The Shelf Life of Bliss

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: July 1, 2007

FORGET the proverbial seven-year itch.

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BYE-BYE HAPPINESS Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston’s live-in relationship turns sour in “The Break-Up.”

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Not to disillusion the half million or so June brides and bridegrooms who were just married, but new research suggests that the spark may fizzle within only three years.

Researchers analyzed responses from two sets of married or cohabitating couples: one group was together for one to three years, the other for four to six years.

While the researchers could not pinpoint a precise turning point — the seven-year itch, as popularized in the play and film about errant husbands, was largely a theory — they found distinct differences between the groups.

“We know the earlier ones are happier,” said Prof. Kelly Musick, a University of Southern California sociologist. “The initial boost that marriage seems to provide fades over time.”

Research also showed that the median duration of first marriages that end in divorce remains a little more than seven years, which means that those couples will likely spend more than half their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake.

“Some folks start getting less happy at the wedding reception,” said Larry Bumpass, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the study with Professor Musick.

Is there a three-year itch?

“There is not necessarily anything magical about year three,” Professor Musick said. “We know that typically when marriages end in divorce, half end before seven or so years and half end after. This is the same idea.”

Their analysis, which included unmarried, cohabitating partners but not gay couples, was based on the National Survey of Families and Households, a national

sample of 9,637 racially diverse households conducted by the University of Wisconsin Center for Demography and Ecology. The research, coupled with a survey released today by the Pew Research Center, provides an intriguing look at an ethereal part of marriage. Everyone knows the first blush of love is the strongest, but measuring how long it will last and whether that bliss is unique to marriage has always fallen more into the category of “here’s what my mother says” than something quantifiable.

In an academic paper they completed last year that analyzed earlier findings from the national surveys, Professors Musick and Bumpass compared responses to questions about how couples described their relationships, how often they fought and over what, and how they would envision their lives if they separated.

The research doesn’t address whether blissful 21st-century relationships are any more or less enduring than they were in the 20th century, so it may be that happy coupledom always came with a three-year expiration date. With nonmarital childbearing more common and women more economically independent, “What’s keeping people together is their love and commitment for each other,” Professor Musick said, “and that’s fragile.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the findings have some foundation.

Bart Blasengame, a 33-year-old freelance writer from Portland, Ore., was with his former fiancée for three years. “I felt like, by year three, we were both forcing it,” he recalled.

“It’s the whole cliché of pursuit,” he said. “Your dates are planned out like some Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with unicorns and rainbows. By year two, we were cruising along, living together, relatively happy. But from a growth standpoint things had started to atrophy. We were happy, content is a better word, but there was no spark.”

But the evolving rules of marriage provide both opportunities and pitfalls, Professor Musick said. “There may be greater potential to find fulfillment in relationships,” she said, “but that possibility and the expectations that come from it may lead to greater disappointment for some” if the expectations aren’t fulfilled.

Her bleak statistical assessment of the durability of enchantment is one of several new findings about relationships and marriage in America. In a word, the State of the Unions is precarious.

Even with the nation’s population increasing, the number of married Americans age 21 to 54 has declined slightly since 2000 — apparently for the first time, as measured by the Census Bureau. In the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of Americans in every racial and ethnic group who were never married has continued to grow by double digits.

The United States is far from embracing Europe’s postmarriage model or its much higher rates of nonmarital births. Most Americans surveyed this year by the Pew center, in fact, still say marriage is an ideal, if a more elusive one.

While roughly 9 in 10 American adults eventually marry, the time they spend married has declined sharply, in part because they are marrying later and living longer as widows. Moreover, the Pew survey found that 79 percent of Americans say a woman can lead a complete and happy life if she remains single. The comparable figure for men was 67 percent.

While married couples generally say they are more satisfied with their lives, younger adults are far less likely to stigmatize alternatives such as living together and having children out of wedlock, according to the Pew telephone survey of 2,020 adults, which is available at www.pewresearch.org.

The Pew survey found that nearly half of Americans in their 30s and 40s have cohabitated. Among all adults, a minority (44 percent) said that living together without getting married was bad for society (only 10 percent said it was a good thing), although the Pew survey concluded that “by providing an alternative to marriage, cohabitation for some appears to diminish rather than strengthen the impulse to legally marry.”

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In general, married people are presumed to be happier and better off, but Professor Bumpass, who found that most marriages nowadays are preceded by cohabitation, and Professor Musick questioned whether those benefits were unique to marriage and whether they are stable over time.

“We conclude that the boundaries between marriage and cohabitation may become increasingly blurred,” Professor Musick said.

As for the three-year itch, Byron Lester, a 49-year-old information technology administrator from Bloomfield, Conn., is well suited to consider it. Married three years and two months ago, he said the secret to success is often in the details. “Little things really do mean a lot,” he said.

Mr. Lester said he abandoned his cherished newspaper reading during dinner because that is when his wife most enjoys conversation. “And I think she’s adapted to watching more sports,” he said.

Marriage rates vary widely by race, ethnicity, education, income (63 percent of white women over 18 who make more than $100,000 are married; 25 percent of poor black women are). Soaring divorce rates have leveled off, most experts agree, but one reason may be that the dissolution of live-in relationships are not taken into account.

Raoul Felder, the celebrity divorce lawyer whose favorite aphorism is that marriage is the first step on the road to divorce, says marital longevity has fallen victim to the velocity of our suped-up society.

“We’re all addicted to a television-clicker lifestyle,” he said.

But a dissipation of that all-enveloping rapture is no reason to give up on a relationship, many people insist.

“At times, sure, I’m bored,” said Sean Meehan, 51, a therapist from West Hartford who has been married for 14 years. “Who isn’t? But you talk about it with your spouse and you can switch things up.”

“People are so used to everything being disposable,” he said. “They throw out diapers, lighters, coffee cups, so they can throw out a marriage.”

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex adviser, cautioned, too, that the notion of a three-year itch can become self-fulfilling. “How dangerous it is to say something like that,” she said. “From now on, everyone who’s getting married will say it will last three years and then I will have to look for someone else.”

Or, as Paul D. Neuthaler, a divorce mediator in Westchester, said: “The fizzle tends to bubble out within a three- to five-year period when the basis for the marriage was purely physical or related to some attraction not closely associated with each partner’s essential character.”

Another new study, by Prof. Evelyn Lehrer of the University of Illinois at Chicago, contradicts the chestnut that women who marry later are more likely to divorce. She found that with both men and women marrying later than ever, later marriages seem to last longer.

Stephanie Coontz, director of and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research group, said: “We’re getting close to a 180-degree turn in many of the rules about what makes marriage work and not work. The marriages of college-educated couples are becoming more stable.”

Professor Musick is happily married herself — “mostly,” she says — and will celebrate her third anniversary this fall. “My honeymoon,” she mused, “is almost over.”

Whatever the trends, marriage and relationships are in an unusual state of flux, as they were for baby boomers. With so much room to maneuver, younger couples have fewer firm markers to guide them.

In the film “Knocked Up,” Ben beseeches his father for advice after his one-night stand results in a pregnancy.

“I’ve been divorced three times,” his father replies. “Why are you asking me?”

Disability, the Insurance That Is Often Sadly Overlooked

By HILLARY CHURA

Published: June 30, 2007

It took just 17 days for Cindy Wrenn to realize that her disability insurance premium was not just another drain on her checking account. One-third of American workers are likely to be disabled for an extended period, and she became one of them when she had a stroke and brain aneurysm at age 28.

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Disability pay helps Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark.; her son, Jordan; and husband, Scott, deal with her Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Mrs. Wrenn signed up for her long-term disability insurance policy in February 2002, as a supplement to the one she had through her job as a licensed title agent. After her medical emergency, the policies paid 70 percent of her salary for the six months it took her to get back to work full time.

“We thought we were too young to have an illness and were pretty secure in our jobs,” said Mrs. Wrenn, of Knoxville, Md. “It wasn’t an outrageous premium, so we did it. Because of disability insurance, we got to follow through with the purchase of our house, and that is where we are living today.”

Disability insurance provides partial income replacement so that if someone becomes disabled, they need not dive into savings, sell a home or radically change how they live. Working people are more likely to become disabled than they are to die prematurely, even though twice as many people have life insurance as have disability coverage, according to industry statistics.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, illness is a major factor in home foreclosures.

About one-third of 20-year-old workers today will become disabled before they hit retirement age at 67, according to the Social Security Administration. And the primary cause of disability is chronic disease — cardiovascular, musculoskeletal problems and cancer are leading diagnoses — rather than work-related mishaps or nonworkplace accidents, according to a 2007 study for the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education, a nonprofit organization that informs the public about insurance needs.

While job-related expenses decrease if someone cannot work, other expenses can soar, especially if homes must be altered to accommodate a disability, said Craig Sampson, a lawyer in Richmond, Va. He bought disability insurance in 1999 when he was self-employed. He pays about $800 a year for $30,000 in coverage.

“Being disabled, you can go down the financial tubes fairly quickly,” he said. “Not only do you have regular living expenses you are unable to meet, but you have other expenses and all the uncovered medical bills. There’s a lot of stuff health insurance doesn’t cover.”

Tammy Brown of Bradford, Ark., signed up for short-term and long-term disability insurance after she started working for Wal-Mart Stores when she was 17. Fifteen years later, in December 2004, when she was 32, she learned that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was told she had two to five years to live. She took the summer of 2005 off to spend time with her children, then 6 and 9, and received short-term disability. She went back to work in a wheelchair for about a year, then left on long-term disability in 2006. She receives about half of her salary now.

“Without disability, we would’ve lost our home, our vehicle,” Mrs. Brown, now 34, said. “We probably would’ve had to move in with my in-laws.”

The family bought a handicapped-accessible van and installed a handicapped lavatory complete with roll-in shower and rails around the toilet as well as two ramps to the house and a lift to help move Mrs. Brown around the home. Now unable to use her hands or arms to any degree or walk, she needs 24-hour care, either from relatives or someone they pay.

“As I look back on it, I don’t know what we’d have done without it,” Mrs. Brown said. “I never thought I’d ever use it. I thought I’d be working at Wal-Mart until I was 60 or 70.”

There are two major types of disability insurance. Short-term coverage, often offered by employers, covers the first part of a disability and may provide income for a week up to a year or two, depending on the policy.

Long-term insurance starts after short-term coverage ends and helps replace income for a predetermined period, usually two or five years or when the disabled person retires. It can be offered through work — though usually not free —as well as through private policies.

Even those with a policy through work should consider buying private coverage, as an employer’s policy may be bare-bones, could take a while to begin and will not continue when the employee changes jobs. It may also exclude pre-existing health problems.

About 42 percent of full-time workers have no short- or long-term disability, according to Michael Fradkin, vice president for disability product management for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Specialists agree that if you can afford only one type of disability insurance, buy long-term coverage since being without an income for several months would be a burden but being without an income ever again could be devastating.

Because independent disability insurance tends to be expensive — and becomes more so as people age — specialists urge workers to buy it as soon as they start working so they can lock in lower rates. Besides, young workers often have not yet developed health problems that will hinder coverage later.

Mr. Fradkin said many employers offer disability policies, but some have been shifting costs to employees. At the same time, insurers are changing policies to make benefits less generous. They also are becoming more selective in who is granted a private policy.

The policy should replace at least 60 percent of take-home salary and ideally up to 80 percent, if that level of coverage is affordable. Disability insurance will not cover the whole salary for fear that there would be no incentive to work if the entire paycheck could be collected for staying home.

Before purchasing an individual long-term disability policy, it is best to figure out monthly expenses as well as any income from employers, investments or the government. Realize, however, that Social Security payments tend to be minimal, have a five-month waiting period and apply only if someone cannot do any job. Payouts through work policies are subject to taxes, while benefits through independent coverage are tax free.

Bruce Block, a disability specialist with Jenkins Block & Associates in Baltimore, said few people really understood their coverage. Plans vary. Some pay if someone is unable to work in her own professions; others pay if a person cannot do any job, Mr. Block said. Some offer a combination. Others provide coverage for only a few years, some until Social Security begins.

Premiums vary depending on age, sex, income, health, whether a person smokes, what type of job they have and the exclusions they accept. Generally a young nonsmoking accountant who would not need a payout for two years would pay a smaller premium than a chain-smoking construction worker who would want immediate disbursements.

Cara J. Lovenson, an insurance broker and employee benefits consultant in New York City, said she recently sold a policy to a 45-year-old man in relatively good health who is paid about $200,000 a year. She said the policy cost him about $2,800 a year, covered 80 percent of his salary and started payments after 90 days.

Mrs. Wrenn said that when she and her husband, Matthew, discuss ways to cut expenses, dropping their disability is never an option.

“I’ll never let it go,” Mrs. Wrenn said, “well, not until I retire.”

Buying into the Green Mvt

Buying Into the Green Movement

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: July 1, 2007

HERE’S one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

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WORLDLY GOODS The 438-horsepower Lexus luxury hybrid sedan.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight— careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand — and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives.

That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement.

Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available under Home Depot’s new Eco Options program.

Such choices are rendered fashionable as celebrities worried about global warming appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue,” and pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Lenny Kravitz prepare to be headline acts on July 7 at the Live Earth concerts at sites around the world.

Consumers have embraced living green, and for the most part the mainstream green movement has embraced green consumerism. But even at this moment of high visibility and impact for environmental activists, a splinter wing of the movement has begun to critique what it sometimes calls “light greens.”

Critics question the notion that we can avert global warming by buying so-called earth-friendly products, from clothing and cars to homes and vacations, when the cumulative effect of our consumption remains enormous and hazardous.

“There is a very common mind-set right now which holds that all that we’re going to need to do to avert the large-scale planetary catastrophes upon us is make slightly different shopping decisions,” said Alex Steffen, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com, a Web site devoted to sustainability issues.

The genuine solution, he and other critics say, is to significantly reduce one’s consumption of goods and resources. It’s not enough to build a vacation home of recycled lumber; the real way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to only own one home.

Buying a hybrid car won’t help if it’s the aforementioned Lexus, the luxury LS 600h L model, which gets 22 miles to the gallon on the highway; the Toyota Yaris ($11,000) gets 40 highway miles a gallon with a standard gasoline engine.

It’s as though the millions of people whom environmentalists have successfully prodded to be concerned about climate change are experiencing a SnackWell’s moment: confronted with a box of fat-free devil’s food chocolate cookies, which seem deliciously guilt-free, they consume the entire box, avoiding any fats but loading up on calories.

The issue of green shopping is highlighting a division in the environmental movement: “the old-school environmentalism of self-abnegation versus this camp of buying your way into heaven,” said Chip Giller, the founder of Grist.org, an online environmental blog that claims a monthly readership of 800,000. “Over even the last couple of months, there is more concern growing within the traditional camp about the Cosmo-izing of the green movement — ‘55 great ways to look eco-sexy,’ ” he said. “Among traditional greens, there is concern that too much of the population thinks there’s an easy way out.”

The criticisms have appeared quietly in some environmental publications and on the Web.

GEORGE BLACK, an editor and a columnist at OnEarth, a quarterly journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently summed up the explosion of high-style green consumer items and articles of the sort that proclaim “green is the new black,” that is, a fashion trend, as “eco-narcissism.”

Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said. He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.

“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”

Environmentalists say some products marketed as green may pump more carbon into the atmosphere than choosing something more modest, or simply nothing at all. Along those lines, a company called PlayEngine sells a 19-inch widescreen L.C.D. set whose “sustainable bamboo” case is represented as an earth-friendly alternative to plastic.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

A second home, complete with solar panels and constructed with salvaged lumber, in Edgartown, Mass.

Manjunath Kiran/European Pressphoto Agency

Laptops and desktop computers said to be good for the earth.

But it may be better to keep your old cathode-tube set instead, according to “The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook,” because older sets use less power than plasma or L.C.D. screens. (Televisions account for about 4 percent of energy consumption in the United States, the handbook says.)

“The assumption that by buying anything, whether green or not, we’re solving the problem is a misperception,” said Michael Ableman, an environmental author and long-time organic farmer. “Consuming is a significant part of the problem to begin with. Maybe the solution is instead of buying five pairs of organic cotton jeans, buy one pair of regular jeans instead.”

For the most part, the critiques of green consumption have come from individual activists, not from mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. The latest issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, has articles hailing an “ecofriendly mall” featuring sustainable clothing (under development in Chicago) and credit cards that rack up carbon offsets for every purchase, as well as sustainably-harvested caviar and the celebrity-friendly Tango electric sports car (a top-of-the-line model is $108,000).

One reason mainstream groups may be wary of criticizing Americans’ consumption is that before the latest era of green chic, these large organizations endured years in which their warnings about climate change were scarcely heard.

Much of the public had turned away from the Carter-era environmental message of sacrifice, which included turning down the thermostat, driving smaller cars and carrying a cloth “Save-a-Tree” tote to the supermarket.

Now that environmentalism is high profile, thanks in part to the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, mainstream greens, for the most part, say that buying products promoted as eco-friendly is a good first step.

“After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, “you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as “tree-hugging hippies” and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. “You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. “You need participation on a wide front.”

It is not just ecology activists with one foot in the 1970s, though, who have taken issue with the consumerist personality of the “light green” movement. Anti-consumerist fervor burns hotly among some activists who came of age under the influence of noisy, disruptive anti-globalization protests.

Last year, a San Francisco group called the Compact made headlines with a vow to live the entire year without buying anything but bare essentials like medicine and food. A year in, the original 10 “mostly” made it, said Rachel Kesel, 26, a founder. The movement claims some 8,300 adherents throughout the country and in places as distant as Singapore and Iceland.

“The more that I’m engaged in this, the more annoyed I get with things like ‘shop against climate change’ and these kind of attitudes,” said Ms. Kesel, who continues her shopping strike and counts a new pair of running shoes — she’s a dog-walker by trade — as among her limited purchases in 18 months.

“It’s hysterical,” she said. “You’re telling people to consume more in order to reduce impact.”

For some, the very debate over how much difference they should try to make in their own lives is a distraction. They despair of individual consumers being responsible for saving the earth from climate change and want to see action from political leaders around the world.

INDIVIDUAL consumers may choose more fuel-efficient cars, but a far greater effect may be felt when fuel-efficiency standards are raised for all of the industry , as the Senate voted to do on June 21, the first significant rise in mileage standards in more than two decades.

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.”

In fact, those light-green environmentalists who chose not to lecture about sacrifice and promote the trendiness of eco-sensitive products may be on to something.

Michael Shellenberger, a partner at American Environics, a market research firm in Oakland, Calif., said that his company ran a series of focus groups in April for the environmental group Earthjustice, and was surprised by the results.

People considered their trip down the Eco Options aisles at Home Depot a beginning, not an end point.

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”

Super Rich Seek New Heights in Pampering

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 15, 2007

Filed at 2:57 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Forget about the $350 stilettos. Shoes with status these days come with $1,000 price tags. And $600 handbags have become so bourgeois. A-listers don't want to be seen with anything costing less than $5,000.

It's no secret that luxury sales have been booming over the past six years. But at a time when the average American is grousing about meager wage growth and feeling strapped by a 30-cent spike in the price of gas, splurging by the wealthy has risen to gaudy proportions as the super rich seek new heights in pampering, price tags and one-of-a-kind items that set them apart.

''There's this insatiable appetite for the most luxurious,'' said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman's retail leasing sales division, who has brought European designers including Versace and Valentino to the U.S. over the past two decades.

Luxury sales worldwide topped $150 billion last year, of which 30 percent came from the U.S., where such sales have been rebounding after taking a pause following the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Telsey Advisory Group's James Hurley.

While U.S. store executives say that the weakening dollar has fueled a surge of tourists from Asia and emerging countries like Russia, whom experts say tend to go for the bling, luxury stores don't have to just wait for foreigners. Sure, investment bankers and Internet entrepreneurs have kept luxury sales booming, but the latest source of new wealth are hedge fund managers -- the top 25 last year made more than a combined $14 billion a year, according to Institutional Investor.

And unless there's another major geopolitical event that sends shoppers hibernating, experts believe luxury spending -- growing at double-digit rates for many high-end purveyors -- won't lose momentum.

Some social experts warn the trend will only increase tensions between the haves and have nots.

The over-the-top splurging is happening at a time when the income gap between the wealthy -- those making more than $350,000 -- and everyone else is the widest since the Depression Era. And while the average American worker's income increased 4.6 percent in 2006, the wealthy have enjoyed double-digit gains.

There's some trickle down effect too. Waiters at tables with $3,000 tabs get their share of big tips. But as Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte Research says, the biggest beneficiaries are artisan and small trade businesses, which are seeing the market expand as Americans' appetite for rare items increases.

According to Carol Brodie, chief luxury officer at CurtCo Media, the publisher of the Robb Report, whose annual issue features the year's best-of-the-best like a $330,000 Mikimoto golden pearl choker, the super rich don't want just the expensive. What they are looking for is the rarest item, something that is custom-made and the best quality. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s, ''it's not about the logos,'' she said. ''It shouts quietly.''

Nevertheless, the price tags seem loud.

Montblanc recently sold a $700,000-plus pen just a few days after it showed up in the New York store. The pen, adorned with rubies, sapphires and diamonds, took 15 months to handcraft. At Cartier, $1 million to $2 million sales checks -- rare only a few years ago -- is occurring a couple times a month at its North American boutiques.

Frederic de Narp, CEO and president of Cartier North America, said the largest bill tallied by a customer on a single visit last year topped $11 million. He would not give specifics on the purchase.

And Bulgari reports that single purchases in the millions of dollars are becoming more common in the States as well.

Louis Vuitton this spring pre-sold its limited number of $40,000-plus handbags made up of a patchwork of samples from different spring and summer collections.

The bags cost only slightly less than the median household income of $46,326, as reported by the Census Bureau.

Even Coach Inc., whose bags average $300, is extending its reach to the next tier. Last year, the handbag maker introduced a collection of limited edition $10,000 crocodile handbags.

Designers and retailers are also going to new lengths to cater to these wealthy buyers -- Tom Ford's new store in Manhattan has a butler who will bring drinks or order lunch.

With luxury merchants generating at least $8,000 in revenue per square foot -- about 10 times what a middlebrow retailer takes, according to Consolo, these boutiques can afford the frills. But these stores can't afford to be snooty about who they serve.

As luxury companies expand their stores or open new ones in such major cities as New York, Las Vegas and Washington, and reach out into wealthier towns like Chevy Chase, Md., they have to be careful about giving all customers who walk in the door the VIP treatment. Even celebrities seem like to shop in Juicy Couture sweats.

''Stores have to be more welcoming regardless of who they are,'' said Jim Taylor, vice chairman of the Harrison Group, a marketing consultancy. He noted that based on a comprehensive Harrison study on the wealthy, most of the well-heeled interviewed say they have not been treated well.

Nevertheless, the prices on luxury goods keep going up as stores don't see any consumer resistance. The dollar's weakness against the Euro has also made European goods more expensive here. According to Kelly Bensimon, founding editor of Elle Accessories, only a few years ago, the must-have bag retailed for $500; now the ''it'' bags go for well over a $1,000.

Trend experts say the shoe designer du jour is Christian Louboutin, whose prices top $1,000-- most likely beyond the reach of most upper middle class women seeking to splurge.

''Whether it's a handbag, shoe, or watch, the price of keeping up has gone up,'' said Bensimon. ''In order for you to be that woman, you have to have a serious bank account.''

Allison Weiss Brady, 36, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who is on the board of her family foundation, said she likes to be practical when buying handbags preferring to buy bags in basic colors. Still, she spends $20,000 per season on accessories and typically spends $5,000 per bag, much more than the $2,000 she used to spend a few years ago.

Among Brady's most prized finds recently are a pair of $11,000 earrings at Judith Ripka and a multicolored lizard Fendi handbag for $4,960.

Keri Frame, director of stores at Wynn Las Vegas, who oversees the 22 Wynn-owned stores in the luxury resort -- including Manolo Blahnik, Gaultier and a Ferrari dealership -- agreed that increasingly customers are looking for items almost no one else has.

Frame noted that it takes four years to make Jean Dunand watches sold at Wynn & Co. Jewelry, and 16 were made this year. Wynn has sold four of those ranging in price from $350,000 to $575,000 so far this year.

That leaves the hoipolloi who want to have the latest runway item feeling inadequate, or going into debt to try to keep up.

Nadine Absolam, a 32-year-old Brooklyn resident, says she likes to have the trendiest designer items, but she said it's getting harder to come up with the cash.

''My first priority should be my bills. But these designers bring out so many hot items that you must have these things,'' said the Pilates instructor. ''I am always late with my bills.'' Absolam spends about $1,000 in clothing and accessories per month, about half of her monthly salary. One of her most recent buys was a $1,100 Gucci messenger bag; her boyfriend last Christmas bought her Fendi's ''Spy bag,'' priced at around $3,000 and coveted by fashionistas.

''I can't keep wearing my Spy bag. I have to change it,'' to look fresh, Absolam said.

Others like Jennifer Sandovan, 28 of Yonkers, N.Y., say they just don't want to be part of it.

''I think it's a waste,'' she said. The most Sandovan pays for a handbag is $50.

If the average American doesn't want to dig themselves into debt, that may be the most they should spend. But for the well-heeled, spending $3,000 for an accessory doesn't make much of a dent.

According to an analysis of the latest IRS tax data available by Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley economist with Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, those in the top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million in 2005, up $908,000 from the prior year; the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up almost $4.4 million from the year before, according to the study.

Meanwhile, real reported income in the U.S. rose 3.4 percent in 2005 on average but the average income for those in the bottom 90 percent fell slightly compared with the year before, according to the study.

John Vogel, faculty director, Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, said such disparity doesn't bode well for society.

''We build a society around the middle class and as the middle class gets stretched and shrinks there are significant implications,'' said Vogel. If the ideal life is owning a pair of $1,000 shoes, that's ''a terrible ideal for young people.''

A growing number of stores and shoppers are seeing the need to give back, however. Brady, the philanthropist who divides her time between Miami and New York, prefers to shop at stores where a portion of sales goes to a charity.

And who knows how the younger generation will prioritize luxury?

Francois-Henry Bennahmias, president and CEO of Audemars Piguet North America, which sells watches that average about $40,000, does wonder about how his 11-year-old daughter's generation will view luxury spending.

''Will she want a watch, or will she want to spend on the environment?'' asked Bennahmias. ''You don't know what the youth will go for.''

Influx From Zimbabwe to South Africa Tests Both

Benedicte Kurzen/EVE

At the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather each evening for prayer. South Africa’s services have been severely strained.

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: June 23, 2007

JOHANNESBURG, June 22 — As Zimbabwe’s disintegration gathers potentially unstoppable momentum, a swelling tide of migrants is moving into neighboring South Africa, driven into exile by oppression, unemployment and inflation so relentless that many goods now double in price weekly.

South Africa is deporting an average of 3,900 illegal Zimbabwean migrants every week, the International Organization for Migration says. That is up more than 40 percent from the second half of 2006, and six times the number South African officials said they were expelling in late 2003.

And that reflects only those who are captured. Many more Zimbabweans slip into the country undetected, although estimates vary wildly. In a nation of 46 million, most experts say, undocumented Zimbabweans could number several hundred thousand to two million.

Social tensions are ratcheting up in both nations, as Zimbabwe’s adult population dwindles and South Africans, already burdened by high unemployment, face new competition for jobs and housing. The migrants also pose a diplomatic problem, because South Africa is trying to broker an end to Zimbabwe’s long political crisis without criticizing its government or appearing to have a major stake in the outcome.

The situation is inflicting ever more misery on the Zimbabweans. The vast majority flee their country’s penury to find a way to support their families back home. But in South Africa they often find xenophobia, exploitation and a government unwilling and ill-equipped to help them.

“There’s a lot of competition” with South Africans “for other resources like housing in informal settlements, access to limited primary health care and education,” said Chris Maroleng, an expert on Zimbabwe at the Institute for Security Studies, a research organization in Pretoria.

South Africa’s government already struggles to provide free housing, medical care and employment for its own poorest, including the millions living in shantytowns. Here, where joblessness runs from 25 to 40 percent of adult workers, the Zimbabweans — now the nation’s largest migrant group — are increasingly seen as intruders, not victims, and clashes between the groups are not uncommon.

Unquestionably, the Zimbabweans are victims first. A rising number claim to be refugees from persecution by President Robert G. Mugabe’s police and by supporters of his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Just six Zimbabweans sought political asylum in South Africa in 2001; last year, the total was nearly 19,000, more than a third of all asylum applications in South Africa.

But most are fleeing privation, not persecution. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was officially 4,530 percent in May; economists say it is at least twice that. Industries are operating at barely 30 percent of capacity, unemployment exceeds 80 percent and a disastrous harvest is likely to leave up to four million in need of food aid this year.

A memorandum prepared by 34 international aid agencies, including the United Nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, predicted this month that the country’s economy would cease to function by the end of this year.

Remittances keep the economy afloat: half of all households get most of their money from distant friends and relatives, a Global Poverty Research survey concluded last June. More than one in five of those who sent money lived in South Africa, the most of any nation except Britain.

Magugu Nyathi arrived in Johannesburg two and a half years ago and found work as a journalist for a Zimbabwe news organization. Her aunt, an office worker in Bulawayo, earns 400,000 Zimbabwe dollars a month — about $9, until the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted this week.

Now the aunt’s monthly salary is worth about $2. She survives in part on a stipend from Ms. Nyathi.

“There are families who don’t have a kid outside the country,” said Ms. Nyathi, who lives in Cape Town. “How are they surviving? Just think of it.”

Ms. Nyathi is lucky as migrants go: she has a skill and has obtained a temporary permit that allows her to remain legally in South Africa while her application for asylum is processed. Because Zimbabwe was long one of the best-educated nations in Africa, a share of migrants — particularly teachers, who have often been targets of harassment by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters — stand a good chance of finding work in South Africa, legally or not.

Johannesburg’s government said this week that 8 in 10 people who had visited a new office for migrant assistance were Zimbabwean, and that the visitors included mathematicians, geologists, engineers and experts in computers and aviation.

But skills are no guarantee of employment. At the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather every evening, waiting for the doors to open so they can spend the night. They occupy several floors of the building, from the foyer to stairwells and meeting rooms.

“Some of the people we have in this building are amazing,” said the Rev. Paul Verryn, the Methodist bishop of Johannesburg. “We have a doctor, two accountants, teachers, a health inspector — all sleeping on the floor.”

Even qualified migrants find it hard to get jobs without work permits or temporary permits that allow migrants to stay while they apply for asylum.

The permits are issued only in a handful of offices, and only at limited times. The Home Affairs Ministry, which regulates immigration, is frequently accused by Zimbabweans and advocacy groups of deliberately withholding permits, perhaps to force them to return home. More likely, it is simply overwhelmed: in Pretoria, for example, refugees often sleep on the streets outside the office to be the first of hundreds and even thousands who line up to apply for asylum.

Those who apply for asylum wait years for a decision, as officials tackle a vast backlog. Last year, as nearly 19,000 Zimbabwean applications for asylum flooded in, Home Affairs processed fewer than 2,000 requests from past years and granted asylum to a mere 103 people.

The growing crush of applicants presents the government with a delicate problem. During his seven years in office, President Thabo Mbeki has studiously avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, and is trying to present himself as an impartial broker in negotiations between Mr. Mugabe and opposition politicians to lay the groundwork for a presidential election next year.

When a leading opposition politician, Roy Bennett, fled Zimbabwe last year under threat of arrest, his application for political asylum was denied because the South African government decided that his claims of persecution were not founded. Mr. Bennett’s farm had been seized by the government, he had been imprisoned for a year for shoving a member of Parliament and he had been accused by the Zimbabwe police of plotting to murder Mr. Mugabe.

Mr. Bennett eventually won asylum, but only after going to court.

“The problem in giving someone asylum is that you have to make a statement about the country that individual is fleeing,” said Mr. Maroleng, at the Pretoria institute. “Politically, it raises questions, and it undermines the government’s policy on Zimbabwe, which is not to engage the government of Zimbabwe” on questions of repression and misrule.

So migrants wait for a chance at legal residence that may never arrive. On Thursday, a schoolteacher and union official from Harare used his Zimbabwe civil-service passport to walk across the border in Beitbridge and make his way to Johannesburg.

The teacher, who insisted on anonymity, said he had left his wife and two children behind because he was living in fear. He had been arrested and beaten after joining a union march in September, he said. “As we go forward toward elections in 2008,” he said, “we are again targets of violence. Every morning, my life was very much in danger.”

But he might have stayed, he said, had his monthly salary not been the equivalent of $15.

Another teacher, a friend, had fled Zimbabwe last year after government spies mistook a wake in her parlor for a meeting of opposition members, and set fire to her house, she said.

“You don’t feel the pain on somebody when it’s not happening to you,” she said in a Johannesburg clinic for migrants seeking legal advice. “I never expected such a life. But I think there’s a reason why God wants this.”

But for the moment, she said: “I just want a job. I can do dishes. I don’t mind that I was a teacher.”

My Virginity Went From Choice to Burden

By KATE McGOVERN

Published: June 24, 2007

Are you pregnant?” Sabrina asked me.

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David Chelsea

“No,” I said. I was leaning against the plastic divider of the nurse’s station at the clinic where I worked part time interviewing patients for a psychologist’s study of depression. Normally my contact with Sabrina, or with any of the nurses, was brief, involving the whereabouts of patients who had screened positive for depressive symptoms.

That morning, though, I had fainted on the train on my way to work. In the past, my occasional fainting spells — officially known as vasovagal syncope — had been precipitated by specific sources of pain: if I had a bad stomachache, say, or twisted my neck oddly.

I had grown accustomed to predicting these episodes just before they began. But that morning on the train it occurred at random, when I was otherwise feeling fine, which had left me sufficiently rattled that I sought out Sabrina in the nurse’s station.

Sabrina was my favorite nurse. She wore cat-eye glasses with plastic floral-print frames and scrub tops long and belted, like ’80s dresses culled from a vintage clothing shop. Sometimes I’d catch her on “kitchen duty,” as she called it, emptying basins of bloodied instruments on Wednesday mornings.

Wednesday morning was known as “procedures clinic.” Sometimes “procedure” meant cyst removal, IUD placement or a few other things, but usually it meant abortion.

That morning, Sabrina’s ponytail hung long down her back, thick with a hair extension. Her scrub dress was purple. She tapped her acrylic nails on the plastic counter and looked me up and down.

“You’re sure you’re not pregnant?” she asked.

I definitely was not pregnant. Pregnancy, in fact, was a scientific impossibility for me. Not because I’d had a slow month or two (though this was what I implied to Sabrina, with a carefully calculated roll of the eyes) but because at age 25, quite by accident, I was still a virgin.

When you are a young woman of childbearing years, most visits to the doctor inspire some form of inquiry about the state of your uterus. At my college health clinic, it didn’t matter what you went in for: pinkeye, sprained ankle, heavy drinking. Anything seemed to be a potential symptom of pregnancy.

At 19, seeking a Z-Pak or Robitussin with codeine, I was able to laugh the question off easily. “I’m still a virgin,” I’d say to the doctor, nurse practitioner, receptionist — whoever it was who asked. My virginity seemed so utterly normal to me at the time, and it was. Many of my friends were still virgins then, too. I was a late bloomer; I was choosy. And anyway, who wants to have sex in a twin bed?

As the sexless years ticked by, though, I became less forthcoming with the details of my virginity. Two days after my 24th birthday, I visited a gastroenterologist’s office in pain so acute that I couldn’t stand upright.

The male doctor to whom I presented my distended stomach was somewhat incredulous. “So you’re really in pain? Are you sure you’re not just pregnant?”

Quite sure.

“Do you want to take a pregnancy test just to be sure?”

No, really, that’s not necessary.

Three hours later, having gone from gastroenterologist to radiologist to gynecologist and back again, I was irritated. I was in pain, I had been explored rather intimately by three different doctors with three different devices and I had been reminded of my sexual inexperience at least five times.

After all this, it turned out it was nothing but a ruptured ovarian cyst that had caused my bulging stomach and the pain that the gastroenterologist hadn’t believed I had felt.

When I returned to his office, he laughed — a haughty kind of chuckle that made me momentarily hate him and all his ovaryless kind. “Well, I guess you’re not pregnant!” he exclaimed.

By that point, if I was to keep the promise I made to myself at 21 (to lose my virginity by the time I turned 25), I had only one more year. Four years had once seemed impossibly far away. But as that birthday loomed ever larger on my mental calendar, my lingering virginity began to loom larger as well, until I entered a state of near panic and told myself it was time to meet someone, anyone, and get it over with.

So I looked — in bars and at friends’ parties, on the subway, in coffee shops. And I met a lot of perfectly decent men. But I remained a virgin. I never actually made the choice to no longer be.

To inject a bit of much-needed humor into the situation, I even posted my virginity on Craigslist. I had no intention of following through with what I joked to friends was “my little experiment,” but nonetheless I was curious to read the responses that poured in (more than a hundred in the first hour).

I wasn’t so much surprised by the volume of responses, but rather by their wide range. There were, predictably, those who offered to “make it special,” “do it right,” and other variations on that theme. There were also men who confessed to being aging virgins themselves.

But the responses that most surprised (and pained) me were those from men who were ostensibly looking out for me. “If you’ve waited this long,” said one, “wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s really special?”

I was too much of a realist to think I was going to wait until I had found my one and only. Still, the well-meaning Craigslist crowd had it partly right. I hadn’t waited all this time just to lose it to a random guy for the sake of getting it over with.

Unfortunately, this realization did little to stem my anxiety. When my friends told me to chill out, that I was attractive and great and that it would happen when the time was right, I freaked out even more. Why had the right time not shown up yet? And what if it never did?

Eventually I began to view my entire reproductive system as a personal affront. Every month, my period, which had been cloyingly regular since the day it started, served as nothing more than a reminder that there was no possible way I might be pregnant. I was sure I could hear mean giggles coming from inside the box of tampons as I opened it.

FOR most women like me (we who expect to be mothers at some point but not yet), the prescient discomfort of PMS comes as a welcome relief, evidence yet again that the birth control pills, the IUD, the condom or whatever the contraceptive of choice has done its duty.

But when I felt my emotions spike and my midsection contort, there was no sigh of relief. There was just a sigh. There goes another month.

Then one week, two close friends happened to call within days of each other, each anxious that their periods were late. I played sympathetic. It’s probably just stress, I offered, you should relax. Suddenly, though, mine was late, too. Not a day or two, but more than a week — especially unusual for me, and certainly enough to make a girl worry, if she had cause to.

Instead, I found myself becoming increasingly jealous of my friends’ anxiety. I longed not for an unintended pregnancy (of course), but for the fear of the possibility of one.

I did not envy the women I saw in the clinic every Wednesday, awaiting their “procedures.” I believe in every woman’s right to make that choice, but I had no desire to be there on the table myself, my own feet in the stirrups.

Still, the possibility of conception (and perhaps the fear that accompanies it) is part of womanhood. Without it, I wondered, imagining the lonely eggs floating inside me without even the potential of fertilization, was I fully a woman?

I know, I know: sex and conception aren’t even linked for many women, whether because of their sexuality or their fertility or their personal choices, and I would never question the legitimacy of their womanhood. A woman is so much more than her ability to bear children. I know this, I believe it, and yet I wanted that possibility.

AT the clinic that day, Sabrina looked at me over the rims of her glasses, an eyebrow raised. I was ready to take a pregnancy test if she suggested it. I would pay for a pointless medical test before I would admit to this or any other health professional that at 25 I was still a virgin. Because if I told Sabrina the truth, I would also feel compelled to tell her that I wasn’t a prude, that I had felt strongly for men, had slept with their breath in my hair and their skin against mine, but just this one thing, this technicality, really — though I knew it was more than that — had eluded me.

But Sabrina didn’t need all that information. My virginity was not a big deal to her. She had just spent her morning cleaning the tiny vacuums that empty the uteruses of women who might be much like me, except for this one huge thing. If anything, my virginity might have struck Sabrina as a wise choice, or at least a safe one.

But I couldn’t view it that way. My virginity had trapped me in childhood, and by 25 I was willing to lie to appear as if I was out of it, if only for a moment, if only to one person. I was willing to lie, even pay, for the illusion of normalcy.

I was almost disappointed when Sabrina didn’t suggest a pregnancy test. Instead, she sent me to a doctor who, after asking if I was pregnant, assured me that I was fine. But the idea that I could pretend my virginity away stuck with me, and shortly thereafter, I went on birth control. I told myself (and my gynecologist, and my mother) that I wanted to abate the cramps that had become increasingly disruptive in the past year or two.

This was partly true. But I also wanted to bring the fantasy as close to reality as possible. To this end, I paid a $24 monthly co-pay on the prescription and pumped my body full of hormones I didn’t really need. Crazy, I know. But before I had been on the pill even three months, as if those little white tablets tricked my body in more ways than one (and I should add, at the very moment that I made the choice to stop worrying about it), I lost my virginity.

My impulse was to run back to Sabrina, to finally take that pregnancy test, even though I was pretty sure of what it would say. Pretty sure, but no longer completely. And somewhere, in that measure of uncertainty, was the woman I wanted to be.

Freegan in the USA

Not Buying It

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

At New York University, Autumn Brewster rescued a discarded painting.

By STEVEN KURUTZ

Published: June 21, 2007

ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Darcie Elia found angel wings.

New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.

Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another member of the crowd.

Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.

Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin examining a plastic toiletries holder.

A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.

The site, which provides information and listings for the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.com, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.

According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.

Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.

“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.

There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Others took home a TV.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

Others took home detergent.

In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design Within Reach, but it’s nice.”

But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)

Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk politics.

In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.

The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s Sanitation Department.

“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” (Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. “Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”

At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.

Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. (Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.

As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event (Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover Shop-Vac.

“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.

Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”

There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”

Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial products to brush their teeth?

Michael Falco for the New York Times

Madeline Nelson quit her corporate job and became politically active.

Enlarge This Image

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Adam Weissman, center, is de facto spokesman of the freegan movement.

“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its cardboard container is biodegradable.

These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is an impossible dream.

Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans “try to reduce the impact.”

It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.

Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”

After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.

She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.

“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.

An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.

The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.

She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is waiting for one to come up on freecycle.org. There are no new titles on the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers share used books, or goes to the public library.

But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”

Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not working for money.”

Michael Falco for the New York Times

Freegans furnish their homes with items like the CD rack in Madeline Nelson’s living room.

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Evan Sung for The New York Times

The food at a recent feast came from supermarket trash.

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Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times

A TV cart was rescued from garbage.

She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. “More trash will be there tomorrow.”

By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she said.

ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a Korean television crew.

Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through the store’s clear garbage bags.

The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat it rather than see it go to waste.)

As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather electronic entertainment.

Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers in the near future.

Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of life.

As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the biggest step.”