user: IN: Massachusetts loses jobs, but unemployment rate drops
The state unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent despite losing 7,100 jobs, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development reported Thursday.

The unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percent from August to September, according to a survey of households, tying the post-recession low of 4.6 percent recorded in May. Nationwide, the unemployment rate was 5.1 percent last month, and the number of new unemployment claims last week fell to a 42-year low.

“Although the state experienced job losses in September, the overall jobs picture is strong,” state labor secretary Ronald L. Walker II said in a statement.

But a survey of establishments found that most sectors shed jobs in Massachusetts last month. Leisure and hospitality employers added 2,800 workers last month and government added 2,300. Companies in education and health services businesses cut an estimated 4,700 jobs, however, and trade, transportation, and utilities employers cut 3,000 positions.

The only other sector to add jobs was financial services, which grew by 900 workers, the state said. Construction lost a seasonally-adjusted 2,000 jobs and manufacturing businesses cut 1,700.

Job creation numbers and unemployment rate data don’t always sync up because the household survey and the employer survey measure different things. A Massachusetts resident who finds a job in New Hampshire would not be recorded in the Massachusetts employer survey, for example. The surveys are conducted by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What is a short summary of the above article?

OUT: Two key surveys of the state’s labor market show the Massachusetts unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent despite losing 7,100 jobs.


IN: Sex, Bombs and Burgers
The premise of Peter Nowak's intriguing if ephemeral book is that the modern world is still shaped by our elemental urges: fighting, food and sex. The warrior instinct helped spur advanced military developments—not just weapons but rations, matériel and communications—which enter the broader culture, where they are shaped and defined in the marketplace by our quest to fulfill our desires.

Mr. Nowak begins with the symbiotic relationship between warfare and food. Napoleon once offered a top prize of 12,000 francs to whoever could preserve food for his hungry army. Frenchmen were soon cooking, sealing and boiling food in glass jars and then in tin cans. During World War II, Jay Hormel fed the U.S. Army with Spam, a pre-boned pork shoulder vacuum-sealed and cooked in a can. Modern food additives also owe their existence to war: The British military once concluded that 41% of men drafted in World War I had been medically unfit because of malnutrition.

All these wartime technologies quickly worked their way into peacetime kitchens. The microwave oven had a more circuitous development. In 1940, Nazis bombed the cathedral city of Coventry. The beautiful old city had been so devastated that Goebbels created a new verb to commemorate it, Koventrieren, or to raze to the ground. British scientists, desperate to produce a device that would allow the RAF to anticipate such attacks, partnered with American scientists to perfect the magnetron—in other words, radar.

This complicated machine was produced by a new American company called Raytheon. After the war, Raytheon used the radar technology to make the first microwaves. The microwaves were large at first, sold only to cruise ships and to Lay's, which used the new technology to dry its potato chips in seconds.

An ad for Spam from the 1960s.

By Peter Nowak Lyons Press, 386 pages, $26.95

The sections on "Bombs" and "Burgers" are the strongest in Mr. Nowak's book; the weakest focus on "Sex." The soft, bendable plastic that created Barbie is a war byproduct, he notes, and she traces her lineage to a German sex doll named Lilli. Today the Internet, an offspring of the American military's Arpanet, is overrun with porn—according to Mr. Nowak, $89 is spent on online porn every second. However salacious its title sounds, the book falters in its discussion of precisely how porn has changed and been changed by technology.

Mr. Nowak has an excellent eye for the riveting and the ridiculous. (Apparently Polaroid once produced the delightfully named "Swinger," a camera targeted at those who did not want to have their film processed at a Fotomat.) The frivolity of the book becomes a drawback, though, when Mr. Nowak attempts to make serious points about how today's genetically modified food industry had its roots in the military-edible complex that sprang to life after World War II.

Mr. Nowak rightly praises the work of Norman Borlaug, the DuPont chemist who cut his teeth doing research for the U.S. military and in the 1960s created a hybrid wheat plant whose yield was so enormous that struggling countries such as Mexico and India became self-sufficient by raising the crop. Indeed, they were even able to export their wheat. Mr. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for what was called the "Green Revolution"—referring to the fields of green crops that his invention produced.

Genetically modified food is an outgrowth of Mr. Borlaug's work. Yet recently, European countries have begun to ban it, and many African nations refuse genetically modified organism, out of worry that they will contaminate their own crops. Golden Rice, a bio-engineered crop from Monsanto, could save millions of lives, has been controversial for years, Mr. Nowak summarizes the tension beautifully: "It's a situation that illustrates just how emotional and paranoid people in the developed world have become about food, a luxury that people in the developing world don't have."

But Mr. Nowak undermines his own data by quoting a critic who warns that using GMOs could lead to "the destruction of everything," which is not particularly convincing, especially considering the critic is Britain's Prince Charles, who embodies the developed world's cosseted paranoia. Mr. Nowak closes the section with a a timid suggestion to consider GMOs, but ultimately lacks confidence in the heart of his own book. He should have summoned his own warrior instinct to do battle with the foolishness of those who would rob poor countries of food for the sake of their own phantom fears.
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OUT:

assistant: Ken Kurson reviews Sex, Bombs and Burgers by Peter Nowak.