With the official ‘dark launch’ of Facebook’s new Timeline feature, all those old moments are coming back quicker than you can say ‘forgot-I-had-psychogenic-amnesia’. Also, they look great. Maybe not the moments themselves, but Timeline is very pretty. With a flick of your finger the years scroll by from ‘Now’, where you’ll see the usual profile items in cozy new arrangements, all the way back to ‘Born’. Of course since Facebook didn’t exist when most of us were born, the moments get a little sparse if you move below 2006. But for all of the millennial kids whose parents created their profiles before they threw the baby showers, this is their life.

For those of you who haven’t activated your own Timeline, consider this your warning. You might be thinking that this will be an annoying, but ignorable addition like that mandatory ticker/chat list (which you can now hide btw). Or perhaps you imagined a simple face[book]lift like the last profile update. Either way, it is not that simple.

Facebook has yet to state a date for when/if Timeline will become a mandatory feature. As of now, once you decide to opt in and activate Timeline, you’ll have seven days to mess with it before it automatically goes public. Granted, it’s a lot more fun to set up than the old forms and buttons. But that’s just one week to pore over every tidbit of digital action on your wall since—whenever. You’ll see one night stands. You’ll see your ex in pictures where you’re happy together.

You’ll read status updates that make you sound dumber than you are now (my own status, 10 Aug 09: “Who needs to stand on a platform to shoot a slingshot anyhow? It’s going to do exactly the same thing from the ground.” #algebra #publicshame), and—unlike before, when seeing all of this stuff took clicking buttons, getting way too drunk, and putting on the Marvin Gaye Here, My Dear Pandora mix—it’s all right in front of your eyes. And it’s designed by people who know how to make things look like you want to look at them.

I’m half thankful now for years of moderate Facebooking. Half, the good half, because I have relatively little content to sift through while choosing what to delete, what to keep, and who gets to see the finished me. The other half is that I did a lot of stuff in the past five years! When it’s all laid out and organized I feel a sick urge to fill in the blanks. I find myself thinking about scrap books and photo albums that I’ll finally do my mother the favor of scanning in just to fill that pre 2006 abyss. You’ll see what I mean.

Don’t spend too long weighing the pros and cons of your new Timeline. Here’s the deal: You could go through on a delete rampage, redacting your life, removing moments that maybe you shared with somebody else who’ll now be hurt when they realize you’re too cool to remember that time with them. Or–and this will be my angle on it–you can go through your friends list and think real hard about who you want having the peep show of your life. I bet you won’t even have to break a brain sweat. Chances are, if their smiling faces don’t pop up here and there in your Timeline, you probably don’t even know them.

What do you think about #Facebook #Timeline? Let me know @N_Ypress.

You can follow Carib on Twitter @44carib

It’s a strange day in New York City when toxic chemicals could become as commonplace in schools as pencils, books and tater tots.

Polychlorinated Biphenyls–more commonly known by the abbreviation PCBs–could potentially be present in at least 700 public schools in the city, says a list compiled by the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) and distributed by Rep. Jerrold Nadler. PCBs are believed to cause cancer as well as serious damage to the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems in humans. The compounds were used in construction materials like insulation, electrical equipment and lubricants in the 1950s and ’60s until they were banned by the EPA in 1978.

In 2010, the city allowed the EPA to conduct a pilot test program, measuring PCB levels and determining remediation strategies for five schools—one in each borough. While Downtown schools weren’t included in the pilot program, several schools in the area that are potentially contaminated with PCBs were part of the NYLPI list, including P.S.184 Shuang Wen in the Lower East Side and P.S. 150 in Tribeca. (The full list can be found on the NYPLI website.)

The results from the schools that were included in the pilot program were astonishing. At P.S. 199 on the Upper West Side, there were higher-than-average levels of PCBs, 600-1100 nanograms per cubic meter in the indoor air at the school. The EPA’s reference dose, the quantity of PCBs that a person can be exposed to daily over a lifetime with little appreciable damage or risk, is 200 to 300 nanograms per cubic meter.

The city has acknowledged the need to remove all known sources of PCBs from public schools, the biggest of which are old light ballasts, but the method of removal, including testing, proper abatement, determing the order in which schools will be worked on as well as a timeline and funding, are up for fierce debate among parents, politicians, health experts, the Department of Education and the School Construction Authority (SCA). “What we’ve been pushing for is that the city should come up with a remediation plan to remove these light ballasts quickly,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents the west side of Manhattan from the Upper West Side to Downtown. “They’ve got a 10-year plan and that is simply not acceptable.”

A few weeks ago, the City Council passed a new law requiring schools to notify parents when PCBs are found and at what levels. Council Member Margaret Chin, whose district includes much of Downtown Manhattan from Tribeca to the South Street Seaport to Chinatown and the Lower East Side, noted that the Council is pushing for a much shorter, two-year plan to inspect all city schools for PCBs. Chin said 18 schools in her district were built between 1959-1978.

“The SCA is in our school regularly. This has been a constant thing at our school, a constant string of testing and results and the action plan,” said Michelle Lipkin, co-president of the P.S. 199 PTA. Lipkin said they’ve been dealing with PCB issues for the past four years, ever since they were first discovered in the building and the SCA removed all of the lighting ballasts.

Ballasts made before the 1979 ban were filled with PCBs because the chemical compound acts as an excellent flame retardant, which kept fluorescent lighting fixtures from catching fire when the electrical current was switched on. This technology is now obsolete and the latent PCBs are either leaking or about to, but the ballasts need to be removed by abatement technicians who can not only safely take them down but also ensure that the PCB levels surrounding them remain low.

Because of the cost and sheer scale of the project—an estimated $850 million—the city has set a 10-year timeline for removal. But now the communities around these affected schools are fighting back.

Community Board 7, of the Upper West Side, recently penned a resolution, which they took to the full board this week. The resolution asks that “John King of the New York State Department of Education instruct the SCA to expeditiously inspect all schools constructed before 1978 or PCB contamination in lighting fixtures; and that the SCA lighting fixture remediation program be completed within the EPA recommended two- to three-year timeframe.” The state is not required to adhere to the EPA’s guidelines, but many are hoping that they will.

The DOE, however, emphasized that they are doing more than other cities and insisted that their timeline is reasonable.

“Our plan to replace light fixtures in more than 700 school buildings is unprecedented compared to other cities, and PCBs are a nationwide issue,” said Natalie Ravitz, director of communications at DOE, in an emailed statement in response to questions about the DOE’s handling of the removal. “While some people think we should spend more and do this faster, we continue to believe this is an aggressive, environmentally responsible plan that will cause minimum disruption to student learning and generate significant energy savings for the city and taxpayers in the long run.”

But others believe that the matter is far more urgent.

“PCBs are very very dangerous when it comes down to children’s development,” said Christina Giorgio, a staff attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) in their environmental justice department. “[They] attack every system of the human body. You will have permanently depressed IQs with long-term exposure. When you’re talking about the school environment, you are indisputably talking about long-term exposure.”

NYLPI has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of New York Communities for Change, a group that includes many concerned parents, to force the DOE and SCA to remove the ballasts sooner under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which requires that PCBs are properly removed immediately wherever they are found.

“What the DOE likes to say is that there’s no immediate health risk. Provided you’re not a pregnant woman, if you walk into a room that is contaminated with a high level of PCBs, are you going to drop over dead? No, you’re not. But that’s not what we’re talking about,” Giorgio said.

While all agree that the health risks are accumulated over time, some are insisting that any amount of time spent in PCB-tainted air is too much, especially for women.

“There’s a great deal of research showing risks to pregnant woman now, women who plan to become pregnant in the near future and even those who want to have families a decade from now,” said Andrea Miller, president of NARAL Pro-Choice NY. Other groups advocating for women’s reproductive rights, including Planned Parenthood, have stepped forward to urge the DOE to move more quickly to remove PCBs.

Miller said that her organization understands that the DOE has a lot on its plate; they aren’t asking for immediate removal, they want the DOE to get started quickly and consider stepping up the schedule.

“A woman working in our schools shouldn’t have to trade her ability to have a healthy pregnancy,” Miller said. “We’re just asking that they take this seriously and take a closer look at what the experts are recommending as far as an appropriate timeline.”

“It’s a matter of putting pressure on the city and on the administration,” said Nadler. “They claim it will cost $700 million to $1 billion. We don’t think it will cost that much, but even if it did, we need to do it. We would come up with the money if it were an immediate catastrophe. This is a slow-moving catastrophe.”

As for when Downtown schools might see new ballasts in their schools, members of New York Communities for Change learned that the city will prioritize the retrofitting of new ballasts in the following order: schools with visual signs of leaks, elementary schools built between 1950-1966, secondary schools built between 1950-1966, elementary schools built between 1967-1979, secondary schools built between 1967-1979, elementary schools built before 1950 and secondary schools built before 1950.

As evidenced by the City Council’s resolutions, Chin believes awareness of PCBs is growing but that advocacy is still needed. She pointed out that principals and custodians must work to alert the DOE when ballasts clearly show signs of PCB leaks and repairs need to be made. She added that the EPA could help in educating communities and schools on PCBs.

“Advocacy has to continue,” Chin said, “especially on the [City Council’s] Education Committee. This will be an ongoing process.”

- With additional reporting by Marissa Maier

“New York is my love,” said Tony Award-winning writer Steven Sater, best known for writing the lyrics and book of Broadway rock musical Spring Awakening.

The writer divides his time between Los Angeles and New York City. Though his wife and two children live in L.A., in a big house with a full-sized refrigerator and a yard, he opts to work out of his apartment in the Dakota Building.

Steven Sater

“It’s very tiring and I’m away from my family a lot,” he said of his bi-coastal life. Still, it affords him the flexibility to work with top artists from around the country and the world.

Sater is currently collaborating with legendary composer Burt Bacharach.

“He is spectacularly talented, and it’s the dream of a lifetime for me to be writing with him,” Sater said. “We write in a very traditional manner. I give him a lyric first, then I go to his house and he plays it for me and we sit around a piano.”

This contrasts with the more modern method he uses with Duncan Sheik, his collaborator on Spring Awakening and other projects. “When I write songs with Duncan, we write by email. I email him a lyric, he emails back an MP3,” explained Sater.

Sater won the 2007 Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Musical Score for Spring Awakening. He writes for television and movies as well as theater. In addition to the Bacharach collaboration, he is working on a new version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for Sony Pictures and workshopping three new shows with Duncan Sheik, including The Nightingale, a musical based on the Hans Christian Anderson story.

Sater grew up in Indiana and attended Washington University in St. Louis before moving to the East Coast to study English Literature at Princeton.

“I felt at home the first time I came to the Upper West Side,” he said. “I make much more use of the cultural life of New York than I do L.A. In New York, I go out. I’m at the theater, I’m at museums, I go to concerts.”

He enjoys being within walking distance of the theater district, Lincoln Center and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where he often goes to watch videotapes of old shows.

The health-conscious vegan writer has no trouble finding food to his taste close to home. Some of his favorite neighborhood restaurants include Josie’s, Cafe Dell’arte, Telepan and Cafe Luxembourg.

Sater selected Lea Michele to star in Spring Awakening when she was just 14, and has remained close with her throughout her rise to stardom on the hit Fox TV series Glee.

The two recently enjoyed a vegan dinner together on the West Side.

This is the first time that Maldonado has sought this kind of assistance. He is independently employed as a house painter and receives food stamps and city benefits for one child. But that is still not enough to provide for his family, considering the economic downturn, rising food prices and crippling medical bills—every Monday, a doctor gives him three injections in his back and shoulders for pain.
“Sometimes, I got no money for food,” Maldonado said.

West Harlem resident Katherine Moncion shops at the campaign’s supermarket-style pantry. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

In the past year, the number of people in need of food assistance has grown and their faces have changed. New patrons have jobs or high school diplomas and bachelor degrees, and many are visiting pantries for the first time.

This is partly why food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the city are facing a perfect storm: high demand coupled with cuts to government spending. And so food assistance programs are restructuring operations and cutting services. For many providers, turning away those in need is not an option.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, prospective clients for the West Side Campaign Against Hunger waited in a full room at the church, on West 86th Street and West End Avenue. Keith Kaiman, the development director, has taken note of the increasing number of clients coming in for interviews with the nonprofit’s counselors.

“I’ve been here a year. For a Thursday this is very crowded,” Kaiman said.

This past August, new clients had almost doubled—an 82 percent increase—compared to August 2007. The surge has been steady, Kaiman said. There are about 200 people a day coming in for help, compared to 130 a day last year.

“A food pantry is the only way to save money,” said Jose Berroa-Saro, one of the campaign’s four social service counselors.

Counselors take note of potential clients’ living situations, in hopes of directing them to services better suited for their needs.

“Our motivation is that we don’t want to see them again,” Berroa-Saro said.
When the clients are accepted into the program, they are allowed to use the food pantry once a month. The pantry is a small space with visitors maneuvering around shelves with shopping carts. Rather than being handed a bag of food, clients are given the freedom to shop using a point system, somewhat like a supermarket. The campaign, which began in 1993, was the first customer co-op to use a supermarket-style pantry.

Across town, at the Yorkville Common Pantry on East 109th Street, staff braced last week for the flux of clients in need of a holiday meal or a food package. The pantry expects—and knows how to manage—a large crowd.

In the last several months, the pantry has experienced an 18 percent increase in visitors each week, a total of 1,700 patrons. Many of those new customers have been from East Harlem and the Isaacs/Holmes houses on East 93rd Street and First Avenue.

“We’re seeing a lot more people from the area,” said Daniel Reyes, director of programs. “Usually, it was a 50-50 split from people in the outer boroughs and people who live in the area. It’s changed to 70-30 now.”

The pantry has filled the vacuum created by smaller pantries and soup kitchens that have been unable to meet the needs of hungry New Yorkers. Reyes said he’s recently noticed repeat customers at the 24-7 emergency food service, where people can come in and receive a bag of food, no questions asked. Since the emergency service is not designed to continually assist customers, the staff expanded the regular pantry program, which allows clients to visit once a week. The qualifying zone, which previously covered East 75th to 125th streets between Park to Fifth avenues, now reaches up to 145th Street and over to the Hudson River.

Keith Kaiman, development director for the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, says he’s seen about 200 people coming in each day looking for help, compared to about 130 per day last year. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

“We’ve extended to three zip codes,” Reyes said. “That’s part of the rise in the numbers.”

Last week, a survey by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger found that more than 80 percent of Manhattan food pantries and soup kitchens have experienced a higher demand for food over the past 12 months, a trend seen throughout the city. Much like at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger and Yorkville Common Pantry, most new clients are immigrants, employed people or families with children.

Nearly 90 percent of respondents in the city reported an increase in clients; more than half of respondents said the number of people coming in for food has greatly increased. And almost three-quarters of these organizations said they are not distributing enough food to meet the demand.

To compensate, organizations are trying to improve their own efficiency. The campaign has staggered clients’ monthly visits to the pantry. Volunteers try to move clients out as quickly as possible by informing them of what is available and how many points they have. Wait time has been cut down by an hour.
About 90 percent of the goods distributed by the campaign, which also buys supplies through a food budget and accepts donations, come from the Food Bank for New York City, an independent nonprofit that distributes food to more than 1,000 programs citywide.

“Fortunately, we’re a large pantry so we have the capacity,” said Kaiman, the development director. “But we’ve been ordering so much food we’ve had to dip into the savings.”

The Yorkville Common Pantry recently received a well-timed, unprecedented bump in food donations from its base of schools, synagogues and the nonprofit City Harvest. That allowed the organization to provide food without dipping into the weekly food budget.

Still, the pantry has been forced to make food packages smaller and increase the food budget to $11,000 from $8,000. Because of cuts, the 24-7 emergency food service program is now open only 16 hours a day, from 8 a.m. to midnight.
“At this point I’m hoping that we won’t have to cap the number [of clients] and tell them we can’t provide service,” said program director Reyes.

Although much is still up in the air, government support of food assistance programs is likely to contract as well. With revenue drying up, the city slashed agency spending last month in an effort to close a $2.3 billion budget deficit projected for 2010. Council members have held hearings to propose areas that can be cut.

“I sat through three days of hearings. It was like going to a funeral,” said Council Member Gale Brewer.

She has been a supporter of the campaign, reserving $7,000 in member item money for its English as Second Language classes next year. But that money is vulnerable to budget cuts.

“The cuts do hurt poor people,” Brewer said. “We’re still trying to negotiate with the mayor.”

Last year, Yorkville Common Pantry, with a total budget of $550,000, received $9,500 from Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito; this year, it is running without member item money. In the first half of fiscal year ’09, the city allocated nearly $51,000 in food products to Yorkville.

“Money from the city is going to be very hard to come by for many groups that are providing an extremely important service,” said Council Member Dan Garodnick, whose district includes the Isaacs/Holmes projects. “Our goal in government is to try to take all creative steps to mitigate the impact.”

The pantry still gets money from the city: about $20,000 worth of food products a year, including funding through the Emergency Food Assistance Program. But the real damage will be done by state cuts, according to Reyes. In August, Gov. David Paterson released a round of budget cuts to state agencies which slashed more than $27 million from the Department of Health. That is trickling down to local programs like the pantry, which recently received a letter from the department’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program asking the organization to outline its own budget cuts.

“The state is so nice,” Reyes quipped.

At the federal level, spending for food stamps and food pantry programs comes through the farms appropriations bill. In response to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger’s survey, Sen. Charles Schumer called for an emergency plan to increase federal funding for food stamps programs, food banks and tax breaks for corporate and individual donors. But until the federal government implements this plan, places like Yorkville Common Pantry must make do with state and city money, as well as private donors, which decreased by $150,000 this year. So Reyes is still bracing for the worst.

“We’re looking at at least $200,000 of cuts in our budget,” he said. “But I’m still waiting for the downturn to hit.”