NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

as a way to build a sense of trust and loyalty am
ong boys he then repeatedly abused.
Mr. Sandusky, after repeated requests, agreed to t
he interview because he said his decades of work w
ith children had been misunderstood and distorted
by prosecutors.
“They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any
young person and twisted it to say that my motives
were sexual or whatever,” Mr. Sandusky said. He a
dded: “I had kid after kid after kid who might say
I was a father figure. And they just twisted that
all.”
Yet over the course of the interview, Mr. Sandusky
described what he admitted was a family and work
life that could often be chaotic, even odd, one th
at lacked some classic boundaries between adults a
nd children, and thus one that was open to interpr
etation — by those who have defended him as a gene
rous mentor and those who have condemned him as a
serial predator.
He said his household in State College, Pa., over
the years came to be a kind of recreation center o
r second home for dozens of children from the char
ity, a place where games were played, wrestling ma
tches staged, sleepovers arranged, and from where
trips to out-of-town sporting events were launched
. Asked directly why he appeared to interact with
children who were not his own without many of the
typical safeguards other adults might apply — show
ering with them, sleeping alone with them in hotel
rooms, blowing on their stomachs — he essentially
said that he saw those children as his own.
“It was, you know, almost an extended family,” Mr.
Sandusky said of his household’s relationship wit
h children from the charity. He then characterized
his close experiences with children he took under
his wing as “precious times,” and said that the p