Living On The Front Line- US Domestic Militarization

   The American Domestic Militarization starts in our border areas.

 

 

 

August 17, 2013

War on the Border

By TODD MILLER

THREE generations of Loews have worked the family’s 63 acres in Amado, Ariz. In the last 20 years, the Loew family harvested thousands of pounds of onions, garlic and pumpkins without incident. So Stewart Loew, 44, who was born and raised on the farm, was surprised when he went to irrigate his fields one night and found himself surrounded by federal agents.

Pointing to the fires about 200 feet away that Mr. Loew lit to keep warm while he irrigated his fields, one of the agents slogged out of the ankle deep water in the irrigation ditch and asked Mr. Loew what he was doing.

“I’m irrigating, dude,” said Mr. Loew, who was in his pajamas. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t ‘dude’ me, I’m a federal officer,” the Border Patrol agent said, and demanded Mr. Loew’s identification.

Since Mr. Loew did not carry his wallet in his pajama pocket, the agents followed him into his house; a local police officer, who knew the Loew family, had already arrived, vouched for Mr. Loew’s identity and assured the federal agents that Mr. Loew posed no threat to the homeland or national security, and the agents left without comment or apology.

This kind of brush with law enforcement would have been unthinkable to previous generations of farmers here. But these run-ins have become increasingly common in the rugged, hilly desert stretch along the southern borderlands where, in the post-9/11 world, everyone — even farmers in pajamas — is a potential threat.

The United States-Mexico border has become a war zone. It is also a transfer station for sophisticated American military technology and weapons. As our country’s foreign wars have begun to wind down, defense contractors look here, on the southern border, to make money.

Lately it has become entirely normal to look up into the Arizona sky and to see Blackhawk helicopters and fixed-wing jets flying by. On a clear day, you can sometimes hear Predator B drones buzzing over the Sonoran border. These drones are equipped with the same kind of “man-hunting” Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (Vader) that flew over the Dashti Margo desert region in Afghanistan.

The Border Patrol is part of Customs and Border Protection, now the federal government’s largest law-enforcement agency. Its presence is a constant factor not only in the lives of Stewart Loew and his neighbors, but also in the lives of those who live in places like San Diego, El Paso, Brownsville, Tex., and other big cities along the southern border that have sizable Latino populations.

The Border Patrol, however, concerns itself far less with counterterrorism than with the agency’s traditional tasks of immigration and drug enforcement. This creates an uneasy mixture of missions. And it results in the deployment of an expensive military apparatus to police and capture immigrants who cross the border in the hopes of finding jobs as maids, janitors or day laborers.

In 2012, a majority of the more than 364,000 people arrested by Border Patrol agents nationwide were migrant workers crossing the border. Agents did not capture or arrest a single international terrorist.

But they have disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of people like Stewart Loew who live and work near the border. There’s a point on Interstate 19, two miles from the Loews’ farm, that buzzes with what borderland residents call the “men in green,” who stop and interrogate everyone who drives past. Border Patrol vehicles scan the off-road areas smugglers and migrants use to circumvent official checkpoints. A mobile control tower with a sophisticated surveillance system mounted on its cabin is visible near the Loews’ farm.

The Department of Homeland Security, which includes Customs and Border Protection, plans to invest billions more in borderland surveillance towers, drones and helicopters if the House adopts the immigration reform bill that the Senate passed in June. Even if it doesn’t pass, there is more than $1 billion in the federal budget for surveillance towers that will likely be clustered around the Arizona desert lands, near Mr. Loew’s farm, where most undocumented migrants cross the border.

The Republican senators Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota added a proposal to the immigration bill that would provide about $40 billion in financing for extra agents and 700 miles of fencing along the United States’ southern boundary, which Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, noted would become “the most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Indeed, if the Senate’s bill, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, passes in the House, the Border Patrol will swell to 40,000 agents, making it the size of a small army.

In recent years, we have built up our boundary and immigration policing apparatus with great speed. Founded in 1924, the Border Patrol deployed just over 4,000 agents in 1993. In only 20 years the agency’s ranks have more than quintupled, and if the reform passes it will increase its size tenfold.

The Border Patrol buildup in the aftermath of 9/11 was unparalleled. In the 10-year period following 9/11, the United States spent a staggering $90 billion on border enforcement.

In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.

Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.”

In 1999, the anthropologist Josiah Heyman wrote that the Southwest was becoming a “militarized border society, where more and more people either work for the watchers, or are watched by the state.”

There is nowhere else in the country with such extensive and concentrated surveillance technology; nor is there any part of the United States in which people are as clearly divided between the police and the policed.

And the militarized security zone has begun to creep beyond the southern border and to affect those who live near the northern border in places like Spokane, Wash., Detroit and Erie, Pa., where the Border Patrol has significantly increased its ranks.

IN the border zone — 100 miles from the boundary into the interior — the Border Patrol’s authority extends beyond that of other law enforcement agencies. For example, agents have the authority to conduct routine searches at the border even in the absence of reasonable suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.

“The problem with giving the largest federal law enforcement agency, and one that operates with few if any accountability mechanisms, is that it is a recipe for civil liberties abuses, and seriously risks further erosion of Fourth Amendment rights,” says James Duff Lyall, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. Mr. Lyall notes that the areas involved constitute a sizable portion of the country; if you consider land and coastal borders, this 100-mile zone encompasses approximately two-thirds of the United States population.

Agents that operate in the 100-mile zone now regularly board buses and trains and ask passengers for identification. They have — and use — the authority to further question anyone who raises suspicions, especially people who appear to be from another country.

In 2007, for example, a Border Patrol agent in Syracuse, N.Y., asked Silvio Torres-Saillant, a professor of English at Syracuse University, to produce his documents. When Mr. Torres-Saillant, a United States citizen of Hispanic descent, gave the agent his university identification, the agent demanded additional documents. At the Border Patrol’s Rochester, N.Y., station, 2,743 people were arrested on buses, trains and in stations from 2006 to 2009.

Border Patrol agents record the skin complexion of the people they arrest, and most of those arrested were of “medium” complexion and from Latin America, according to a 2011 report, “Justice Derailed: What Raids on New York’s Trains and Buses Reveal About Border Patrol’s Interior Enforcement Practices,” by the New York University School of Law and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

In a much-publicized incident, Border Patrol agents stopped Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, 125 miles south of the border, in New York. When Mr. Leahy asked what authority the agent had to detain him, the agent pointed to his gun and said, “That’s all the authority I need.”

The Immigration and Nationality Act gives Border Patrol agents even greater authority when they operate within 25 miles of the international border. Here agents “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.”

Mr. Loew says agents don’t always comply with the 25-mile exemptions; he points out that his farm in Amado is 30 miles from the border, and that that did not stop agents from entering his property or from surrounding him while he prepared to irrigate his fields.

Three years after Mr. Loew’s brush with federal agents, Border Patrol agents held his 16-year-old son at gunpoint after they mistook the minivan he was driving for another one. Mr. Loew says he wonders if the agents were veterans, since so many Border Patrol recruits seem to be ex-military men; in fact, almost one-third of all agents have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s no wonder that more and more people in the 100-mile zone from across the political spectrum view the Border Patrol as an occupying army.

If immigration reform passes, it will mark another milestone in a transformation that has already resulted in the creation of a war-zone-like area in which agents enjoy special powers to chase down, question and detain people.

Two oversight offices within the Department of Homeland Security have already received hundreds of complaints of rights violations, including beatings and Taser shootings, at the border. In the last three years, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 15 people along the Southwest border. Whether or not the immigration bill passes, the militarization of the border and the disturbance it causes people like Stewart Loew suggest it is time to look seriously into how we might better police the agencies that police the border.

Todd Miller is the author of the forthcoming book “Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/opinion/sunday/war-on-the-border.html?hp&_r=0

Food Marketing Culture

How Goya became your go-to at the grocery store

August 25, 2013
By Lydia DePillis

About a year ago, in Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, an independent grocer called Bestway changed hands. The new owner is In Suk Pak, a South Korean by way of Pennsylvania. He renamed the store Bestworld, replacing the second word of the big-block letters out front. He rejiggered the store’s product mix to fit the neighborhood’s changing demographics, adding gourmet chips and high-end beers and Asian items like wasabi peas and dried seaweed.

But there was one aisle he didn’t touch: Goya’s.

Festooned with blue Goya-labeled tape and a Goya-logo spice rack, the aisle is densely packed with sacks, cans, boxes, bottles and jars of every imaginable bean, grain, sauce, juice and spice. The Goya salesperson just tells him what he needs to fill the section, and he’s happy to take the advice.

“I’m not Latino. I don’t know what they eat,” says Pak, shuffling around in a pink striped polo shirt supervising stocking on a Wednesday morning. Plus, he says, the neighborhood’s non-Hispanic residents will buy Goya, too.

Just a block away, Progreso International also stocks Goya products – they’re cheap and of good quality, the proprietor says.

That level of trust among urban Hispanic communities has landed Goya in nearly every corner bodega and medium-size independent grocery store like Bestworld. And while Goya seems exotic, the food is mostly not imported, or even run by people with roots in Latin cultures.
Behind the label

The company, in fact, is based in New Jersey. It was founded 77 years ago by Spaniards who had come to New York through Puerto Rico. It has hired enough natives to develop a flavor profile that’s close to the real thing and has marketed itself as an Hispanic-owned company.

Now, it’s the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States, with $1.3 billion in sales last year (still a long way behind market giants like General Mills, which brought in $16.7 billion in 2012).

But the burgeoning Hispanic population isn’t enough for Goya. It has moved into other foreign cuisines, like Indian and Chinese, in a bid to become the food company for all people new to America. It’s also developing products for second and third generations of immigrants, who might want something pre-cooked but still homey-tasting, or who might have intermarried with other nationalities and want to mix everything together (“Latin fusion” is featured prominently in the website’s recipe section).

“It’s a United Nations kind of label,” says Bob Gorland, a supermarket consultant at Matthew P. Casey & Associates. He regards Goya, more than any other brand, as a section unto itself, much like the kosher aisle or natural foods area.

Now, as the “general market” becomes more interested in ethnic cuisines, Goya has positioned itself as the “authentic” option that you don’t have to rummage through ethnic markets to find. In other words, Goya is becoming white.

Which, commercially, is a pretty unbeatable approach.

Goya – so named after the Spanish painter because founder Prudencio Unanue Ortiz liked the simplicity and vague familiarity of the name – started out packing and selling olives and olive oil in Brooklyn. It’s now a sprawling network of 16 worldwide processing and distribution centers, mostly based in the United States. In Puerto Rico and Spain, Goya now supplies the reverse immigrant population from Latin American countries.

The company headquarters is across the street from the Secaucus, N.J., train station. To see the actual packing under way, visitors don a hairnet and earplugs and push through a door to the factory floor (most of the canning is done in Buffalo, N.Y.).

From there, it’s another very short cab ride to the cavernous warehouse, which is stacked floor to ceiling both with gigantic sacks of raw ingredients on their way to packaging as well as Goya’s 2,200 finished products (plus quite a few products that other big brands like Nestle pay the company to store and distribute).
The Goya way

That Goya has warehouses at all is unusual. Many big food companies ship their products directly to warehouses belonging to grocery chains, like Safeway, which load their own trucks from there.

Goya always has done direct store delivery – “DSD” in industry jargon – because, as the owners see it, every store has a different audience. The sales staff researches local immigrant groups with the help of a business intelligence tool called Geoscape, as well as more enterprising techniques, like hanging out at the local money transfer franchise to see where people are sending checks home to. That way, Goya knows how to stock exactly what Cubans or Salvadorans or Peruvians are looking for, which creates brand loyalty.

“To us, it’s important to make the connection through a product that maybe we’re not going to sell truckloads of, but we’re going to have the product on the shelf so when a consumer goes in they say, ‘Wow, I can relate to Goya because it’s authentic, this product makes me feel like I’m at home,’ ” says Peter Unanue, the chief executive’s younger brother and an executive vice president in charge of distribution.

Often, Goya’s representatives even will help the big supermarkets decide how to stock the rest of their store to welcome local immigrant groups, like selling plantains and yucca in the produce section if there are lots of Mexicans living nearby, and consulting on the right cuts of meat.

In more and more demographics, Goya is now familiar.

“People have the tendency to be a little more creative with what they’re cooking, and I think they get that alternative with the products Goya offers,” says Gary Budd, who manages stocking for Giant Foods in the middle Atlantic.

Even Wal-Mart is seeing things Goya’s way. “When we first started to do business with them, they wanted to put a generic program in place,” Lopez says. “It wasn’t successful because of the diverse ethnicities.”

Goya certainly isn’t without competition – from brands like Del Monte and Bush’s, but also often from supermarkets themselves. Giant and Target will put a store-brand can of beans next to Goya’s, at a few nickels off the price. In those situations, Goya likes to contend that its products have a higher quality than the generic brand.

Ubiquity, however, is an even bigger advantage for Goya than perceptions of quality. Food bloggers sometimes specify Goya ingredients because it’s the easiest way to identify what to look for. Yvette Marquez runs a popular Mexican food website called Muy Bueno. She started out in El Paso, Texas, where there were lots of options for ingredients. Now she’s in Denver, where she’s found that ethnic food aisles are more limited to Goya products. “I’ve recommended Goya products because I know people will be able to find it,” she says. Plus, they have items like ready-made empanada dough.

But, she notes, it’s not exactly gourmet fare. The hipster foodies still probably will seek out super-specialty items in bodegas that carry things the supermarkets won’t. For everyone else, there’s Goya.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/23/how-goya-brought-ethnic-food-to-white-america/

Jewish Rome

From The New York Times Travel Section -

July 12, 2013

Echoes From the Roman Ghetto

By DAVID LASKIN

The Portico d’Ottavia is one of those chunks of urban surrealism that you come across only in Rome. From a cavity about 20 feet below street level, the ruin of a massive 2,000-year-old portico thrusts its crumbling marble geometry into the present. The dome of a Baroque church, Santa Maria in Campitelli, peers down from the next piazza like a nosy matron.

A few steps from the ruins, multilingual waiters reel in tourists to dine on their terraces amid pyramids of artichokes. A poster on a palace wall hawks kosher sushi — coming soon! Bearded men in skullcaps jostle students in tank tops.

No one seems the least bit thrown by this jarring mosaic of times and cultures. Everybody is too busy talking, sipping, pointing, sauntering, forking up something delicious.

For half a millennium, the Portico d’Ottavia has been the heart of Rome’s Jewish ghetto, four cramped blocks wedged between the Tiber, the Turtle Fountain, the Theater of Marcellus and the Palazzo Cenci. Amid today’s celebration of earthly pleasures, I had trouble finding the small wall plaque that commemorates “la spietata caccia agli ebrei” — the merciless hunting down of the Jews — that took place here on Oct. 16, 1943.

Seventy years ago, the world was at war, Rome was occupied by the Nazis, and the ghetto was a virtual prison for a large part of the city’s Jewish community. On the morning of Oct. 16, 1943, SS Captain Theodor Dannecker ordered that the prison be emptied.

Trucks pulled up on the cobblestoned piazza beside the Portico d’Ottavia, the neighborhood was sealed, and 365 German soldiers fanned out through the narrow streets and courtyards. Families hid at the backs of their shuttered shops. The able-bodied and quick-witted jumped from their windows or fled along the rooftops. The unlucky were hounded from their homes at gunpoint and herded into the idling trucks. Of the more than 1,000 Roman Jews seized that day and later transported to Auschwitz, only 16 survived.

On a balmy night in April, I sat pondering that dark time with my wife and two of our daughters on the terrace of Ba” Ghetto, a lively restaurant near the Portico d’Ottavia. All around us, waiters were bearing platters of grilled meat and assuring tourists that their fried artichokes alla giudia were the best in Rome. Deep into the night, a sparkler ignited atop a slice of cake and everyone sang “tanti auguri a te” (happy birthday to you) to a 20-something beauty.

It was impossible not to be stunned by the contrast between the festive present and the somber past. Even a dozen years ago, when we first visited the ghetto, the neighborhood felt forlorn and insular. Old, suspicious eyes sized us up as we made our way past kosher butchers and shabby tailor shops. Jews had been confined to these flood-prone riverside streets in 1555 by Pope Paul IV, and in 2001, an aura of melancholy still lingered.

But today the place is a party. Well-heeled Romans flock to the ghetto to “eat Jewish” the way New Yorkers pop down to Little Italy or Chinatown. On that soft spring evening, with Israeli cabernet brimming in our wineglasses and plates heaped with hummus and couscous, we had trouble summoning up the shadows of the past.

In this city’s 2,000 years of glorious and inglorious history, the nine-month German occupation (Sept. 11, 1943, to June 4, 1944) is just a nick. But, as I learned in the course of a week spent chatting with bakers and archivists, museum curators and rabbis, cabdrivers and historians, the nick remains raw. “Memories of Hitler and Fascism are still vivid,” Alessandra di Castro, director of the Jewish Museum of Rome, told me. “The wound still has not healed.”

The deepest wound was inflicted on the ghetto (ex-ghetto, as Ms. di Castro corrected me with fierce pride), but there are other sites around the city that bear witness to the struggle and suffering of those months. With a good map, some bus tickets and a bit of imagination, I was able to tease out this painful, fascinating chapter of Roman history.

From our rented apartment at the foot of the Janiculum Hill, I trekked out to corners of the city that most tourists, unaware of their connection to the war, either avoid or hurry through. A 20-minute stroll along the Tiber brought me to the ex-ghetto, but I had to cross the city on two buses to reach the Via Tasso, site of a notorious SS prison and now a museum. And from there it took another 15 minutes by tram to reach the San Lorenzo neighborhood, which was heavily bombed by the Allies.

It was helpful before setting out to brush up on history. Rome and Berlin, of course, were allies in World War II — but when the Allies took Sicily in July 1943 and began massing for an invasion of the Italian mainland, the Fascist axis collapsed. Mussolini was ousted, and the weak new government that took control began secretly negotiating for an armistice.

The Nazis, however, had no intention of letting Italy go neutral. When an armistice was announced on Sept. 8, the German army sprang to disarm Italian soldiers and shore up positions on the Italian mainland. Rome waited and trembled as the Germans closed in.

On Sept. 10, a troop of disbanded Italian soldiers and civilians made a desperate last stand at Rome’s Porta San Paolo. The battle raged through the day outside the gate’s crenelated twin towers and beneath the Pyramid of Cestius, which looms over the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats and Shelley lie. Some 597 Italian soldiers and civilians, including 27 women, died defending their city, but by day’s end the Germans prevailed.

I asked the attendants in the little gift shop inside the cemetery if they knew where the battle had been fought, and one of them directed me to the nearby Parco della Resistenza dell’8 Settembre. I strolled around the rather unkempt park, past parents airing babies in the shade of palms and sycamores. But aside from a plaque commemorating “the soldiers of every corps and citizens of every class who opposed the German invaders,” I found little trace of the battle.

Shadows were lengthening as I made my way through the Porta San Paolo and waded into the roaring traffic of the Piazza dei Partigiani (Plaza of the Partisans), a major transportation hub just outside the city walls. Here I caught a tram to the San Lorenzo neighborhood, a working-class district about three miles east of the ghetto.

On July 19, 1943, shortly before the fall of Mussolini, Allied aircraft bombed San Lorenzo hoping to take out a crucial railway pivot point. In the course of the bombardment, some 2,000 to 3,000 Roman civilians died, and a stray bomb heavily damaged the gorgeous Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, parts of which date back to the sixth century. I wanted to check out what the church and neighborhood look like today.

The tram skirted the hoary arches of the Porta Maggiore and rumbled through the ugly, gritty but supposedly gentrifying blocks near the vast University of Rome complex. My stop was next to a modern parking lot that might have been in the Bronx. I was about to recheck the map when I spotted San Lorenzo’s mellow 12th-century brick campanile rising against a stand of horse chestnuts. The basilica’s door swung shut behind me, and the modern world blinked out into the Middle Ages.

Photos in the sacristy show the ruin that remained after an American bomb caved in the roof of the nave and shattered parts of the mosaic floor, one of the most beautiful in Rome. Stone by stone, the crimson and white coils and diamonds were lovingly retrieved and set back into place

As my guidebook instructed, I descended a short flight of steps at the end of the nave to find the tomb of St. Lawrence, who was martyred over hot coals in the year 258.

But the moment that will stay with me came in the 12th-century cloister. Amid the dainty paired columns and drifts of myrtle and herbs, I stumbled upon a fragment of a bomb’s casing that was pried out of the rubble in 1943 — a shard of American steel displayed incongruously in a sacred Roman garden.

In the days that followed, I asked a number of Italians whether Romans harbored any bitterness toward the United States over the collateral damage at San Lorenzo: a beloved basilica in ruins, thousands of citizens killed in a bombing raid gone awry. The answer was always the same: We are still grateful to America because you liberated us from the Nazis.

The Via Tasso, about midway between San Lorenzo and the ghetto, is an undistinguished thoroughfare of 19th- and early-20th-century apartment blocks and schools, with a crumbling arch at one end and the sanctuary of the Scala Sancta (the sacred stairs that Jesus trod) at the other. It looks like a comfortable, convenient place where middle-class Romans and striving immigrants live, though not a spot you’d go out of your way to visit.

But during the nine months of the Nazi occupation, Via Tasso 145 was the most feared address in Rome. It was here in a charmless, smudged yellow apartment house that the SS and the Gestapo had their headquarters, their prison and their torture chambers. During the occupation, the place was so dreaded that Romans never called it the Via Tasso. Instead they would say laggiù (down there), as in, “He was hauled off laggiù.”

If you’ve seen the classic Roberto Rossellini film “Rome, Open City,” you’ll have some idea of the sinister atmosphere of sadism and despair that infected the Via Tasso. Former apartments were walled off into tiny cells where political prisoners and captured partisans lived in the dark with no bed or toilet. The Italian writer Corrado Augias was an 8-year-old student at a boarding school that backed up on the Via Tasso. “Even after so many years,” he writes, “I can still clearly remember the screams that sometimes broke the stillness of the night and penetrated all the way inside our dormitory.”

The former Gestapo headquarters is now the site of the Historical Museum of the Liberation of Rome, with displays devoted to the brutality of the Nazi occupation and the response of the Roman people. Artifacts are sparse but heartbreaking: a sock embroidered with the words “courage my love” that a wife or mother smuggled in, a tortured prisoner’s bloody shirt, a mournful portrait of Colonel Giuseppe Cordero di Montezemolo, an officer in the Italian Army who organized the Roman resistance. The SS interrogated and tortured Montezemolo at Via Tasso for 58 days, but he uttered not a word.

On the museum’s second floor, five prison cells preserve the incredibly moving messages that prisoners scratched on the walls. “Addio piccola mia — non serbarmi rancore un bacio,” one prisoner wrote (“Farewell, my little one, don’t harbor any bitterness on my account, a kiss.”)

The next day, a balmy Sunday, my wife and I decided to get out of town and join sweater-clad Romans and ski-pole-toting German trekkers for a leisurely saunter on the Appian Way. Though just a few minutes by bus from central Rome, the road seems to slumber 2,000 years in the past. The original colossal cobblestones, heaved and rutted by time, still pave the way. Along the margins, villas peep from behind hedgerows and grain fields lie open to the sky. Aside from the occasional jet overhead and the whine of a Vespa, the illusion of classical antiquity was nearly complete.

But the shadow of the war fell here as well. At a crossroads just past the Catacombs of San Callisto, a sign points the way to the Fosse Ardeatine. We followed a country lane sunk deep in birdsong and drew up at a gate that resembles a tangled wrought-iron thorn bush. Beyond a lawn hemmed with flower beds rises a high stone wall with a black rectangular cavity incised in the bottom. Inside, in the perpetual twilight of caves and tunnels, is the site of a notorious Nazi massacre. Just as the Via Tasso meant torture during the German occupation of Rome, so the Fosse Ardeatine meant slaughter.

In retaliation for a partisan bombing on the Via Rasella (near the Barberini Palace) that killed 33 German soldiers on March 23, 1944, the SS ordered that 330 Romans — 10 for every German — be put to death. The city quaked as the Nazis did their culling. Partisans imprisoned at the Via Tasso, political prisoners from the Regina Coeli prison in Trastevere, former soldiers, Jews, farmers, students, even a priest ended up in the ranks of the condemned.

For some reason 335 men — five more than the required number — were transported on March 24 from Rome to the Fosse Ardeatine, a quarry for pozzuolana (a volcanic ash used to make cement) near the Appian Way. The victims were shot point blank inside one of the caves. When the last man was dead, the executioners exploded dynamite to collapse the cave and seal off the bodies.

The memorial at the Fosse Ardeatine is all the more powerful for being perfectly simple. An opening in the cliff’s side ushers you from daylight to the darkness of the tunnels. A single light flickers in a chapel. Bronze gates guard the spot where the corpses, stacked five deep, were discovered after the city was liberated. Inside the mausoleum 335 identical slabs of granite cover the tombs of the slain.

Fabrizio Genuini, the affable guard at the memorial’s entry, told me as I left: “Many come to Rome to see the Colosseum and the catacombs at San Callisto, but relatively few people aside from school groups come here anymore. Memory is short.”

On June 4, 1944, two and a half months after the massacre, the American Fifth Army entered Rome from the south and east with little enemy resistance. “My God, they bombed that, too!” one G.I. marveled when he saw the ruins of the Colosseum.

In fact, the Germans had retreated, “wild-eyed, unshaven, unkempt, on foot, in stolen cars,” in the words of one witness, without destroying a single building or bridge. In the end, Rome had little strategic value, and the Nazis were aware that it would have been a public relations disaster to wreck the Eternal City.

Toward the end of our Roman holiday, I returned to the ex-ghetto to chat, to eavesdrop and to eat. But my real motive was to check the pulse of the place 70 years after incomprehensible suffering.

On a bright afternoon, the cafes were crowded; waves of tourists were sampling kosher fast food and artisanal cheese and biscuits; visitors from the United States, Israel and Germany were queuing up at the security checkpoint of the Jewish Museum of Rome beneath the imposing fin de siècle Tempio Maggiore.

In a few hours, the restaurants lining the Via Portico d’Ottavia would fill, and the sound of unconstrained voices would echo off the walls, cobblestones and columns.

Yet I couldn’t help hearing an undercurrent of sadness and anxiety. At the unmarked corner shopfront of the Boccione Jewish bakery, a local landmark for two centuries, the proprietor, Bianca Sonnino, cut me an extra-large slice of pizza ebraica (Jewish pizza) — not pizza at all but a dense nutty-fruity coffeecake. Signora Sonnino told me proudly that Boccione has been her family’s business for generations and that her mother devised the recipe for torta della ricotta.

But when I asked about the war, she teared up. A gentile woman hid her family, she told me, but close relatives were among those who were deported to Auschwitz and never returned. “After the war, the ghetto was nothing,” she said. “It was a dead zone.”

Now some Roman Jews worry that the area is becoming too lively. Gentrification has jacked up apartment prices beyond the reach of most of the families who lived here for centuries, indeed millenniums. The narrow lanes around the Portico d’Ottavia are usually filled with a cosmopolitan collection of well-heeled bohemians and tourists. A Jewish school recently opened a block from the synagogue, though most of the children commute from other neighborhoods. The ex-ghetto is still the beating heart of Jewish Rome, but increasingly Jewish Romans come here only to pray, to eat, to celebrate and matriculate.

In a few years, the last survivors of the Nazi occupation will be gone and the events of those terrible nine months will take their place in the flusso di Roma, the ebb and flow of Rome’s vast tidal history. But for now, amid the joyous clamor of the ghetto, the voices of those who endured that time can still be heard.

IF YOU GO

On the evening of Oct. 16, to commemorate the anniversary of the roundup of 1943, a torchlight procession will gather in Trastevere and march across the Tiber to Largo 16 Ottobre in the ex-ghetto.

Where to Eat

Ba” Ghetto, Via del Portico d’Ottavia, 57; (39-06) 6889-2868; kosherinrome.com. Classic (kosher) Roman Jewish cooking with a zesty Mediterranean twist, including couscous, hummus and falafel. A kosher dairy branch is up the street at Via Portico d’Ottavia, 2/A.

La Taverna del Ghetto, Via Del Portico d’Ottavia, 8; (39-06) 6880-9771; latavernadelghetto.com. Baccalà, fried zucchini flowers, pasta with broccoli and sausage, meatballs, goulash, grilled tuna. The food here is kosher, hearty and traditional.

Giardino Romano, Via Portico d’Ottavia, 18; (39-06) 6880-9661; ilgiardinoromano.it. Roman-Jewish specialties — planked and fried artichokes, tripe, oxtail, abbacchio (lamb) — served indoors in an attractively restored 16th-century palace, or outdoors in a quiet back garden or on the festive terrace near the Portico d’Ottavia. Not kosher, but open on Friday night and Saturday.

Pasticceria “Boccione” Limentani, Via Portico d’Ottavia, 1; (39-06) 687-8637. You’ll probably have to wait in line and the service may be gruff, but it’s worth it for the pizza ebraica, the ricotta e visciole (wild cherry) tart and the slice of history.

Museums and Memorials

Explorations of the ghetto should begin at the Jewish Museum of Rome, Via Catalana; (39-06)-6840-0661; museoebraico.roma.it. A museum visit includes a tour of the Tempio Maggiore upstairs. Closed Saturday. Admission 10 euros.

Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Piazzale Del Verano, 3; (39-06) 446-6184; basilicasanlorenzo.it.

The Historical Museum of the Liberation of Rome (Museo storico della Liberazione), Via Tasso, 145; (39-06) 700-3866; museoliberazione.it. Closed Monday. Free admission.

Fosse Ardeatine Memorial, Via Ardeatine, 174; (39-06) 513-6742. Free admission.

David Laskin, a frequent contributor to Travel, is the author of “The Family: Three Journeys Into the Heart of the 20th Century,” due from Viking in October.

http://www.travel.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/travel/echoes-from-the-roman-ghetto.html?nl=todaysheadlines&_r=1&

Multitasking Myths Debunked.

From The New York Times -

May 3, 2013

Brain, Interrupted

By BOB SULLIVAN and HUGH THOMPSON

TECHNOLOGY has given us many gifts, among them dozens of new ways to grab our attention. It’s hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought.

But what constitutes distraction? Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer.

In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching.

As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy to count the added expense of the hassle of change. When your brain is switching tasks, the cost is harder to quantify.

There have been a few efforts to do so: Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.

We decided to investigate further, and asked Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, and the psychologist Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon to design an experiment to measure the brain power lost when someone is interrupted.

To simulate the pull of an expected cellphone call or e-mail, we had subjects sit in a lab and perform a standard cognitive skill test. In the experiment, 136 subjects were asked to read a short passage and answer questions about it. There were three groups of subjects; one merely completed the test. The other two were told they “might be contacted for further instructions” at any moment via instant message.

During an initial test, the second and third groups were interrupted twice. Then a second test was administered, but this time, only the second group was interrupted. The third group awaited an interruption that never came. Let’s call the three groups Control, Interrupted and On High Alert.

We expected the Interrupted group to make some mistakes, but the results were truly dismal, especially for those who think of themselves as multitaskers: during this first test, both interrupted groups answered correctly 20 percent less often than members of the control group.

In other words, the distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber. That’s enough to turn a B-minus student (80 percent) into a failure (62 percent).

But in Part 2 of the experiment, the results were not as bleak. This time, part of the group was told they would be interrupted again, but they were actually left alone to focus on the questions.

Again, the Interrupted group underperformed the control group, but this time they closed the gap significantly, to a respectable 14 percent. Dr. Peer said this suggested that people who experience an interruption, and expect another, can learn to improve how they deal with it.

But among the On High Alert group, there was a twist. Those who were warned of an interruption that never came improved by a whopping 43 percent, and even outperformed the control test takers who were left alone. This unexpected, counterintuitive finding requires further research, but Dr. Peer thinks there’s a simple explanation: participants learned from their experience, and their brains adapted.

Somehow, it seems, they marshaled extra brain power to steel themselves against interruption, or perhaps the potential for interruptions served as a kind of deadline that helped them focus even better.

Clifford Nass, a Stanford sociologist who conducted some of the first tests on multitasking, has said that those who can’t resist the lure of doing two things at once are “suckers for irrelevancy.” There is some evidence that we’re not just suckers for that new text message, or addicted to it; it’s actually robbing us of brain power, too. Tweet about this at your own risk.

What the Carnegie Mellon study shows, however, is that it is possible to train yourself for distractions, even if you don’t know when they’ll hit.

Bob Sullivan, a journalist at NBC News, and Hugh Thompson, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, are the authors of “The Plateau Effect: Getting From Stuck to Success.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html