Chemical Weapons Showdown With Syria Led to Rare Accord

Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

The violence in Syria continued on Monday. Above, Syrians went to the aid of a man who was wounded when a missile hit the al-Mashhad district of Aleppo.

WASHINGTON — In the last days of November, Israel’s top military commanders called the Pentagon to discuss troubling intelligence that was showing up on satellite imagery: Syrian troops appeared to be mixing chemicals at two storage sites, probably the deadly nerve gas sarin, and filling dozens of 500-pounds bombs that could be loaded on airplanes.

Within hours President Obama was notified, and the alarm grew over the weekend, as the munitions were loaded onto vehicles near Syrian air bases. In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria’s increasingly desperate president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.

What followed next, officials said, was a remarkable show of international cooperation over a civil war in which the United States, Arab states, Russia and China have almost never agreed on a common course of action.

The combination of a public warning by Mr. Obama and more sharply worded private messages sent to the Syrian leader and his military commanders through Russia and others, including Iraq, Turkey and possibly Jordan, stopped the chemical mixing and the bomb preparation. A week later Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the worst fears were over — for the time being.

But concern remains that Mr. Assad could now use the weapons produced that week at any moment. American and European officials say that while a crisis was averted in that week from late November to early December, they are by no means resting easy.

“I think the Russians understood this is the one thing that could get us to intervene in the war,” one senior defense official said last week. “What Assad understood, and whether that understanding changes if he gets cornered in the next few months, that’s anyone’s guess.”

While chemical weapons are technically considered a “weapon of mass destruction” — along with biological and nuclear weapons — in fact they are hard to use and hard to deliver. Whether an attack is effective can depend on the winds and the terrain. Sometimes attacks are hard to detect, even after the fact. Syrian forces could employ them in a village or a neighborhood, some officials say, and it would take time for the outside world to know.

But the scare a month ago has renewed debate about whether the West should help the Syrian opposition destroy Mr. Assad’s air force, which he would need to deliver those 500-pound bombs.

The chemical munitions are still in storage areas that are near or on Syrian air bases, ready for deployment on short notice, officials said.

The Obama administration and other governments have said little in public about the chemical weapons movements, in part because of concern about compromising sources of intelligence about the activities of Mr. Assad’s forces. This account is based on interviews with more than half a dozen military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the intelligence matters involved.

The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, warned in a confidential assessment last month that the weapons could now be deployed four to six hours after orders were issued, and that Mr. Assad had a special adviser at his side who oversaw control of the weapons, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported. Some American and other allied officials, however, said in interviews that the sarin-laden bombs could be loaded on planes and airborne in less than two hours.

“Let’s just say right now, it would be a relatively easy thing to load this quickly onto aircraft,” said one Western diplomat.

How the United States and Israel, along with Arab states, would respond remains a mystery. American and allied officials have talked vaguely of having developed “contingency plans” in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require upward of 75,000 troops. But there have been no evident signs of preparations for any such effort.

The United States military has quietly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there, among other things, prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was reported to have traveled to Jordan in recent weeks, and the Israeli news media have said the topic of discussion was how to deal with Syrian weapons if it appeared that they could be transferred to Lebanon, where Hezbollah could lob them over the border to Israel. But the plans, to the extent they exist, remain secret.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: A Waterproof Hearing Aid From Siemens

A lot of people who are hearing impaired would be more active if they weren’t afraid of damaging delicate hearing aids that don’t like the humidity of gyms or the dousings of jet skis.

Responding to this issue, Siemens has introduced what it says is the first waterproof hearing aid, capable of working as deep as three feet under water.

Called the Aquaris, the device can also be connected to a Bluetooth remote, called the Minitek, that streams audio to the earpieces, so a person could listen to music from a Bluetooth music player when swimming, for instance. Or an accessory microphone can be worn by someone whom you need to pay close attention to in a noisy room.

A survey by Siemens found that of 500 hearing aid owners, 17 percent restricted their activity to avoid damaging their hearing aids. That is particularly hard on groups like hearing-impaired children and people who work at jobs where there is dust or grime, like farmers or steel workers.

The Aquaris is available through audiologists nationwide, and is priced at around $2,500, per ear, although that number varies based on the cost of the custom fitting.

Read More..

Health Spending Growth Stays Low for 3rd Straight Year

WASHINGTON — National health spending climbed to $2.7 trillion in 2011, or an average of $8,700 for every person in the country, but as a share of the economy, it remained stable for the third consecutive year, the Obama administration said Monday.

The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52 years the government has been collecting such data.

Federal officials could not say for sure whether the low growth in health spending represented the start of a trend or reflected the continuing effects of the recession, which crimped the economy from December 2007 to June 2009.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said that “the statistics show how the Affordable Care Act is already making a difference,” saving money for consumers. But a report issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in her department, said that the law had so far had “no discernible impact” on overall health spending.

Although some provisions of the law have taken effect, the report said, “their influence on overall health spending through 2011 was minimal.”

The recession increased unemployment, reduced the number of people with private health insurance, lowered household income and assets and therefore tended to slow health spending, said Micah B. Hartman, a statistician at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In the report, federal officials said that total national spending on prescription drugs and doctors’ services grew faster in 2011 than in the year before, but that spending on hospital care grew more slowly.

Medicaid spending likewise grew less quickly in 2011 than in the prior year, as states struggled with budget problems. But Medicare spending grew more rapidly, because of an increase in “the volume and intensity” of doctors’ services and a one-time increase in Medicare payments to skilled nursing homes, said the report, published in the journal Health Affairs.

National health spending grew at roughly the same pace as the overall economy, without adjusting for inflation, so its share of the economy stayed the same, at 17.9 percent in 2011, where it has been since 2009. By contrast, health spending accounted for just 13.8 percent of the economy in 2000.

Health spending grew more than 5 percent each year from 1961 to 2007. It rose at double-digit rates in some years, including every year from 1966 to 1984 and from 1988 to 1990.

The report did not forecast the effects of the new health care law on future spending. Some provisions of the law, including subsidized insurance for millions of Americans, could increase spending, officials said. But the law also trims Medicare payments to many health care providers and authorizes experiments to slow the growth of health spending.

“The jury is still out whether all the innovations we’re testing will have much impact,” said Richard S. Foster, who supervised the preparation of the report as chief actuary of the Medicare agency. “I am optimistic. There’s a lot of potential. More and more health care providers understand that the future cannot be like the past, in which health spending almost always grew faster than the gross domestic product.”

Evidence of the new emphasis can be seen in a series of articles published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, now known as JAMA Internal Medicine, under the title “Less Is More.” The series highlights cases in which “the overuse of medical care may result in harm and in which less care is likely to result in better health.”

Total spending for doctors’ services rose 3.6 percent in 2011, to $436 billion, while spending for hospital care increased 4.3 percent, to $850.6 billion.

Spending on prescription drugs at retail stores reached $263 billion in 2011, up 2.9 percent from 2010, when growth was just four-tenths of 1 percent. The latest increase was still well below the average increase of 7.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2010.

Federal officials said the increase in 2011 resulted partly from rapid growth in prices for brand-name drugs.

Prices for specialty drugs, typically prescribed by medical specialists for chronic conditions, have increased at double-digit rates in recent years, the government said. In addition, spending on new brand-name drugs — those brought to market in the previous two years — more than doubled from 2010 to 2011, driven by an increase in the number of new medicines.

“In 2011,” the report said, “spending for private health insurance premiums increased 3.8 percent, as did spending for benefits. Out-of-pocket spending by consumers increased 2.8 percent in 2011, accelerating from 2.1 percent in 2010 but still slower than the average annual growth rate of 4.7 percent” from 2002 to 2008.

Read More..

Health Spending Growth Stays Low for 3rd Straight Year

WASHINGTON — National health spending climbed to $2.7 trillion in 2011, or an average of $8,700 for every person in the country, but as a share of the economy, it remained stable for the third consecutive year, the Obama administration said Monday.

The rate of increase in health spending, 3.9 percent in 2011, was the same as in 2009 and 2010 — the lowest annual rates recorded in the 52 years the government has been collecting such data.

Federal officials could not say for sure whether the low growth in health spending represented the start of a trend or reflected the continuing effects of the recession, which crimped the economy from December 2007 to June 2009.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said that “the statistics show how the Affordable Care Act is already making a difference,” saving money for consumers. But a report issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in her department, said that the law had so far had “no discernible impact” on overall health spending.

Although some provisions of the law have taken effect, the report said, “their influence on overall health spending through 2011 was minimal.”

The recession increased unemployment, reduced the number of people with private health insurance, lowered household income and assets and therefore tended to slow health spending, said Micah B. Hartman, a statistician at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In the report, federal officials said that total national spending on prescription drugs and doctors’ services grew faster in 2011 than in the year before, but that spending on hospital care grew more slowly.

Medicaid spending likewise grew less quickly in 2011 than in the prior year, as states struggled with budget problems. But Medicare spending grew more rapidly, because of an increase in “the volume and intensity” of doctors’ services and a one-time increase in Medicare payments to skilled nursing homes, said the report, published in the journal Health Affairs.

National health spending grew at roughly the same pace as the overall economy, without adjusting for inflation, so its share of the economy stayed the same, at 17.9 percent in 2011, where it has been since 2009. By contrast, health spending accounted for just 13.8 percent of the economy in 2000.

Health spending grew more than 5 percent each year from 1961 to 2007. It rose at double-digit rates in some years, including every year from 1966 to 1984 and from 1988 to 1990.

The report did not forecast the effects of the new health care law on future spending. Some provisions of the law, including subsidized insurance for millions of Americans, could increase spending, officials said. But the law also trims Medicare payments to many health care providers and authorizes experiments to slow the growth of health spending.

“The jury is still out whether all the innovations we’re testing will have much impact,” said Richard S. Foster, who supervised the preparation of the report as chief actuary of the Medicare agency. “I am optimistic. There’s a lot of potential. More and more health care providers understand that the future cannot be like the past, in which health spending almost always grew faster than the gross domestic product.”

Evidence of the new emphasis can be seen in a series of articles published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, now known as JAMA Internal Medicine, under the title “Less Is More.” The series highlights cases in which “the overuse of medical care may result in harm and in which less care is likely to result in better health.”

Total spending for doctors’ services rose 3.6 percent in 2011, to $436 billion, while spending for hospital care increased 4.3 percent, to $850.6 billion.

Spending on prescription drugs at retail stores reached $263 billion in 2011, up 2.9 percent from 2010, when growth was just four-tenths of 1 percent. The latest increase was still well below the average increase of 7.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2010.

Federal officials said the increase in 2011 resulted partly from rapid growth in prices for brand-name drugs.

Prices for specialty drugs, typically prescribed by medical specialists for chronic conditions, have increased at double-digit rates in recent years, the government said. In addition, spending on new brand-name drugs — those brought to market in the previous two years — more than doubled from 2010 to 2011, driven by an increase in the number of new medicines.

“In 2011,” the report said, “spending for private health insurance premiums increased 3.8 percent, as did spending for benefits. Out-of-pocket spending by consumers increased 2.8 percent in 2011, accelerating from 2.1 percent in 2010 but still slower than the average annual growth rate of 4.7 percent” from 2002 to 2008.

Read More..

Monsanto Profit Balloons on Latin American Sales

WASHINGTON (AP) — Agricultural products giant Monsanto reported Tuesday that its profit nearly tripled in the first fiscal quarter as sales of its biotech corn seeds expanded in Latin America.

The company raised its earnings guidance for the year, briefly lifting its shares to its highest level in more than four years.

The company's sales grew 21 percent to $2.9 billion in the quarter, with most of increase coming from the company's corn seed business.

The St. Louis company earned $339 million, or 63 cents per share in the three months ended November 30. That compares to earnings of $126 million, or 23 cents per share, in last year's quarter.

Monsanto's results easily trumped analyst predictions of 36 cents per share on sales of $2.6 billion in revenue, according to FactSet.

The company's first fiscal period is usually not very profitable, as farming operations slow during the fall months in the U.S. and Europe. But increased sales in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and other Latin American countries helped drive earnings from September through November.

Monsanto told investors last year that it expects to benefit more from the growing season in the Southern hemisphere. Monsanto predicts that international sales will account for half of its growth in seeds for fiscal 2013, which ends in August.

Sales of the company's largest unit, seeds and genomics, grew 27 percent to $1.1 billion, on demand from farmers in Brazil and Argentina.

Monsanto's corn and soybean seeds have genetically engineered traits meant to produce more crops and repel bugs. The company says these benefit farmers enough that they come out ahead, even though the seeds cost more than conventional seeds.

For all of fiscal 2013, the company expects profit of $4.30 to $4.40 per share.

Analysts predicted profit of $4.39 per share.

Shares added $2.39, or 2.5 percent, to $98.33 in midday trading Tuesday after rising as high as $99.99 earlier in the session. That was the highest price for Monsanto shares since October 2008.

Read More..

With Eye on China, Japan Weighs Raising Military Spending

TOKYO — Japan’s new conservative government announced a review of national military strategy on Monday that analysts said was aimed at offsetting China’s growing military power and that may increase defense spending for the first time in a decade.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered his government to replace the nation’s five-year military spending plan and to review defense guidelines adopted in 2010 by the left-leaning Democratic Party, which his party defeated in elections last month. Those guidelines called for gradual reductions in defense spending, and also in the size of Japan’s military, particularly in the number of tanks and infantry members.

Mr. Abe had promised during the election campaign to strengthen the military to defend Japan’s control of islands in the East China Sea that are also claimed by China.

Mr. Abe did not release details of his intent on the military revisions, but news reports said the replacement plan would probably reverse the Democrats’ cuts, starting with a 120 billion yen, or $1.4 billion, increase in the military budget in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins in April. That would be the first increase in Japanese military spending since 2002, as the nation has tightened its belt during a long economic decline.

The reports said the new spending plan, proposed by members of Mr. Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, would seek to increase the number of ground troops, strengthen air and sea defenses around the disputed islands, and buy new early-warning aircraft to guard against Chinese intrusions near the islands, as well as missile launchings by North Korea.

The reports said the plan could also include financing for a feasibility study on acquiring Osprey aircraft, American vertical-takeoff transport planes whose introduction last year to a Marine airfield on Okinawa set off protests. The Osprey can fly farther and faster than Japan’s current helicopters, allowing its troops to more easily reach the disputed islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Despite a decade of defense cuts, analysts said Japan last year had the world’s sixth-largest military budget, spending 4.65 trillion yen, or $5.3 billion, on defense. Japan has one of the largest and most advanced militaries in Asia, though it has kept a low profile to avoid stirring bitter memories of its early-20th-century empire building.

Mr. Abe’s efforts to raise Japan’s military profile in the region are intended not only to bolster his nation’s declining influence, but also to help an economically ailing ally, the United States, counter China’s rising military prowess.

Read More..

American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.

SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet.

Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press

Bill Richardson led a private delegation to North Korea on Monday.

Mr. Richardson, who has visited North Korea several times, called his four-day trip a private humanitarian mission and said he would try to meet with Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old South Korea-born American citizen who was arrested on charges of “hostile acts” against North Korea after entering the country as a tourist in early November.

“I heard from his son who lives in Washington State, who asked me to bring him back,” Mr. Richardson said in Beijing before boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang. “I doubt we can do it on this trip.”

In a one-sentence dispatch, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed the American group’s arrival in Pyongyang, calling it “a Google delegation.”

Mr. Richardson said his delegation planned to meet with North Korean political, economic and military leaders and visit universities.

Mr. Schmidt and Google have kept quiet about why Mr. Schmidt joined the trip, which the State Department advised against, calling the visit unhelpful. Mr. Richardson said Monday that Mr. Schmidt was “interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect,” but did not elaborate. Mr. Schmidt is a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness.

Except for a tiny portion of its elite, North Korea’s population is blocked from the Internet. Under its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the country has emphasized science and technology but has also vowed to intensify its war against the infiltration of outside information in the isolated country, which it sees as a potential threat to its totalitarian grip on power.

Although it is engaged in a standoff with the United States over its nuclear weapons and missile programs and habitually criticizes American foreign policy as “imperial,” North Korea welcomes high-profile American visits to Pyongyang, billing them as signs of respect for its leadership. It runs a special museum for gifts that foreign dignitaries have brought for its leaders.

Washington has never established diplomatic ties with North Korea, and the two countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

But Mr. Richardson’s trip comes at a particularly delicate time for Washington. In the past weeks, it has been trying to muster international support to penalize North Korea for its launching last month of a long-range rocket, which the United States condemned as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions banning the country from testing intercontinental ballistic missile technology.

North Korea has often required visits by high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, before releasing American citizens held there on criminal charges. Mr. Richardson, who is also a former ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Pyongyang in 1996 to negotiate the release of Evan Hunziker, who was held for three months on charges of spying after swimming across the river border between China and North Korea.

Read More..

Books Of Style: Three Books on Becoming a Better You — Books of Style

The Beauty Experiment: How I Skipped Lipstick, Ditched Fashion, Faced the World Without Concealer, and Learned to Love the Real Me, by Phoebe Baker Hyde. Da Capo Press. 248 pp. $16.

Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Help You Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, by William Davis, M.D. Rodale Books. 352 pp. $27.99.

Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick, by Jeremy Dean. Da Capo Press. 256 pp. $26.

OH, those pesky Mayans. It was bad enough that their ancient astro-forecast led many people to quake all year long for fear that the end of the world was not only nigh but specifically nigh — as in, Dec. 21 nigh. But when, on Dec. 22, the human race discovered that doomsday had come and gone without apparent incident, more Mayan mischief kicked in: mankind found itself with only 10 days to come up with New Year’s resolutions, a necessity too many had assumed would be made moot by apocalypse.

Remarkably, three books have emerged since the nonfateful winter solstice that can help everyone become a finer creature in the brave new world of 2013. All of these books — one about self-image, one about diet and one about habits — would seem, on the face of it, to be counterintuitive. That’s an appropriate attribute for a year that never was supposed to exist.

The first thing you might like to know about “The Beauty Experiment,” a memoir by Phoebe Baker Hyde, is the improbable fact that the author’s picture was taken by a 4-year-old. What woman, what writer, would make such a devil-may-care move? Experiment, indeed. Ms. Hyde’s book is a testament to her hard-won conviction that, when it comes to appearance, externals do not matter. In her early 30s, after giving birth to her first child (a daughter), Ms. Hyde “bought thicker makeup and brighter lipstick” and a flashy red velvet dress, hoping to glamorize the “zombie” she saw in the mirror. A photo of herself in the velvet togs showed her that she looked “not sexy, but shaggy; not ‘Red-Hot,’ but hangdog,” and made her cry, “because I was stupid, vain, heartbroken and ashamed of all of it.”

In February 2007, woebegone and “at war with myself,” she decided to shun cosmetics, hair salons and pricey clothes for an entire year to see if she could shore up her self-esteem by making peace with her unadorned raw materials. The antidote to her feelings of inadequacy, she decided, was “to be free of illusions.” Getting a short haircut at her husband’s barbershop, eschewing lipstick and even earrings, she “dragged an oppressive sense of plain Janeness” around for a month, but soon began to feel empowered by her “Momnisexual” look. After having another child (a son), she stuck with a pared-down approach. These days, she writes, when she spots her reflection in a mirror, she no longer sees “wrinkles, anxiety, zits, or exhaustion, although they are all there. Instead, I see a face, a person, a personality, a life.”

Ms. Hyde’s postpartum funk was caused in part by baby weight she could not shed, but childbirth is not the only spur to extra poundage. Dr. William Davis, a preventive cardiologist in Milwaukee, argued in his best-selling 2011 book “Wheat Belly” that wheat — yes, even whole-grain wheat — the ingredient of everyone’s daily bread, is unhealthy. “I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist,” he concedes.

Nevertheless, the doctor not only stuck to his guns, but also issued a manifesto expounding his wheatless worldview, in the form of the “Wheat Belly Cookbook,” which he dedicates to “everyone who has come to understand the liberation that emerges with wheatlessness.”

Over the last decade, Dr. Davis put himself and thousands of his patients who were “at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity” on wheat-free regimens. He says he watched them not only lose 20, 30, 50, even 100 pounds or more, but also recover from chronic diseases like ulcerative colitis and diabetes.

Investigating these results, he learned that a high-yield hybrid “dwarf” strain of wheat had been developed in the United States in the middle of the last century, and adopted not only here but also around the world. This “Frankengrain” as he calls it, thickens waistlines and causes ills from acne, psoriasis, depression and migraines to arthritis, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Worse, the doctor contends, it contains a protein called gliadin that stimulates appetite and dupes gullible neurons into craving food the body does not need. In his cookbook, Dr. Davis says that gliadins tempt people to eat 440 calories more per day than their grandparents did. Gliadins are opiates, he explains, which “generate a need for more ... and more, and more.”

Whether or not you’re persuaded, such arguments have played a part in starting the gluten-free wave that engulfs the country. But the doctor warns against assuming that every glitch is gluten. Though he considers wheat the worst offender, he mistrusts other grains as well, and warns gluten-free converts to read labels closely, because “rice starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and tapioca starch” send blood sugar levels soaring.

In his cookbook, with scores of grain-free recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even dessert — brownies, cupcakes and Key lime pie, made with flour ground from beans, nuts and flaxseed — he points another way forward. Cooking, baking and eating without wheat is a “cataclysmic revelation for most people,” he admits. “It’s unsettling, it’s upsetting, it’s downright inconvenient.” Still, he asks, what is a bit of inconvenience, weighed against the rapture of watching a “protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly vanish?”

If you were to try to give up wheat for the new year, how long do you think you would be able to stick it out before you crumbled and ordered a bagel? Jeremy Dean, a London psychologist and pop psychology blogger, notes in “Making Habits, Breaking Habits” that conventional wisdom holds that it takes the “magic figure of 21 days” to form a new habit. This reckoning turns out to be faulty, Mr. Dean explains, if the habit is complicated or replaces an existing one. Sixty-six days — a little more than two months — is a more reasonable span, he suggests; but 254 days is not out of the question.

Demonstrating how a person might forge a new pattern of behavior, Mr. Dean describes the notional measure of switching to whole-wheat bread from white over a period of several weeks. “I intended to eat more healthily, and now I am,” he explains. Obviously, Dr. Davis would beg to differ — not that Mr. Dean, who addresses generalities, not gastrointestinal realities, and motivation rather than medicine, would care, in all likelihood. “Why, exactly, do you want to make a new habit?” he asks. “Sometimes, the reasons are obvious and don’t need any further soul-searching, but this isn’t always the case.”

This statement hints that he might suspect that the business of making habits and breaking habits, fraught and chancy as it may sometimes be, is not the end of the world.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 7, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated in a passing reference the equivalent length of time that Jeremy Dean, the author of “Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick,” believes is reasonable for forming a new habit. As the column stated, Mr. Dean believes it is 66 days. But that is equivalent to a little more than two months, not three. 

Read More..

Books Of Style: Three Books on Becoming a Better You — Books of Style

The Beauty Experiment: How I Skipped Lipstick, Ditched Fashion, Faced the World Without Concealer, and Learned to Love the Real Me, by Phoebe Baker Hyde. Da Capo Press. 248 pp. $16.

Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 Recipes to Help You Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, by William Davis, M.D. Rodale Books. 352 pp. $27.99.

Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick, by Jeremy Dean. Da Capo Press. 256 pp. $26.

OH, those pesky Mayans. It was bad enough that their ancient astro-forecast led many people to quake all year long for fear that the end of the world was not only nigh but specifically nigh — as in, Dec. 21 nigh. But when, on Dec. 22, the human race discovered that doomsday had come and gone without apparent incident, more Mayan mischief kicked in: mankind found itself with only 10 days to come up with New Year’s resolutions, a necessity too many had assumed would be made moot by apocalypse.

Remarkably, three books have emerged since the nonfateful winter solstice that can help everyone become a finer creature in the brave new world of 2013. All of these books — one about self-image, one about diet and one about habits — would seem, on the face of it, to be counterintuitive. That’s an appropriate attribute for a year that never was supposed to exist.

The first thing you might like to know about “The Beauty Experiment,” a memoir by Phoebe Baker Hyde, is the improbable fact that the author’s picture was taken by a 4-year-old. What woman, what writer, would make such a devil-may-care move? Experiment, indeed. Ms. Hyde’s book is a testament to her hard-won conviction that, when it comes to appearance, externals do not matter. In her early 30s, after giving birth to her first child (a daughter), Ms. Hyde “bought thicker makeup and brighter lipstick” and a flashy red velvet dress, hoping to glamorize the “zombie” she saw in the mirror. A photo of herself in the velvet togs showed her that she looked “not sexy, but shaggy; not ‘Red-Hot,’ but hangdog,” and made her cry, “because I was stupid, vain, heartbroken and ashamed of all of it.”

In February 2007, woebegone and “at war with myself,” she decided to shun cosmetics, hair salons and pricey clothes for an entire year to see if she could shore up her self-esteem by making peace with her unadorned raw materials. The antidote to her feelings of inadequacy, she decided, was “to be free of illusions.” Getting a short haircut at her husband’s barbershop, eschewing lipstick and even earrings, she “dragged an oppressive sense of plain Janeness” around for a month, but soon began to feel empowered by her “Momnisexual” look. After having another child (a son), she stuck with a pared-down approach. These days, she writes, when she spots her reflection in a mirror, she no longer sees “wrinkles, anxiety, zits, or exhaustion, although they are all there. Instead, I see a face, a person, a personality, a life.”

Ms. Hyde’s postpartum funk was caused in part by baby weight she could not shed, but childbirth is not the only spur to extra poundage. Dr. William Davis, a preventive cardiologist in Milwaukee, argued in his best-selling 2011 book “Wheat Belly” that wheat — yes, even whole-grain wheat — the ingredient of everyone’s daily bread, is unhealthy. “I recognize that declaring wheat a malicious food is like declaring that Ronald Reagan was a Communist,” he concedes.

Nevertheless, the doctor not only stuck to his guns, but also issued a manifesto expounding his wheatless worldview, in the form of the “Wheat Belly Cookbook,” which he dedicates to “everyone who has come to understand the liberation that emerges with wheatlessness.”

Over the last decade, Dr. Davis put himself and thousands of his patients who were “at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and the myriad destructive effects of obesity” on wheat-free regimens. He says he watched them not only lose 20, 30, 50, even 100 pounds or more, but also recover from chronic diseases like ulcerative colitis and diabetes.

Investigating these results, he learned that a high-yield hybrid “dwarf” strain of wheat had been developed in the United States in the middle of the last century, and adopted not only here but also around the world. This “Frankengrain” as he calls it, thickens waistlines and causes ills from acne, psoriasis, depression and migraines to arthritis, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Worse, the doctor contends, it contains a protein called gliadin that stimulates appetite and dupes gullible neurons into craving food the body does not need. In his cookbook, Dr. Davis says that gliadins tempt people to eat 440 calories more per day than their grandparents did. Gliadins are opiates, he explains, which “generate a need for more ... and more, and more.”

Whether or not you’re persuaded, such arguments have played a part in starting the gluten-free wave that engulfs the country. But the doctor warns against assuming that every glitch is gluten. Though he considers wheat the worst offender, he mistrusts other grains as well, and warns gluten-free converts to read labels closely, because “rice starch, cornstarch, potato starch, and tapioca starch” send blood sugar levels soaring.

In his cookbook, with scores of grain-free recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even dessert — brownies, cupcakes and Key lime pie, made with flour ground from beans, nuts and flaxseed — he points another way forward. Cooking, baking and eating without wheat is a “cataclysmic revelation for most people,” he admits. “It’s unsettling, it’s upsetting, it’s downright inconvenient.” Still, he asks, what is a bit of inconvenience, weighed against the rapture of watching a “protuberant, flop-over-the-belt belly vanish?”

If you were to try to give up wheat for the new year, how long do you think you would be able to stick it out before you crumbled and ordered a bagel? Jeremy Dean, a London psychologist and pop psychology blogger, notes in “Making Habits, Breaking Habits” that conventional wisdom holds that it takes the “magic figure of 21 days” to form a new habit. This reckoning turns out to be faulty, Mr. Dean explains, if the habit is complicated or replaces an existing one. Sixty-six days — a little more than two months — is a more reasonable span, he suggests; but 254 days is not out of the question.

Demonstrating how a person might forge a new pattern of behavior, Mr. Dean describes the notional measure of switching to whole-wheat bread from white over a period of several weeks. “I intended to eat more healthily, and now I am,” he explains. Obviously, Dr. Davis would beg to differ — not that Mr. Dean, who addresses generalities, not gastrointestinal realities, and motivation rather than medicine, would care, in all likelihood. “Why, exactly, do you want to make a new habit?” he asks. “Sometimes, the reasons are obvious and don’t need any further soul-searching, but this isn’t always the case.”

This statement hints that he might suspect that the business of making habits and breaking habits, fraught and chancy as it may sometimes be, is not the end of the world.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 7, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated in a passing reference the equivalent length of time that Jeremy Dean, the author of “Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick,” believes is reasonable for forming a new habit. As the column stated, Mr. Dean believes it is 66 days. But that is equivalent to a little more than two months, not three. 

Read More..

You're the Boss Blog: This Week In Small Business: YOLO!

Dashboard

A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

The Deal: A Not-So-Grand Bargain

A “fiscal cliff” deal is reached and after all the drama this chart sums up the impact. One provision could head off a doubling of milk prices. Here’s what’s in it for small businesses. Jared Bernstein says the fiscal debate has killed the economic debate. Kevin Drum says we don’t have a spending problem, we have an aging problem. One blogger believes that the biggest beneficiaries of the resolution are puppies. Bruce Bartlett explains when the deficit will be fixed. John Boehner is re-elected House speaker. Hugh Hefner marries. These are the four business gangs that rule the country. Next up: the debt ceiling.

Happy New Year: Small-Business Predictions

This infographic shows what’s in store for small businesses in 2013. The editors at Springwise.com offer 10 business opportunities for the coming year. Here are 12 buzzwords you can expect to hear. Here are 20 quotations you can use to prosper. Here are 21 predictions from social media experts. Both Constant Contact and Marla Tabaka spot marketing trends they think will affect small businesses, including “the rise of MomPopolies.” Here are six e-mail marketing and four hyperlocal trends to watch. Oh, and here are eight major tech predictions and four predictions for your finances. A Pennsylvania psychic counselor predicts an avalanche that “will destroy many lives.” Amanda MacArthur suggests 12 worthwhile small-business resolutions. Here are the top five reasons your employees will quit. This video recaps 2012 in four minutes.

The Economy: Auto Sales Are Strong

Many economic bloggers ended 2012 feeling pessimistic. The Restaurant Performance Index contracted, and SurePayroll’s November small-business scorecard is down. Construction spending also fell, and small-business borrowing slowed. But manufacturing (pdf) picked up in December, and don’t forget that the drilling boom for shale oil is remaking America’s energy picture and has brought net oil imports to a 20-year low. Borrowing rates are as cheap as they have ever been in America, and domestic auto sales were very strong last month. The unemployment rate stays steady, online labor demand (pdf) increased, the private sector added 215,000 jobs, and the Philadelphia Fed’s leading indexes (pdf)  projected growth. A physics teacher imparts real life lessons.

Start-Up: A Well-Known Blogger Tries the Start-Up Life

These are 13 promising East Coast start-ups to watch in 2013. A start-up wants to be the Spotify for e-books. Bruno Aziza shares some advice from his start-up adventure: “Unless you are working on something truly different, or have a compelling story to tell, nobody will pay attention. … Unless you can truly add value, nobody cares.” This 15-year-old thinks he can reinvent how we consume news. A well-known blogger plans his own start-up. Jay Patani says interns are the unsung heroes of start-ups. Or maybe baby boomers are more essential?

Marketing: Content on the Cheap

Can you guess the most annoying and hated words and phrases of the year? (Yes, “whatever” made one list, and so did “YOLO” and “fiscal cliff.”) An influential marketing blog picks the most influential marketing books. Andy Sernovitz offers a few suggestions for rescuing unsubscribers. Michael Stelzner explains why stories attract customers. Mathew Donald has five brochure-designing tips, including: “Do not slack off during the proofreading process.” Marcus Sheridan has eight renegade methods to use content marketing to dominate your industry, including, “Reward your competitors”: “Stop pretending your competitors don’t exist. Your customers already know they exist, so find a way to deal with it, to your advantage.” Ryan Derousseau explains how to introduce a content strategy on the cheap.

Your People: Stupid Things Bosses Say

Cullen Roche examines what makes people successful. Jeff Schmitt says there are seven types of employees you should weed out, including the viruses: “You can’t expect them to be slavishly sunny and loyal to you. But you can expect them to be helpful, respectful and protective toward each other.” Jeff Haden says there are eight stupid things bosses say to employees, including: “Sure, I’ll be happy to talk to your brother about a job.” You won’t believe how many people applied to work at Comcast last year.

Management: The War on Fraud

A 16-year-old maker of motorcycles proves that passion trumps experience. In this economist’s guide to year-end charitable giving, Dean Karlan advises not to divide donations among many charities: “If there is one that is doing the most good for the cause you care the most about, then every dollar you give to the one doing the second best work is a dollar not given to the one doing the best work!” Here’s how to beat “the overwhelm” of entrepreneurship. Adrian Swinscoe says the relationships you have with existing customers are your keys to success. Volvo owners have the best credit scores. Daniel Hood files a dispatch from the war on fraud. Here are five ways to stay healthy at work.

Social Media: Twitter Tools

Here’s how to start your social media year off with a bang. Jeff Bullas lists six social media trends you should not ignore, including: “Facebook will continue to strengthen its grip as the dominating and the de facto social network of choice.” A webinar explains how to leverage social media effectively and efficiently. Did you know there are still a few cool things you can do with your blog post after you hit publish? These are the top 20 Web sites every blogger should know and the six top Twitter tools for business. And if your business is not a big user of social media, don’t worry: you’re in good company.

Around the Country: Honk if You Love Someone

Avis buys Zipcar. Polaroid is creating branded retail stores. Texas was the best place for small-business job growth in 2012. Jeff Jordan wonders if American malls are dying (Russian malls certainly are not). One man goes on a quest to make a city smile: “Honk if you love someone.” Entrepreneur magazine’s Growth Conference is this week in Dallas. Constant Contact and the City of Chicago Treasurer’s Office announce a small-business online marketing contest. Meet the “poshest” entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley (even though they will probably be wiped out by climate change in the next 40 years). This week, 150,000 people are expected to converge on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.

Around the World: What’s Up in Iceland?

Indian manufacturing hits a six-month high. Chinese manufacturing expands. Unemployment falls in Spain. And do you ever wonder what’s really going on in Iceland? This may be the best review of “Les Misérables” ever.

Technology: Michael Arrington Is Bored

Here are 10 objects that prove that 3-D printing will change the world, and Dylan Love lists the best 3-D printers. Michael Arrington is bored: “Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. … But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007. 2007! Old news! Ancient platforms!” Even so, enormous changes are on the horizon for the smartphone. These are the 15 best gadgets of 2012, and here are 13 technologies you won’t see in 2013. Steve Kovach says Windows phone users have one big problem. A bunch of well-known (and not so well-known) companies want us to go paperless in 2013. A mobile messaging app processed 18 billion messages on the last day of 2012.

Tweet of the Week

@AaronCBaker: I’m hoping they release some sweet beepers at CES this year

The Week’s Bests

Eric Barker says there are 10 things you should do every day to improve your life, including laugh: “People who use humor to cope with stress have better immune systems, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, experience less pain during dental work and live longer. Laughter should be like a daily vitamin.”

Scott Grannis says the fiscal cliff resolution goes a long way toward explaining why this has been the weakest recovery in history: “The burden of our debt binge is already upon us because we have borrowed trillions of dollars to support consumption, rather than new investment. What matters in the future is how productively we spend the proceeds of future bond sales, not how we pay off the bonds we’ve already sold. We can make progress on the margin if we can reduce federal spending relative to the size of the economy, since that in turn will reduce the amount of the economy’s resources we waste. Allowing the private sector to increasingly decide how to spend the fruits of its labors will likely improve the overall productivity and strength of the economy, because the private sector is most likely smarter about how it spends its own money. We’ve got to get the government out of the way if we are to move forward.”

This Week’s Question: Will the fiscal cliff deal help or hurt your business?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Read More..