conuly

One about choosing a trade instead of years in college - haven't read the whole thing yet.

The Case for Working With Your Hands
By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor that seemed to check out in every way but wouldn’t work, I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.”

I called Fred, and he invited me to come to his independent motorcycle-repair shop, tucked discreetly into an unmarked warehouse on Goose Island. He told me to put the motor on a certain bench that was free of clutter. He checked the electrical resistance through the windings, as I had done, to confirm there was no short circuit or broken wire. He spun the shaft that ran through the center of the motor, as I had. No problem: it spun freely. Then he hooked it up to a battery. It moved ever so slightly but wouldn’t spin. He grasped the shaft, delicately, with three fingers, and tried to wiggle it side to side. “Too much free play,” he said. He suggested that the problem was with the bushing (a thick-walled sleeve of metal) that captured the end of the shaft in the end of the cylindrical motor housing. It was worn, so it wasn’t locating the shaft precisely enough. The shaft was free to move too much side to side (perhaps a couple of hundredths of an inch), causing the outer circumference of the rotor to bind on the inner circumference of the motor housing when a current was applied. Fred scrounged around for a Honda motor. He found one with the same bushing, then used a “blind hole bearing puller” to extract it, as well as the one in my motor. Then he gently tapped the new, or rather newer, one into place. The motor worked! Then Fred gave me an impromptu dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter-motor bushings of the mid-’70s. Here was a scholar.

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. This was something of a regression: I worked on cars throughout high school and college, and one of my early jobs was at a Porsche repair shop. Now I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods.

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can’t wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant “bwaaAAAAP!” of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It’s a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is “Yeah!”

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. My shop rate is $40 per hour. Other shops have rates as high as $70 per hour, but I tend to work pretty slowly. Further, only about half the time I spend in the shop ends up being billable (I have no employees; every little chore falls to me), so it usually works out closer to $20 per hour — a modest but decent wage. The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational.

And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot. If the motorcycle is 30 years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business 20 years ago, its tendencies are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on old motorcycles, and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screw-ups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue. Imagine you’re trying to figure out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are almost always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch if each of eight screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments have to be taken into account. The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. You often hear people complain about mechanics and other tradespeople whom they take to be dishonest or incompetent. I am sure this is sometimes justified. But it is also true that the mechanic deals with a large element of chance.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

Often as not, however, such crises do not end in redemption. Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility. The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality, as I learned some time ago. After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. I used to work as an electrician and had my own business doing it for a while. As an electrician you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

You might wonder: Wasn’t there any quality control? My supervisor would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was sometimes corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article at hand. Rather, my supervisor and I both were held to a metric that was conjured by someone remote from the work process — an absentee decision maker armed with a (putatively) profit-maximizing calculus, one that took no account of the intrinsic nature of the job. I wonder whether the resulting perversity really made for maximum profits in the long term. Corporate managers are not, after all, the owners of the businesses they run.

At lunch I had a standing arrangement with two other abstracters. One was from my group, a laconic, disheveled man named Mike whom I liked instantly. He did about as well on his quota as I did on mine, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. The other guy was from beyond the partition, a meticulously groomed Liberian named Henry who said he had worked for the C.I.A. He had to flee Liberia very suddenly one day and soon found himself resettled near the office parks of Foster City, Calif. Henry wasn’t going to sweat the quota. Come 12:30, the three of us would hike to the food court in the mall. This movement was always thrilling. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. (Marx writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”) Over his burrito, Mike would recount the outrageous things he had written in his abstracts. I could see my own future in such moments of sabotage — the compensating pleasures of a cubicle drone. Always funny and gentle, Mike confided one day that he was doing quite a bit of heroin. On the job. This actually made some sense.

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count — not least, the exercise of your own powers of reason.

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

One about interning at an organic farm

Many Summer Internships Are Going Organic
By KIM SEVERSON

Erin Axelrod, who graduated from Barnard College last week with an urban studies degree, will not be fighting over the bathroom with her five roommates on the Upper West Side this summer. Instead she will be living in a tent, using an outdoor composting toilet and harvesting vegetables on an organic farm near Petaluma, Calif.

As the sole intern at a boutique dairy in upstate New York, Gina Runfola, an English and creative writing student, has traded poetry books for sheep.

And Jamie Katz, an English major at Kenyon College in Ohio, is planting peach trees at Holly Tree Farm in Virginia.

These three are part of a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer, in search of both work, even if it might pay next to nothing, and social change.

They come armed with little more than soft hands and dog-eared copies of Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which takes a dim view of industrial agriculture.

A few hope to run their own farms. Others plan to work on changing government food policy. Some are just looking for a break from the rigors of academia. But whatever the reason, the interest in summer farm work among college students has never been as high, according to dozens of farmers, university professors and people who coordinate agricultural apprenticeships.

Andrew Marshall, who began organizing apprenticeships for the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association in 2003, used to see an average of 75 applications a year. This season, he has fielded over 200, with more coming in every day.

Katherine L. Adam, who runs the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, financed by the Department of Agriculture, said 1,400 farms sought interns this year, almost triple the number two years ago. The number of small farms, which attract the new agrarians and can use the cheap, enthusiastic help, has grown sharply since 2003, according to the department.

Of course, employing people who know a lot about food systems but nothing about farming can be as much a headache as a help. Manure spreaders get broken, carrot shoots get pulled instead of weeds, and people sleep in. It is not all hayrides and flowers for the apprentices, either. Ms. Adam sometimes gets complaints from interns who say the amenities are not good enough or the farmers work them too hard.

Still, during a recession, a summer on the farm provides respite from grim job hunts and as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe. But for many students, farm life is a way to act on the growing enthusiasm for locally raised food and the increased concern over food safety and the environmental impact of agriculture.

Some students say food is the political movement of their time. “I no longer wish I was born in the ’60s,” said Mr. Katz, 20, who discovered farming as an outgrowth of his interest in environmental issues.

But food policy is much more personal than deforestation or global warming. “Everyone eats, and everyone has a vested interest in this,” he said.

The new rush from campus to country is not among conventional agricultural students from land-grant schools. Many of those still seek internships on large-scale farms or with companies like Monsanto, although interest in studying conventional agriculture has been in decline for at least a decade, said John P. Reganold, a soil science professor at Washington State University. To counter that, Washington State in 2006 became the first university to offer an organic farming degree, he said.

About a third of the new agrarians will receive college credit, he and other professors estimated. The rest have to be satisfied with room, board and a stipend that can be as little as $25 a week and as much as $300 a week or more at larger farms.

At 3-Corner Field Farm in Shushan, N.Y., Karen Weinberg hires one intern to help her raise lambs and make sheep’s milk cheese. This year she had more than 20 applicants, a significant increase over last year.

She picked Ms. Runfola, who had already worked for her selling cheese at the Greenmarket in Union Square in New York.

Ms. Runfola, who grew up on the Jersey Shore and has never even gone camping, will plot her next move from a small trailer parked a half a city block away from the Internet connection in the main farmhouse.

Although she has come to understand a lot more about where food comes from, she is not as strident as some of her new agrarian friends.

“Working on the farm really doesn’t pay that much, so it’s not helping me economically,” said Ms. Runfola, 22, who has left New York University and plans to attend a less expensive college. “But it’s free room and board while I figure out my next move.”

Dru Rivers has had more than 150 people fill out the online application to be one of four interns working her 200 acres of organic fruits and vegetables at Full Belly Farm in Northern California. That is three times as many as last year.

Ms. Rivers, who began farming organically 25 years ago, said her generation had inspired the next.

Alex Liebman, 19, is part of that new wave. He is taking a leave from working on his biology degree at Macalester College in St. Paul to spend a year at Full Belly Farm.

His parents, who raised him in Holyoke, Mass., are environmentalists and supporters of local agriculture. His father would refuse to drive him to soccer practice because he thought using a car to travel somewhere to exercise was ridiculous.

This will be Mr. Liebman’s third farm internship. He has come to love the muscle fatigue that sets in at the end of a day. The rhythm of farm life is a welcome break from cellphones and Facebook. And the work makes him feel as if he is doing something to better the world.

“I’m not sure that I can affect how messed up poverty is in Africa or change politics in Washington,” he said, “but on the farm I can see the fruits of my labor.”

“By actually waking up every day and working in the field and putting my principles into action, I am making a conscious political decision,” he added.

Sometimes, the interns can get a little too political. Recently, an intern in Florida wanted to report her organic farmer for using antibiotics on sick sheep. Under national organic regulations, that is permitted as long as the treated animal is separated from the herd — a fact the young agrarian did not know.

She called Ms. Adam, who set her straight. “She thought the farmer wasn’t P.C. enough,” Ms. Adam said. “A lot of these students are very idealistic in terms of farming.”

Rick and Kristie Knoll, who for 30 years have worked a 10-acre plot in Brentwood, Calif., used to hire interns who were eager to be part of a farm that supplies restaurants like Chez Panisse. But it got to be too much work.

“These are kids who are not used to living in a small trailer or doing any kind of work,” Ms. Knoll said. “Most of them are privileged and think they want to try something new. They need structure. We need farmhands.”

One about the very firstest Jewish American Girl doll ever.

American Girl’s Journey to the Lower East Side
By ALLEN SALKIN

WHEN Abraham Foxman met Rebecca Rubin, he was impressed.

“I’m surprised,” said Mr. Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, as he gazed at Rebecca, a brown-haired doll who was sitting on his desk last week, her hazel eyes locked unwaveringly onto his.

Ms. Rubin, all of 18 inches tall, is the newest historical character doll to be released by American Girl, the company in Middleton, Wis., whose products have a rabidly devoted following among the female 7- to 12-year-old set. She is a 9-year-old girl living on the Lower East Side in 1914 with her Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, siblings and a grandmother known only as Bubbie.

The company has produced a Hispanic doll, Josefina, a character who lives in New Mexico in 1824; a Nez Percé girl, Kaya, from 1764; and an African-American girl, Addy, from 1864. Rebecca is its first Jewish historical character.

Mr. Foxman, whose group fights anti-Semitism, is not easy to impress. On a windowsill of his office on Third Avenue he has a collection of wooden dolls, which he bought in Poland last October, that portray Jewish businessmen counting piles of coins.

At the request of a reporter, Mr. Foxman had read the first of six books that chronicle a year in Rebecca’s life.

“It’s not offensive. It’s sensitive,” he said. “How about that? Most of the time these things fall into stereotypes which border on the offensive.”

It is no accident that the Rebecca doll, which goes on sale May 31, did not push any of Mr. Foxman’s buttons. Every detail of her background, her appearance and whom she would be if she were actually alive, is a result of a painstaking multiyear effort by American Girl to get this character and her marketing right.

What is at stake for the 23-year-old American Girl company, which was purchased by Mattel in 1998 and which generated $463 million in revenue last year, is maintaining its record of hit dolls and generally favorable reviews. In 1993 critics attacked the company for making Addy a slave at the start of her stories, wondering why the company could not have chosen a post-slavery era for its African-American doll. And in 2005, Marisol, from the Girl of the Year line, was criticized for a passage in her book that was negative toward an urban Hispanic neighborhood.

Although Addy’s story was not revised and the company says Marisol sold well for the year she was available, a Jewish doll presents her own set of potential pitfalls. While other dolls represented ethnic backgrounds with distinctive visual characteristics, what constitutes a Jewish girl’s appearance is much more open for debate.

The goal is that no one be offended and that Jewish and non-Jewish little girls alike will want to play tenement house with their new toy, which costs $95 — plus more for accessories like a sideboard with a challah resting on it.

The preliminary research that led to Rebecca’s development started in 2000, said Shawn Dennis, the senior vice president for marketing. American Girl had wanted to do a doll focused on the immigrant experience. After work by two in-house historical researchers, and interviews with focus groups, it was decided to make the character Jewish.

“Russian-Jewish immigration, that group has an effect on the labor movement, that group has an effect on the burgeoning Hollywood entertainment business,” Ms. Dennis said. “We thought it would have the makings of what would be a relatable story to tell.”

To write the books, the company found Jacqueline Dembar Greene, who had written a historical novel for young adults set in 1654 about Jewish immigrants to New Amsterdam.

Ms. Greene and company researchers made a trip to Manhattan, visiting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and a row house on East Seventh Street.

There was back and forth between Ms. Greene and American Girl executives about how to handle certain situations, including the fact that in the first book Rebecca and her father work in his Rivington Street shoe shop on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

“There were full meetings about that,” said Ms. Dennis, who learned a lot about Judaism during the project. “There were so many different styles of Jewish practice, some stricter than others, in 1914 and today. What our research told us was the greater pressure during that time period was assimilation and blending in and becoming American.”

As Ms. Greene worked on the books, company designers set about figuring out what Rebecca should look like. The company’s research had found that Rebecca’s Russian-Jewish descent allowed a range of physical characteristics, creating a wide palette of choices, said Megan Boswell, the director of design and development. Facial structure is not typically an issue because the company generally chooses from an existing set of molds.

Hair color was a big issue, debated for years. At first it was a dark auburn, but it was thought that might be too untypical. Ms. Boswell said. Then dark brown, the most common hair color for Russian-Jewish immigrants, was discussed. But perhaps that would be too typical, too predictable, failing to show girls there is not one color that represents all Jewish immigrants.

“In the end, after many discussions weighing out the advantages of both approaches,” Ms. Boswell said, “we created what we felt was an optimum combination and gave her a new mid-tone brown hair color with russet highlights.”

This is not the first Jewish American Girl. The company has a series called “Girl of the Year,” which features contemporary characters, each available only for 12 months. The character for 2001 was Lindsey Bergman, and the opening of her only story book does not display the same misty affection for Jewish culture as do the Rebecca stories. Lindsey, as narrator, describes a matzo ball that is flung across a room: “If you don’t know what a matzo ball is, I’ll tell you,” she narrates. “It’s a slippery, dumpling-like blob of mush that floats around in chicken soup.”

Despite the extensive research into Jewish history, which included consultations with the American Jewish Historical Society and the Yeshiva University Museum, the books are not without errors, said Paula Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, who looked over two of the books at a reporter’s request.

One error was in a passage that says pogroms were carried out by Russian soldiers. Professor Hyman said pogroms, mob violence against Jews, were stirred up by political operatives and typically carried out by peasants. The other was a mention of forced conscription of Jewish boys into the czar’s army in 1914, which ended more than a decade earlier, she said.

To Elie Rosenfeld, the chief operating officer of Joseph Jacob Advertising, whose firm was hired to help market Rebecca through Jewish publications and direct mailings to Jewish households, historical matters were of less concern than ones which would trigger a reaction in modern Jews.

Mr. Rosenfeld read the books with an eye to weeding out mentions of garish physical characteristics, obscure religious practices, or stereotypical professions. But he said he found nothing to cut. “By the time we saw everything, it was so well put together there was nothing we had to pull out and say stop the presses you can’t run this,” he said.

Rebecca’s release date was originally scheduled to be June 1, but it was moved to coincide with Manhattan’s Israel Day parade.

The company hopes the doll will appeal to everyone. If a blond Christian girl in North Dakota enjoys pretending she is living in a tenement on the Lower East Side in 1914, helping her Bubbie make latkes for Hanukkah, American Girl will be happy to sell her a toy menorah.

An article on Stapleton, where I live! Evangeline and Ana have really enjoyed seeing all the sailors for Fleet Week, which kinda changes my ambivalence towards the whole occasion (any occasion that requires the use of multiple flyovers while also crowding the Ferry doesn't exactly get the thumbs up from me). Yesterday the boat was a full 15 minutes late, so we took car service home. The nieces called out the window "Hi sailor! Bye sailor!" at all of them passing, and they spent an amusing several minutes singing an impromptu song about the "three sailors" they saw when walking.

A Quiet Side of Fleet Week, in a Staten Island Neighborhood
By JOSEPH BERGER

If the streets of Stapleton on Staten Island have the forlorn, slipshod look of a onetime seaport, they come by it honestly: Stapleton is indeed a former naval port, though some of the bars and nightclubs that sailors once relished are now shuttered.

But at least once a year, during Fleet Week, Stapleton comes to life as a naval port again. This week, 10 United States and Canadian ships — a destroyer, a cruiser and assorted gray patrol ships — dropped anchor side-by-side off the shoreline here to let sailors unwind and explore.

Of course, the explosion of all that pent up shipboard energy is a pale replica of the better-known scene in Midtown, where wide-eyed sailors and marines come to soak in the sights and honky-tonk of “New York, New York, a helluva town.” Here, among the low-rise brick and clapboard buildings on Canal and Bay Streets in Stapleton’s downtown, they can taste New York pizza at Bari’s, have a hamburger at a White Castle, buy hip-hop clothes at Oz, but not much more.

At noon on Thursday, there were fewer than 10 sailors visible on Stapleton’s sidewalks, most of them just grabbing lunch or takeout from McDonald’s before heading out to Manhattan.

Most of the sailors take a shuttle bus right from the gated Homeport to the Staten Island Ferry, as did Kevin Rohrer, a 6-foot-8 petty officer on the U.S.S. Hurricane who hails from Williamsport, Pa. He planned to see the sights of Manhattan and maybe take in a Yankee game. Did he know what he might be able to see in Staten Island when he got back?

“Honestly, not really,” he said.

But the 100 Staten Islanders serving as Fleet Week volunteers can predict from the experience of years past that many of the sailors who head for Manhattan will deplete their cash after a few days and wind up back here. Among the hangar-like buildings and other bleak remnants of the former Navy station, the volunteers offer the sailors hot dogs, spicy sausages and watermelon slush at rock-bottom prices and a rec room with a pool table. For the lucky few who are “adopted” by local families, there is a stand-alone bed and home-cooked meals.

“Over here, it’s a real hometown atmosphere,” said Donna Cutugno, a manager at a girls’ detention center who leads the volunteer effort. “They get off the ship here, and the recreation center here becomes their home away from home. We stay open 24 hours, and if they come back broke they can play cards and watch TV.”

Hundreds of schoolchildren rush to see the sailors in their crisply pressed white uniforms and hats and then tour the ships; it is an experience that seems to spur fantasies of romance, combat or adventure among the young. Their parents and teachers say that while their borough may be New York’s smallest in population (477,000) and may seem its most forgotten by government services, it sends a significant portion of its young men and women to help fight the country’s wars.

“We have a lot to offer,” said Diane Whalen, a fourth-grade teacher at Eltingville Lutheran School who was leading a school trip. “Staten Island is more intimate, more comfortable than Manhattan.”

Of course, Fleet Week, designed to honor naval sacrifices with a visit by 3,000 sailors, marines and Coast Guard members, may also be a public relations ploy for the maritime services. But Stapleton could use a public relations push as well.

Named after a 19th-century merchant, Stapleton was the site of a farm where the railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up. It was part of the village of Edgewater; the Victorian brick village hall built in 1889 still stands in Tappen Park. The village blossomed into a lively industrial hub specializing in German-American breweries, but lost its autonomous government when Staten Island voted to become part of New York in 1894. It seemed to suffer prolonged neglect after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, which encouraged malls and housing in the island’s interior and the south, not along the northeast shore.

Things briefly looked up when President Ronald Reagan selected Stapleton to be a Navy port in 1983, but then President Bill Clinton closed the base in 1994. In the years since, people like Michael Behar, who in 1998 located his Oz clothing store in what had been one of the nation’s first Woolworth’s, have been pressing city officials to revitalize the area.

Mr. Behar, former chairman of the nonprofit Downtown Staten Island Council, believes Stapleton’s worst days are behind it. Artists seeking cheap housing and good light have moved into the low-rise buildings, and he has created an exhibition space above his store called Gallery 6, which has a half-dozen exhibits a year.

Immigrants — Albanians, West Africans and Mexicans among them — have given the working-class neighborhood a polyglot flavor. Crime has declined sharply. But Mr. Behar feels there has been little visible progress in redevelopment of the 36-acre Homeport site, though no shortage of visions, including one for a Formula One racetrack and a movie studio.

The latest city plan would build 350 housing units and a sports complex. Some $66 million for new roadways and other infrastructure was approved in 2006, but the city is still designing those improvements. In the meantime, the Homeport’s buildings house a court, a police squad and a firefighting marine unit.

“Fifteen years later, it’s still sitting fallow with pristine views of New York City,” Mr. Behar said. “It’s an area going through a renaissance on its own without the help of the local elected.”

All that, of course, is unknown to the sailors, who have enjoyed its modest pleasures: Graylin Gammage, a cook aboard the guided missile cruiser Vella Gulf, liked the jazz he heard and the chicken fingers he nibbled at a local bar. And some sailors like Stapleton’s quiet contrast to the razzle-dazzle of Times Square and its embrace of the military.

Schlepping chow from a McDonald’s back to his crewmates, Thomas Donovan of Nova Scotia said he planned to see the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Strawberry Fields in Central Park. But he also wanted to stroll around the nearby neighborhood.

“I want to see stuff I don’t know much about,” he said. “That’s why I joined the Navy.”

One on how proposals to legalize gay marriage in NY (yay) are having trouble finding opposition. Good. I cannot believe the nerve of some groups trying to call themselves "pro-family". Fucking twits.

Gay Marriage Slow to Draw an Opposition in N.Y.
By JEREMY W. PETERS

ALBANY — Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn was feeling distressed.

The State Assembly had just voted to legalize same-sex marriage, after gay rights groups flooded the Legislature with visits, phone calls and e-mail messages. Where, he wanted to know, was the other side?

“Wake up! Where are you?” Mr. Hikind, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, said in an interview. “It’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, and you’re losing — big time.”

As the Legislature considers whether to make New York the next state to legalize same-sex marriage, social conservatives have been largely missing from the debate in Albany.

The interest groups working to legalize marriage for gay couples have been laying the groundwork for more than four years, lobbying lawmakers and funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to their campaigns. And last week they began running television commercials in three of the state’s largest media markets promoting same-sex marriage as an equal rights issue.

Their opponents, who are just beginning to organize, say they feel outgunned and underfinanced.

The difficulties in New York echo those that conservatives have faced throughout the Northeast. Over the last six weeks, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have all moved to allow gay couples to wed.

The region has been challenging for opponents of same-sex marriage, in part, because the measures are being decided by state legislatures — not voter referendums where the opponents’ ability to motivate large numbers of voters, rather than influence institutional players, has been an advantage.

“It is the lack of a proposition or referendum,” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said. “There is a disconnect within the constituencies. Many of them really have no idea how to present their grievances.”

In New York, the National Organization for Marriage, whose resources have been stretched thin from other campaigns in the Northeast, began making phone calls to recruit supporters only late last week.

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

“Frankly, the governor caught us all by surprise when he put this bill out there,” said Dennis Poust, communications director for the New York State Catholic Conference, the bishops’ political arm. “We weren’t expecting it.”

Other groups that typically take the lead on conservative causes, like New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms and the Conservative Party of New York State, say they lack the resources to mount a broad media campaign.

And the state does not have the large numbers of evangelical Christians and Mormons that have helped fuel movements to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples in other states, like California.

“It’s been a little bit of a challenge in New York,” said Peter S. Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, the Washington-based conservative advocacy group led by Tony Perkins. “The pro-family network in New York is not as well organized as it is in other states.”

The only statewide organization dedicated to preserving New York’s marriage laws is the Coalition to Save Marriage, an alliance of conservative leaders that has no headquarters or staff.

“I wish I would have started six years ago,” said Maggie Gallagher, who founded the National Organization for Marriage, based in Princeton, N.J., in 2007. “I would have a state organization. I would have a director who’s a National Organization for Marriage person who’s directly lobbying. But that’s not where I am.”

The State Assembly passed Gov. David A. Paterson’s bill to give same-sex couples the right to wed by a vote of 89 to 52 last week, and gay rights advocates are pushing for a vote in the closely divided Senate before the Legislature adjourns at the end of June.

Supporters have a financial advantage, too. The National Organization for Marriage said it planned to spend a minimum of $100,000 on its efforts in New York, mainly on telephone and e-mail appeals to voters and the purchase of ads on Web sites. The Empire State Pride Agenda, the leading gay rights organization, is already spending at least twice that on its TV advertising campaign and has hired Patricia Lynch Associates, one of Albany’s most influential lobbying firms, for $10,000 a month.

To be sure, those advantages do not guarantee that advocates will prevail in the 62-member Senate, and supporters concede they still need several votes to pass the marriage measure.

Still, social conservatives in New York state have seemed somewhat fragmented in recent years, lacking a galvanizing issue like the death penalty, over which they waged epic battles with Govs. Mario M. Cuomo and Hugh L. Carey.

“Everybody is operating in their own stratosphere,” said Michael R. Long, chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State.

Mr. Long said the Conservative Party would do what it could with its limited arsenal: e-mail messages to legislators, news releases and a call to action on its blog.

“If I had the money or the wherewithal, naturally I’d like to be on radio or TV,” he said.

The efforts have also been hurt by the lack of a statewide political figure to lead the opposition. The state’s two senators, governor, legislative leaders and attorney general all support allowing gay couples to wed.

Even the new archbishop of New York, Timothy M. Dolan, whose upbeat personality and communication savvy suggest he could be a powerful voice on public policy, has no plans to step into the debate, his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said last week.

“Not at this point, no,” Mr. Zwilling said. “He’s letting the conference take their normal role,” referring to the bishops’ political arm.

Mr. Paterson said the archbishop did not raise the issue when the two met last month.

Still, there have been stirrings since the Assembly passed the marriage bill.

Hispanic churches organized a rally outside Mr. Paterson’s office in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday that drew thousands of people.

The phone solicitations by the National Organization for Marriage are focusing on districts where opponents believe senators’ positions can be influenced. Residents who oppose same-sex marriage are being asked to donate money or contact their senator.

“The other side, as far as the time they’ve spent organizing in New York, it’s clearly the case that they’re ahead of us,” said Brian S. Brown, the group’s executive director. “But we have only partially been on the field of play.” He added: “Wait till we get on the field.”

An article on recent urban planning in NYC. Go look at it, it's got a nifty graphic with a before and after view of a street in Brooklyn

In the Future, the City’s Streets Are to Behave
By DAVID W. CHEN

Imagine narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds. Sidewalks made of recycled rubber in different colors under sleek energy-efficient lamps. Mini-islands jutting into the street, topped by trees and landscaping, designed to further slow traffic and add a dash of green.

This is what New York City streets could look like, according to the Bloomberg administration, which has issued the city’s first street design manual in an effort to make over the utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape that dominates the city.

The Department of Transportation will begin reviewing development plans to see whether they align with the 232-page manual’s guidelines, and promises that projects with these features will win approval quickly.

“Lots of things have changed in 40 years, but this part of our infrastructure hasn’t,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner. “If we’re going to be a world-class city, we need guidelines that lay out the operating instructions of how we get there.”

The manual, to be released on Wednesday, culminates nearly two years of work involving more than a dozen agencies led by the Department of Transportation. By offering “a single framework and playbook,” as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg says in the introduction, the manual promises to simplify the design process and reduce the costs for city agencies, urban planners, developers and community groups.

Urban planners say that the document is long overdue, and that it promises to be as much a map to the future as it is a handbook for the present: getting people to think about streets as not just thoroughfares for cars, but as public spaces incorporating safety, aesthetics, environmental and community concerns.

Robert Moses, Mr. Bloomberg is not.

“Moses had a sort of utopian view of orderly, suburban places that de-emphasized New York’s ‘cityness,’ while Bloomberg embraces the soul of the city itself and recognizes it as a solution to the region’s environmental, sustainability, and energy problems,” said Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

Some drivers, though, are reserving judgment. Taxi drivers, for one, say that while they appreciate the city’s efforts to beautify the streets, they hope that they do not lead, even indirectly, to fewer parking spots or traffic that is too slow.

“The streets are a place where many motorists need access to, in order to earn a livelihood, so what would be of some concern is if there was less space for vehicles, or drivers had to slow down to complete their fares,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

The manual does not supersede any laws or regulations and it does not portend rapid changes visible overnight to residents or visitors; rather, the effect should be gradual, and in keeping with the character of a neighborhood, the manual says.

Still, the manual stands out as an unequivocal mission statement, echoing guides issued in recent years by cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Washington and Portland, Ore. It also complements a broad push by the Bloomberg administration to make the city more amenable to pedestrians and bicyclists — with next week’s closing of parts of Broadway being one prominent, if controversial, example.

For the most part, though, the manual spells out in technical detail a wealth of choices as to what the city likes — and doesn’t like — when it comes to roadways, sidewalks, trees, lighting and benches.

A good portion of the manual analyzes the different materials deemed attractive, practical and cost-effective. These include flexible rubber sidewalk pavers, which can be shaped to avoid trees or other objects. They also include several kinds of LED street lights.

One example illustrating the difference the guide could make is a stretch of Carlton Avenue near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Years ago, it was just an uninviting ribbon of pavement, stretching into the horizon; now, it looks like an integral part of the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill neighborhoods, with a large white median dotted by trees.

The manual also sheds light on how cumbersome the design process for development or renovation has been, given the number of agencies or entities normally involved. On a typical street, according to one illustration, almost a dozen entities — including six city agencies — are responsible for elements ranging from sidewalk cafes (Department of Consumer Affairs) to utility poles (Department of Transportation) to facades or awnings (Department of Buildings).

“In tough times, it’s vital to pioneer new cost-efficient practices, especially when dealing with the expensive need to maintain the city’s infrastructure,” said Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler.

At times, the manual has the veneer of a vicarious travel guide, because many of the photographs depict scenes from places outside New York: a roundabout in Asheville, N.C.; a neighborhood traffic circle in West Palm Beach, Fla.; a dedicated bus lane in Paris; a raised intersection in Cologne, Germany; and a shared street in Brighton, England.

City Councilman John C. Liu, chairman of the Council’s Transportation Committee, said the important thing was to simplify the overall process of development as it relates to the streets.

“I think it’s positive, because the city has always been notorious for imposing all sorts of requirements and new standards which often take people by surprise,” said Mr. Liu, who has sometimes clashed with the Department of Transportation. “This will have the effect of encouraging people toward this kind of standard without making people jump through hoops.”