Poor Mojo's Newswire

"It came in through the bedroom wall and permeated in through the front door," Mr. Zitomer, 49, a database administrator, said. "Our apartment was filled with smoke almost every night. We had to have the windows open in the middle of the winter."

Secondhand smoke is overtaking noise as one of the most common complaints coming before condo and co-op boards. While the issue isn't new, real estate lawyers say that with New Yorkers prohibited from smoking at work, in bars and restaurants, and even directly in front of buildings, the battle against secondhand smoke is increasingly taking place at home.

"This is the hot controversy in condos and co-ops right now," a real estate lawyer who gets a new smoking-related case about once a month, Aaron Shmulewitz, said. He added that with more science confirming the dangers of secondhand smoke and fewer people picking up the smoking habit, homeowners are more sensitive to the problem.

When she became pregnant with her second child, she looked for ways to stave off those sad feelings — and ended up doing something surprising. She ingested her placenta.

Placentophagy, as it’s called, grabbed headlines this summer after a judge ordered a Las Vegas hospital to give a new mom her uterine lining, which the woman planned to dry, grind up and ingest. She, like Shalev, had heard that ingesting the placenta was a natural way to ward off the baby blues — those overwhelmed, weepy feelings that 80 percent of moms develop after giving birth.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.