz and ... well, whatever noise rabbits make. Just ask the folks at Seattle Tilth, a composting and gardening nonprofit that this summer added goat sheds and pens to its long-standing local chicken-coop tour. Or ask the participants in Detroit's Garden Resource Program, which recently launched beekeeping classes and saw them fill up immediately. Even the so-called Chicken Whisperer, a.k.a. Andy Schneider, who hosts an urbane chicken radio show six days a week from suburban Atlanta, is branching out. He is planning an episode on turkeys after fielding so many questions about them from listeners. (Watch TIME's video "Barnyard Animals in Back Yards.")

The growing popularity of raising barnyard animals in backyards — or indoors (at least two companies, ChickenDiapers.com and MyPetChicken.com sell nappies to people who want their birds to bunk with them) — has forced many municipalities across the country to statutorily reckon with allowing livestock within city limits. But legal or not, urban animal husbandry is gaining cachet. That's not only because of the desire to eat local and organic but also because the shaky economy has more people wanting to be more self-sufficient. Says Seattle Tilth garden educator Carey Thornton: "Food you raise yourself just tastes better."

Most newbies keep chickens for eggs. Schneider's organization, Backyard Poultry, has groups in 19 cities in the U.S. and four outside the country; of the 700 members in Atlanta, for example, only five raise hens for consumption. Miniature goats are usually kept for milk and weed-eating; bees, for honey and pollination.

But the truly hard-core urban farmers are plumping their animals for meat, shortening the food-supply chain and being responsible carnivores. "It's empowering," says Carpenter, who is nurturing 10 bunnies to eat. "People want to own their meat-eating."

See pictures of urban farming around the world.

See TIME's photoessay "Cow-Pooling."

Of course, not everyone wants to get that close to their food sources. Dwarf goats in particular have been a point of contention. They smell bad and can wreak havoc if they escape, opponents say; some also worry that allowing goats will pave the way for legalizing llamas and cows in cities. Goat advocates, who note that only horned males emit musk, say the ruminants are gentle enough to be walked on a leash and that they generate high-quality manure, which can be used as fertilizer.

The movement has led to heated debates in city-council meetings over the definitions of livestock, small animals and farm animals. The result: a hodgepodge of animal-ownership laws across the nation and even within a state. This spring in North Carolina, for example, Asheville voted to allow temporary permits for goats to clear vegetation, while Charlotte banned them from properties smaller than a quarter of an acre — despite supporters showing up at a city-council meeting with signs reading I LOVE MY PYGMY GOAT.

Those enthusiasts may have taken a page from the godmother of goat lovers, Jennie Grant, owner of Brownie and Snowflake, who founded the Goat Justice League two years ago while pushing Seattle to legalize miniature goats. It is now permissible to have three on a 5,000-sq.-ft. lot, and some city departments have hired goats to clear blackberry brambles. "Part of my lobbying effort included bringing fresh chèvre to city-council members' offices," she says.

Locavore yuppies and suburban soccer moms aren't the only ones committing to animal husbandry. Catherine Ferguson Academy, a Detroit high school for teens who are pregnant or have already become mothers, has for years had a working farm adjacent to campus. The school considers gardening and raising animals integral to its curriculum. Under the tutelage of life-sciences teacher Paul Weertz, the young women built a barn one year and provide daily care for rabbits, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and peacocks. The students recently acquired a pig and, says principal Asenath Andrews, they're going to eat it.

Andrews hopes farming teaches the girls to be more entrepreneurial, well-rounded moms. "Breast-feeding, which is definitely not a popular adolescent activity, is looked on differently by the girls who experience the lessons with baby rabbits," she says. A teachable moment happened the day students broke open an egg containing what appeared to be a viable chick, which the girls frantically tried to save, even calling in the school nurse. The chick died, but the episode sparked a thoughtful conversation about premature human babies, the risks they face and the possibility that saving ailing preemies isn't always merciful. It was one of her most fulfilling days as an educator, Andrews says. "If we have one of those discussions a year, it's worth having a goat — or 10 goats — at the school."

Of course, which animal is most valuable to the downtown farmer depends on whom you ask. "[Rabbits] are the ideal urban farm animal," says Carpenter, because "they can feed almost exclusively on Dumpstered items like lettuce, stale bread, etc." Seattle Tilth's Thornton thinks that ducks are better for gardens than chickens and that they provide tastier eggs. "I think the duck is the future," she says. Game on, chicken lovers.

Ann Arbor Kills Its Newspaper — To Save It

When Larry Kestenbaum, clerk of Washtenaw County, Michigan, was in Lansing for a meeting recently, he saw something unfamiliar on the faces of the other clerks: pity. Colleagues from hard-pressed towns like Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo were offering sympathy because, despite everything, they still had a local newspaper, while Ann Arbor, his county seat, did not.

At first blush, Ann Arbor is an unlikely place to earn the dubious distinction of being the first good-size municipality in the U.S. to give up on its only daily newspaper. A2, as the town is known, is more or less the beauty queen of Michigan: pretty, confident and seemingly immune to the problems of her peers. It still has a downtown with sidewalk cafés and quirky local stores. Its biggest employers are two universities and two hospitals, and it has weathered the recession better than most of the rest of the state. Nearly half its residents have graduate degrees. How could the paper die in a place like this? (See 10 ways your job will change.)

The answer is that it didn't die. It was killed by its owners in a high-stakes gamble to try to create a new and more profitable enterprise. (In the past nine years, the paper lost more than half its classified-ad pages.) The Ann Arbor News ceased to exist on July 23. On July 24, AnnArbor.com was launched. The new website has a paper version — also called, oddly, AnnArbor.com — that comes out on Thursdays and Sundays. The News's owner, Advance Publications, is betting it can rebrand the 175-year-old News as a Web publication, turn a profit and still satisfy its readers' craving for local news. A lot of U.S. newspapers, and their readers, have a stake in whether the experiment in Ann Arbor succeeds.

A local newspaper is more than an organ for delivering news and information. It's a habit, a watering hole, a local landmark. It's a unifying force, even if that's just because, like a loud uncle, it gives everyone something to complain about. It's the hub that connects many people to their community. "The News was like an old friend. You weren't sure why you spent time with it, but you did, because it was such an old friend," says Charles Eisendrath, who runs the Knight-Wallace Foundation at the University of Michigan. How does a city deal with that loss? What, if anything, is irreplaceable in the transition from print to Web?

Death's paperboy has been tossing a lot of venerable titles onto the porch of history recently. The 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News are gone. Dozens more are shadows of their former selves, their revenues and resources gutted by the flight of classifieds, the gasping economy and the hordes of websites competing for readers' attention. The best that most print publishers can do is try to slow the drain-circling while frantically figuring out how to make money on the Web. This means cutbacks, layoffs, misery. (See the 10 most endangered newspapers in America.)

Instead of stanching the blood, the Newhouse family, which owns Advance — a group that includes more than 20 daily newspapers across the country — is using Ann Arbor as a lab subject to see if it might hurt less to tear the Band-Aid off quickly. Fixed costs such as paper, printing and delivery have been drastically reduced. From a staff of 316 at the News in May 2008, AnnArbor.com has a full-time staff of approximately 60, about 35 of them "content creators" (reporters) — plus some 80 from the "preferred blogging community," the majority unpaid — according to AnnArbor.com president and CEO Matt Kraner. Rather than looking like a news-media website, AnnArbor.com deliberately reads more like a social-media site, with equal weight given to reports on a new diner and the proposed city income tax. Ads — known as "deals" — are incorporated into the feed, and users can vote for their favorite, with the highest vote getter scoring a place on the cover of the Sunday hard-copy edition. Not exactly Pulitzer material — yet.

Read "What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper?"

Read TIME's cover story "How to Save Your Newspaper."

"Ann Arbor is an extremely Web-savvy market," says Kraner of why it was selected for this experiment, "probably the most Web-savvy Newhouse has. Secondly, with all the high-tech industries in this town, this market is very open to new ideas and new concepts. Third, we want to be the hub of connection. I don't know if you can find a market anywhere that has such passion for its community."

But passion cuts both ways. "It feels like they wrecked part of our community and built this shiny new thing," says Julie Weatherbee, 42, who works at the University of Michigan library. "And we don't want it." Weatherbee wasn't a huge fan of the old paper but thinks it could have been improved instead of destroyed — and that locals might stay away from AnnArbor.com because of what Advance did. (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession — and after.)

Besides, if there's anything Ann Arbor won't lack for, it's news. There's already at least one profitable local-news site in town. Mary Morgan, 48, a former News staffer, and her husband Dave Askins, 44, started the Ann Arbor Chronicle last September. It specializes in long-form accounts of local council, school-board and other civic-association meetings. "I hand-tooled most of the HTML myself," says Askins. (He learned on his other site, Teeter Talk — word-for-word transcriptions of interviews with local figures on the couple's teeter-totter.) The Chronicle, says Morgan, has about 20,000 unique visitors a month and draws enough advertisers and donations for the two of them to live off. "A lot of people don't want to read an 8,000-word piece on the city council," says Askins, smiling gently behind his foot-long beard and granny glasses, "but they want it to be there."

Some locals are seeing the loss as an opportunity. The folks behind the Ann Arbor Observer, a 33-year-old free monthly, hope to pick up some of the News's journalists and advertisers. Then there's the Ann Arbor Journal, a free weekly paper/website that started circulating to 20,000 homes three weeks before the News closed. Plus, the university has the Michigan Daily, which doesn't cover the town but keeps an eye on its biggest employer. All in all, there may eventually be more reporters covering Ann Arbor than before the newspaper was killed.

Still, for residents like Dave and Micki Moray, it's not the same. Every day they'd come home from work — he as a manager and she as a nurse at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital — pick up the paper, take it to the back porch and read. Dave, 58, was a News paperboy. The couple sold and bought cars for themselves and their daughters through the classifieds. The Morays are employed, active, avowed news junkies and won't read a newspaper online, because it feels like work. "We're not against change. But just to have the rug pulled from under us like that — why didn't they tell us how bad it was?" says Dave. "I would have paid more for it." Now Dave buys one of the Detroit papers, usually at the newsstand because they deliver only three times a week. But it's not the same.

In a fragmented media universe where the battle will be fought for every eyeball, dedicated readers like the Morays are treasures. But their loyalty is hard-won. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Ann Arbor community-content experiment, it's already proved one thing: the content part is easy; the community part is not.

Can China Save the World?

by Bill Powell

On a steamy saturday afternoon just outside Shanghai, Zhang Yi is in a blessedly cool General Motors showroom, kicking the tires of the company's newer models. He's not there to beat the heat. He drives a small Volkswagen now and wants to upgrade. A middle manager at a state-owned steel company, Zhang has no worries about his job or China's economy. "Things are still pretty good," he says. "I have no problem now affording one of these," nodding toward the array of gleaming new Buicks nearby. (Read "China's Booming Car Market Shifts into Reverse.")

There aren't a lot of places in the world these days where consumers speak with that kind of confidence. With the U.S., Japan and all of Europe mired in the worst global recession in 30 years, China has shown a restorative strength that six months ago many doubted it had. A devastating slump in exports crippled growth late last year, but on the back of a $586 billion government stimulus program — about 13% of GDP, spread over two years — China has snapped back. The economy grew 7.9% in the second quarter and will now probably expand 8% or more this year. Evidence of increasing momentum appears almost every day. Factory production has begun to edge up, in part because Chinese consumers continue to spend money at a healthy pace. Auto sales, helped significantly by government subsidies for small-car purchases, hit an all-time record in April and will easily surpass those in the U.S. this year. Overall, retail sales in China this year are up 16%. (Read "Is China's Economy Strong Enough To Save the World?")

Numbers alone do not capture the sense that the balance of global economic power is shifting eastward. There have been several moments that seemed to crystallize the zeitgeist, none more memorable than U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's speech in June before the best and the brightest at Peking University, the Harvard of China. Not long ago, students there would have been the most respectful and polite of audiences. Yet when Geithner tried to reassure one questioner that China's investments in U.S. government debt were "very safe," the response was perhaps an indication of the onset of a new economic order: the students laughed.

The U.S., the unquestioned leader of the global economy, is now in the midst of a disorienting shift in economic policy, away from the let-it-rip form of capitalism that has guided it for almost 30 years and toward more overt government control and regulation of huge swaths of the economy. No one yet can safely say whether this is wise, but in the U.S. it is certainly the stuff of increasingly fierce debate. No such doubts are evident in China, where the government reacted to the crisis with alacrity and the economy is now responding in kind.

That's why, for global companies like General Motors, China is no longer the future. It's the present. Of the world's 10 biggest economies, China's is the only one that is growing, and it could soon surpass Japan's to become the world's second largest. The Shanghai exchange has soared more than 80% this year, by far the best performance among major markets. Nations that depend on producing commodities, such as Australia and Brazil, have benefited immensely over the past six months as demand from China has driven up the price of raw materials. Helped by trade with China, Asia's export-driven economies are sputtering back to life. Overall, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts that in the three years from 2008 to 2010, China will, astonishingly, account for almost three-quarters of the world's economic growth. Not surprisingly, China has now become the focus of a world that is looking for a way out of the swamp. As Shanghai-based economist Andy Xie puts it, "Everyone wants to know the same thing: Can China save the world?"

Trading Places
A few years ago, that question — and the notion that China could drive global growth — would have seemed absurd. After all, China's economy was dependent on manufacturing, which was in turn dependent on demand from the U.S., the world's undisputed economic locomotive. But that engine remains sidetracked. The IMF predicts the U.S. economy will contract 2.6% this year. American home prices continue to fall in some cities, while the unemployment rate has soared to 9.5%, the highest since 1983. The U.S.'s much ballyhooed stimulus plan has so far yielded little measurable benefit, save putting some spark back in stock markets. The absence of real signs of recovery has Washington discussing the possibility of yet another round of stimulus spending, despite a ballooning federal budget deficit.

Read "China Takes on the World."

See The China Blog.

The speed and relative success so far of China's stimulus stands in stark contrast with that of the U.S. According to a recent study by the World Bank, Beijing's government spending will generate more than 80% of the country's overall economic growth this year. This is partly because China was already in the midst of a nationwide infrastructure program when the recession hit. Emergency spending measures simply added to existing schemes already under way. In other words, the projects really were shovel-ready, and the money hit the streets quickly — and in large dollops. Outlays on new railway construction, for example, were $41 billion last year. They will be $88 billion this year. Says one senior FORTUNE 500 executive: "In the U.S., NIMBY [not in my backyard] is still the order of the day, whereas in China it's more like IMBY. They build where they want, when they want. And they move fast." (Read "A New Deal for China?")

China's recovery and growing economic importance have led some to suggest that global institutions such as the Group of Eight — the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia — are becoming obsolete; that the only dialogue that really matters going forward is the conversation between the "G-2": China and the U.S. On July 27, President Barack Obama appeared to acknowledge this when, addressing participants in high-level talks between the two countries, he said Washington's relationship with Beijing would "shape the 21st century." In recent months, Beijing has started to throw its weight around. China seeks — and will almost certainly soon get — greater voting rights in the IMF. In June, China agreed to buy up to $50 billion in bonds issued by the IMF to boost the fund's capacity to deal with the global financial crisis. Earlier this year, Chinese leaders, worried about the strength of the U.S. dollar and the safety of their own $763.5 billion investment in U.S. Treasury Department debt, called for the creation of an alternative to the greenback as a global reserve currency. More recently, Beijing has signaled an intention to slowly establish its own currency, the renminbi, as a dollar alternative in international trade by providing subsidies for Chinese companies to price their exports in renminbi. One economist, Qu Hongbin of HSBC in Hong Kong, goes so far as to say that 40% to 50% of China's overall trade flows could be settled in renminbi by 2012 (though few other economists believe this will happen anywhere near that fast). This willingness to make its positions known publicly and push other governments to see things China's way "is very different from 10 years ago, when Beijing was much quieter and more low-profile," says Jun Ma, an economist at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. (See China covers.)

Indeed, China is increasingly open about both its ambitions and its concerns over U.S. economic policy, given its position as Washington's largest foreign creditor. Beijing never signed on to what became known in the late 1990s as the Washington Consensus on global economic policy, which called for free trade, privatization, light-touch regulation, prudent fiscal policies and — at least as many interpreted the consensus — free capital flows. The U.S. Treasury, in the wake of the credit meltdown, has put forward a plan to enhance regulation of its own capital markets, but that is unlikely to prevent Beijing from continuing to push for the IMF to take a greater role in policing global markets. At its core, despite embracing many aspects of the market, China runs a top-down, command-and-control economy, and its success so far in skating through the recession relatively cleanly may encourage other developing countries to adopt its brand of capitalism.

Not So Fast
still, the best possible answer to the question of whether China can save the world is: Not yet. Plenty of economists doubt that China's economy is as sound as it appears or truly on the road to a sustained recovery. And many more dismiss the chatter about China as the world's economic savior as hopelessly premature.

China's overall economic vigor may continue to impress, but there are questions surrounding the quality of its performance. The People's Bank of China, the central bank, is giving great gobs of money to state-owned banks that, with Beijing's forceful encouragement, are lending to state-owned companies participating in infrastructure construction. Skeptics are frightened by the amount of cash being shoveled out the doors. The central bank recently announced that new loans in June totaled $224 billion. That was more than double the previous month's amount and brought new bank lending in the first six months of the year to nearly $1.1 trillion, exceeding the total for all of 2008.

Read "Why China's State-owned Companies Are Making a Comeback."

See pictures of life on the fringes of the People's Republic.

To optimists, the June data showed just how determined the Chinese government is to implement effective monetary countermeasures to fight the downturn. As Peking University finance professor Michael Pettis says, China is "throwing everything including the kitchen sink'' at the problem. There is no question that as a result of the flood of financing, a lot of Chinese have jobs they otherwise wouldn't. But, as Grant's Interest Rate Observer, an influential Wall Street newsletter, points out in its latest issue, "Massive injections of money and credit ... are always bullish before they are bearish." The newsletter draws worrying parallels between China's current credit boom and the gush of lending that produced the U.S. housing bubble, the collapse of which devastated the financial sector and triggered the global credit crisis and current recession.

There are certainly signs that some aspects of China's recovery are ephemeral. Part of the reason China's stock market has soared is that Chinese companies have received so much cheap financing that they have dumped proceeds into the equity market for lack of better alternatives. Andrew Barber, Asia strategist at Research Edge, a New Haven, Conn., investment-research firm, estimates that up to 30% of new bank lending this year has wound its way into equities. Why isn't the money going into new businesses? The evidence suggests that in key parts of the economy growth remains anemic, particularly the important export-manufacturing sector, which continues to suffer from the reduction in global demand. According to a report from Fitch Ratings in the U.S., Chinese lending continues to accelerate even though corporate profits overall are shrinking — suggesting that China may be incubating its own financial crisis that could be triggered when the adrenal rush of the stimulus wears off. (Read "Is a China Stock Bubble Forming?")

Little Big China
Those caveats are important. But China's technocrats are well aware of the risks they are running. "They came into this [crisis period] with eyes wide open," says Barber, recognizing that loans being granted in a relatively weak economic climate could start to go bad in droves. The country's once shaky financial sector was cleaned up several years ago — in 2007, nonperforming loans amounted to just 3% of total bank assets — and vehicles set up to deal with China's last banking crisis still exist. In other words, Beijing thinks its financial system is strong enough to handle the risks of its very loose monetary policy.

To be sure, even if darker scenarios never unfold and China's economy continues to power ahead, it will probably not, on its own, be enough to drag the rest of the world into a recovery. Size matters. The U.S. has a $14 trillion economy; China's is $4.4 trillion. The U.S. accounted for nearly 21% of total global GDP last year; China just 6.4%. Chinese consumption, in other words, is growing — but is still insufficient to lift the world's advanced economies out of recession. Consumer spending drives less than 40% of China's GDP; in the U.S. before the bust, the consumer accounted for almost 70%. With American shoppers now on the sidelines — the U.S. savings rate has soared from zero to nearly 7% in the past nine months as consumers have closed their wallets — the world desperately needs someone to step into that void. (Read "China Won't Ride to World's Economic Rescue.")

China can help. But it remains a relatively poor country, with an annual per capita income of $6,000, compared with $39,000 in the U.S. and $33,400 in the E.U. To be solidly middle class in China's big cities is to have an income of about $12,000. Brisk though auto sales may be, most Chinese still can't afford a Volkswagen or a Buick, let alone a BMW. Even as China's consumers feel richer, their share of its economy may not change much until Beijing enacts reforms to the health-care and social-security systems, steps that would give people more confidence to spend rather than save. Last year, says Peking University's Pettis, China's consumption was about the equivalent of France's. No one is calling on France to save the world. (Read "China's Auto Bailout Takes a Different Route.")

China faces enormous challenges — a massive shift of population from rural areas to cities, cleaning up decades of environmental degradation, continuing to provide the increase in prosperity that has underpinned political stability. Given their scale, it should surprise nobody that it is still most concerned with saving itself economically — not anyone else. Beijing is most unnerved by the prospect of labor unrest of the sort that resulted in the death on July 24 of a steel-company executive in northeast China at the hands of a mob.

But the resilience of the Chinese economy is no mirage. If Beijing can come through the global crisis without an economic meltdown of its own, its leaders' reputation and confidence will be boosted. An economic model that survives the worst downturn since the Great Depression will have undeniable appeal in the developing world, at a time when the Washington Consensus is thoroughly shot. Beijing, before the crisis, was already rising, its global reach and influence expanding. As the rest of the world falters, that is truer than ever. China is not yet the leader of the global economy. But it's getting there.

— with Reporting by Austin Ramzy / Beijing

See pictures of China's investment in Africa.