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NEED TO DESTRESS? HELP IS HERE.
HOW CROOKED CONTRACTORS ARE RIPPING OFF FORECLOSED HOMES
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04.14.13 #44 CONTENTS
NEED TO DESTRESS? HELP IS HERE DATA: Your Body on Stress Q&A: Alicia Menendez on Destressing at Work ANDREW J SHATTÉ: Why Women Stress More at Work Than Men STYLE: How to Be Effortlessly Chic LIFESTYLE: 7 Things I Decided Are Just Not Worth the Stress EAT THIS: Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just an Artichoke WEDDINGS: 21 Tips For a Stressless Day
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DISREPAIR The dirty business of cleaning up foreclosed homes. BY BEN HALLMAN
POINTERS: The Iron Lady Passes ... Obama Stays the Course on Guns JASON LINKINS HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE
Voices MICHAEL HOGAN: Envying New York’s Tabloid Titans BEN GOLDACRE: What Doctors Don’t Know About Prescription Drugs QUOTED
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BEYOND ‘I DO’ Wedding photographers share the stories behind their favorite shots. BY ERIN MIGDOL
FROM THE EDITOR: Breaking and Entering ON THE COVER: Photo illustration
for Huffington by Troy Dunham
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Breaking and Entering N THIS WEEK’S issue, Ben Hallman looks at allegations of abuse and misconduct within an industry that, not coincidentally, began to boom when the housing market began to tank. Since 2006, about 10 million American homes have been foreclosed. Ben puts the spotlight on those who go to work after foreclosure: the bank contractors responsible for maintaining and inspecting foreclosed and abandoned homes. It’s a $2 billion business that has also spawned a flurry of lawsuits — stemming from a mix of overly aggressive actions, misunderstandings and
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bureaucratic confusion — charging that contractors have taken action on homes while people are still living in them, including emptying lived-in homes of furniture, heirlooms, and even pets. In one case — sadly typical — a woman named Marie Osborne returned one day to her foreclosedon home to find it had been entered, pillaged and padlocked by a company that had assumed it was abandoned.
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Ben also speaks to contractors and inspectors who are just doing their jobs — jobs that sometimes mean run-ins with squatters, drug dealers and other unexpected visitors. As one inspector, Mary Sisson, put it, “I’ve been chased by dogs, I’ve been spat at, I’ve had things thrown at me. I’ve walked in on gang members.” Elsewhere in the issue, Lori Fradkin shares the wisdom she’s gleaned in the course of attending 21 weddings, a mix of lighthearted advice and tips for navigating what can be a stressful day — and not just for the people actually getting married. Some of my favorites: “Remember that a marriage joins two lives, not just two people.” “Bridesmaids probably won’t wear their dresses again, even if the bride assures them that they’ll be able to.” (Discuss!) And, “Cliches completely get a pass: No one is going to judge the newlyweds for saying they feel like the ‘luckiest people in the world.’” This week’s installment is also the first of an ongoing Huffington series on how we can reduce the destructive force of
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stress in our lives — at work, at home, and beyond. You’ll find Alicia Menendez talking all things de-stressing on the Today show, Amanda Chan on seven things that are not worth the stress, Laura Schocker on how stress affects your body and your
This week’s installment is the first of an ongoing Huffington series on how we can reduce the destructive force of stress in our lives — at work, at home, and beyond.” brain, as well as features on why differing belief systems create more stress for women than men, what the French can teach us about stressing less about style, and how to reduce stress in the kitchen when cooking with one particularly delicious but intimidating ingredient.
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SENATE TO BEGIN DEBATE ON GUN CONTROL PACKAGE
The Senate voted on Thursday to start debate on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s gun control bill, overcoming a Republican filibuster threat. The vote came just one day after a bipartisan compromise was reached on a deal to expand background checks. The deal would require checks on gun purchases made online and at gun shows, and will be proposed as an amendment to the original bill. Earlier this week, Obama asked the public to pressure Congress on passing legislation. “I know many of you in Newtown wondered if the rest of us would live up to the promises we made in those dark days,” Obama said. “We will not walk away from the promise we’ve made.” Family members of Newtown, Conn., shooting victims met with senators this week on Capitol Hill to press them to support the gun bill and watched as the lawmakers cast their votes.
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MARGARET THATCHER DIES
“Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of Britain, died of a stroke this week at 87 years old. Her death sparked mixed reactions across the world. President Obama said she “stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered,” while Prime Minister David Cameron said she “took a country that was on its knees and made Britain stand tall again.” But others in England celebrated the death of a woman whom they blame for creating a social divide and financial crisis, and South Africa released a stinging eulogy for Thatcher, who never imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime.
TEXAS STUDENT GOES ON STABBING SPREE
A 20-year-old student has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault for a stabbing rampage at Lone Star College System’s campus in Cypress, Texas. At least 14 people were wounded in the attack. Police said the student, Dylan Quick, told them he had fantasized about the stabbing spree and planned it, the AP reports. The attack comes just three months after a shooting at a different Lone Star campus in which two people were injured.
RICK SANTORUM: ‘IT WOULD BE SUICIDAL’ FOR GOP TO SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a 2012 presidential candidate, maintained his hardline stance against gay marriage this week, despite calls within the conservative movement for the GOP to change its tune on social issues.”The Republican Party’s not going to change on this issue. In my opinion it would be suicidal if it did,” he told the Des Moines Register. Two Republican senators recently announced support for gay marriage, and all but three Democratic senators have done so as well.
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LOUISVILLE WINS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
The Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA tournament Monday night with an 82-76 victory over the Michigan Wolverines. Rick Pitino, who is now the first coach to win championship titles at two different schools, became a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Louisville player Kevin Ware, who suffered a nasty leg injury during the regional final, watched from the sidelines and unexpectedly got to finish cutting down the nets for his team amid a sea of confetti.
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BILL CLINTON AND STEPHEN COLBERT JOIN FORCES THAT’S VIRAL INTERNATIONAL TOPLESS JIHAD DAY
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Stephen Colbert made sure to focus on the important issues while interviewing Bill Clinton Monday night, asking the former president if he uses Facebook and Twitter. While Clinton does use Facebook, he said he wasn’t so sure about tweeting. “What if you tweet and nobody tweets back? There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter,” Clinton said. Before he knew it, Colbert had set up a Twitter account for him with the handle @PrezBillyJeff. Clinton, who famously sent only two emails during his presidency, quickly gained tens of thousands of followers.
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
THE REAL WOLF-MAN
NORTH KOREA APPROVES A NUCLEAR STRIKE ON THE U.S.
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THAT’S NOT A POODLE...
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BROOKSLEY BORN SAID A BUNCH OF STUFF THAT ACTUALLY MADE A LOT OF SENSE N A LANDMARK event that went largely unremarked upon by cable news providers and newspaper front pages, someone in Washington, D.C., spent time saying things to reporters that actually made sense. That person? Brooksley Born, former head of the Commodity Fu-
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tures Trading Commission (CFTC) during the Clinton administration. According to Ian Katz of Bloomberg News, some of the things she said out loud that made sense included the contention that big banks should be “tasked with the job of deciding how best to split themselves up” and that “there should be rules imposed, perhaps something like Glass-Steagall.” This was just the beginning of an extended jag of saying things aloud
A 2009 portrait of Brooksley Born, former head of the CFTC.
Enter that were compatible with the traditional notions of logic. “The Glass-Steagall Act, before it began to be eroded by the bank regulators, was a good idea, and the financial system was protected by that,” Born said. She then opined that the big banks currently “have too much political power and too much money to be sufficiently capable of being managed, of being supervised and regulated, and of being permitted to fail,” in a dazzling, rarely-seen-in-Washington demonstration of stringing sentences together that do not contain ideas that are intrinsically foolish. But Born was not done turning a symposium sponsored by Public Citizen into a veritable Cirque Du Soleil of sense-making. She pointed out that “despite the efforts in Dodd-Frank to make sure that we don’t bail out one of these major institutions, I think we would have to if they started to fail.” By “we” she meant “American taxpayers,” who provided trillions of dollars to big banks during the 2008 financial crash, with which those big banks bought lobbyists to help ensure that Dodd-Frank would be of limited utility to prevent future financial crises, and subsequent
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trillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts. During her time as head of the CFTC, Born was a lonely voice in Washington, routinely saying things like, hey, we should probably rigorously regulate this derivatives market, so that it doesn’t result in some epic economic cockup sometime a few years from now. You know, stuff like that. I am paraphrasing. As Matt Taibbi famously recalled, Born’s efforts
A dazzling, rarely-seenin-Washington demonstration of stringing sentences together that do not contain ideas that are intrinsically foolish.” earned her the denunciation of Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who subsequently — and over Born’s strenuous objections — went on to lead the legislative gobemouches of that era to pass the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. To properly visualize the “modernization” of “commodity futures,” just imagine Lehman Brothers collapsing in a wet, sad heap of incompetence and the ensuing financial sector collapse that sent billions of
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dollars of wealth to “money heaven,” running forever and ever on a loop on a television that is being repeatedly thrown at your head. Oh, look: It seems that former SIGTARP director Neil Barofsky was also on this panel, saying things that made sense as well, like the fact that the “financial services industry” is currently engaged in an effort to convince lawmakers that “any type of financial regulation will destroy the world” using the sort of “tired, invalid, disproven arguments” that are far
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more commonly spoken aloud in D.C., to reporters. That’s two people who were in Washington on Sunday, saying things that were not, objectively speaking, a hot sack of horse leavings. Sorry. I buried the lede. I am not used to observing these activities in nature. What are the implications of having people in Washington saying things that are actually sensible, aloud in public, where just anyone can hear them and write them down? I suppose there is a chance now that this is the start of a trend that might catch on, but, haha, not really.
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Former SIGTARP director Neil Barofsky, another person who said things that made sense recently, is seen testifying during a Senate Finance Committee Hearing in 2010.
SOURCES: STANFORD SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, MAYO CLINIC, A.D.A.M. MEDICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA, PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AMERICAN HEART. ASSOCIATION. ILLUSTRATIONS BY: TROY DUNHAM
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This is Your Body on Stress Your boss reams you out for a bad presentation — you break out into a sweat. Your demanding mother-in-law comes for a visit — your head pounds. An unexpected expense takes a hit on your bank account — your stomach aches. Here’s why: Historically, the majority of stressors facing humans were physical (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), requiring, in turn, a physical response. “We are not particularly splendid physical creatures,” says David Spiegel, M.D., director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford School of Medicine. Once our bodies identify a threat, we prepare for war (or getting the heck out of there): muscles tense up, the heart starts beating faster and blood flows away from any non-essential body system.
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TAP ICONS FOR INFO
Problem is, while a few hundred years ago our stressors were primarily physical, today the vast majority of stress is psychological. But our bodies have yet to catch up. Your boss yells. Your body thinks “grizzly bear.” What’s more, the brain isn’t always particularly good at evaluating how serious a particular stressor is. When the body is constantly stressed, it’s pouring resources into fighting that stress, which can, over time, take a profound physical toll. To help understand what exactly is going on inside your body when you’re stressed out, we asked Spiegel and Amit Sood, M.D. — associate director of Complementary and Integrative Medicine and chair of Mayo Mind Body Initiative at Mayo Clinic — to break it down. — Laura Schocker
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DAMON DAHLEN
Alicia Menendez Talks How to Destress on the Today Show “Oranges in particular — greats amount of Vitamin C — help to lower cortisol, which we all know is the stress hormone.”
This week, we turn the cameras on HuffPost Live host Alicia Menendez (above) discussing how to de-stress at the office for Stress Awareness Month.
TAP HERE FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW
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The Week That Was
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Cairo, Egypt 04.06.2013
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Members of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement shout anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans and light flares during a rally in front of the prosecutor general’s office on the group’s fifth anniversary.
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Hebron, Israel 04.04.2013 A Palestinian demonstrator throws a petrol bomb towards Israeli security forces during clashes that took place as thousands attended the funerals of a prisoner and two teenagers shot dead by Israeli troops. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 04.06.2013 Members of the Elite Unit of the Brazilian Military Police (BOPE) practice maneuvers in front of the Christ the Reedemer statue ahead of the FIFA Confederation Cup in June and the 2013 World Youth Day in July. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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London, England 04.06.2013 Revellers enjoy “International Pillow Fight Day” in Trafalgar Square. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Boston, Mass. 04.04.2013 Suzin Bartley, executive director of the Children’s Trust Fund, works on the display of 69 pairs of children’s shoes on the Grand Staircase at the State House. Each pair represent the average number of children abused every day in Massachusetts.
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Buenos Aires, Argentina 04.03.2013 A man pushes his bike through a flooded street in La Plata. At least 35 people were killed by flooding overnight, the governor said, bringing the death toll from days of torrential rains to at least 41, and leaving large stretches of the provincial capital underwater. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Gaza City, Gaza 04.07.2013 A Palestinian barber shaves the beard of a youth at his shop. The Palestinian human rights center denounced the arrest and beating of a group of youths by Hamas police earlier this week because of their trendy haircuts, which the group considers offensive. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Farah, Afghanistan 04.04.2013 An Afghan army soldier stands guard in the destroyed courthouse stormed by suicide bombers disguised as Afghan soldiers in a failed bid to free more than a dozen Taliban prisoners. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Paju, South Korea 04.06.2013 A South Korean Army soldier walks on Unification Bridge near the border village of Panmunjom. More South Koreans began to leave North Korea and the factory park where they work, four days after Pyongyang closed the border to people and goods. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Mequite, Texas 04.04.2013 Gov. Rick Perry looks on as a flag is folded, to be presented to the family of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, after a memorial service. The couple was found shot to death in their house. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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New Orleans, La. 04.07.2013 California guard Layshia Clarendon (23) watches the ball as Louisville forward Sara Hammond (00) shoots in the second half of a national semifinal game at the Women’s Final Four of the NCAA college basketball tournament. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Nairobi, Kenya 04.05.2013 Members of the Kenyan military parade practice ahead of the presidential inauguration on April 9, bringing an end to an election season that riveted the nation with fears of a repeat of the 2007-08 post-election violence. Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Lucky Guy Makes Me Envy New York’s Tabloid Titans Watching Lucky Guy is like peeking in on a lost world. Not just because it’s the last major work written by Nora Ephron, although that’s part of it. Though no one but her closest in-
timates knew it at the time, Ephron was battling cancer when she wrote the play, and it can be read — or, for those lucky enough to get a ticket, seen — as her statement on how to face death. (Answer: Chasing a cursor across the screen like your life depends on it.) And not just because it’s about
Tom Hanks as tabloid columnist Mike McAlary (center left) during a performance of Lucky Guy.
Voices Mike McAlary, a larger-thanlife reporter and columnist for the New York City tabloids (all of them — they kept hiring him away from one another) who died way too young. Don’t be fooled by the familiar-looking 56-yearold playing him onstage. McAlary, portrayed by Tom Hanks in the show, was just 41 when he died of colon cancer, on Christmas Day 1998. A year earlier, he’d won the Pulitzer for breaking the Abner Louima story. No, Lucky Guy feels like a telegram from history because the newspapers it celebrates don’t exist anymore. Not like they used to. Gone are the days when a single columnist could steer the municipal conversation with shoe-leather reporting on police malfeasance. McAlary’s colleagues in the play express their awe at his ability to get the “wood” — frontpage headlines, in type so big you had to set them in wood — for days on end with his explosive columns. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine those gritty dispatches from the city’s jails and precincts knocking Lindsay Lohan off page one. And the printers sure as hell don’t use wood anymore. McAlary and his buddies prid-
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ed themselves on giving voice to the working class. Remember the working class? They’re still here, but nobody seems all that interested in hearing what they have to say. Today’s city tabloids are more reminiscent of their supermarket cousins than their muckraking ancestors. In Ephron’s telling, McAlary once got beat up by an old friend outraged by his decision to do a puff profile of Donald Trump.
Lucky Guy feels like a telegram from history because the newspapers it celebrates don’t exist anymore. Not like they used to.” The tabloids were supposed to make rich slobs like Trump feel the heat of the street, not blow smoke up their asses. But times were changing. It was the 80s. Greed was good, no matter what Oliver Stone had in mind when he gave that line to Michael Douglas. McAlary wasn’t an activist; he was a columnist! If readers wanted Trump, by God he was going to give it to them. So that’s one way things changed. In the Reagan era, we became fasci-
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nated by the rich all over again. It’s a fascination that continues. And then came the Internet. Instead of getting their news from one or more newspapers, people starting getting it online. Suddenly, it didn’t matter so much what one guy wrote in one newspaper. Suddenly, everybody had a platform — which was great news for many people, but not for people who had worked their whole
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The tabloids were supposed to make rich slobs like Trump feel the heat of the street, not blow smoke up their asses.” lives to take over Jimmy Breslin’s chair. Then again, McAlary died just two years after The New York Times launched its website. He missed most of the fun, and it’s possible he would have thrived in this new ecosystem. He certainly had the ego to be an Internet star.
Mike McAlary is congratulated by his coworkers in the city room of the Daily News for winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Voices Look, I don’t want to romanticize this world any more than it’s already been romanticized. For one thing, I wasn’t there; for another, those who were probably wouldn’t like me very much, since I write stuff like this and this. Still, I confess that, watching the play, I envied these guys the certainty of their paths, even as I worried about their long-term prospects (not to mention their livers). From where I sat, it looked as if they’d lived through a golden age, where the rules were clear and all you had to do was live by them: learn the ropes, develop your sources, write the story, get the wood. We are so much freer today. Anyone can be a columnist. Anyone can “commit journalism,” as New York Times media columnist David Carr likes to say. But figuring out what to do, how to do it and, above all, how to get paid for it — that’s the hard part. It’s the same all over. So many paths to prosperity have disappeared. If what you do can be reduced to ones and zeros, watch out. You should see Lucky Guy. Tom Hanks is as good as he’s ever been, and that’s no small praise, since Broadway is an unforgiving medium. The supporting cast is
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full of fine actors you’ll recognize without always knowing why — veterans like Peter Scolari (Bosom Buddies, Girls), Maura Tierney (ER), Christopher McDonald (Happy Gilmore), Peter Gererty
Today’s city tabloids are more reminiscent of their supermarket cousins than their muckraking ancestors.” (The Wire), Courtney B. Vance (The Hunt for Red October) and Michael Gaston (Inception). Maybe you’ll feel the way I did: envious of these journalistic rock stars, who enjoyed notoriety and middle-class wages for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Or maybe you’ll feel like the man a row behind me. I overheard him saying to his wife that he’d seen the play twice already and knew some of the reporters it depicts. When it ended, he had tears pouring down his cheeks. He’d lost that world all over again. Michael Hogan is the executive arts and entertainment editor of The Huffington Post.
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Why Women Are More Stressed at Work Than Men
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E’VE HEARD THAT men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but are they also different when it comes to stress at work? The Wall Street Journal (“Office Stress: His vs. Hers”) sheds some light on this question. ¶ The WSJ focused on a new survey from the American Psychological Association, which polled 1,500 employees on a slew of workplace conditions that are known to affect our stress. The usual suspects emerged for both men and women. For example, not getting paid enough and insufficient opportunity for advancement led to dissatisfaction and stress for both sexes. But more interesting than these old chestnuts were the emerging differences between men and women at work.
Voices In a reversal of previous trends, women are becoming more stressed at work than men. Why? I believe it’s because women are more conflicted between work and home, and I believe that greater conflict is due to the different belief systems that men and women hold. In her watershed book, In a Different Voice, Harvard sociologist Carol Gilligan detailed how we raise our little girls and little boys differently. We make it clear to our little men that success and achievement are the keys to their future: mastering math, hitting the ball out of the park, getting the big corner office. On the other hand, we bombard our little girls with the message that their role is as the relationship maker, the smoother of friendship waters, the maker of peace. My work has shown that these messages get coded as “iceberg beliefs”: broad-based beliefs about the world and how we should be in that world. And these icebergs, dubbed such since only the tip of the belief is above the water and in our conscious minds, while formed in childhood, drive our adult behavior. Take Karen Herbison, one of the women featured in the WSJ article. Karen began to feel stressed when her management style was
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criticized as not tough enough. I can only speculate about Karen, but for many women, they would adopt a management style that fit their relationship-forming “icebergs,” which many male peers and superiors, looking through their achievement-at-any-cost lens, may perceive as weak. Women are wired to achieve too, and so they are “encumbered” with both the achievement and
Women are more conflicted between work and home, and I believe that greater conflict is due to the different belief systems that men and women hold.” affiliation demands while men are much more likely to escape with the achievement onus only. Don’t agree? Then ask yourself whether a job that requires weekly travel, days at a time, would have the same impact on a woman as a man. And isn’t “society” much more likely to criticize a woman in that job (she’s sacrificing her family on the altar of ambition) than a man — who is, after all, just doing his job as breadwinner.
Voices The Great Recession has only served to exacerbate these internal conflicts for women. It’s a matter of record that men were downsized in significantly greater proportions than women. And so women came to a new prominence as household breadwinners. In 1988, women contributed 38 percent of a family’s income. By 2009 the figure was at 47 percent, where it continues to hover today. In such a scenario, women are crashing between their iceberg that they should be at home nurturing their children and their iceberg that they need to be at work. And conflicts between icebergs cause stress. Of course, men and women are, in fact, both from planet Earth, and we share many of our strengths and foibles. Work-home conflict is no more exclusive to women than the drive to succeed is to men. So what can men and women do to short circuit their “icebergs” and ease their workplace stress? The key is self-awareness. Understand that many of us have developed icebergs about being there for our families that drive us home and icebergs about achievement that drive us to work. If we are to avoid collisions, we need to map out where
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these icebergs, when we are most vulnerable, and have a clear plan of when we give in to each. One of my coaching clients kept a written page that spelled out which work demands took precedent over dinner with her kids, and which did not. Another client had a mantra at the ready when she felt obliged to stay at work when she wanted to be with her family, which accounted for her financial role in their lives
‘Iceberg beliefs’ [are] broad-based beliefs about the world and how we should be in that world … While formed in childhood, [they] drive our adult behavior.” — “sometimes ‘being there’ for my kids means being at work.” Conflicts between the domains in our lives aren’t going anywhere. And stress is here to stay. The only frontier available in managing stress and finding balance is in the realm of our thoughts and beliefs. By Andrew J. Shatté, Ph.D. is the chief science officer of meQuilibrium.
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SCIENCE
COURTESY OF TED
What Doctors Don’t Know About the Drugs They Prescribe TEDTalks can sometimes portray science in triumphalist tones, with fabulous innovations that are changing the world forever. But
the real action in science is often around dirty, messy, angry problems and my TEDTalk is about the dirtiest I’ve seen yet. Doctors need the results of clinical trials to make informed choices, with their patients, about
Ben Goldacre speaks during the 2013 TED conference.
Voices which treatment to use. But the best currently available evidence estimates that half of all clinical trials, for the treatments we use today, have never been published. This problem is the same for industry-sponsored trials and independent academic studies, across all fields of medicine from surgery to oncology, and it represents an enormous hidden hole for everything we do. Doctors can’t make informed decisions, when half the evidence is missing. Most people react to this situation with incredulity, because it’s so obviously absurd. How can medics, academics and legislators have permitted such a huge problem to persist? The answer is simple. This territory has been policed — and aggressively — by the pharmaceutical industry. They have worked hard to shut down public discussion on the topic, for several decades, with great success. They say, for example, that the problem is modest, and that critics have cherry-picked the evidence: but this is a lie. The best evidence comes from the most current review of all the literature, published in 2010. It estimates that half of all completed trials are left published, and that
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trials with negative results are about twice as likely to be buried. Then they pretend that the problem is in the past, and that everything has been fixed. But in reality, none of these supposed fixes were subjected to any kind of routine public audit, and all have now been well-documented as failures. What’s more, they all shared one simple loophole: they only demanded information about new trials, and this is hopeless. Anything that only gets us the results of studies completing after 2008 does nothing to fix medicine today, because more than 80 percent of all treatments prescribed this year came to the market more than 10 years ago. We need the results of clinical trials from 2007, 2003, 1999 and 1993, to make
TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful “idea worth spreading” every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!
HUFFINGTON 04.14.13
Voices informed decisions about the medicines we use today. This isn’t about catching companies out for past misdemeanors, it’s a simple practical matter of making medicine optimally safe and effective. The arguments go on, with ever more red herrings: industry spokespeople pretend that information about trials — such as Clinical Study Reports — can’t be released without breaching the confidentiality of individual patient participants. But in reality, the EU Ombudsman has already forced the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to release hundreds of these exact same documents. He stated clearly that the administrative burden of removing any individual patient information is minimal. Next, they claim the cost of sharing trial information is prohibitive: but both the EMA and GSK have committed to releasing all the Clinical Study Reports that they have, and the EMA has already shared millions of pages of documents, quite happily. Sometimes industry people even claim — in hugely patronizing tones — that it’s better for only regulators to see trial results, behind closed doors, because the public would panic if exposed to dissenting views.
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There’s more. Sometimes they pretend that the academic journals are the bad guys, for rejecting papers with negative results, when the evidence shows this was barely ever an issue, and, in any case, there are now endless openaccess journals, specifically designed to accept negative results. Then there are the hole-pickers: people who pay lip service to the problem, with a brief claim that
We need the results of clinical trials from 2007, 2003, 1999 and 1993, to make informed decisions about the medicines we use today.” they are “on your side,” then expend all their worldly effort trying to pour cold water on the problem, pretending that things aren’t so bad after all. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, once laughingly told me that every page of my book Bad Pharma was infused with paranoia: that he could tell I’d been made furious by having the same argument about missing data, over and again, with chancers; that I had resorted to obses-
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN GEE; SHUTTERSTOCK / DARIUSZ MAJGIER (BOOK)
Voices sively covering every exit in the argument with snipers, to hem the enemy in, across hundreds of pages. I admit I am obsessed, and I hope you’ll share those details: if not by reading the book, then at least by inhaling the eight page briefing we have produced for our campaign, at alltrials.net. Because this is where I have to confront my inner grouch, and cave in to the optimism of TED. I have to tell you about the successful campaign for trials transparency that has grown since this talk first went up. In the UK, last October, almost as soon as Bad Pharma was published, there were questions on withheld trial results in parliament, including a Prime Minister’s Question (which David Cameron simply dodged). This led to widespread editorials, comment pieces, and news coverage in the London Times and elsewhere. A group of us, myself and some properly eminent UK medics, had a meeting with the Health Minister. The UK parliament’s Health Select Committee called on the GMC, NICE, and the pharmaceutical industry to address the problem of missing trials; the Public Accounts Committee are looking
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HUFFINGTON 04.14.13
The best currently available evidence estimates that half of all clinical trials, for the treatments we use today, have never been published.” at the withheld data on Tamiflu; and the Science and Technology Committee have now commenced a formal parliamentary inquiry into the problem of withheld results more widely.
“The whole edifice of medicine is broken,” writes Goldacre in his book, Bad Pharma.
Voices In January, science writer Simon Singh grew frustrated at my whining that things weren’t moving fast enough, and gave a generous donation to the campaigning charity Sense About Science. This kickstarted some more traditional lobbying. We teamed up with the great and good — journal editors, academics and a knight — to form the alltrials.net campaign. AllTrials asks people to sign up to two simple things: firstly, recognize that this is an ongoing problem; and secondly, call for the release of basic information (including brief summary results, and the long “Clinical Study Report” where available) for all trials, on all treatments currently in use, whether past or future. This has grown almost faster than we can. Over 40,000 individuals have signed up, and over 200 organizations. More than a hundred patient groups have committed their support, recognizing that it’s their members who participate in trials, and take medicines based on their results. We are now supported by almost all medical and academic professional bodies in the UK — the Royal Colleges, the Societies and Faculties — not to
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mention the National Physicians Alliance from the U.S., and the European Public Health Association. The outsider position in the UK is now not supporting the AllTrials campaign. In February, GlaxoSmithKline, one of the biggest drug companies in the world, signed up, and committed to publicly releasing all their Clinical Study Reports, going back to the beginning of the
Future generations will look back at our tolerating this bizarre situation in astonishment, the same way that we look back on medieval bloodletting.” company. More companies are discussing signing, and if these promises are delivered, they could finally add an interesting new element to the game: for the first time ever, I believe there will be commercial incentives to transparency. Imagine that there are two treatments, both with apparently equal benefits. One is made by a company that shares all its results, but the other is made by a company that publicly mocks and
derides the very notion that doctors and patients should dare to ask for such a thing. Which treatment do you want? I think the answer is clear, but we need more than this. We need public engagement on the issue, and wider recognition among policymakers, to get on with concrete solutions. That’s why I hope you’ll sign up to alltrials. net, and if you’re a member of a professional body anywhere in the world, then please get them to sign, too. If you’re from a company, then we are very happy to talk informally — and confidentially — about any anxieties you may have, but please, save your reputations, and sign. The current state of affairs is absurd. We can spend tens of millions of dollars on just one trial, hoping to ensure it is free from bias, and trying to accurately detect tiny differences between one treatment and another. And
MORE ON TED WEEKENDS IS THE PLACEBO EFFECT DANGEROUS?
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Voices
THE CREATION OF PREFERRED REALITIES
yet we let all those biases right back in, by allowing people to bury half the data. Future generations will look back at our tol-
Sometimes industry people even claim — in hugely patronizing tones — that it’s better for only regulators to see trial results, behind closed doors.” erating this bizarre situation in astonishment, the same way that we look back on medieval bloodletting. The time is now, to fix it forever, easily. Ben Goldacre was trained in medicine at Oxford and London, and works as an academic in epidemiology.
A selection of the week’s related blogs HEADLINES TO VIEW BLOGS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S THEME
GETTING PAST THE IDEA OF FAILURE
A PUSH TO PUBLISH
THE PROBLEM OF PUBLICATION BIAS
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO/CBS NEWS, CHRIS USHER; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; GETTY IMAGES AP PHOTO/EUGENE HOSHIKO
Voices
QUOTED
Part of the Republican Party’s problem, is that it’s kind of a silent film, blackand-white short, in an age when people are used to quadraphonic sound, jump cuts, full color and HD.
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“ She’s brilliant and she’s dedicated, she’s tough. She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general ... It’s true! C’mon.”
— Pres. Barack Obama cozied up to California Attorney General Kamala Harris during a speech at a Democratic National Committee fundraising lunch
— Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
told reporters at an early-morning session with bureau chief Robert Costa and himself
“ This is what it’s like to live in a country with no EPA.”
— HuffPost commenter BenC460, on the 1,000
dead ducks found in China’s Nanhe River
“ Are we supposed to be shocked a poor person is honest? Of course he’s honest! Dishonesty is how you get rich, not homeless.”
— HuffPost commenter alaskan
on Billy Ray Harris, the homeless man who returned a diamond ring
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: (AP PHOTO/MARKUS SCHREIBER; CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; NCP/STAR MAX/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; ISAAC BREKKEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR CLEAR CHANNEL
Voices
QUOTED
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“ It seems to me that now they’re fighting for the name. I worry that it means somehow we debase, or we change, what marriage is. I just worry about that.”
— Jeremy Irons
said of advocates for same-sex marriage, as opposed to civil unions, on HuffPost Live
“ We never really talked – we just had eyeball sex.”
—Ke$ha
told Metro U.K on a moment she shared with Johnny Depp at the benefit concert for Hurricane Sandy in L.A.
“ It could be worse. They could mass execute people in shopping malls, movie theaters and elementary schools like we do here in the U.S.”
— HuffPost commenter faust2001,
on the 7 people killed and left for dead on a roundabout in Mexico
“ A tempest in a C Cup...”
— HuffPost commenter UTHeretic
on Victoria’s Secret ‘Bright Young Things’ slogan upsetting parents
CHRIS MCGONIGAL
04.14.13 #44 FEATURES DISREPAIR
BEYOND ‘I DO’
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The Dirty Business of Cleaning Up Foreclosed Homes
LAST MARCH, a 23-year-old bank contractor cut through the secured gate at the entrance to a farm in Little Rock, Ark., and proceeded to a small house on the property. There, according to a police report, he broke the lock off one of the doors and forced his way inside. Âś The man, who police would later identify as David Cole, was allegedly there on official business: He worked in a little-known but booming industry that maintains and inspects millions of foreclosed and abandoned homes owned by mortgage lenders in the wake of an epochal real estate bust. BY BEN HALLMAN
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The bank responsible for this particular home had presumably decided that the home was another discarded mess, and Cole’s company had been dispatched to shore the building against the ravages of weather and decay. The owner of the property, a recently widowed woman named Marie Osborne, acknowledges that
that has quietly become a giant in the business of tending to abandoned properties, and Daryl Cole, proprietor of Cole & Sons, a local business that was supposedly acting as a subcontractor. Neither Daryl Cole nor his son David returned requests for comment. Safeguard declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
“ I’ve been chased by dogs, I’ve been spat at, I’ve had things thrown at me.” she was indeed in foreclosure. She was away when Cole arrived, she said. Still, the house was very much hers and far from abandoned, as even a cursory review would have made clear, according to a lawsuit she subsequently filed. When she returned home, Osborne was “astonished” to discover that her doors had been padlocked and her belongings ransacked, she claims. A grandfather clock was missing, along with an antique gold mirror, several televisions and family photos, Osborne alleges. Osborne filed the lawsuit against those she asserts are responsible — Safeguard Properties, a Valley View, Ohio-based firm
OPENER PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS McGONIGAL
In response to a general question about the merits of dozens of lawsuits against the company — and scores of similar complaints lodged against others in the same line of work — a spokeswoman noted that Safeguard completed more than 14 million work orders last year. “That isn’t to minimize the lawsuits, because our goal would be zero,” the spokeswoman said. Even so, she added, instances like these are “extremely rare.” But accounts such as Osborne’s have become familiar as the “field services” industry sifts through the wreckage of a monumental wave of reckoning that has seen some 10 million homes slide into foreclosure since 2006. An investigation by The Huffington Post featuring interviews with more than two
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dozen independent bank contractors and a review of more than 100 lawsuits reveals that the industry, which experts estimate booked more than $2 billion in revenue last year, is plagued by allegations of misconduct and abuse. According lawsuits and police reports drawn from communities nationwide, contractors have emptied lived-in homes of all possessions, including jewelry, heirlooms, and — in at least one instance — the family cat. They have
tors to inspect and repair homes. “I have gone to inspect properties reported as vacant that were still occupied. This happens too often.” The troubles emanating from the home inspection and repair business are the product of unique forces that generated the business at hand. The same banks that contributed to the real estate bubble via overly aggressive, lightly supervised mortgage lending now confront a glut of overgrown, vacant, and damaged homes.
“ I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown.” allegedly dumped trash illegally rather than paying for disposal, and have been accused of painting over potentially hazardous mold instead of removing it. They have allegedly forged paperwork, and used doctored photographs to bill banks and the federal government for services never performed. “I’ve walked into houses that someone else was supposed to take care of that were in horrible shape,” said Mimi Norris, who owns JR Services, a small company in Ohio that hires contrac-
Some of these homes are foreclosed and owned by mortgage companies; others are abandoned but still in legal possession of the former owners. The banks also dispatch contractors to the homes of people who have fallen 45 days or more behind on their payments but are not in foreclosure to determine if they have been abandoned. All told, an estimated 3.3 million properties require either an inspection or some form of repair work each month. Many of the contractors willing to engage in the dirty work of cleaning and repairing these homes have landed there by way
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ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
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of joblessness — among them laid-off loan officers and other mortgage industry refugees striving to make an honest living in a bad economy. Others are felons or cheats drawn to a sector that boomed after the housing bubble popped, seeking opportunity in an industry with a history of underpaying its workers and neglecting background checks. Fierce competition among the businesses that hire
these contractors and weak supervision by banks and federal agencies have prompted some workers to take shortcuts and to do work they are not licensed to do. Adam Reynolds, a Naples, Fla., contractor who ran a field services company called REO Proz until it folded last year, said he was routinely dispatched by banks or larger field services companies to drill out locks to see whether properties were vacant, only to find that tenants still lived there and had never missed a payment. “Countless times,” he said,
A woman from Boston, Mass., chants during a rally in front of the Fannie Mae headquarters on Sept. 27, 2012, in Washington, D.C. Homeowners, renters and supporters conducted a three-state protest to save the homes of millions of Americans in foreclosure.
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he received orders to clean out properties that had personal photos on the shelves and fresh food in the refrigerator. “I’ve even had an order sending me to a property that was never owned by any bank,” he said. “I know it has got to be painstaking at the top to keep tabs on everyone, but these errors are lifechanging for some people.” For the contractors, the work is by turns grim and dangerous. Entering other people’s property armed with nothing more than flashlights, they sometimes encounter squatters and criminals who use boarded-up properties as drug dens, sometimes provoking violent confrontations. “I’ve been chased by dogs, I’ve been spat at, I’ve had things thrown at me,” said Mary Sisson a mother of three who inspects abandoned homes in the suburbs of New York City. “I’ve walked in on gang members.” The full costs of the industry’s shortcomings are borne by more than immediate victims: The consequences ripple out to surrounding communities. Shoddy repair work allows homes to disintegrate into eyesores and neighborhood hazards, attracting vagrants,
junkies and thieves who tear out installations such as copper wiring. Pipes burst, filling basements with water, while broken windows allow rain to penetrate, spawning the growth of dangerous mold. Lawns grow into burgeoning forests, giving cover to destructive rodents and pests. In Klamath Falls, Ore., Jonathan Hankins, his wife and young son said they were forced to abandon the home they bought from Freddie Mac last year after they started suffering from nosebleeds, respiratory problems and mouth sores. A home testing kit revealed that parts of the house were contaminated with 76 times the allowable maximum level of methamphetamine residue, Hankins said. A local realtor hired to clean out the property never reported that the home was used as a drug lab, Hankins said.
Jonathan Hankins and his family when they bought their house from Freddie Mac. They later discovered the home was contaminated with 76 times the allowable maximum level of meth residue.
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Last year, Secret Service agents working with the Federal Housing Finance Agency raided American Mortgage Field Services in Brooksville, Fla., north of Tampa. The owner recently pleaded guilty to creating fraudulent inspection reports for work that was never done over a three-year period, overbilling Bank of America, which hired the company to inspect Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac properties, by $12.7 million. In addition to Fannie, Freddie
“filthy” with “broken windows, roaches and hair in [the] sink” even though it was supposedly inspected just two days before by a contractor hired by HUD. The most common problem appears to be inspectors breaking into still-occupied homes. Contractors are regularly dispatched to secure houses against damage from cold weather or to perform so-called “trash outs” in which they empty homes of belongings. Several contractors told The Huff-
“ Out here in the field there is no oversight. This is the Wild West.” and other mortgage companies, many abandoned and foreclosed homes are owned directly by the federal government, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which also hires contractors to watch over the homes. An audit last September by HUD’s Office of Inspector General found that 60 percent of sampled homes were not properly maintained. The auditor who checked up on one home, near Santa Ana, Calif., commented in field notes that the property was
ington Post that they have frequently been sent on such jobs only to find on arrival that the legal owner still lives in the house. Most leave after they force their way inside and find family photos and other evidence that indicate a house is still occupied by its owner. Some do not. PIRATE MENTALITY In Whippany, N.J., Lynn Stringas claims that contractors working for CoreLogic Field Services, a Westlake, Texas-based company working for Wells Fargo, forced their way into her home three separate times. Like many others
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Lynn Stringas poses for a portrait at her parents’ home in Maywood, N.J., on April 4, 2013. Stringas claims contractors forced their way into her house in Whippany, N.J., on three occassions. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON DAHLEN
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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who have had run-ins with bank contractors, her home was in the foreclosure process, but she was still the legal owner. The last break-in came after Stringas and her attorney called the bank repeatedly, pleading that they stop, she said. On that final occasion, Stringas claims, the contractors kicked in the front door and dumped boxes of papers she had left in her kitchen throughout her house. “I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown,” Stringas said. In Punta Gorda, Fla., a Canadian couple vacationing in a rental home returned from a day at the beach to discover that their laptop
police report, Titenko denied taking the belongings, and also denied opening the refrigerator and removing a beer, though a can of beer bearing his fingerprints was found open on a counter. Titenko could not be located for comment. Public records reveal that he has been arrested at least six times in Florida for burglary and robbery, along with larceny, narcotics possession and attempting to sell stolen goods. CoreLogic declined to comment. “The banking industry has a pirate mentality,” said Matthew Weidner, an attorney in Sarasota, Fla., who has represented scores of homeowners in lawsuits against field services companies. “They
“ Conditions are ripe for those willing to cut corners and commit fraud.” computer, iPod and six bottles of wine were missing, according to a lawsuit by the owner filed in Florida circuit court. A contractor, Victor Titenko, was sent by a field services company called Core Logic after someone wrongly determined the house was abandoned. According to a
take the position that if you have a mortgage, they can break down your door whenever they want.” As Marie Osborne tells it, the presence of the valuables left in her Arkansas farmhouse should have been enough to establish clearly that her home was not abandoned. She claims in her lawsuit that anyone could have quickly surmised that her home was still occupied, given how fam-
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ily and workers were coming and going on a daily basis. A check of the electric and gas meters would have shown that utilities were turned on, she said. Osborne’s account was confirmed by Lt. Jeff Allison, a Little Rock police detective who investigated the case. Allison estimated the value of the missing items at “several hundred thousand dollars,” noting that some had belonged to movie stars and presidents. There was “no reason to think” the home was abandoned, Allison said. “You could have walked in and lived there that day.” Osborne’s late-husband, William Jennings Osborne, made a fortune in the medical research industry. He was known both for his philanthropy and for his lavish Christmas light display, which attracted national attention and traffic jams so awful that neighbors eventually sued to halt the festivities. When he died in 2011, he left behind large debts, including an unpaid mortgage on the house, one of several that he owned. The homes would later sell at auction. But at the time of Cole’s visit, Marie Osborne was the legal owner of the horse farm. Cole was arrested and is set to
stand trial in the next few months on a burglary charge. According to police, he worked for a company owned by his father, Daryl Cole. According to public records, Daryl Cole is a convicted sex offender who pled guilty in 2008 to using the Web to solicit an officer who was posing as a 14-year-old girl. Allison said that the elder Cole told police that his son told him he had burned the televisions. None of the items from the house were recovered. Whether Cole & Sons worked directly for Safeguard or indirectly through another contractor cannot be determined from public records. But the very fact that the company was dispatched to attend to Osborne’s property highlights what critics portray as a major problem with the industry: scant background checks to ensure that people without criminal backgrounds are sent into other people’s homes. A Safeguard spokeswoman said the company requires background checks for the “business principals” of direct vendors it hires, and expects them to do the same with employees and subcontractors they might use. Plaintiffs’ lawyers allege that companies like Safeguard, and the banks and federal agencies that hire them, are failing in their obliga-
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DAMON DAHLEN
DISREPAIR
tion to oversee the low-paid, littletrained and itinerant workers who often actually do the jobs. Several bank agents told the HuffPost that while many contractors appear to be scrupulous and careful, sloppy mistakes and dangerous shortcuts amount to routine events. “Out here in the field there is no oversight,” said Brent Johnson, an Iowa-based contractor who has worked in the industry for 15
years. “This is the Wild West. The American public is buying homes at a reduced cost and thinking they are getting a good deal, but they are buying nightmares.” NOT WORTH THE DANGER Two decades ago, banks themselves generally took care of foreclosed and abandoned properties. But as the mortgage industry grew, lenders began parceling out the work to a handful of large field services companies, which established networks of subcontractors
Stringas shows her possessions, scattered in her parents’ garage in Maywood, N.J.
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in states across the country. The housing crash and subsequent increase in foreclosures dramatically enhanced demand for such services. At the end of 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-controlled mortgage companies that together own or guarantee roughly half of all mortgages in the United States, held 48,000 foreclosed homes on their own ledgers. By the end of 2010, that number had grown almost fivefold to 235,000. As of January, 1.5 million homes were in the foreclosure process or were owned by banks or a federal agency, according to RealtyTrac, an online real estate data company. In addition, 1.8 million home-
closed and abandoned homes — along with those that are still occupied but in default, requiring a monthly inspection to verify occupancy — created a rare job opportunity for mortgage industry castaways. In the years since the crash, more than 10,000 have filled the ranks of the field contracting services industry, knocking on doors, taking photos of front lawns and repairing broken windows and toilets — often at the same homes they built or helped finance only a few years earlier. “All of a sudden we saw an enormous influx of people wanting to get in on the money and not really knowing what they were doing,” said Norris, who
“ All of a sudden we saw an enormous influx of people wanting to get in on the money and not really knowing what they were doing.” owners were delinquent by at least 60 days on their mortgages, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. These numbers have remained high even as the housing market has more broadly shown recent signs of recovery. The swelling numbers of fore-
owns the Ohio property inspection company. Many of these contractors started small businesses with the aim of capturing some share of the work flowing from the largest field services companies, a group that includes Safeguard, Corelogic, Lender Processing Services in Jacksonville, Fla., and Cyprexx Services in Bradenton, Fla. These small compa-
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nies, in turn, often hire contractors of their own, which sometimes farm the work out yet again. With each layer of subcontracting, though, oversight tends to diminish along with compensation, generating pressure and opportunity to cut corners, contractors said. “There can be two or three companies between you and the bank taking chunks of this money out for doing nothing but shuffling paperwork,” said Wayne Frazier, a general contractor in Maryland. The trickle-down effect often means that banks and taxpayers aren’t getting much for each dollar spent. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development pays a maximum of $30 for an initial home inspection and $20 for each subsequent inspection, according to agency pricing sheets. Angie Montgomery in Cincinnati said she earns $3 per inspection — $4 if the job requires that she go inside a house. Out of that, she must pay for gas and car maintenance, along with liability insurance premiums. She must also contend, she said, with angry homeowners who see her as an agent of the same bank that they are fighting with to
avoid foreclosure. She has been yelled at, bitten by dogs and once entered a home where the vindictive former owner had cut a hole in the floor, then covered it with a carpet, she said. A Craigslist search for “property inspector” turned up dozens of ads looking for people to inspect homes for as little as $1 or $2 per job. For so little money, inspectors often don’t bother to get out of their cars, let alone knock on doors, talk to neighbors or check to see if utilities are turned on, experienced contractors said. The same market forces that have brought down pay for home inspections have bled into the other types of cleaning and repair work contractors commonly do. Buczek Enterprises, a company in Derby, N.Y., advertises that it will pay $30 to mow grass up to a foot high, and on a lawn up to 10,000 square feet, or a little bit bigger than a baseball diamond. Rates that low may not even cover travel time and fuel costs, experienced contractors said. Frazier and other contractors facing this pay squeeze said they have simply stopped accepting such jobs, concluding that the meager pay is not worth the risk or hassle. “I’m an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran,” Frazier said, “and it is
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BEN HALLMAN
more hostile here working for these companies.” UNSCRUPULOUS MONEY With both oversight and pay at a minimum, the conditions are ripe for those willing to cut corners and commit fraud, industry veterans said. The most prevalent form of misconduct is the practice of simply charging for work done poorly, or not done at all, a HuffPost review found. Though field services contractors are required to submit
photographs documenting their work, follow-up inspections indicate this form of verification is not always sufficient, or is sometimes falsified. An audit by HUD’s Inspector General last September found that one Las Vegas field services company, Innotion Enterprises, had failed to maintain “at a high standard of care” more than one-third of the properties audited. At one home, HUD auditors discovered weeds that were four feet high — even though a photo submitted 13 days before showed a contractor pulling weeds. During another review, an HUD audi-
Contractor Angie Montgomery completes an inspection in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earns $3 per inspection — $4 if the job requires she enter the house.
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tor found that a contractor who claimed to have installed safety rails on a front porch had not bothered to attach them with screws or nails to hold them in place. The cost to HUD for this botched work: approximately $360 per home, per month. A phone number for Innotion was disconnected.
statement. “We have started working on the fixes and we anticipate they will be completed by Sept. 30, 2013. The OIG has been briefed on our plan and is fully aware of our commitment to right the wrongs.” Though HUD oversees a relatively small number of abandoned and vacant homes — about 40,000 at any given time — experienced con-
“ I’m an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and it is more hostile here working for these companies.” Another HUD Inspector General audit — the one that determined that 60 percent of sampled homes were not properly maintained — also found that HUD continued to dole out contracts to companies after the agency had identified performance issues with those same companies. The report concluded that the agency “did not have adequate procedures in place to ensure consistent and adequate enforcement” of contracts. “Every concern raised by the Office of the Inspector in the [audit] has been addressed,” said Jerry Brown, a HUD spokesman in a
tractors said the same issues are at play throughout the industry. Bruce Davenport, a Georgia contractor who fixes up vacant homes, estimated that 70 percent of the properties he visits show signs of jobs half-done, or not done at all. Sometimes the evidence of misconduct is apparent to anyone who happens by a foreclosed home. In Lehigh Acres, a Florida exurb among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, police arrested Don Zilen in 2011 after he admitted to illegally dumping more than 10,000 pounds of trash that he pulled out of two homes into the backyard of a vacant house near where he lived. According to a pay record for the job — which Zilen also un-
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wisely dumped — Fannie Mae had hired Cyprexx Services to clean out the houses. Cyprexx hired a local company, REO Proz, which hired Zilen. Adam Reynolds, the former owner of REO Proz, told HuffPost that licensed dumpsites charge to accept waste, so Zilen likely calculated that he could save a few hundred dollars by emptying the trash in someone’s backyard. Reynolds said that Zilen had passed a background check,
entrusted to verify damage claims for the Federal Emergency Management Agency included criminals with records for embezzlement, drug dealing and robbery. FEMA subsequently tightened its screening requirements. HUD did not respond to requests for comment about what steps the agency takes to vet its contractors. Broadly, regulations that govern federal contracts require “reasonable efforts” to not include an individual as a “prin-
“ The banking industry has a pirate mentality. They take the position that if you have a mortgage, they can break down your door whenever they want.” but acknowledged that he did not perform such checks on all subcontractors. “Sometimes we hired them on a whim,” he said. ‘REASONABLE EFFORTS’ The failure by the industry to consistently vet contractors echoes practices that led to past investigations and rule-changes. In 2005, for example, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigation found that government inspectors
cipal” whom “due diligence would have exposed as having engaged in conduct that is in conflict with the contractor’s code of business ethics and conduct.” In the case of one Atlanta field services company, a simple background check may have prevented what some contractors allege was a short-lived, but costly scam. Brandon Lambert and his business partner, Jason Mathis, opened Premier Property Management Services last August using $70,000 in seed money from a local businessman, Mike Ed-
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wards, as starting capital. Registration papers indicate that Lambert was chief financial officer for the company. He is also a convicted felon, having served two stints in prison for check fraud and forging documents, according to public records. Over a three-month span, Lambert and Mathis hired contractors to clean and preserve hundreds of properties. In October, the company abruptly shut its doors. Seven former contractors who maintained homes for the company allege that Lambert and Mathis
properties for entities including HUD, according to contractors who spoke to HuffPost. It’s not clear what steps, if any, these companies take to vet the contractors they hire to carry out work orders. Asset Management Services, or AMS, in Bristol, Pa., is one of the companies that hired Premier Property to maintain foreclosed homes, several contractors said. On its website, AMS boasts that its “highly skilled and trained property technicians manage thousands of assets across the nation.”
It’s not clear what steps, if any, these companies take to vet the contractors they hire to carry out work orders. owe tens of thousands of dollars for work that was done, but not paid for. Two of the contractors have filed claims in Atlanta courts. Edwards said that he hasn’t recovered any of his investment money. Premier Property was a middleman, or an “order mill” as some contractors call these companies. At least least half a dozen larger field services companies hired it to clean out and preserve
AMS did not respond to a request for comment. Beth Meade, a former AMS employee hired in the fall of 2011, said almost all of her colleagues were temporary workers earning minimum wage and that they received little training. She said she was assigned with one other worker to oversee a portfolio of 125 properties in northern Florida owned by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had taken title to them after a bank failure. Meade said she hired con-
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tractors to inspect and preserve homes by searching “general contractors” and “Florida” using Google. She said she didn’t know if the contractors she hired had criminal pasts or whether they were licensed to do repair work — or even whether there is a licensing requirement in Florida. In an interview, Edwards said that he should have known better than to loan Lambert and Mathis money without better vetting their backgrounds. He said that he cut off the funding after it seemed clear that Lambert was “making up numbers.” He said he did not expect to be repaid and that he is not pursuing legal action, having concluded it would be fruitless. Opinions differ on what happened: Edwards said he thinks Mathis and Lambert were simply bad businessmen; former contractors told HuffPost they believe the pair intentionally cheated them. After Premier Property collapsed — or was looted — Mathis and Lambert appear to have stayed in the Atlanta area. In December, a Georgia company called American Contracting Consultants Inc. listed Mathis as its “registered agent” in pub-
lic filings. Antwane Adams, also listed as a registered agent of the company, told HuffPost that he is a childhood friend of Mathis. Adams said the business came about after Mathis approached with an opportunity: If he and his wife would pitch in just a few thousand dollars, Mathis and Lambert would help them launch a new business in the property preservation industry. Adams said he did not know anything about the industry prior to the proposal. In January, Adams said, he began hearing from contractors who claimed the two men owed them money. When confronted with the allegations, Mathis and Lambert “up and disappeared,” Adams said, taking with them tools and other equipment. Adams said he was working to remove Mathis’s name from registration documents. “We’ve been getting a lot of grief about this,” he said.
Foreclosure defense lawyer Matthew Weidner discusses why the nation needs to “wake up” to the industry’s tactics. Tap here to watch the full video on HuffPost Live.
Beyond ‘I Do’ Wedding Photographers Share the Moments You Can’t Plan For
WHAT IS IT LIKE to capture the happiest moments of a stranger’s life? We asked top wedding photographers around the country to choose the most memorable photo they’ve taken and share the story behind it. For some, the “picture-perfect” moment came and went quickly (a bride bursting into hysterics during the ceremony), while for others it was a slower build (observing a couple melt into one another). In each case, the photographer had a uniquely intimate vantage point, one the newlyweds would only be let in on weeks later, while flipping through their photo album. Ahead, find 16 images that rest on these moments. Also, watch for tips scattered throughout on how to take the stress out of the big day, from someone who — having attended 21 weddings — knows a thing or two about them.
By ERIN MIGDOL
Jordana Hazel Piper and Jeff Pope’s 2012 wedding in Laguna Beach, Calif., was officiated by Jeff’s brother, and at one point during the ceremony, Piper began laughing hysterically. “It’s one of those little moments we’re so lucky as photographers to catch,” Hazel said. “It’s just this tiny split second that most people probably don’t really notice. That’s what’s so great about photography.”
21 TIPS FOR A STRESSLESS WEDDING (FOR ALL INVOLVED) By LORI FRADKIN
The wedding is about the couple, but it’s not only about the couple. Maybe you could make the case that when people elope or have a totally private ceremony, it really is just about the two of them. But assuming there are others in attendance, the wedding is a big deal for family and friends who are like family too. Remember that a marriage joins two lives, not just two people.
Thea Dodds For photographer Thea Dodds, snapping a shot of brides Emily and Kristen Keenan on the back of an old truck was the perfect way to highlight their Vermont wedding’s elegant, rustic theme. Dodds (who recently wrote a book about photographing same-sex weddings) said the brides’ pose makes this shot a pretty standard wedding photo, which was a perfect fit for the Keenans. “Even though they’re two brides, they’re actually a really traditional couple and they really wanted this white wedding. [The pose] seemed like it really fit for them, and it was a wonderful way to put them on the back of this truck,” Dodds said.
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Wedding websites are not just vanity projects. Yes, you have to put pictures of yourself and your future spouse online, often accompanied by your charming “how we met” and proposal stories, but it’s not just about broadcasting your happiness to the world. Having all the relevant information (registry, hotel and transportation, area attractions) in the same place is extremely helpful for guests. I’m now disappointed when a couple doesn’t create one of these sites.
Eric Laurits Photographer Eric Laurits kept his eye on the flower girl throughout this 2010 Masachusetts wedding, and snapped this shot during the traditional Catholic ceremony. For Laurits, the picture represents the universal role of children in weddings. “It’s got this great story of grown-up girls, and then this one little girl that’s just off in her own world, curious about what’s going on, not paying attention to what’s happening up on the altar because she doesn’t care and she doesn’t really know,” Laurits said.
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Little kids in formal attire are incredibly adorable. They may get nervous walking down the aisle. They may get fussy or talkative during the ceremony. And they may get tired (or wired) by the end of the night. But, on the other hand, toddler tuxes!
tip Bridesmaids probably won’t wear their dresses again, even if the bride assures them that they’ll be able to. The chances of the dress being something they would have picked out on their own are pretty slim, but that’s OK. The bridesmaids agreed to be in the wedding party because of their relationship with the bride, so for the most part, they’ll wear whatever she asks them to. It’s just part of the deal.
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You will never regret having tissues in your purse. It doesn’t matter if the bride and groom are my best friends or if they’re my fiance’s friends and I’ve met them only once. I will most likely tear up. Recently, at a wedding in Boston, I told my fiance I just had the sniffles. I was lying.
Karen Wise Photographer Karen Wise only had a few minutes to compose this shot while bride Priti Paul’s hands and feet were painted during her traditional Mehndi ceremony in Udaipur, India, in 2004. The shot remains Wise’s favorite because it’s so different from the typical bridal portrait — and because the event was Wise’s first destination wedding. “What this wedding shoot represented for me was strength, courage, independence and pure artistry,” she said.
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Just because an item is on the registry doesn’t mean it’s a great gift. Sure, the couple might use a laundry hamper or flatware polish, but is that really what you want to give a close friend on this special occasion? Do you really want to be the one to say congratulations with a corn husker? Leave that to someone who doesn’t know them as well or let the newlyweds buy it with the credit they get from returns. Choose a silver picture frame or porcelain vase instead.
Elizabeth Messina Photographer Elizabeth Messina was trying to figure out how to photograph the bride’s beautiful gown — a challenge, since the San Francisco hotel they were in was too dark — when she decided to get creative and ask the bride to stand in the windowsill. “I felt like if I could get her to stand up there then I could see the scope and the beauty of the dress more. And honestly it came out better than I could have imagined,” she said. “I think the lesson in that for a bride is, if you’re comfortable, don’t be afraid to do something your photographer suggests because we have your best interests at heart.”
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Your friend’s spouse-to-be doesn’t have to be someone you would want to marry. Perhaps you don’t agree with the groom’s political beliefs or don’t find his jokes that funny or aren’t attracted to him. Well, that’s fine, because you’re not marrying him. As long as he loves your friend and they have a strong connection, just be happy for them.
Jasmine Star Shane and Mikaela Bradley opted to see each other right before their October 2012 wedding in Vancouver, and photographer Jasmine Star said the rainy skies cleared just in time for her to take this shot. “Within the first 10 minutes of being with each other they kind of melted into each other,” she said. “For them, [the wedding] is more about the marriage, and I feel like that photo captures exactly what was going on that day.”
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It’s not selfish or rude to plan a wedding over a holiday weekend. I realize this one is controversial, as a lot of people like to arrange their own trips over Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc. But my feeling has always been tip that if you’re close enough to be invited to a person’s wedding (and aren’t going just out of obligation), this shouldn’t be such a burden. If the wedding involves any travel at all, you’re probably going to have to take off a Monday or a Friday to be there anyway, so it’s really just a matter of using that vacation day for personal reasons instead and devoting your holiday to the wedding.
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10 Out-of-towners always appreciate a good hospitality bag. It’s such a treat to arrive at the hotel and have the person at the front desk present you with a gift. Because, in addition to the weekend schedule (which is essential), you know you’re about to get chocolate chip cookies. Or M&M’s. Or caramel corn. Or pretzels. Or some regional treat. Or all of the above. The best bags, I’ve found, have a combination of sweet and salty and at least one bottle of water. The water comes in especially handy when you get back from the reception and don’t want to open the $8 Evian.
Black tie doesn’t necessarily mean ball gown. This is a wedding, not the Academy Awards. So while it’s smart to ask around to see if the hosts have any expectations or preferences, I’ve definitely worn short dresses to very formal weddings and haven’t been out of place.
Matt Adcock Before her 2012 wedding in Mexico, bride Holly Johnson told photographer Matt Adcock of Del Sol Photography that she didn’t mind if it rained. Between the ceremony and reception, her statement was put to the test. Even though she and groom Matthew Glisson spent 30 minutes taking rain-soaked photos and had to move their reception indoors, Adcock said they didn’t care. “Before I came to Mexico I was running from rain. Every one of us, we ran from rain, the bride’s picking up her dress, ‘Oh my god,’” Adcock said. “But here, it was arms wide open. And she predicted it. That’s special.” tip
Leslie Barbaro Photographer Leslie Barbaro captured this spontaneous moment while shooting portrait shots of Jonathan Malumay and Julio Mendes, who said their vows at New York City Hall. Malumay, a member of the military, and Mendes married in 2012 after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “I think it’s so powerful to see intimate images of same-sex couples, despite the gains that have been made in marriage equality,” Barbaro said. “They actually did this without me even asking.”
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Plus-ones should be given more liberally as you get older. It’s understandable that you don’t want your single friends scrambling to find someone, only to bring a random date you’ve never met. But guests in relatively new relationships shouldn’t be subject to the same strict “how long have you been together?” test that they might have been just after college. First of all, you probably have fewer people in this situation now than you would have in the past, as many of your friends have already paired off. But beyond that, a six-month relationship at 29 is typically much more serious than a six-month relationship at 22. The rules should change accordingly.
Brandon Kidd Gary and Lora Critchley’s 2011 wedding in California was all about family, said photographer Brandon Kidd — they flew their families out from England and spent a week camping out in the mountains before the big day. So Kidd knew he had to capture their walk back down the aisle while surrounded by loved ones. “I liked the photo because it’s a good celebration with all their family right there,” Kidd said. “The wedding was a culmination of all the fun festivities ahead of time, and the anticipation of the week was building to this moment.”
tip Sometimes it’s worth sacrificing a little sleep to extend the festivities after the reception. Honestly, I usually just want to crash after the send-off, and I’m not the type to seek out a wild after-party. But I’m thinking of the night I sat in the lobby of a Chicago hotel eating pizza with one of my best friends and two of her friends I didn’t know quite as well. We’d all spent hours on the dance floor, but the impromptu get-together that followed made the weekend even better.
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You can pull together a beautiful wedding pretty quickly if you want to. One of my friends got engaged in November and tied the knot in March. There was no need for a prolonged engagement. She and her now-husband were ready to get married, so they got married. And their wedding was just as gorgeous and fun as weddings I’ve been to that took double the time to plan.
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Paper Antler Toward the end of Ashley and Creighton Schmidt’s 2012 wedding in Iowa, the guests lit paper lanterns and sent them off into the night. Photographers Jonny and Michelle Hoffner of Paper Antler caught this shot of Ashley releasing her lantern just before she and Creighton left the reception. “I love the total expression of joy on Ashley’s face and behind her, the sight of the other lanterns drifting off into the pitch black sky,” Jonny said. “It was the perfect ending to such a beautiful day.”
There’s really no need for a signature drink. Your guests will be happy with wine, champagne, vodka or some other basic beverage and likely prefer these drinks to a fruity concoction with a whimsical name. Focus more on making the food stand out. I still have fond memories of the lobster-taco appetizers at one wedding and the macaroni and cheese bar at another. tip
Kate Harrison Stacey Jones and Duane Dickson were plagued by torrential rain on their wedding day in Mendocino, Calif., but Jones didn’t let that stop her from enjoying herself, photographer Kate Harrison said. During their photo shoot, Jones grabbed an umbrella and had a quiet moment to take it all in. “Stacy was so wiling to get wet and dirty without hesitation at all. And for me that really exemplifies the modern bride that I love to work with,” Harrison said. “She’s not concerned with some sort of ‘perfect’ that other people might create. She wasn’t caught up in that.”
Photo slideshows are risky. Proceed with caution. It’s sweet to see your friends as babies and with their families and with each other and with each other’s families, but these presentations can get overly long. Also, there’s the potential for a projector malfunction. This isn’t to say don’t put them together. Just keep your audience in mind if you do. tip
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Photographer Angelica Glass took this photo through the tinted windows of bride Jenna Arnold’s car as she got out to see her groom, Jeremy Goldberg, for the first time at their 2012 Maine wedding. Glass said she did very little retouching in the photo’s editing process. “I love the photo because you’re not really sure what’s going on. You have to think about it for a minute or two,” she said.
The bouquet toss is kind of an uncomfortable tradition. Even when I was single, I chose that time to go to the bathroom, especially as the group of eligible women started to dwindle. Or I would stand off to the side in the back of the group and let my less shy friends go after the flowers. There are few things in life that aren’t made better with Beyonce, but even “Single Ladies” doesn’t improve this particular situation. In fact, it always signaled to me that it was time to hide. tip
Max Wanger
It’s really nice to hear the bride and groom express how they feel about each other. Not everyone recites personal vows at the ceremony. But in addition to toasts from the best man and maid of honor and friends and family, I want a few words from the couple. I want to hear the groom say how stunning his bride looks and how sweet she is with his grandpa. I want to hear the bride talk about the groom’s good heart and how he calms her down when she’s feeling anxious. And cliches completely get a pass: No one is going to judge the newlyweds for saying they feel like the “luckiest people in the world.” tip
Victoria Grand and Sean Daily married in 2010 in the very isolated Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado, so photographer Max Wanger wanted to make sure the couple’s portrait told the story of where they were. “I remember I kept walking further and further away from them and told them to just stay there looking away from the camera until we got the photograph,” he said. “The couple was amazing, and the setting was incredible.”
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The grown-ups like to party just as much as the kids. Many of the weddings I’ve attended have been for close family friends, so my parents and their friends have been invited as well. I’ve found that it’s often my dad’s friends who are rounding up a group for tequila shots. Plus, when “Firework” comes on, my first thought is not to find friends my age, but to jump up and down with one of my dad’s best friends who happens to be a big Katy Perry fan.
Reza Behnam “Photographing the guys is traditionally a tricky task,” photographer Reza Behnam explained. “Most guys don’t like their pictures taken and get very uncomfortable.” Behnam typically poses women more stylistically, resulting in shots with a glamorous feel. With the gentlemen, Behnam mainly tries to get them to relax — in this case, he asked the group to tell the groom dirty jokes. “The jokes were amazing, and the reactions were sensational,” Behnam said. When it comes to creating a mood for the photo, Behnam tends to edit images of the guys in black and white, for a look that’s both “classic and cool.” The contrasts he looks for in a great black-and-white image cover the full range from pure black to pure white and everything in middle. “This is one of my favorite pictures of the guys,” Behnam said. “It has a lovely natural feel to it without any distracting elements.”
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A variety of appetizers is more important than a variety of desserts. No one is going to be all “Ugh, macarons” if you decide to end the evening on an extra-sweet note, but as long as you have a really awesome cake, you’re good. While everyone is mingling during the cocktail hour and hungry for the main course, however, they’re going to be excited to have options.
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Rebecca Gosselin Susan and Daniel Ighani are horse trainers and married at their farm in Napa, so they knew they had to take a few photos with their horse, Tapatio. Photographer Rebecca Gosselin helped walk Tapatio around and into position, though he did get distracted by the grass on the side of the road. “The picture is really significant to the couple since they are fanatic horse people, and that’s really important to me as their wedding photographer — creating photos that are important to the couple, not necessarily to me,” Gosselin said. “There’s also a sweetness between the couple themselves, and the couple with the horse.”
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“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey is the magical song that gets people on the dance floor. If you’re inclined to avoid it because you worry that everyone plays it, consider that maybe there’s a reason. The band played this at the end of a friend’s wedding in 2008, and I still associate the song with that night. This might be because I had friends who hopped up on stage — emboldened by more than just the lyrics — but I think the familiarity of the song also encourages guests to gather and sing to one another.
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It’s wonderful to have a good wedding, but it’s more important to have a good marriage. Despite the effort that goes into making everything perfect, the wedding is still just one night. Ultimately, it’s not about the food or the flowers or the music or the dress. It’s about the relationship between the two people you’ve come together to celebrate.
Sergio Photographer Sergio said groom Eric Wajnberg’s powerful look in this photo, taken during his and Andrea De Domenico’s portrait session at their 2006 wedding in Arizona, gave him goosebumps. He got the shot thanks to his strategic directions for Wajnberg. “If I tell people to be serious, they make a face like they’re constipated sometimes,” he said. “So I tell him to be badass, and he did, and she did that, and I was like, ‘That’s it.’ I really love when he did that face.”
Exit Effortlessly Chic: 7 Reasons to Do As the French Do
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Exit HE FRENCH are known for a few things: Amazing pastries, rich history and drool-worthy style. French gals have it going on in the wardrobe department and possess a certain je ne sais quoi that leaves them looking effortlessly chic, 24/7. Whether they’re donning a slinky black dress or just a plain old Oxford shirt, they emanate
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good taste and elegance. But sometimes it feels as though they are in on a few beauty and style secrets that we Americans aren’t privy to. How do they get sexy bedhead hair? What gives them the confidence to try out new trends? Thankfully, we can look to a few of our favorite Francophiles to see how they make getting dressed easy and stress-free.
Catherine Deneuve NATURAL BEAUTY IS DE RIGUER.
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You’ll rarely catch a Parisian in heavy foundation and thick eyeshadow. Instead, they keep it light and natural, playing up their best features with a swipe of mascara or a nude lipstick.
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Carine Roitfeld WHEN IN DOUBT, BLACK IS ALWAYS THE ANSWER. Neon, patterns and bright colors are great, but when in doubt black is always a timeless and chic option.
Emmanuelle Alt CASUAL DOES NOT MEAN SWEATPANTS. French women have low-key style days, too, but those days rarely include sweats or fleece. Instead, they do casual the classy way — an oversized Oxford shirt and a pair of slouchy pants.
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Vanessa Paradis STYLE IS ALL IN THE SUBTLETIES. Upon first glance, Paradis’ outfit is pretty basic. A black blazer paired with a high-waisted skirt is hardly innovative, but when you look at all of the details, you realize how fashion-forward her look really is. The shoulder pads in the jacket, combined with the textured skirt and embellished top take this ensemble from ordinary to extraordinary.
Laetitia Casta PUSH BOUNDARIES.
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A veil is a bold move when you’re not walking down the aisle, but when paired with red lips and the right attitude, it can never fail.
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BEDHEAD IS ALWAYS BETTER. The French have perfected bedhead hair. And not only is it insanely sexy, but it’s also insanely easy.
Marion Cotillard INVEST IN ONE CLASSIC PIECE. Instead of having stacks and stacks of clothes that you probably won’t wear, invest in a few key pieces that look great on their own.
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7 Things I Decided Are Just Not Worth the Stress BY AMANDA L. CHAN
RECENTLY HAD a come-to-Jesus moment with stress, and it involved hives — and lots of ’em. Itchy, rashy, little itty-bitty bumps that first started on my upper arms, then spread down to my wrists, then appeared on my chest and thighs and calves, and eventually made their way to my neck and even my right cheek (just a couple
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there, thank goodness). By the time they’d made their way to my face, though, I’d about had enough and entered full-offense mode: bathing in oatmeal wash, taking Benadryl every night before bedtime (and praying that its drowsy effects wouldn’t make me sleep through my alarm in the morning) and applying hydrocortisone cream like it was Lubriderm. A little background: I’ve always been pretty good at handling stress — I grew up in a very regimented household, with a heavy emphasis
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on grades and extracurriculars, and I never really had any problems juggling everything. I’ve always quietly managed it all, taking secret pleasure in seeing just how many things I could pile on my plate at one time. But now that I’m a full-fledged adult, the stressors have morphed from academics and activities to more serious shapes — you know, the ones that we all have to deal with, yet wish we didn’t have to. So when just a few too many stressors decided to manifest in a week-and-a-half time span, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when my body decided to revolt. So in the week following the first appearance of the hives, I didn’t just take medicinal action (with all my
creams and drugs and lotions) — I realized I needed to take mental action, too. Conveniently enough, I had a trip to San Francisco booked to visit my best friend shortly after the hives appeared. I took this as my one big shot at relaxing and unwinding, and I made a concerted effort to not worry I SUPER and take things in LOVE PORK.” stride for the trip. That five-hour flight across the country (and then back again) also left for some great reflection time, to think about what (and who!) exactly stresses me out, what measures I can take to minimize said stressors, and what is just simply not worth stressing out about.
Worrying that I’m overreacting or having irrational feelings about something. When someone upsets me, my closest friends will tell you that my very first instinct is to immediately ask everyone if I overreacted in response to the situation, and if my feelings to the situation are valid. Maybe they’re just being good friends, or maybe I really am just always right (ha!),
but usually the answer is no, I’m not being crazy. But after doing this probably thousands of times — “So are you sure I’m not ridiculous for feeling this way?” — I’ve realized that who cares if I am ridiculous for feeling a certain way? It’s how I feel, and at the end of the day, if I’m upset over something, it’s my prerogative to feel that way. I’m not right or wrong because of my feelings — it is how it is, and that’s OK. (But friends, I still retain the right to vent!)
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Putting on lotion. So ... I was born and raised in Arizona. You know, that state down there by New Mexico and California that’s known for its dry heat. So if anyone has knowledge of what scaly, dry skin looks like, trust me, I do. Yet, I’m terrible about putting on lotion. Super terrible. I always forget. It smells nice. I know it’s ladylike to have soft and supple skin. I do put on sunscreen when I know I’m spending time outside, but for the most part, nope. Don’t really care. Though I’ll probably regret it in 20 years when I look 100 because of my skin.
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Not keeping up with my piano playing. I’ve played piano since I was about 4 or 5 and took lessons up until college. I loved it (and still do!) but since leaving home, I haven’t had the opportunity to practice (not having a piano right in your living room may be a contributor). For the first couple of years while I was out here, I would get really upset when I would try to sight-read something and be terrible at it. I felt like I was a failure for not being able to play to the level I did when I was still playing every day and receiving formal training. But I’ve come to realize several
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things. First: I’m not a professional pianist, nor am I trying to be, so it’s OK if I am not the most awesome player in the world. Second: It’s the feeling that I get when I’m practicing something that brings me joy. I don’t have to be able to play the hardest piece ever to love music.
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Catching something on the subway. Lord only knows how many diseases I’m exposed to every day on the subway, but I’ve been fortunate so far to have only caught some colds and one particularly nasty case of the flu (knocking on so much wood right now that that’s all I ever catch!). I have friends who are obsessive about hand sanitizer, or who refuse to sit down on the subway seats, or who will get up and move so that they don’t have to be near a stranger. But you know what? This is the city, and this is how cities are. I just tell myself my immune system is getting stronger by the day.
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Having an undying love for pork. I SUPER LOVE PORK. And, alas, my favorite porcine cut is pork belly — the fattier, the better. As a health editor, I
realize this is pretty not-good. But you know what? I generally eat healthy (well, I do also love noodles, but that’s a whole other story) and eat mostly vegetables and grains like quinoa. Plus, I rarely eat fried foods or fast food. So if I want to indulge in some pork, I’m gonna. Having to like everyone I meet. Now, I’m not saying it’s OK to be mean to people. But, as a girl who was raised to “make friends with everyone,” I’ve realized something as I’ve grown up: It’s OK to not like someone and not want to spend a lot of time with him/her. This may seem like a “no duh” realization to most of you, but as a self-declared nice girl, it’s been
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I running from something? Can I please stop running now? To me, there are so many other ways to exercise — a fun fitness class, team sports, etc. — that I am giving myself permission to think running is boring.
Arianna Huffington explains how GPS for the Soul, our stressrelieving mobile app, works.
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especially freeing to realize that some friends are really just meant to be small-doses friends. Not every personality is going to jibe, and that is completely OK. Not liking running. Maybe I’m not being clear enough — I have a deep disdain for running. Yes, I realize that running is healthy and an awesome form of cardio. But there is just something that I find particularly boring about the exercise. Why am I running? Who am I running to? Am
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Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just an Artichoke
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BY REBECCA ORCHANT
HUFFINGTON 04.14.13
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E UNABASHEDLY LOVE artichokes. Their flavor is really unlike anything else on earth, they are great for you and (conversely) they are one of the few foods society has collectively deemed acceptable to dip in drawn butter. As the saying goes, all things worth having are worth fighting
W
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for, and cooking artichokes occasionally requires a bit of elbow grease. But if you think this thistle is impossible to prepare, we’ve got great news for you: there’s a stressless way to cook everything, and cooking artichokes simply usually makes them taste the best. A few things you’ll have to deal with:
1. THE SPINES
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We know they seem really scary. We know you prefer that your food not fight back. So we’re going to make this extra simple: lay your artichoke on its side, and with a sharp knife, cut off about the top quarter, so it looks like this:
If you want to get rid of the spines on the outer leaves (especially great if you’re cooking for kids or other people who act like babies), just take your kitchen scissors and snip off the tops of any leaves with spikes.
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2. THE STEM
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For lots of artichoke preparations, like steaming, baking and roasting, you’ll want your artichoke to be able to stand up on its base. To do this, just trim the stem right at the base of the artichoke, creating a flat surface. You’ll be left with one of these:
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HUFFINGTON 04.14.13
HUFFINGTON 04.14.13
EAT THIS
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3. THE OXIDIZATION
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One of the things people find scariest about the artichoke is that it turns brown once you cut it — the humanity. Do not panic! This is why lemons were invented. You can either drop your trimmed artichoke into a bowl full of water with added lemon juice, or rub a cut lemon on any parts of the artichoke you’ve trimmed. Artichokes and lemons are buds, and they taste awesome together.
PRO TIP: if your artichoke turns brown in some places, it’s still going to taste exactly the same, so do not have a conniption.
Okay. Now you’ve got a prepped artichoke, so what should you do with it? You have a lot of options, which we know can be overwhelming. John at FoodWishes.com has probably the easiest, most fool-proof and not-scary recipe for artichokes that we have ever come across.
BONUS POINTS: It’s simple and lets you taste as much pure, artichoke flavor as possible.
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