In mid-February 1917 a women's movement independent of political affiliation erupted in Line New York City, the stronghold of the Socialist party in the United states. Protesting against the high cost of living, thousands of women refused to buy chickens, fish, and vegetables. The boycott shut down much of the City's foodstuffs marketing for two weeks, riveting public attention on the issue of food prices, which had increased partly as a result of increased exports of food to Europe that had been occurring since the outbreak of the First World War.

    By early 1917 the Socialist party had established itself as a major political presence in New York City. New York Socialists, whose customary spheres of struggle were electoral work and trade union organizing, seized the opportunity and quickly organized an extensive series of cost-of-living protests designed to direct the women's movement toward Socialist goals. Underneath the Socialists' brief commitment to cost-of-living organizing lay a basic indifference to the issue itself. While some Socialists did view price protests as a direct step toward socialism, most Socialists ultimately sought to divert the cost-of-living movement into alternative channels of protest. Union organizing, they argued, was the best method through which to combat the high cost of living. For others, cost-of-living or oganizing was valuable insofar as it led women into the struggle for suffrage, and similarly, the suffrage struggle was valuable insofar as it moved United States society one step closer to socialism.

    Although New York's Socialists saw the cost-of-living issue as, at best ,secondary or tertiary to the real task at hand, the boycotters, by sharp contrast, joined the price protest movement out of an urgent and deeply felt commitment to the cost-of-living issue. A shared experience of swiftly declining living standards caused by rising food prices drove these women to protest. Consumer organizing spoke directly to their daily lives and concerns; they saw cheaper food as a valuable end in itself. Food price protests were these women's way of organizing at their own workplace, as workers whose occupation was shopping and preparing food for their families.

    Astronomers theorize that a black hole forms when a massive object shrinks catastrophically under its own gravity, leaving only a gravitational field so strong that nothing escapes it. Astronomers must infer the existence of black holes, which are invisible, from their gravitational influence on the visible bodies surrounding them. For example, observations indicate that gas clouds in galaxy M87 are whirling unusually fast about the galaxy's center. Most astronomers believe that the large concentration of mass at the galaxy's center is a black hole whose gravity is causing the gas to whirl. A few skeptics have argued that the concentration of mass necessary to explain the speed of the whirling gas is not necessarily a black hole: the concentration in M87 might be a cluster of a billion or so dim stars.

    The same hypothesis might have been applied to the galaxy NGC 4258, but the notion of such a cluster's existing in NGC 4258 was severely undermined when astronomers measured the speed of a ring of dust and gas rotating close to the galaxy's center. From its speed, they calculated that the core's density is more than 40 times the density estimated for any other galaxy. If the center of NGC 4258 were a star cluster, the stars would be so closely spaced that collisions between individual stars would have long ago torn the cluster apart.