December 11, 2005

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  Villanova This makes me very proud of my alma mater. Again and again it becomes powerfully evident that we are a nation of extraordinary people. These kinds of cooperative efforts are the foundation of our greateness and our future. In our present dilema we are prone to apathy because it may seem that there is nothing that can stem the tide of cynicism resulting from the blatant deception and continued arrogance of our current leadership. But if ever there were a time when we need to realize that this country is inhabited by commonly decent, generous, competent, and caring citizens, that time is now. Villanova creates a wave of positve energy as they step up to help fellow Americans in a quick and decisive way. This is an example to the entire community, all of the students, faculty, families extended, and those considering Villanova as an option in their higher education plans. Villanova’s example clearly defines a value system permeating the atmosphere and shows that they are so capable of accomplishing more than fielding the undefeated, number 4 ranked,NCAA men’s basketball team. (Sorry, but I could not resist inserting this most vital bit of info). Merry Christmas One and All, and Most of All Thank You and Merry Christmas to Each and Every One of Our Service Men and Women. Our Christmas here at Home would not be possible without your sacrifice which is ever so much greater in this holiday season. God Bless Us One and All, The Whelan Family, Olivia Frances, Michael Patrick, and DA. An inspiring semester for displaced scholars By: Melissa Weigel Issue date: 12/9/05 As a University, Villanova prides itself on its sense of “community.” It’s a word that is hard to define; it’s something that one can only know by truly seeing it in action. This past semester, the University exemplified its mission of being a welcoming community to all by opening its arms to 29 students from New Orleans-area colleges. Twenty-two students came from Tulane University, six from Loyola and one from College of the Holy Cross. The transition process has been difficult but rewarding for both the students and the faculty and staff involved. “It was hectic trying to catch up on all of the work,” freshman Maggie Ferrante from Tulane said. “But the teachers were really good about giving us enough to time to make it up.” “It was hard not being where we had planned,” said freshman Mina Hariri, also from Tulane. “I had prepared myself all summer to go to Tulane, and here we didn’t really get an Orientation or anything.” The students were quick to counter any negative comments with positive ones, though. The administration met with them periodically throughout the semester in order to ensure a smooth transition. “They were always sending us e-mails, having meetings to learn about clubs, taking us to dinner at Burns Hall,” freshman Angela Deeb from Loyola said. “They gave us mentors, which were upper class students, and they were a good resource.” Villanova was one of the first universities across the country to accept students whose educations were suspended due to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. According to George Walter, the Associate Dean of Enrollment Services, it all started with a phone call to the admission office from the parent of a student from a New Orleans college. From there, the University formed an ad hoc committee with representatives from each of the colleges, as well as ones from the Registrar’s, Bursar’s, Financial Assistance and Residence Life offices. In a period of about 72 hours, they met, came up with a plan, and initiated it. Walter said that they met on the Wednesday before Labor Day, and the following Tuesday, students arrived at Villanova. The experience of finding a new school was a bit harder on the students. “The biggest problem with finding a school was money,” Ferrante said. “Villanova waived tuition costs, which made it a lot easier.” The University agreed to not charge tuition, which allowed the New Orleans colleges, which had already accepted the students’ tuition payments, to use that money for rebuilding efforts. The students left New Orleans with almost nothing. When evacuating, they were told that they would be able to return in a few days, so many took only the essentials. Some had only a small duffel bag of clothes with them. Deeb did not even bring her computer, but Villanova provided her with one as she is a student in the College of Commerce and Finance. The majority of the students were only able to return to their campuses to pick up the rest of their belongings in mid- to late November. Despite the hardships – being the “new kid,” living at Harcum, making up schoolwork, having few of their possessions – the students came through the experience with a positive outlook. “I feel like we should say thank you somehow,” Ferrante said. “This is something I’ll always remember.” “It was a crazy first semester, but it was definitely a memory,” Deeb said. Even for the faculty, the experience was an inspiring one. “I came to Villanova in 1989, and one of the reasons I decided to join the community was the sense of warmth and welcoming it had,” Walter said. “This experience has served to reinforce that impression, and prove that we live what we say, that we really are a community.” Many students will return to their universities when they open for the spring semester. Several students, however, have chosen to remain at Villanova and have applied for regular admission.

  Gator Becomes Claria Don’t Call It Spyware  Three years ago the company was considered a parasite and a scourge. Today it’s a rising star – selling virtually the same product. How a pop-up pariah won the adware wars. By Annalee Newitz Back in 2002, Gator was one of the most reviled companies on the Net. Maker of a free app called eWallet, the firm was under fire for distributing what critics called spyware, code that covertly monitors a user’s Web-surfing habits and uploads the data to a remote server. People who downloaded Gator eWallet soon found their screens inundated with pop-up ads ostensibly of interest to them because of Web sites they had visited. Removing eWallet didn’t stop the torrent of pop-ups. Mounting complaints attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. Online publishers sued the company for obscuring their Web sites with pop-ups. In a June 2002 legal brief filed with the lawsuit, attorneys for The Washington Post referred to Gator as a “parasite.” ZDNet called it a “scourge.” Today Gator, now called Claria, is a rising star. The lawsuits have been settled – with negligible impact on the company’s business – and Claria serves ads for names like JPMorgan Chase, Sony, and Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal praises the company for “making strides in revamping itself.” Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Microsoft came close to acquiring Claria. Google acknowledges Claria’s technology in recent patent applications. Best of all, government agencies and watchdog groups have given their blessing to the company’s latest product: software that watches everything users do online and transmits their surfing histories to Claria, which uses the data to determine which ads to show them. Apart from plush new offices at the northern edge of Silicon Valley, it’s remarkable how little the latter-day Claria differs from the old Gator. It’s true that the company has toned down its most aggressive tactics. Journalists, watchdogs, and regulators seem mollified. For the most part, though, the company is in the same business as before, courting the same customers and selling a product that does the same thing in the same ways. Claria wears in a sharp suit and has a scrubbed face and coiffed hair – but it still looks a lot like Gator. CEO Scott VanDeVelde doesn’t deny this. “I don’t feel like there’s a need to wipe the slate clean,” he says. “Our technologies are dead center of where the market is going.” The spyware wars are over – and spyware has won. Like many dotcoms born in the late 1990s, Gator began with an idea for a product – but no clear way to make money from it. “Our idea was a program that would store your passwords and automatically log you into password-protected sites,” says Wally Buch. Buch brainstormed the software with a friend, Symantec founder Denis Coleman, who would remain involved in the company until early 2004. They called it eWallet. Buch came up with the missing revenue model a few weeks later as he waited in the checkout line at a grocery store. The woman in front of him bought diapers, and he noticed that her receipt included coupons for baby products. Buch realized that the Web could do the same thing for advertising: If he kept track of sites people visited, he could deliver ads that reflected their interests and thus increase the chance of triggering a sale. Along with then-CEO Jeff McFadden and VP of marketing Scott Eagle, Buch and Coleman decided to give away eWallet and use it as a sort of Trojan horse for pop-up ads. As users surfed the Web, ads would appear based on the site they were visiting. The gambit worked. Millions of people downloaded eWallet, and Gator’s bank balance began to grow. A host of similar companies followed, including WhenU, 180Solutions, and DirectRevenue. In 1999, Gator parlayed its early success into $12.5 million in financing. That’s when McFadden and Eagle decided the company’s main product was not password-storing freeware but a covert ad-delivery platform. “Things really changed after that,” Buch recalls. “It’s not that I thought pop-ups couldn’t be valuable, but the way they did it was over the top. It was an invitation to trouble.” Uncomfortable with the company’s direction, he left before the year was out. The business took off without him. In 2000, The Industry Standard called Gator one of the “10 companies to watch.” The firm pulled in $14.5 million in 2001; revenue totaled $40.5 in 2002, when Gator delivered pop-ups to 12 million desktops. “We had 300 retailers, and the click rates were amazing,” Eagle says. “All we were thinking about was how to continue growing.” While Gator was raking in profits and plaudits, computer users were growing frustrated. One minute they were downloading seemingly benign freeware, the next their systems were spewing pop-ups and uploading private data. Programs they hadn’t deliberately installed and didn’t want anyway were interfering with other apps and dragging down system performance. All this spawned a backlash, leading to a new market for antispyware utilities, like Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, designed to remove the offending software, including Gator’s, from users’ computers. Meanwhile, executives at Web operations noticed that pop-ups interfered with their own ability to do business. For one thing, the ads enticed visitors to click links that whisked them off to other sites. For another, the ads papered over their own sites’ ads. Advertisers who didn’t get an adequate response on publishers’ sites wouldn’t renew, and that was bound to compromise potential revenue. As the leading distributor of pop-up software, Gator became a lightning rod for criticism. By summer 2001, the Interactive Advertising Bureau was telling the press about Gator’s “deceptive” practice of “illegally” interfering with Web businesses. Gator wasted no time in striking back. In August, the company had sued IAB for “malicious disparagement” that interfered with its right to deliver pop-ups. The parties settled in November, agreeing to cooperate in the development of future Gator products. In June 2002, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones, and seven other online publishers filed a lawsuit, charging Gator with nine counts, including interfering with business and violating trademark. Gator’s software, they claimed, infringed on their trademarks because it used their brand names to trigger ads for competitors - that is, when it detected a user logging into The New York Times‘ site, it would pop up an ad promoting The Wall Street Journal. The publishers hoped to convince the court that Gator was specifically targeting their businesses and delivering competing pop-ups. They hired Ben Edelman, a Harvard economics graduate student with a law degree and a techie bent, to trace the trail of secret signals, both within users’ computers and over the Net. Thanks to his forensic work and eventual testimony, the publishers won a preliminary injunction forcing Gator to stop targeting their sites. Ben Edelman is the world’s premiere spyware epidemiologist. In his Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab near Harvard Yard, he deliberately infects a sacrificial PC with programs like eWallet. Then he tracks the way the applications sink their tendrils into host desktops, collect sensitive information, and transmit it to the mothership. This research has earned him few friends in the industry. Eagle, ever on the defense against competitors, believes Edelman is a spy for his rival WhenU. After I tell the Claria VP I’m planning to visit Edelman, he turns grim. “Why don’t you ask him who he works for?” he asks testily. The fact is, Edelman works for the same kind of customers Eagle does: large organizations with a substantial Web presence. His consulting clients include AOL, the National Football League, and Wells Fargo. In Edelman’s testimony on behalf of the publishers in their 2002 suit, he gave a step-by-step overview of how Gator’s user tracking and ad delivery software wound up on the machines of unwitting users. When someone downloaded eWallet, Edelman found, another program called OfferCompanion came along for the ride. Whenever the browser loaded a new site, OfferCompanion sent the new URL to Gator, which served a related pop-up for the software to display. Moreover, Edelman discovered, the stealth program couldn’t be removed using the Windows uninstall command. Once it was on a PC, it took some effort to erase. He also found that thousands of smaller companies were also distributing OfferCompanion (along with similar programs) bundled with Kazaa and AudioGalaxy. These distributors made deals with yet another tier of companies that gave away the bundle along with still more freeware. Whenever a user clicked on an ad, everyone along the chain took a cut. So if Gator got $10 for each click on a Home Shopping Network pop-up, the second-tier distributors might get 10 cents each and the third-tier distributors 5 cents each. Sometimes, though, the middlemen didn’t wait for a user to click; they simply made it look that way. When someone clicks on a pop-up ad, the advertiser puts a cookie – a small text file – on the user’s browser to track his movements. The more active the user is on the advertiser’s site, the more the distributors get paid – especially if the result is a sale. These companies realized they could add code that stashed a cookie in the browser whenever a pop-up appeared. Thus, each pop-up served made them another dime, whether or not it ever got clicked. The scam, known as cookie stuffing, became endemic to the industry. “Quite simply, affiliates use spyware to rip off marketing departments,” Edelman says. The publishers’ suit set off a cascade of bad news for Gator. L.L. Bean, Hertz.com, and Overstock.com piled on during 2003 and 2004, launching separate suits for unfair business practices and trademark infringement. In April 2004, the FTC held a summit to address the spyware problem and followed up with lawsuits against companies like Seismic Entertainment. Seismic’s code embedded itself so deeply in the operating system that trying to delete it occasionally ruined the host PC. The agency didn’t go after eWallet or OfferCompanion, but it was clear that the Feds were paying attention. Then Yahoo! announced that its toolbar would block pop-ups from Gator, among others. Amid the string of setbacks, Gator canceled plans for an IPO. Eagle declines to talk about it. “Suffice it to say that market conditions weren’t right,” he says. The lawsuits and bad publicity left the company wounded, but the numbers were exploding anyway: Profit grew from $91,000 (on revenue of $40.5 million) in 2002 to nearly $35 million (on revenue of $90 million) in 2003. The user base was roughly 35 million and growing 50 percent annually. Apparently, Gator didn’t need to change its software; it needed to change its image. So, as Eagle puts it, “we shifted the momentum and grabbed the mike.” The first move was to give the company a new name. Thus, in October 2003, Gator, the fearsome snapping reptile, became Claria, the paragon of transparency and light. Next Claria went to work replacing the pejorative word spyware with the more business-friendly adware. The adware model was already an accepted way for software companies to support otherwise free products – the free version of the Eudora email program, for instance, displays ads in a small window that can’t be closed while the program is in use. Claria execs argued that eWallet was no different. Moreover, they policed the distinction with diligence: Anyone who called the company’s products spyware risked a lawsuit. In late 2003, Claria filed a libel suit against PCPitstop.com, a mom-and-pop site that distributed spyware-removal tools. The suit claimed that PCPitstop was infringing on Claria’s business by including the company on a list of firms that distributed spyware. As part of a settlement, PCPitstop took down several pages on its site describing how the company’s pop-up generator ruins PC performance and tracks every move consumers make online. Meanwhile, Claria quietly settled the suits filed by L.L. Bean, Hertz.com, and Overstock .com. All parties signed nondisclosure agreements, so the terms are secret and nobody will discuss them. The next step was to cozy up to regulators. Claria offered to help government agencies and industry watchdogs establish guidelines for spyware, and perhaps show how its own practices were more benign. To that end, the executive suite made room for a new position: chief privacy officer. Reed Freeman, a former staff attorney at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, took the job. Freeman spoke at industry events about the importance of privacy and consumer rights, and Claria became a supporter of the Antispyware Coalition, a lobbying group headed by the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. Claria seemed to embrace the Coalition’s business-friendly list of rules for pop-up advertising companies that sought to rise above the spyware label. The rules are simple: There must be “conspicuous notification” when adware is downloaded, and that notice must include a clear explanation of what the software will do and how it can be uninstalled. But for all Claria’s rhetoric, critics pointed out, its actions suggested a less than hearty embrace of the coalition’s intent. For example, it complied with the notification provision by adding to the installation procedure a pop-up window full of small type explaining how Claria’s products work. Edelman scoffs at this solution, arguing that the notification text is “longer than the US Constitution and nobody reads it.” If Edelman wasn’t convinced, several makers of antispyware software were. In April 2005, Claria issued a press release saying it had convinced McAfee to “acknowledge” that Claria’s software apps weren’t “malicious threats”; McAfee had “inadvertently labeled” Claria a “top threat of 2004.” Claria also persuaded Microsoft and Aluria to remove its products from the list of programs targeted by their antispyware apps. Eagle won’t discuss how he made his case to these companies, but Aluria CEO Rick Carlson says he’s satisfied with Claria’s disclosure policy. “At some point the consumer has to take responsibility and read,” he says. As for whether it’s easy enough to remove Claria’s software, “users are never more than two clicks away from uninstalling,” he says. Claria’s cleanup strategy very nearly paid off in a big way. According to a June 30, 2005, New York Times piece, Microsoft considered acquiring Claria. The two went as far as holding meetings to discuss terms. However, Redmond employees who were aware of Claria’s reputation demurred, setting off what the Times called an “internal battle” among Microsoft execs. Neither company will comment on the article. The reported deal didn’t go through, but Eagle says he’s not worried. His company’s revenue for 2004 topped $100 million. Claria is back. As Claria sheds the last of Gator’s skin, Eagle is keen to talk about the final element in the company’s corporate makeover. “We’re moving into the personalized content business,” he says. Translation: The company plans to stop delivering pop-ups altogether. At first blush, the news sounds like solid evidence that Claria has emerged from the spyware wars with a new focus. Having taken pop-ups as far as it could, the company has decided to leave the format behind. But this isn’t to say it’s finished tracking customers and using the information to sell advertising. PersonalWeb, a Claria product scheduled to launch in January, is a close cousin of the OfferCompanion program that hitched a ride on eWallet. It tracks everything users do on the Internet and sends the information to remote servers for analysis. Then it places ads on partnering publishers’ Web sites, changing them depending on the profile of the visitor. The crucial difference is that PersonalWeb doesn’t display irritating pop-ups that might make users wonder what else has been installed on their PCs. Better yet, publishers will get a cut of the clickthrough commissions for ads Claria places on their sites. There will no more fights over territory. “It’s great for everybody,” Eagle says. “Merchants make money, publishers make money, and so do we.” The new product doesn’t alter Claria’s course. Rather, it cuts a more viable pathway through the wilderness McFadden and Eagle first opened in 1999. PersonalWeb reflects the key lesson the company has learned since then: While everyone hates pop-ups, nobody much minds behind-the-scenes spying. In fact, surreptitious tracking is all the rage. Google – with its interconnected search, email, chat, blogs, and social networks – is also in the business of targeting ads based on user behavior. So are MSN and Yahoo! All three maintain profiles of everyone who signs up for their services. They use cookies to track what visitors do on their sites while they’re logged in; the downloadable Google and MSN toolbars track which sites users visit when they’re logged out. Like Claria, Google has amassed a vast database of user profiles that it plans to use for even better targeting in the future. Few people in the online business community question the idea that marketing software should track user behavior. Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it’s possible to track people online without being underhanded. The FTC is in favor of online advertising, she explains, “and sometimes tracking makes advertising work better for consumers.” Esther Dyson, who has been harshly critical of spyware companies in her influential newsletter, Release 1.0, agrees. “As long as there’s disclosure and people are given a choice, I think monitoring users’ behavior isn’t a problem,” she says. That’s the kind of green light Gator could never get. But in the evolving world of behavioral marketing, Claria is the hottest, um, adware company around. Contributing editor Annalee Newitz (brainsploitation@yahoo.com) wrote about the female orgasm in issue 13.07

  Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Janerik Henriksson/European Pressphoto Agency The playwright Harold Pinter, who has cancer, addressed the Swedish Academy by video from London. December 8, 2005 Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S. By SARAH LYALL LONDON, Dec. 7 – The playwright Harold Pinterturned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years. “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” Mr. Pinter said. “You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Sitting in a wheelchair, his lap covered by a blanket, his voice hoarse but unwavering, Mr. Pinter, 75, delivered his speech via a video recording that was played on Wednesday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Doctors told him several years ago that he had cancer of the esophagus and recently ordered him not to travel to Stockholm for the speech, his publisher said. The playwright, known in recent years as much for his fiery anti-Americanism as for his spare prose style and haunting, elliptical plays like “The Caretaker” and “The Homecoming,” was awarded the $1.3 million Nobel literature prize in October. In its citation, the Swedish Academy made little mention of his political views, saying only that he is known as a “fighter for human rights” whose stands are often “seen as controversial.” It mostly focused on his work, saying that Mr. Pinter “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers José Saramago of Portugal, Günter Grassof Germany and Dario Foof Italy. When he won the award, Mr. Pinter said he did not know if the academy, whose deliberations and reasoning are kept secret, had taken his politics into account. He clearly welcomed the platform the award gave him to bring his views, long expressed in Britain, to a larger audience. Dressed in black, bristling with controlled fury, Mr. Pinter began by explaining the almost unconscious process he uses to write his plays. They start with an image, a word, a phrase, he said; the characters soon become “people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.” “So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction,” he continued, “a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.” But while drama represents “the search for truth,” Mr. Pinter said, politics works against truth, surrounding citizens with “a vast tapestry of lies” spun by politicians eager to cling to power. Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. “I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road,” he said. “Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love.” He returned to the theme of language as an obscurer of reality, saying that American leaders use it to anesthetize the public. “It’s a scintillating stratagem,” Mr. Pinter said. “Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.” Accusing the United States of torturing terrorist suspects in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Pinter called the invasion of Iraq – for which he said Britain was also responsible – “a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.” He called for Prime Minister Tony Blairto be tried before an international criminal court. Mr. Pinter said it was the duty of the writer to hold an image up to scrutiny, and the duty of citizens “to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” “If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man,” he said. Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

  Abercrombie & Fitch John Lei for The New York Times Let’s dance! I mean shop: Images of scantily clad young men appear all over Abercrombie & Fitch December 8, 2005 Critical Shopper Browsing Out Loud By ALEX KUCZYNSKI NEVER has a store that sells bluejeans and T-shirts more closely resembled a hookup joint. The four-story Abercrombie & Fitchflagship on Fifth Avenue is a sprawling nightclub of a place with muscled young men standing guard at the front entrance, their smiles entreating passers-by to look. At their backs, the front windows are mysteriously shuttered. Inside, the lighting is a moody chiaroscuro, and the music thumps at such high volume that you have to shout to be heard. A central staircase with subtly lit frosted glass-block flooring is a dramatic sculptural counterpoint to the darkness. On a weekend afternoon, knots of conspiratorial-looking teenagers huddled out front, blowing on their cupped hands, talking on cellphones, casting eager gazes at one another from beneath eyelids at studied half-mast. In the store, which opened last month, hotties circulate the catwalklike floors, touching up their lip gloss, gossiping with one another. Only the fact that they occasionally lean over to fluff at a sweater, their hair fanning silkily across their shoulders, would lend you an inkling that they are actually employees. Right. Because you are not in a nightclub. You are here to shop. This is what Abercrombie does with distinction: the most efficient way to move tons of jeans and T-shirts is not to sparkle with antiseptic, anodyne cleanliness like Gap, but to sell these relatively generic pieces of clothing using the sexual ideology of the new millennium, an era informed by readily available pornography, the strip-club aesthetic and a post-AIDS abandon. The nightclub setting and the racy marketing campaigns make the clothes more appealing to the kids. And tick off the parents. Which, in turn, makes the clothes even more appealing to the kids. For all the hype surrounding Abercrombie, the clothes are, well, just clothes. Upon entry, you find a row of glass cases displaying denim jeans. This is the denim “bar,” a term increasingly employed by public relations people to connect the act of shopping to the act of ingesting food or drink, to subtly convince shoppers that buying clothes is an intimate activity providing either nourishment or intoxicating pleasure. And the jeans are fine, priced from $69.50 to $198 for the Ezra Fitch premium styles. For women the preppy Ezra Fitch collection includes tailored shirts, embroidered with a tiny moose on the front, and saucier camisoles, like a strapless beaded one with an Empire waist for $128. In gray or white, it was actually elegant. I would skip the holiday T-shirts with phrases that are as corny as lines from the 1970′s show “Love, American Style,” like “Santa loves a hot cookie,” “Never a silent night” and, my personal favorite, “Is that a candy cane in your pants?” Men’s clothes are simple: polos, fleece items, jeans, khakis, sweaters, overcoats. I liked the cable-knit sweaters in lamb’s wool, nylon and cashmere, many of them bearing the embroidered moose. On the walls of the store a three-story mural depicts a kind of adolescent sexual Guernica: young male athletes in all manner of gymnastic contortion, mostly stripped to the waist, their torsos striated with muscle, their pants packed with cartoonishly provocative, eye-popping bulges of which even Porfirio Rubirosa would have been skeptical. Abercrombie has a long history of provocation. In 2002 the company marketed thong underpants for the 8-to-10-year-old set that bore slogans like “wink wink” and “eye candy.” In 2003 it released its Christmas Field Guide, a catalog that featured naked or nearly naked young models and offered advice on oral sex, group masturbation and orgies. “Sex, as we know can involve one or two, but what about even more?” one layout proposed. Abercrombie recalled it after protest from parents’ groups. Even teenagers have finally taken offense. Earlier this year a group of Pennsylvania girls organized a “girl-cott” of T-shirts with slogans like “Who needs brains when you have these?” In May the company settled a class-action lawsuit charging that it discriminated against nonwhite job applicants. Abercrombie agreed to pay $50 million, including nearly $40 million in damages to female and minority employees and job applicants who claimed that because they did not conform to the Nordic, preppy Abercrombie & Fitch look they were exiled to the backroom, fired or never hired in the first place. If I were an employee today, the thing I would be most concerned about is the noise in the store. A booming sound system delivers ear-splitting dance music every minute of the day. On my first visit I couldn’t stay in the store longer than 10 minutes because the thumping club-mix version of Erasure’s“Oh L’Amour” – an annoying piece of postdisco detritus – was so loud. On my way out I approached a sales clerk. “How can you stand this noise all day long?” I asked. Her mouth moved as if to say, “What?” “HOW CAN YOU STAND THIS NOISE ALL DAY LONG?” She nodded. “I EAT TYLENOL LIKE IT’S CANDY,” she shouted, holding her hands up to her head. Oh, great, I thought. By this time next year she’ll be deaf and need a liver transplant. ON my second, third and fourth visits, I arrived with a decibel meter because I wanted to find out exactly how loud the place was. Following guidelines set forth by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I recorded decibel levels from the low to the high 80′s most of the time I was in the store, although a few songs were played at higher volumes. One reached a peak of 97 decibels. Anything over 85 decibels can damage hearing, according to Amy K. Boyle, the public education director of the League for the Hard of Hearing. “If you have to shout in order to be heard, you are probably in an environment that could be damaging to your hearing,” she told me. “A simple rule of thumb is that if you have to yell from three feet away, the background noise is too high.” (Typical conversation registers at about 60 decibels, busy city traffic at about 85; gas mowers and tractors register in the 90′s.) On one of my visits I sought auditory refuge in the dressing room, but even there speakers pumped out the music. Half-naked in the semi-obscurity, the bam-bam-bam of the music a continuous assault, I wondered if perhaps Abercrombie’s marketing director had ever worked psy-ops for the military. I asked a clerk if she could ask the manager to turn the music down. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. Thomas D. Lennox, the Abercrombie vice president for corporate communications, said the company monitors music levels throughout its stores. “It is loud,” he said. “And we do monitor it.” He added that the company had not received any complaints from customers. With the exception of the moose-imprinted clothing and the slogan-bearing T-shirts, there are lots of perfectly lovely things to like at Abercrombie, like a women’s long-sleeve T-shirt in silky cotton and polyester ($24.50) and a lamb’s-wool-viscose-nylon-angora-cashmere belted cable-knit sweater ($228) that Katharine Hepburn would have worn with, perhaps, the khaki cargo pants ($69.50). But I’ll have to buy items I like from the user-friendly Abercrombie Web site. Because shopping at the flagship store is among the more unpleasant experiences to be had in usually retail-friendly Manhattan. Abercrombie & Fitch 720 Fifth Avenue (56th Street), Manhattan; (212) 381-0110 ATMOSPHERE Marquee without the cocktails. PRICES Inexpensive to moderate. Men’s down jackets, $178; Ezra Fitch cashmere sweaters for women, $148; vintage bead necklaces, $19.50; cotton T-shirts embellished with the word “Lust,” $39.50. SERVICE Not attentive, considering there are enough staff members on hand to make the place look like a bustling club at any hour of the day. Best line from a sales clerk (while peering at my hand-held decibel meter): “Dude. That is the weirdest looking phone I have ever seen.” Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

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