In the 1800s, New York City encountered an infrastructure problem it had not anticipated: far more tall (i.e., more than 6 stories high) buildings were being constructed than city planners had anticipated. The city's water-supply system, which brings water from reservoirs in upstate New York and relies on gravity to deliver the water, couldn't generate enough pressure to force the water up to the high floors. So the city mandated that any such "tall" buildings would have to have a water tower on the roof; water was pumped up to the tower, and gravity could once again be used to bring it down to the various floors below, with sufficient pressure to keep the residents happy. At the beginning of this decade, it was estimated that there were 10,000 water towers in the city, with over 100 built or replaced each year. Most of them are built of wood, because wood resists temperature changes and corrosion. The towers are designed to hold a day's supply of water for the building, and more water is pumped up each night. Like most New Yorkers, I've unconsciously accepted the existence of these water towers in the same way I accept the existence of subways, yellow taxi cabs, and skyscrapers. But the pervasive nature of water towers struck me for the first time just yesterday, when I sat out on the terrace of my Manhattan apartment building, eating breakfast on a cool, quiet summer morning — and realized that I could see at least a dozen water towers without even moving. Big ones, small ones, some standing alone, others clustered closely together with towers on adjacent buildings; it seemed that they were everywhere. For the first time, I appreciated the enormity of the statistic: ten thousand water towers in this city of mine. To illustrate the point, I fetched my camera and tripod, set it up in a corner of the terrace, and took these shots. Though I swiveled the tripod around roughly 180 degrees, I never had to move it to see all of the water towers you see here; and if I could have rotated it a full 360 degrees (which might have been possible up on the roof), I'm sure I could have found a dozen more.

·In a survey of girls 9 and 10 years old, 40% have tried to lose weight, according to an ongoing study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (USA Today, 1996). ·A 1996 study found that the amount of time an adolescent watches soaps, movies and music videos is associated with their degree of body dissatisfaction and desire to be thin (Tiggemann & Pickering, 1996). ·One author reports that at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies." This grows to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen (Brumberg, 1997). ·In a study among undergraduates media consumption was positively associated with a strive for thinness among men and body dissatisfaction among women (Harrison & Cantor, 1997). ·Teen-age girls who viewed commercials depicting women who modeled the unrealistically thin-ideal type of beauty caused adolescent girls to feel less confident, more angry and more dissatisfied with their weight and appearance (Hargreaves, 2002). ·In a study on fifth graders, 10 year old girls and boys told researchers they were dissatisfied with their own bodies after watching a music video by Britney Spears or a clip from the TV show "Friends · In another recent study on media's impact on adolescent body dissatisfaction, two researchers found that: 1.Teens who watched soaps and TV shows that emphasized the ideal body typed reported higher sense of body dissatisfaction. This was also true for girls who watched music videos. 2.Reading magazines for teen girls or women also correlated with body dissatisfaction for girls.