PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Cegah diabetes tipe-2 dengan lima langkah ini

Seseorang bisa terkena diabetes tipe-2 jika tubuh mereka tak bisa memproduksi cukup insulin. Penyakit ini juga bisa menyebabkan banyak kerusakan pada tubuh dan organ internal. Bahkan tak jarang penyakit ini bisa berujung pada kematian jika meningkat menjadi sangat serius.

Diabetes tipe-2 tak bisa diobati dan hanya bisa dikontrol. Untuk itu, sangat penting untuk dapat mencegah penyakit ini sebelum akhirnya terkena. Berikut adalah beberapa cara untuk dapat mencegah diabetes tipe-2 .

1. Menjaga berat badan
Salah satu faktor yang membuat seseorang berisiko terkena diabetes tipe-2 adalah lemak yang berkumpul di sekitar perut. Untuk itu, menurunkan berat badan dan mengurangi ukuran perut sangat penting untuk dapat mencegah diabetes. Terlalu banyak lemak yang berkumpul di sekitar perut akan menurunkan produksi insulin dan akan semakin memicu diabetes tipe-2.

2. Kurangi konsumsi gula
Beberapa orang terkena diabetes karena faktor keturunan. Jika ini yang terjadi pada Anda, sebaiknya hindari mengonsumsi makanan manis. Orang dengan faktor keturunan diabetes akan lebih mudah terkena diabetes, sehingga Anda harus mewaspadai konsumsi gula serta mengecek tingkat gula darah secara rutin. Sesuaikan juga diet Anda agar tetap sehat dan tak terkena diabetes tipe-2.

3. Memilih lemak yang tepat
Tak semua lemak buruk dan harus dihindari. Untuk dapat mencegah diabetes dan menurunkan berat badan, Anda tak harus menjauhi semua lemak. Yang terpenting adalah memilih lemak yang tepat seperti asam lemak omega-3 atau lemak dalam minyak zaitun. Namun beberapa jenis lemak seperti lemak jenuh sebaiknya dihindari sama sekali. Karena lemak jenuh bisa memicu peradangan dan menyebabkan resistensi insulin yang bisa berujung pada diabetes.

4. Olahraga
Olahraga bukan berarti Anda harus nge-gym setiap hari. Menjaga agar gaya hidup tetap aktif dengan berjalan-jalan beberapa hari sekali atau naik turun tangga juga bisa jadi salah satu bentuk olahraga ringan yang bisa menjaga kebugaran tubuh Anda. Berolahraga dan memiliki gaya hidup yang aktif seperti ini juga dapat membantu menangkal risiko diabetes tipe-2.

5. Konsumsi rempah-rempah
Beberapa bentuk rempah seperti kayu manis, merica, dan thyme diketahui bisa mencegah diabetes. Jadi, gunakan rempah-rempah ini pada masakan yang Anda konsumsi untuk membantu Anda menangkal penyakit gula tersebut.

Tak pernah ada obat untuk menyembuhkan diabetes. Yang harus Anda lakukan adalah mengontrol tingkat gula darah setiap hari. Untuk itu, mencegah diabetes datang jauh lebih baik ketimbang harus mengobatinya.

TEHNIK PENGECATAN DINDING

Mengecat dinding kadang di anggap merupakan sesuatu yang sangat remeh.Mungkin anda benar,tapi hati-hati pengaplikasian cat bangunan yang tanpa di sertai pengetahuan tehnik, akan bisa menimbulkan resiko di kemudian hari.Misalnya,Cat cepat pudar,dan mengelupas.

Untuk dapat menghindari resiko cat cepat pudar dan mengelupas,maka perlu di perhatikan beberapa hal sebagai persiapan pengecatan.

1.Dinding bangunan yang akan di cat harus di pastikan suda kering sempurna +/- 1 bulan setelah selesai di pelaster.

2.Tembok di plamir untuk menutup pori-pori bangunan,setelah itu di haluskan dg amplas.

3.Pemberian cat dasar.Cat dasar yang di pergunakan di sini biasanya wall sealler yang berpungsi untuk dapat menetralisir alkali tembok yang berlebihan.

4.pengecetan,setelah cat dasar kering di lanjutkan dengan pengecatan dengan mempergunakan roll atau kuas.

Yang perlu diperhatikan di sini adalah bagaimana kita bisa mengaplikasikan aturan-aturan yang tertera di kemasan cat.

Untuk dinding yang berhubungan dengan cuaca luar (dinding bagian luar) sangat di sarankan untuk tidak di plamir.

Demikianlah persiapan-persiapan sebelum pengecatan di lakukan

SEWA TENDA

saco-indonesia.com, Untuk anda pecinta alam, berkemah juga merupakan kegiatan biasa, sehingga perlu persiapan dan perlengakapan berkemah pastinya sudah hapal diluar kepala, dari kesemuanya peralatan dan perlengkapan berkemah, tenda telah menjadi perlengkapan yang harus dibawa untuk dapat mengarungi dan menikmati alam liar. Sekarang ini juga terdapat banyak variasi, model dan tentu saja harga tenda itu sendiri. Bahkan tak jarang yang telah menjadikan tenda sebagai sebuah bisnis jasa sewa tenda.

Biasanya untuk mereka yang bergerak dalam bisnis sewa tenda seringkali telah menawarkan paket-paket kenyamanan ataupun harga yang bersaing. Salah satunya MyHab. Salah satu pemain bisnis dalam bidang jasa sewa tenda menawarkan kenyamanan meskipun anda berada di alam liar.

Sewa Tenda juga mampu menampung sebanyak dua orang, dimana didalamnya telah dilengkapi dengan tempat tidur yang cukup empuk, lantai yang bisa ditinggikan, bahan anti air sampai ada "lemari besi" (safety box) untuk dapat menyimpan barang berharga pada saat anda ke kamar kecil atau mandi di sungai.

Tak hanya untuk cocok untuk berkemah di alam liar, sewa tenda ini juga cocok untuk keperluan piknik ataupun  menunggu konser atau festival yang mengkususkan anda untuk menginap. Dapat menghemat ongkos menginap dihotel bukan.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

KALIBRASI

Pada umumnya, tiap osiloskop sudah dilengkapi sumber sinyal acuan untuk kalibrasi. Sebagai contoh, osiloskop GW tipe tertentu mempunyai acuan gelombang persegi dengan amplitudo 2V peak to peak dengan frekuensi 1 KHz.

Misalkan kanal 1 yang akan dikalibrasi, maka BNC probe dihubungkan ke terminal masukan kanal 1, seperti ditunjukkan pada gambar berikut:

Gambar di atas menggunakan probe 1X, dengan ujung probe yang merah dihubungkan ke terminal kalibrasi. Capit buaya yang hitam tidak perlu dihubungkan ke ground osiloskop karena sudah terhubung secara internal. Pada layar osiloskop akan nampak gelombang persegi. Atur tombol kontrol VOLTS/DIV dan TIME/DIV sampai diperoleh gambar yang jelas dengan amplitudo 2 V peak to peak dengan frekuensi 1 KHz., seperti ditunjukkan pada gambar berikut:

Gunakan tombol kontrol posisi vertikal V-pos untuk menggerakkan seluruh gambar dalam arah vertikal dan tombol horizontal H-pos untuk menggerakkan seluruh gambar dalam arah horizontal. Cara ini dilakukan agar letak gambar mudah dilihat dan dibaca.

INTERNAZIONALE VS AC MILAN

saco-indonesia.com, Internazionale telah berhasil untuk memenangi pertandingan Derby Della Madoninna kontra AC Milan. Gol tunggal Rodrigo Palacio di menit ke 86 telah menjadi gol satu-satunya dalam pertandingan tersebut yang telah diselenggarakan di Stadion Giuseppe Meazza (23/12).

Babak pertama dimulai Internazionale langsung melancarakan serangnan melaui Fredy Guarin tetapi dapat digagalkan oleh AC Milan. Tak ingin kalah, Milan juga mencoba menjebol pertahanan Internazionale melalui Mario Balotelli tetapi tendanganya masih membentur Juan Jesus.

Di menit ke 10, Balotellli juga mempunyai peluang emas, tetapi sayangnya tendangan Balotelli di dalam kotak penalti Internazionale masih menjauh di atas gawang Handanovic. skor masih 0-0.

Menit ke 11, sepakan bola deras dari Kaka untungnya masih dapat diatasi oleh Handanovic. 20 menit awal Internazionale nampaknya tertekan oleh serangan dari AC Milan. Inter juga mencoba untuk keluar dari sarangnya, melalui umapn taider ke dalam kotak penalti AC Milan, sundulan Nagatomo masih melebar dari gawang Abbiati.

Di menit ke 30, kedua tim masih imbang dengan skor 0-0. Milan juga masih mendominasi pertandingan, kali ini Muntari ingin mencoba peruntungannya tetapi masih melebar dari gawang Internazionale. Permainan kedua tim sudah menjurus kasar, hal ini telah terlihat dari beberapa kali pelanggaran yang dilakukan oleh kedua tim.

Di menit ke 40, Palacio telah dijatuhkan di dalam kotak penalti oleh Muntari, tetapi wasit tidak melihat pelanggaran. Hingga babak pertama berakhir skor tetap 0-0.

Babak kedua dimulai, menit ke 47, Palacio telah berhasil mengirimkan operan kepada Jonathan, pemain asal Brasil ini pun juga langsung menembakkan bola dengan keras, sayangnya masih bisa ditangkap dengan mudah oleh Abbiati. Inter hampir saja telah membuka keran golnya melalui sundulan Campagnaro yang sudah mengarah ke gawang, untungnya masih bisa dihalau oleh Zapata.

Mario Balotelli juga bisa menjadi ancaman nyata bagi Internazionale, beberapa kali Balotelli telah mempunyai peluang di depan gawang Handanovic sayangnya Balotelli belum bisa mengoptimalkan peluang. Di menit ke 65 Nagatomo juga melepaskan tendangan keras ke gawang Abbiati, sayangnya bola juga masih mengarah tepat ke arah kiper.

Di menit ke 72, Balotelli telah melakukan tendangan bebas, tendangannya masih mengarah jauh dari gawang Handanovic. Kedua tim nampaknya masih sulit untuk bisa menembus pertahanan masing-masing tim. Sehingga serangan kedua tim masih gamapng untuk dipatahkan.

Memasuki menit ke 80, beberapa kali sisi kanan pertahanan AC Milan telah menjadi pusat serangan awal Inter. Palacio hampir saja mencetak gol pertama bagi Inter, untungnya tendangan datar Palacio masih bisa ditepis oleh Abbiati di menit ke 81.

Menit ke 86 akhirnya Inter dapat menjebol gawang AC Milan, berawal dari umpan datar Guarin, Palacio dengan mudah memasukkan bola ke gawang. 1-0 bagi Internazionale.

Sadar tertinggal, AC Milan semakin menyerang, sayangnya dari beberapa serangan dapat dipatahkan oleh pemain bertahan Internazionle. Menit ke 90 Muntari harus di kartu merah karena mendorong Kuzmanovic terlebih dahulu. Hingga babak kedua berakhir, Inter tetap memimpin skor 1-0.

Susunan Pemain:

INTERNAZIONALE (3-5-1-1): Handanovic; Campagnaro, Rolando, Juan Jesus; Jonathan, Taider (Kovacic 57"), Cambiasso (Icardi 82"), Zanetti (Kuzmanovic 68"), Nagatomo; Guarin; Palacio

AC MILAN (4-3-2-1): Abbiati; De Sciglio, Bonera, Zapata, Constant (Emanuelson 45"); Poli (Pazzini 87"), De Jong, Muntari; Saponara (Matri 76"), Kaka; Balotelli.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Tribute for a Roller Hockey Warrior

Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.

“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.

One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.

“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”

Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.

His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.

“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”

Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.

The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.

Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.

The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.

Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.

“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”

Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.

Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.

Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.

Play was tough and fights were frequent.

“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”

Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.

“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”

A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.

And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.

Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.

“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”

Dan Walker, 92, Dies; Illinois Governor and Later a U.S. Prisoner

As governor, Mr. Walker alienated Republicans and his fellow Democrats, particularly the Democratic powerhouse Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago.

Ellen Turner Dies at 87; Opened Kitchen to Feed the Needy of Knoxville

Ms. Turner and her twin sister founded the Love Kitchen in 1986 in a church basement in Knoxville, Tenn., and it continues to provide clothing and meals.

ay 4, 2015 ‘Game of Thrones’ Q&A: Keisha Castle-Hughes on the Tao of the Sand Snakes

“It was really nice to play with other women and not have this underlying tone of being at each other’s throats.”

Review: ‘Frontline’ Looks at Missteps During the Ebola Outbreak

y NEIL GENZLINGER

Frontline

Frontline An installment of this PBS program looks at the effects of Ebola on Liberia and other countries, as well as the origins of the outbreak.

The program traces the outbreak to its origin, thought to be a tree full of bats in Guinea.

Gilbert Haroche, Builder of an Economy Travel Empire, Dies at 87

Mr. Haroche was a founder of Liberty Travel, which grew from a two-man operation to the largest leisure travel operation in the United States.

Jack Ely, Who Sang the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, Dies at 71

A 2-minute-42-second demo recording captured in one take turned out to be a one-hit wonder for Mr. Ely, who was 19 when he sang the garage-band classic.

Cher and Marc Jacobs

From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

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