January 31, 2007

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    Jacques Brinon/Associated Press

    The biggest Adidas store in the world is on the Champs-Élysées.

    Megastores March Up Avenue, and Paris Takes to Barricades

    PARIS, Jan. 30 — There was a time when the Champs-Élysées stood for grand living, high style and serendipity. With the Arc de Triomphe on one end and the Tuileries Gardens on the other, you could discover an underground jazz band at midnight and down oysters and Champagne at dawn.

    But the road where de Gaulle celebrated France's liberation from the Nazis, the one known as "the most beautiful avenue on earth," has, like Times Square and Oxford Street in London, turned into a commercialized money trap.

    Most of the music clubs are gone. Movie theaters are closing. Sometimes, all that seems to be left on the 1.2-mile stretch are the global chain stores that can afford the rent.

    And so, in a truly French moment, the Paris city government has begun to push back, proclaiming a crisis of confidence and promising a plan aimed at stopping the "banalization" of the Champs-Élysées. The question is whether it is too late.

    The first step was a decision last month to ban the Swedish clothing giant H&M from opening a megastore on the avenue.

    The decision is intended to slow the invasion of retail clothing stores and to preserve what is left of the diverse character of the most visited site in France, after the Eiffel Tower.

    "We were losing our sense of balance," said François Lebel, a deputy mayor who administers the part of the city that includes the Champs-Élysées. "Drastic action was needed. We don't have anything against H&M. It just happens to be the first victim."

    In a sense, the avenue is a victim of its own success. With rents as high as $1.2 million a year for 1,000 square feet of space, the Champs-Élysées is the most expensive strip of real estate in Europe and the third most expensive in the world, after Fifth Avenue in New York and Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, making it impossible for most small businesses to even consider setting up shop there.

    Multinationals have no such problem. Adidas opened its largest store in the world on the Champs-Élysées last fall. Gap, Benetton, Naf Naf, the Disney Store, Nike, Zara, a Virgin Megastore and Sephora occupy major spaces. Car manufacturers including Toyota, Renault and Peugeot have huge showrooms that display flashy prototypes and serve largely as walk-in advertisements. Low-end fast-food chain restaurants like McDonald's and Quick do high-volume business.

    And things seem only to be getting more expensive. The opening of luxury showpieces like Cartier in 2003, Louis Vuitton's five-story flagship store in 2005 and the Fouquet's Barrière hotel last year (the least expensive room is nearly $900 a night) have given the avenue new glitter.

    Round-the-clock saturation of the street by teams of uniformed and plainclothes police officers — in buses and cars, on in-line skates and foot — has made it safer for its up to 500,000 visitors a day. Armies of street cleaners compensate for the scarcity of garbage bins, a grim reminder of the terrorist bombings on the avenue two decades ago.

    Only seven movie theaters are left, however, half the number of a dozen years ago. The UGC Triomphe has announced that it will close in the next few months unless its landlord backs down from the rent increase it has demanded.

    Jean-Jacques Schpoliansky, the owner of the independent Le Balzac movie theater just off the Champs-Élysées, greets customers seven days a week to give his business a personal touch.

    His rent is 15 times what it was in 1973. But the three-screen theater shows "artistic" movies, so the city gives it an annual subsidy of almost $39,000 to help it stay in business. He says he still doesn't break even.

    "My grandfather founded the Balzac in 1935," Mr. Schpoliansky said. "This place, the human contact with my customers — this is my life."

    Many other merchants lament that the move to save the avenue has come too late. "High-class Parisians don't want to come to the Champs-Élysées," said Serge Ghnassia, owner of the fur shop Milady, which opened on the Champs-Élysées in 1933. "It's not prestigious; it's not pleasant. The people who come are very common, very ordinary, very cheap. They come for a kebab sandwich and a five-euro T-shirt."

    He said he kept the store largely for sentimental reasons, as a sort of shop window to advertise his more upscale stores on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré and in the ski resort of Courchevel.

    Underlying some of that resentment is that groups of young people descend on the Champs-Élysées from the working-class immigrant suburbs on weekend nights. The police keep a close watch on them, monitoring their moves.

    But some old-timers praise the avenue as a sort of democratic — and free — tourist destination for the underprivileged. "The kids coming from the suburbs are coming from the suburbs to look, to see, to escape the places where they live," Mr. Schpoliansky said. "We are a multiethnic country, and that reality is reflected on our street."

    The Champs-Élysées was conceived in 1667 as a grand approach to the royal palace at the Tuileries in what were then fields and swampland on the outskirts of Paris. In the 19th century, it was planted with elms, renamed after the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology and lined with hotels, cafes and luxurious private residences.

    But the divide between the landmark avenue's mythic image and its gritty commercialism has troubled Parisians for much of the last century.

    The prosperity of the 1960s in France attracted airline companies, car dealerships, fast-food restaurants, panhandlers, streetwalkers and badly parked cars. Rents plummeted and many commercial spaces stayed empty.

    In 1990, Jacques Chirac, who was then the mayor of Paris, began a $45 million renovation project that broadened sidewalks, planted more trees, eliminated parking lanes and added elegant streetlamps and bus stops.

    Some of the older enterprises use creative ways to stay in business. The 24-hour restaurant L'Alsace is on the ground floor of the Maison de l'Alsace, a tourism and promotion bureau financed by the Alsace regional government.

    Fouquet's, one of the avenue's few remaining belle époque restaurants, resisted a nasty takeover bid years ago and has been officially designated by the city of Paris as a "place of memory" to preserve its position on the avenue.

    Louis Vuitton is so popular that its customers (most of them tourists) often have to line up outside for entry.

    All that activity has made the unanimous decision by the city's commerce committee to block admission to H&M particularly stunning.

    H&M, which already has nine stores in Paris, had hired Jean Nouvel, a leading French architect, to design the 37,000-square-foot space in what once housed offices of Club Med.

    The company has suggested that it will appeal.

    But the ruling followed a study for the city of Paris last November that found that 39 percent of the avenue's street-front retail space was filled with clothing stores.

    "The avenue progressively is losing its exceptional and symbolic character, thus its attractiveness," the study warned, predicting that if the trend continued, the Champs-Élysées would become as tacky as Oxford Street.

    That gloomy assessment is not shared by Christophe Pinguet, the director of the Shortcut public relations agency and one of the two dozen remaining residents of the Champs-Élysées. From the terrace of his top-floor apartment, Mr. Pinguet looks out on the Eiffel Tower, the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe.

    "I know shops nobody knows," he said. "I know the butcher who delivers meat to Jacques Chirac. I know the police who dress like spies. Sure, the Champs-Élysées can be cheap. But it's not a museum. The battle shouldn't be to keep H&M out. It should be to make sure it's fabulous."


     

    Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage

    Ruby Washington/The New York Times


    The artist Coco Fusco, in combat fatigues, addressing the symposium.

    Ruby Washington/The New York Times


    The critic Lucy Lippard, left, spoke with members of the audience.

    Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage

    "Well, this is quite a turnout for an 'ism,' " said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. "Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women."

    Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

    For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for "The Dinner Party," Judy Chicago's seminal proto-feminist work.)

    Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

    But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you're basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

    The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women's art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

    What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art "was to not make a contribution to Modernism." It rejected Modernism's exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called "ethical hospitality," features now identified with Postmodernism.

    But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the "lavender menace" of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn't, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.

    The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. "I feel like I'm gate-crashing a reunion," Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn't wrong.

    At the same time one of feminism's great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.

    Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, "Activism/Race/Geopolitics," in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.

    The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism's much-maligned sexual "essentialism." But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.

    In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a "feminist future" that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone.

    Ms. Kapur's talk was also topical, but within the framework of India. It is often said that the activist art found in early Western feminism and now adopted by artists in India, Africa and elsewhere has lost its pertinence in its place of origin. Yet in presenting work by two Indian artists, Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) and Navjot Altaf (born in 1949), Ms. Kapur made it clear that they have at least as much to teach to the so-called West as the other way around.

    Ms. Hussain, a religious secularist, used images from her Muslim background as a critical response to sectarian violence; Ms. Altaf (known as Navjot), though based in Mumbai, produces art collaboratively with tribal women who live difficult lives in rural India.

    Collaborative or collective work of the kind Navjot does has grown in popularity in the United States and Europe in the past few years. And several of the symposium's panelists — Ms. Lippard, the Guerrilla Girls, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Catherine de Zegher — referred to it as a potential way for feminist art to avoid being devoured and devitalized by an omnivorous art market.

    It was Ms. Fusco again who brought utopian dreams to earth. While sympathetic to the idea of collective work as an alternative to the salable lone-genius model, she suggested that the merchandising of art is at present so encompassing, and the art industry so fundamentally corrupted by it, that even collectives tend to end up adhering to a corporate model.

    The power of the market, which pushes a few careers and throws the rest out — the very story of feminist art's neglect — was the invisible subtext to the entire symposium. It was barely addressed, however, nor was the reality that the canonization of feminist art by museums would probably suppress everything that had made the art radical. Certainly no solutions for either problem was advanced, except one, incidentally, by Connie Butler, MoMa's drawings curator, who is also the curator of the Los Angeles show.

    In her panel talk she said that when she was agonizing over what choices of work to make for the "Wack!" exhibition, the art historian Moira Roth suggested, brilliantly, that she just eliminate objects altogether. Instead, Ms. Roth said, why not invite all the artists who made them to come the museum for a group-consciousness-raising session, film the session, and then make the film the show?

    Somewhat unexpectedly, signs of a raised consciousness were evident among young people in the MoMA audience, the kind of people we are told either have no knowledge of feminism or outright reject it. In the question-and-answer sessions after each panel, the most passionate, probing and agitating questions and statements came from young women who identified themselves as students or artists.

    When they spoke; when Richard Meyer, a gay art historian, spoke about queer feminism; and when Ms. Mutu ended her presentation by simply reading aloud a long list of curators, scholars and artists — all of them women, all of them black — who, could and should have been at the MoMA symposium, I had a sense that a feminist future was, if not secure, at least under vigilant consideration.


     

    Giants to Name Palmer as Quarterbacks Coach

    Mark Duncan/Associated Press

    Chris Palmer, who was the head coach of the Cleveland Browns from 1999 to 2000, spent last season as the quarterbacks coach for the Dallas Cowboys.

    January 29, 2007

    Giants to Name Palmer as Quarterbacks Coach

    In trying to create a brighter future for quarterback Eli Manning, Giants Coach Tom Coughlin continues to reach into his own past.

    In 1997, Coughlin, then the coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, hired Chris Palmer as his offensive coordinator. Palmer replaced Kevin Gilbride, who had taken the head-coaching position with the San Diego Chargers.

    Coughlin has made a similar move now, hiring Palmer as the Giants' quarterbacks coach to replace Gilbride, who was elevated to offensive coordinator. An announcement is expected today.

    Palmer, 57, spent last season as the quarterbacks coach for the Dallas Cowboys, who changed to the inexperienced quarterback Tony Romo from the veteran Drew Bledsoe at midseason, with good results.

    Palmer was the offensive coordinator of the Jaguars in 1997 and 1998. In 1997, Mark Brunell led the American Football Conference in passer rating and was named to the Pro Bowl.

    In 1999, Palmer became the coach of the expansion Cleveland Browns. He was fired after two seasons; quarterback Tim Couch, chosen with the first overall pick in the 1999 draft, struggled to live up to expectations.

    From 2002 to 2005, Palmer was the offensive coordinator of the Houston Texans, helping develop another No. 1 overall pick, quarterback David Carr.

    The tie between Palmer and Gilbride runs deep. Each played quarterback at Southern Connecticut State — Palmer graduated in 1972, two years before Gilbride. Both are in the university's Sports Hall of Fame.

    Palmer's first coaching experience in the N.F.L. was as the receivers coach for the Houston Oilers from 1990 to 1992. Gilbride was the team's offensive coordinator.

    The Giants were 8-8 in 2006 and lost six of their final eight regular-season games. They made the National Football Conference playoffs as a wild-card team, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in the first round.

    Before the final regular-season game, Coughlin stripped the offensive coordinator John Hufnagel of his responsibilities and handed them to Gilbride.

    Manning, the first choice in the 2004 draft, was inconsistent most of the season and showed few signs of progress from the previous season.

    "I've only had one quarterbacks coach in the N.F.L.," Manning said during a conference call Thursday when asked about his ideal coach. "I'm just looking for someone who's obviously smart, intelligent. Someone who we can have a good relationship and just really communicate well together and be on the same page with things. Someone who has good drills and is going to be hard on me and coach me and make sure that everything that I'm doing, I'm doing to get better."


     

    The magazine repeats the myth of the gobbed-upon Vietnam vet.

    Newsweek Throws the Spitter
    The magazine repeats the myth of the gobbed-upon Vietnam vet.
    By Jack Shafer
    Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007, at 4:09 PM E.T.

    The myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran refuses to die. Despite Jerry Lembcke's debunking book from 1998, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, and my best efforts to publicize his work, the press continues to repeat the fables as fact.

    Earlier this month, Newsweek resuscitated the vet-spit myth in a dual profile of John McCain and Chuck Hagel. Newsweek reports: "Returning GIs were sometimes jeered and even spat upon in airports; they learned to change quickly into civilian clothes."

    Nexis teems with such allegations of spat-upon vets and even includes testimonials by those who claim to have been gobbed upon. But Lembcke—a Vietnam vet himself—cites his own research and that of other academics to assert that he has never uncovered a single news story documenting such an incident.

    Lembcke writes:

    If spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently, surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time. … Indeed, we would imagine that news reporters would have been camping in the lobby of the San Francisco airport, cameras in hand, just waiting for a chance to record the real thing—if, that is, they had any reason to believe that such incidents might occur.

    In researching the book, Lembcke found no news accounts or even claims from the late 1960s or early 1970s of vets getting spat at. He did, however, uncovered ample news stories about anti-war protesters receiving the saliva shower from anti-anti-war types.

    Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls "urban myths." As with most urban myths, the details of the spat-upon vets vary slightly from telling to telling, while the basic story remains the same. The protester almost always ambushes the soldier in an airport (not uncommonly the San Francisco airport), after he's just flown back to the states from Asia. The soiled soldier either slinks away or does nothing.

    One of the early vet-spit stories appears in First Blood, the 1982 film that was the first of the Rambo stories. John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, claims to have been spat upon by protesters at the airport when he returned from Vietnam. "Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer," Rambo says. "Who are they to protest me?"

    Like other urban myths, the spit story gains power every time it's repeated and nobody challenges it. Repeated often enough, it finally sears itself into the minds of the writers and editors at Newsweek as fact.

    Now, it's possible that a Vietnam veteran was spat upon during the war years. Lembcke concedes as much because nobody can prove something never happened. Indeed, each time I write about the spit myth, my inbox overflows with e-mail from readers who claim that a spitting protester targeted them while they were in uniform. Or the e-mail writer claims it happened to a brother or a friend at the airport or bus station.

    I expect similar e-mails this time, and I will share with readers any account that comes with some sort of evidence—such as a contemporaneous newspaper story or an arrest report—that documents the sordid event.

    ******

    My e-mail address is slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Disclosure: Slate and Newsweek are owned by the Washington Post Co.)

    Slate's machine-built RSS feed.

     

     

    Alonso leads the way again for McLaren

    Wed 31 Jan, 8:09 PM

    Fernando Alonso's impressive pace continued today behind the wheel of the McLaren Mercedes MP4-22 as the Spaniard lapped less than a tenth off his best lap recorded yesterday.

    Once again early running was limited but as the day wore on, the Spanish testing venue dried out allowing the 16 runners to bolt on dry weather Bridgestone tyres.

    Alonso led the way with a best lap of 1:12.582s but the new McLaren signing did not enjoy the comfortable one second gap over his rivals as was the case on Tuesday.

    The Renault duo of Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen were second and third fastest in the new R27, both lapping within two-tenths of the ultimate pace but having extended the test to include Friday, did not complete as many laps as many of its rivals.

    Kimi Raikkonen also upped his pace in the new Ferrari, setting the fourth fastest time, while team-mate Felipe Massa joined the test in last year's 248 F1.

    Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica were back on track for BMW Sauber with the fifth and seventh best times while Jarno Trulli was sixth best in the new Toyota.

    Rubens Barrichello was ninth fastest in the Honda RA107 while test driver James Rossiter rounded out the top ten in interim Honda.

    Ralf Schumacher joined the test for Toyota, setting the 11th best time today ahead of Pedro de la Rosa while Kazuki Nakajima put in an impressive 116 laps in the interim Williams Toyota and was 13th fastest.

    Takuma Sato was 14th fastest ahead of David Coulthard in the Red Bull Renault while Giedo Van Der Garde made his test debut for Super Aguri Honda, completing four timed laps.

    Testing in Valencia continues on Thursday.

    Valencia* - 31/01/2007

    1 . F. Alonso - McLaren Mercedes MP4-22 - 1:12.582 (+ 0.000 ) - 86 laps

    2 . G. Fisichella - Renault R27 - 1:12.737 (+ 0.155 ) - 37 laps

    3 . H. Kovalainen - Renault R27 - 1:12.770 (+ 0.188 ) - 43 laps

    4 . K. Raikkonen - Ferrari F2007 - 1:12.860 (+ 0.278 ) - 51 laps

    5 . N. Heidfeld - BMW Sauber F1.07 - 1:13.012 (+ 0.430 ) - 50 laps

    6 . J. Trulli - Toyota TF107 - 1:13.297 (+ 0.715 ) - 47 laps

    7 . R. Kubica - BMW Sauber F1.07 - 1:13.310 (+ 0.728 ) - 42 laps

    8 . F. Massa - Ferrari 248 F1 - 1:13.574 (+ 0.992 ) - 48 laps

    9 . R. Barrichello - Honda RA107 - 1:13.690 (+ 1.108 ) - 72 laps

    10 . J. Rossiter - Honda RA106 - 1:13.732 (+ 1.150 ) - 28 laps

    11 . R. Schumacher - Toyota TF107 - 1:13.839 (+ 1.257 ) - 31 laps

    12 . P. de la Rosa - McLaren Mercedes MP4-22 - 1:14.286 (+ 1.704 ) - 41 laps

    13 . K. Nakajima - Williams Toyota FW28 B - 1:14.401 (+ 1.819 ) - 116 laps

    14 . T. Sato - Super Aguri Honda RA106 - 1:14.812 (+ 2.230 ) - 36 laps

    15 . D. Coulthard - Red Bull Renault RB3 - 1:15.939 (+ 3.357 ) - 26 laps

    16 . G. Van Der Garde - Super Aguri Honda RA106 - 1:26.348 (+ 13.766 ) - 4 laps

     

    Today's Papers

    Resolution Dreams
    By Daniel Politi
    Posted Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007, at 5:47 AM E.T.

    The Los Angeles Times leads with word that German investigators have recommended arrest warrants be issued for 13 American intelligence operatives who were involved with the "extraordinary rendition" of a German citizen. Investigators say Khaled Masri was kidnapped and sent to Afghanistan, where he was allegedly beaten and secretly detained for five months before he was released without charges. The Washington Post and New York Times lead with the increasing debate among Republican senators on how best to respond to President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

    USA Today leads with a look at how at least a dozen states are discussing whether they should use their budget surpluses to decrease business taxes to lure investors. The paper says this is a change since states traditionally have preferred to target personal taxes. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with news that at least 58 people were killed in Iraq yesterday "during rites" on the Shiite holy day of Ashura. The NYT notes that last year there were fewer than a dozen people killed on the holiday, but in 2004 at least 180 people died.

    German officials said indictments could be filed as early as next week. The LAT notes the news comes at a time when an Italian court is considering whether to put 26 Americans and nine Italians on trial for the abduction of an Egyptian cleric. The paper notes it is unlikely the U.S. government would agree to extradite suspects.

    At first, GOP senators wanted to propose one resolution that would strike a balance between supporting President Bush and voicing concern about the war's direction. Now, according to the Post, there are at least five competing drafts going around, and senators can't agree which one best expresses their interests. A "raucous debate" about the different resolutions erupted during a lunch Republican senators had with Vice President Cheney and military leaders. "Resolutions are flying like snowflakes around here," Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said.

    Couldn't the lack of a unifying resolution ultimately help the White House? On Saturday, the Post reported that senators hadn't seen a particularly aggressive lobbying effort by the administration, which could benefit from a bunch of resolutions that dilute any message Congress wants to send President Bush. All this debate probably pleases Vice President Cheney, who was widely quoted when he declared: "[Y]ou cannot run a war by committee."

    The NYT does a good job of summarizing the events regarding Iraq that took place on Capitol Hill yesterday. There was a confirmation hearing for Adm. William Fallon, who was nominated to lead U.S. forces in the Middle East and yesterday said that "what we've been doing is not working." Meanwhile, in another hearing, the leaders of the Iraq Study Group said the diplomatic efforts put forth by the White House in the Middle East have been insufficient.

    The WSJ mentions up high that after initial resistance, Democrats have agreed to President Bush's idea of forming a bipartisan working group on Iraq and terrorism.

    USAT fronts an interview with the No. 2 U.S. general in Iraq, who says Iran is giving weapons to militias in Iraq. According to Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, U.S. officials can "trace back" weapons to Iran through serial numbers. Among the weapons is a new type of roadside bomb that is being used to attack U.S. troops. "Properly handled, it goes through armor like a hot knife through butter," said a military expert.

    The LAT gets word from military officials that the Air Force's role in Iraq could increase. Among its tasks would be a stepped up effort to monitor the Iran-Iraq border to prevent arms smuggling.

    The WP and NYT front, while everyone else goes inside with, the testimony of former NYT reporter Judith Miller at the Libby trial. Miller said Libby first told her that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA almost three weeks before Cheney's former chief of staff claims he got the information from a journalist. Miller also testified that Libby "appeared to be agitated and frustrated" when he told her the news, a contrast with his usual demeanor, which she described as "very low-key and controlled." Everyone notes Miller testified for the prosecutor who sent her to jail for 85 days.

    Miller then "began to sigh frequently and grow testy in her responses" (NYT) when Libby's attorney began his aggressive questioning. The defense tried to target her memory and credibility by wondering how it was possible Miller now knew so many details of a meeting when she claimed that she could not even remember it when she first testified before the grand jury in 2005. The WSJ says at one point Miller "turned to jurors, rolling her eyes and shaking her head in frustration." The day ended with the defense trying to question Miller about other sources with whom she might have discussed Joe Wilson or his wife. The judge said he will hear arguments about whether to allow these questions, but everyone notes he didn't seem inclined to permit them.

    USAT fronts word that a major international report on climate change to be released on Friday will say that with "virtual certainty" fossil fuels are to blame for global warming. "Virtual certainty" means scientists are 99 percent sure, which is a change from 2001 when the group described the connection as "likely" (66 percent).

    The WP's Al Kamen points out that former associate attorney general and convicted felon Webb Hubbell is now promoting life insurance for people who smoke marijuana and are "responsible" about it. Typically those who smoke have had to lie on forms or pay high premiums to get life insurance. To target this "underserved market" Hubbell has teamed up with two insurance companies that agreed to write policies for those who enjoy a good toke.

    Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

     

     

     

    AP Blog: Traffic, Hype Launch Super Week

    Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET

    AP National Writer Paul Newberry is covering the sights and sounds surrounding Super Bowl XLI in Miami and filing daily reports:

    ------

    Wednesday, Jan. 31.

    FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- Decisions, decisions.

    The Indianapolis Colts have just finished their media availability -- you know, the daily round-table where guys answer the same ol' questions for about the 50th time this week -- and I'm faced with a quandary.

    Should I head back to Miami Beach for another round of scintillating news conferences ... or, should I hang out at the Colts' hotel for the rest of the afternoon?

    Let me tell you, Indianapolis has favored status at this Super Bowl in more ways than one. While the Chicago Bears are assigned to a hotel near Miami International Airport, with glorious views of planes landing and taking off, the Colts are trying to get by at a beachside resort in Fort Lauderdale.

    At this very moment, I'm looking out on the sparkling blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It's got to be at least 70 degrees. There's not a cloud in the sky. A gentle breeze is rolling onshore.

    I could go parasailing. Or rent a jet ski. Or just hang out on one of those comfy looking beach chairs, getting some much-needed sun for my pale winter skin.

    I'm sure there's a way to justify this as real work. What if Peyton Manning got a sunburn? I could spring into action for the exclusive interview (assuming I haven't dozed off myself). What if Adam Vinatieri gets a sand spur in that valuable right foot? That scoop would belong to me.

    So, should I stay or should I go?

    I guess it's time to go.

    Who says this isn't a tough job?

    ------

    TUESDAY, Jan. 30:

    MIAMI -- It's Super Bowl Media Day -- time to play my own version of ''Mission: Impossible.''

    Peyton Manning is the target. The goal? Ask a question of the Indianapolis Colts' star quarterback.

    This will require some advanced planning, so I grab a chart handed out by the NFL. Drawing on the expertise gained during my aborted career as a CIA spy (disclaimer: not everything you read in this blog is true), I deduce that Manning will hanging out for a full hour on podium No. 4, which is set up near the 25-yard line of Dolphin Stadium.

    Granted, I'm not actually writing a story on Manning. I don't really need to ask him anything. But if the Super Bowl is for the players (along with the TV networks and corporate sponsors), then Super Bowl Media Day is for the journalists.

    This is our chance to shine. This is a chance to show that we really belong. This is our chance to show that we can ask the hard questions, along with the questions that are hard to ask.

    What's that you say? Getting off one question in one hour doesn't sound all that tough? Well, it's obvious that you've never been to this human traffic jam on steroids, having an elbow jammed in your ribs or a camera banged off the side of your head.

    As a veteran of past Super Bowls, I know this one solitary question is hardly a shoe-in. Manning is the most prominent player in the title game. I'll have lots of competition, hundreds of would-be interrogators ranging from serious journalists -- hey, there's Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson of The New York Times -- to the folks just milking their moment in the spotlight. Yep, those two guys who were dissed by Simon on ''American Idol'' somehow got through the gate, one wearing Manning's No. 18 jersey, the other decked out in the No. 54 of Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher.

    For my purposes, they're all the enemy, the sort of people who will be vying for Manning's precious attention. I'll need to bring my A-game. I'll need to give 110 percent. I know there's no tomorrow (well, actually, both teams will be available Wednesday and Thursday at their team hotels, but that doesn't count).

    Always one to arrive fashionably late, I saunter toward Manning's spot about 10 minutes into this 60-minute affair, hoping that some of the weaklings will already have given up. No such luck -- he's engulfed by a horde of reporters, cameras and recorders.

    One of the more resourceful devices is a long metal pole with a camera taped to the top. Too bad I can't mount myself on top of a pole.

    Right away, I'm able to maneuver directly in front of the quarterback, a seemingly prime spot though I'm stuck behind a five-deep pileup. No need to start shouting yet. I'll bide my time, let the others tire themselves out, then move in for the kill.

    Five minutes after I arrive, I'm able to slide into the four-deep position. Should I start yelling? Not yet.

    Soon, I'm distracted by a cameraman, clicking away at 7 o'clock (right behind my left ear). I turn and give him the look of death. He apologizes and backs away.

    Then, a correspondent from ''Entertainment Tonight'' steals the spotlight, just sauntering right up to announce that he's come to present Manning with some sort of mock award. The quarterback is clearly distracted by the shiny glass trophy, because he turns toward the ET camera right away.

    Dang, I should have brought a present to give Manning.

    The minutes are ticking away -- literally, in large numbers on the stadium scoreboard. Thirty-five minutes to go. Thirty minutes to go. I'm going to have to make my move.

    ''Pey ...!'' That's all I get off before someone else out-hollers me.

    ''Peyton ...!'' A little better, but he still doesn't look.

    Another problem has arisen. I had several potential questions to fire at Manning, but most of them have already been asked. I need some fresh material. Fortunately, my co-worker from Chicago walks up from behind, asking if Manning has said anything about Urlacher.

    What a break! I volunteer to ask the question.

    And what's this? A spot right up front has opened, but Sal Paolantonio from ESPN cuts me off at the pass. And, in a brilliant maneuver, he also interrupts my next attempt -- after I've already gotten out, ''Hey Peyton, how do you account ...''

    Damn those TV guys, with their perfect hair and pressed suits!

    But I don't miss my next chance, getting off the inquiry in its entirety. It's taken a full half hour, but I've made it with 22 minutes to go. Manning looks duly impressed at my interrogating techniques, responding with a long, thoughtful answer.

    When he's finished, I mouth the words ''thank you'' and walk away. I should have brought a ''Mission Accomplished'' banner to unfurl on top of the stadium.

    Looking back, I spot an attractive woman positioned on top of a riser, shrieking toward the podium: ''Peyton! Peyton! Peyton!'' He doesn't even look up.

    Rookie.

    ------

    MONDAY, Jan. 29:

    MIAMI (AP) -- We turned right, sped up the ramp ... and saw nothing but red lights staring back at us as we merged onto Interstate 95. Welcome to South Florida and all its glorious sprawl.

    Riding with a colleague to the Indianapolis Colts' hotel in nearby Fort Lauderdale, I got my first sustained glimpse of this area's notorious traffic. Even though the expected 30-minute drive wound up taking more than an hour, it wasn't that big a deal for someone who's based in Atlanta, where gridlock is an accepted way of life.

    Besides, we made it to the hotel with a few minutes to spare, wading through fans and groupies camped out in the lobby for the Colts' arrival Monday evening.

    Security officers were everywhere -- guarding elevators, searching bags and checking credentials at the entrance to the massive tent where interviews were held with coach Tony Dungy and a small assortment of players (Sorry, no Peyton Manning. He won't be available until Tuesday's media confab at Dolphin Stadium).

    One woman tried to pull a fast one just before the interviews started, arriving at the door without a credential and proclaiming that she was with a journalist who had just walked in.

    The guard wasn't buying her story. He shouted out to the reporter, asking if they were together. ''I've never seen her before'' was the reply.

    Nice try.

    Taking the podium first, Dungy was asked if his players might be tempted by the myriad of opportunities for getting into trouble during Super Bowl week. Good question. Remember what happened the last time the NFL played its championship game in Miami?

    In 1999, Atlanta safety Eugene Robinson was arrested the night before the big game, charged with soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. Not surprisingly, the Falcons were whipped 34-19 by the Denver Broncos.

    ''We did talk about what happened to some other guys at the Super Bowl,'' Dungy said, without naming names.

    Meanwhile, plenty of journalists have been complaining about their digs at the main media hotel, sharing their supposed horror stories when they weren't listening to cliches. The rooms are shabby. It's inconvenient. Heck, they don't even have HBO.

    Of course, this is par for the course when it comes to sportswriters, who must have to take a course in Whining 101 on their way through college. They have one of the best jobs in the world -- if you can call it a job -- but all they do is talk about their hardships.

    They won't get much sympathy from those folks who don't get an all-expenses-paid trip to the country's biggest sporting event.

    ------

    MIAMI (AP) -- Let the press conferences begin!

    A steady stream of talking heads paraded through the Super Bowl media center, discussing everything from the coolest weather of the season (it's dipping into the low 50s) to the state of security (which is ''Level 1,'' in case you were wondering).

    This being Miami, it didn't take long for someone to bring up that ailing leader to the south. Cuban expatriates are making plans for an official celebration whenever Fidel Castro dies, but what happens if he passes away DURING the Super Bowl?

    Not to worry. Robert Parker, who runs the Miami-Dade Police Department, said the city has come up with a plan for just such an occurrence and even rehearsed it. ''We did a tabletop exercise just this morning,'' he said.

    Whew, that's a relief.

    Next to Castro, the most pressing security issue involved that most American of pastimes. Call this one Tailgating -- er -- Gate, because the NFL won't be letting anyone grill brats in the parking lot before the game. Yep, you heard me right. At the biggest football game of the season, tailgating is actually BANNED.

    The NFL's security honcho, Milt Alherich, pointed to a lack of parking space and a need to maintain tight control over the area around Dolphin Stadium. And listen to this spin on things: ''It's for the fans,'' he said. ''It's for the convenience of the fans and the safety of the fans.''

    Hmmm. Somehow, I don't think the fans will see it that way.

    One other thing stood out during the news conference on security. Julie Torres, an ATF agent who's leading the federal effort on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, was asked just what it means to be a ''Level 1'' event.

    Well, she explained, the Iraqi elections were ''Level 2,'' which means the feds didn't assign as many agents to watch over things as they'll have at the Super Bowl. Doesn't that sound like a strange sense of priorities?

    ^------

    SUNDAY, Jan. 28:

    MIAMI (AP) -- The Super Bowl countdown has started -- yep, only one week to go -- but the hype is still at the lukewarm stage.

    Other than a few signs hanging at Miami International Airport (''One Game, One Dream,'' they proclaimed with typical NFL melodrama), it seemed like just another day in this winter mecca. Snowbirds arriving for some much-needed Sun & Surf. A British couple on vacation, not at all interested in this American brand of football. And, of course, the airline delivering a broken piece of luggage on the carousel, along with this infuriating disclaimer.

    ''We're not responsible for any damage to the wheels and handles,'' an agent said. Oh well, I guess I'll be dragging this one the rest of the way.

    The media enclave is set up in the Miami Beach Convention Center, which is right next to the Jackie Gleason Theatre (an ode to another glorious era of partying and debauchery in this town). Out front, a cadre of orange-jacketed security officers stood ready to search every computer bag that came through the doors. Mostly, they just stood around. The cavernous hall was largely empty, the literal calm before the storm in what has become a de facto American holiday. The only signs of life were provided by the NFL Network, blaring from every television as they breathlessly marked the arrival of the Chicago Bears.

    And what about the Indianapolis Colts? Join us again Monday night -- that's when they'll be touching down.

    It wasn't until I turned the corner onto Ocean Drive in search of my hotel that I got my first taste of what's to come. The South Beach traffic was bumper to bumper (OK, so it's probably that way most nights in this land of roped-off clubs and scanty attire, but work with me here). And what's that creeping along in the opposite lane? Yep, it's a white stretch Hummer.

    Ahhh, now it feels like a Super Bowl.


     

    White House Order Tightens Grip

     

    By JOHN D. MCKINNON
    January 31, 2007; Page A6

    WASHINGTON -- A White House move to tighten its control over federal regulations is providing fresh evidence of the Bush administration's intent to leave its conservative imprint on government over the next two years.

    The White House action, in the form of an executive order, is a reminder that despite Democrats' success in November's congressional elections, Mr. Bush retains control of the basic machinery of government that often decides how corporations and citizens go about their business. It is a power that Congress has limited ability to affect.

      What's New: President Bush extended White House oversight of agency regulation to include more informal guidance and more data on costs.
     
      What's at Stake: Businesses are hoping they've gained new tools to avoid costly regulation, while consumer and liberal groups worry about a conservative power grab.
     
      What's Next: Democrats in Congress are likely to take a look, but have few options.
     

    Now Mr. Bush aims to exercise more sway.

    Most notably, the White House has given itself more review authority over many informal agency dictates known as guidance. Critics say the executive order gives the White House a chokehold over new guidance it dislikes. White House officials deny that, saying it is simply strengthening a review process that already occurs in many instances.

    Even defenders of the administration say this change is likely to give the White House more say in how to interpret federal rules. As the White House has assumed more oversight on formal rulemaking, many critics say agencies have done more regulation through informal guidance, such as letters or manuals. Because these aren't formal regulations, the agencies don't have to go through the same elaborate procedures. Labor officials in recent years have issued guidance on hundreds of occupational-safety issues, critics note.

    "I think that's important," James Gattuso, an expert on regulation at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said of the change. "If you believe in review of regulations to ensure they're consistent with administration policy, and no more costly than necessary, you really want guidance documents to be included as well."

    Administration officials say the principal aim of the new policies isn't to stifle regulation but to clarify a process that can appear confusing and opaque to the people affected. Several of the changes are aimed at making sure that regulated companies and individuals get more of an opportunity to comment in advance on planned policies, said Jeffrey Rosen, general counsel of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

    "Bad, bad, bad," Gary Bass, executive director of liberal advocacy group OMB Watch, said of the changes. He predicted they would hamper the government's ability to respond to regulatory crises -- such as the recent E. coli outbreaks on fresh vegetables.

    The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is considering a hearing on the issue. The administration's new approach "interferes with the ability of agencies to make decisions based on their expert opinions, and is something Congress should carefully review," Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) said in a statement. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement that his panel would monitor the situation to "make sure that essential federal protections are not being undermined."

    Mr. Rosen said it's "ironic that a measure that increases availability of guidance documents to the public and allows input by the public would be seen as a problem instead of a benefit." He also said there is an exception for emergencies.

    [Susan Dudley]

    The executive order has three other main parts. It sets a new standard for formal rulemaking that requires agencies to find a "market failure" before proceeding with formal regulation. That's a concept that has been championed by Susan Dudley, the academic Mr. Bush nominated to oversee regulatory matters for the White House. Her nomination has been blocked in the Senate, and the White House has said she instead will be tapped for a senior adviser post.

    Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group, said that provision could derail much new regulation. But Mr. Rosen says it is an attempt to clarify a provision that has governed executive-branch rulemaking since the Clinton administration issued its executive order on regulations in 1993. That 1993 provision called for an agency undertaking a rulemaking to identify the problem it intends to address, including "the failures of private markets," he said.

    The new Bush order also requires agencies to put a senior official -- technically, a presidential appointee -- in charge of regulatory policy. Critics say that will extend the reach of the White House further into agencies' operations. But White House officials say it's just institutionalizing a longstanding practice. Most agencies already have designated a presidential appointee as their regulatory policy chief, Mr. Rosen said.

    Another change requires agencies to develop annual plans for weighing the combined costs and benefits of all regulation planned for the year. Liberal critics say such analyses are biased against regulation and will cause agencies to postpone new rules

     

     

    President Lincoln and Ford's Theater

    JANE ANN MORRISON: Visit to Ford's Theatre provides intimate connection to Lincoln's legacy

    WASHINGTON -- Who knew that Ford's Theatre, where President Lincoln was shot by an assassin/actor, is still a working theater? Certainly not me. I didn't even know it still was standing.

    ..>..> ..> ..>..>..>


    It's not one of the big attractions in Washington. It's no Air and Space Museum or Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. But it's one of those little jewels of living history that encourage the imagination, bringing to life the death of a great president. Was that a movement in the box? Could it be the spirit of John Wilkes Booth preparing to jump on the stage below after shooting Lincoln?

    The theater and the home across the street where Lincoln died are both open to the public (and free), and the basement of the theater houses a small Lincoln museum showcasing such grim memorabilia as the coat he was wearing when he was shot, the derringer used and Booth's diary, in which he explained his plan to kill the man who freed the slaves.

    Ford's Theatre was closed after Lincoln's death because an outraged public didn't want the murder site used for entertainment. The building was used for business but reopened as a theater in 1968 after the historical value came to outweigh the concern that it wouldn't be respectful to put on shows there.

    Lincoln enjoyed theater as an escape from his day job and had gone to see a comedy with his wife and another couple on April 14, 1865. It was about 10:15 p.m. when Booth entered the presidential box to the right of the stage just as the audience was laughing at a line in "Our American Cousin." He shot the president, stabbed Maj. Henry Rathbone and chose as his route of escape to leap onto the stage below, a flamboyant move sure to bring more drama to his act. However, he got entangled with the flags and decorations that marked this as a presidential box. Booth broke a bone in his left leg when he landed on the stage but still fled to his horse waiting in the alley.

    Lincoln was taken to the house across the street, where he died the next morning. You can see the sitting room where Mary Todd Lincoln and son Robert waited through the night. The bed in the back room of this modest boarding house owned by a tailor is not the actual bed Lincoln died in -- that bed is now owned by the Chicago Historical Society -- but you can envision the lanky Lincoln stretched diagonally across the bed, his hand held by the 23-year-old doctor first to respond to "Is there a doctor in the house?"

    Booth, a Southern sympathizer, was captured and killed April 26 in a Virginia farmhouse. I had forgotten he had six co-conspirators, including Mary Surratt, a woman who ran a boarding house where the murder was plotted.

    On my visit to the capital, I trudged to Ford's Theatre through a snowstorm, much like a 19th-century heroine (but with better boots) clutching not a baby, but a ticket to August Wilson's play "Jitney." From where I sat, there was a clear view of the presidential box, with its faded flags draped across the front. Honestly, at one time out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement.

    A strong sense of the presence of a man who had fought for civil rights commingled with the play about blacks in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, men struggling to provide for their families and provide transportation for their poor neighborhood.

    The play hammered home the slow progress of equality in the United States. Seeing "Jitney" at Ford's Theatre, in a city where multicultural is no misnomer, where my cabbies came from India, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Haiti, made it as relevant today as it was 30 years ago and made the death of a man a century and a half ago seem even more tragic.

    When Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages." His massive memorial on the National Mall in Washington brings that message home, but so does a more intimate and human visit to Ford's Theatre.

    Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.

     
     
    ..
     

     

    Iraq

    This article brings into stark reality what is happening every day in Iraq. There must be a complete re-evaluation and coming together of all Americans so this kind of senseless killing will stop.

     

    Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images for The New York Times

    American and Iraqi soldiers on Haifa Street in Baghdad. There, a sergeant was shot last week, and one bullet changed

    January 29, 2007

    'Man Down': When One Bullet Alters Everything

    BAGHDAD, Jan. 28 — Staff Sgt. Hector Leija scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around a space heater, cradling an infant.

    It was after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, on Haifa Street in central Baghdad, and the crack-crack of machine-gun fire had been rattling since dawn. More than a thousand American and Iraqi troops had come to this warren of high rises and hovels to disrupt the growing nest of Sunni and Shiite fighters battling for control of the area.

    The joint military effort has been billed as the first step toward an Iraqi takeover of security. But this morning, in the two dark, third-floor apartments on Haifa Street, that promise seemed distant. What was close, and painfully real, was the cost of an escalating street fight that had trapped American soldiers and Iraqi bystanders between warring sects.

    And as with so many days here, a bullet changed everything.

    It started at 9:15 a.m.

    "Help!" came the shout. "Man down."

    "Sergeant Leija got hit in the head," yelled Specialist Evan Woollis, 25, his voice carrying into the apartment with the Iraqi family. The soldiers from the sergeant's platoon, part of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, rushed from one apartment to the other.

    In the narrow kitchen, a single bullet hole could be seen in a tinted glass window facing north.

    The platoon's leader, Sgt. First Class Marc Biletski, ordered his men to get down, away from every window, and to pull Sergeant Leija out of the kitchen and into the living room.

    "O.K., everybody, let's relax," Sergeant Biletski said. But he was shaking from his shoulder to his hand.

    Relaxing was just not possible. Fifteen feet of floor and a three-inch-high metal doorjamb stood between where Sergeant Leija fell and the living room, out of the line of fire. Gunshots popped in bursts, their source obscured by echoes off the concrete buildings.

    "Don't freak out on me, Doc," Sergeant Biletski shouted to the platoon medic, Pfc. Aaron Barnum, who was frantically yanking at Sergeant Leija's flak jacket to take the weight off his chest. "Don't freak out."

    Two minutes later, three soldiers rushed to help, dragging the sergeant from the kitchen. A medevac team then rushed in and carried him to a Stryker armored vehicle outside, around 9:20. He moaned as they carried him down the stairs on a stretcher.

    The men of the platoon remained in the living room, frozen in shock. They had a problem. Sergeant Leija's helmet, flak jacket, gear and weapon, along with that of at least one other soldier, were still in the exposed area of the kitchen. They needed to be recovered. But how?

    "We don't know if there's friendlies in that building," said Sgt. Richard Coleman, referring to the concrete complex a few feet away from where Sergeant Leija had been shot. Sergeant Biletski, 39, decided to wait. He called for another unit to search and clear the building next door.

    The additional unit needed time, and got lost. The men sat still. Sergeant B, as his soldiers called him, was near the wall farthest from the kitchen, out of sight from the room's wide, shaded window. Sergeant Woollis, Private Barnum, Sergeant Coleman and Specialist Terry Wilson sat around him.

    Together, alone, trapped in a dark room with the blood of their comrade on the floor, they tried to piece together what had happened. Maybe the sniper saw Sergeant Leija's silhouette in the window and fired. Or maybe the shot was accidental, they said, fired from below by Iraqi Army soldiers who had been moving between the buildings.

    Sergeant Woollis cited the available evidence — an entrance wound just below the helmet with an exit wound above. He said the shot must have been fired from the ground.

    The Iraqis were not supposed to even be there yet. The plan had been for Sergeant Leija's squad to work alongside an Iraqi Army unit all day. But after arriving late at the first building, the Iraqis jumped ahead, leaving the Americans and pushing north without searching dozens of apartments in the area.

    The Iraqi soldiers below the kitchen window had once again skipped forward. An American officer later said the Iraqis were brave to push ahead toward the most intense gunfire.

    But Sergeant Leija's squad had no communication links with their Iraqi counterparts, and because it was an Iraqi operation — as senior officers repeatedly emphasized — the Americans could not order the Iraqis to get back in line. There was nothing they could do.

    9:40 a.m.

    An Iraqi soldier rushed in and then stopped, seemingly surprised by the Americans sitting around him. He stood in the middle of the darkened living room, inches away from bloody bandages on the carpet.

    "Get away from the window!"

    The soldiers yelled at their interpreter, a masked Iraqi whom they called Santana. Between their shouts and his urgent Arabic, the Iraqi soldier got the message. He slowly walked away.

    A few minutes later it happened again. This time, the Iraqi lingered.

    "What part of 'sniper' don't you understand?" Sergeant Biletski yelled. The other soldiers cursed and called the Iraqis idiots. They were still not sure whether an Iraqi soldier was responsible for Sergeant Leija's wound, but they said the last thing they wanted was another casualty. In a moment of emotion, Private Barnum said, "I won't treat him if he's hit."

    When the second Iraqi left, an airless silence returned. The dark left people alone to grieve. "You O.K.? " Sergeant B asked each soldier. A few nods. A few yeses.

    Private Barnum stood up, facing the kitchen, eager to bring back the gear left. One foot back, the other forward, he stood like a sprinter. "I can get that stuff, Sergeant," he said. "I can get it."

    The building next door had still not been cleared by Americans. The answer was no.

    "I can't lose another man," Sergeant B said. "If I did, I failed. I already failed once. I'm not going to fail again."

    The room went quiet. Faces turned away. "You didn't fail, sir," said one of the men, his voice disguised by the sound of fighting back tears. "You didn't fail."

    9:55 a.m.

    The piercing cry of an infant was easily identifiable, even as the gunfire outside intensified. It came from the apartment next door. The Iraqi Army had been there, too. In an interview before Sergeant Leija was shot, the three young Iraqis there said that their father had been taken by the soldiers.

    "Someone from over there" — they pointed back away from Haifa Street, toward the rows of mud-brick slums — "told them we had weapons," said a young man, who seemed to be about 18.

    He was sitting on a couch. To his right, his older sister clutched an infant in a blanket; his younger sister, about 16, sat on the other side.

    The young man said the family was Shiite. He said the supposed informants were Sunni Arabs who wanted their apartment.

    The truth of his claim was impossible to verify, but it was far from the day's only confounding tip. Earlier that morning, an Iraqi boy of about 8 ran up to Sergeant Leija. He wanted to tell the Americans about terrorists hiding in the slums behind the apartment buildings on Haifa Street's eastern side.

    Sergeant Leija, an easygoing 27-year-old from Raymondville, Tex., ignored him. He and some of his soldiers said it was impossible to know whether the boy had legitimate information or would lead them to an ambush.

    That summed up intelligence in Iraq, they said: there is always the threat of being set up, for an attack or an Iraqi's own agenda.

    The Iraqi Army did not seem worried about such concerns, according to the family. The three young Iraqis said they were glad that the Americans had come. Maybe they could help find their father.

    10:50 a.m.

    Sergeant. Coleman tried using a mop to get the gear, and failed. It was too far away. With more than an hour elapsed since the attack, and after no signs of another shot through the kitchen window, Sergeant B agreed to let Private Barnum make a mad dash for the equipment.

    Private Barnum waited for several minutes in the doorway, peeking around the corner, stalling. Then he dove forward, pushing himself up against the wall near the window to cut down the angle, pausing, then darting back to the camouflaged kit.

    Crack — a single gunshot. Private Barnum looked back at the kitchen window, his eyes squeezed with fear. His pace quickened. He cleared the weapons' chambers and tossed them to the living room. Then he threw the flak jackets and bolt cutters.

    He picked up Sergeant Leija's helmet, cradled it in his arms, then made the final dangerous move back to the living room, his fatigues indelibly stained with his friend's blood. There were no cheers to greet him. It was a brave act borne of horror, and the men seemed eager to go.

    As Private Barnum gingerly wrapped the helmet in a towel, it tipped and blood spilled out.

    11:15 a.m.

    Sergeant B sat down on a chair outside the two apartments and used the radio to find out if they would be heading back to base or moving forward. He was told to stay put until after an airstrike on a building 500 yards away.

    The platoon, looking for cover, returned to the Iraqis' apartment, where they found the family as they were before — on the couch, in the dark, around the heater.

    Specialist Wilson continued the conversation he started before the gunshot two hours earlier. The young Iraqi man said again that the Iraqi Army had taken his father. "Will you come back to help?" he asked.

    "We didn't take him," Specialist Wilson said. "The I.A. took him. If he didn't do anything wrong, he should be back."

    The Iraqi family nodded, as if they had heard this before.

    Speaking together — none of them gave their names — they said they had lived in the apartment for 16 years. Ten days ago, before the Americans arrived, Sunnis told them they would kill every Shiite in the building if they did not leave immediately. So they fled to a neighborhood in southern Baghdad where some Shiites had started to gather in abandoned homes. But again, a threat came: leave or die. So less than a week ago, the family returned to Haifa Street.

    And now the airstrike was coming.

    Sergeant B told the family that they should go into a back room for safety. He asked if they wanted to take the heater with them (they did not), and he reminded everyone to keep their mouths open to protect their inner ears against the airstrike's shockwave.

    A boom, then another even louder explosion hit, shaking dust from the walls. One of blasts came from a mortar shell that hit the building, the soldier said. The family stayed, but for the Americans, it was time to go.

    12:30 p.m.

    Over the next few hours, the platoon combined sprints across open alleyways with bouts of rest in empty makeshift homes. Under what sounded like constant gunfire, the soldiers moved behind the Iraqi soldiers, staying close.

    At one point, the Iraqis detained a man who they said had videos of himself shooting American soldiers. The Iraqi soldiers slapped him in the head as they walked him past.

    About an hour later, a sniper wounded two Iraqi soldiers who were mingling outside a squat apartment like teenagers at a 7-11. Private Barnum wrapped their wounds with American bandages. He and the rest of the platoon had been inside, taking cover.

    "Stay away from the windows," Sergeant B kept repeating. The point was clear: don't let it happen again. Don't fail.

    4 p.m.

    Downstairs in the lobby of a mostly abandoned high rise on Haifa Street, the sergeant and his men sat on the floor, exhausted. They were waiting for their Stryker to return so they could head back to base. In 14 hours, they had moved through a stretch of eight buildings on Haifa Street. They had been scheduled to clear 18.

    Upstairs, Iraqi soldiers searched rooms and made themselves at home in empty apartments. Many were spacious, even luxurious, with elevators opening into wide hallways and grand living rooms splashed with afternoon sun.

    Under Saddam Hussein, Haifa Street had been favored by Baath Party officials and wealthy foreigners. The current residents seemed to have fled in an instant; in one apartment, a full container of shaving cream was left in the bathroom. In that apartment's living room, a band of Iraqi soldiers settled in, relaxing on blue upholstered couches and listening to a soccer game on a radio they found in a closet.

    They looked comfortable, like they were waiting to be called to dinner.

    Sergeant B and Specialist Woollis, meanwhile, talked about what they would eat when they got back to their homes in California. The consensus was chili dogs and burgers.

    Sergeant B also said he missed his 13-year-old son, who was growing up without him, playing football, learning to become a man with an absentee father. After 17 years in the Army, he said, he was thinking that maybe his family had put up with enough.

    "I don't see how you can do this," he said, "and not be damaged."

    A few hours later, the word came in: Sergeant Leija had died.


     

    Readers strike back

     From Salon.com

    Massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever. This brave new world is filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But do they outweigh its insidious effects?

    By Gary Kamiya

    Jan. 30, 2007 | You, gentle and not-so-gentle readers, have been on my mind lately. You vast and invisible online throng, slouched in front of thousands of computer monitors, have done something revolutionary. You have forever altered the relationship between writer and audience. The Internet has turned what was once primarily a one-way communication into a dialogue -- or maybe a melee. From a cultural perspective, the new democracy of voices online is a wonderful thing. But writers have an odd and ambiguous relationship with their readers, and the reader revolution is having massive consequences we can't even foresee. Writers are being pulled, or lured, down from their solitary perches and into the madding throng. This has opened useful debate and made writers accountable. But it has also thrown open the gate to creeps, narcissists and wannabe Byrons who threaten to damage the fragile, half-permeable membrane writers use to keep the world from being too much with them.

    This is all brand new. Until the Internet came along, actual readers barely dented a writer's consciousness. Before the whole world got wired, the only way readers could respond to a piece was by writing a letter to the editor, or (much less frequently) to the author, putting it in a stamped envelope, and sticking it in a mailbox. As a result, the number of letters was a tiny fraction of what it is in the age of e-mail. And that number was further diminished by an editor who trimmed the few selected letters to meet space considerations and winnowed out the cranks. An article might have been read by 10,000 people, but the writer never knew it. A dozen letters constituted a deluge.

    Most writers have a love-hate relationship with reader mail. I'm no exception. When I started out, back in the snail-mail days, I looked eagerly forward to getting letters -- as long as they compared my prose to Stendhal's. However, I was quickly disabused of the dream that I was destined to be the literary version of Santa Claus. For every letter that compared my prose to Stendhal's, there were 10 that were the epistolary equivalent of a decaying vegetable, hurled with unerring accuracy at my cranium. (Actually, since no one was ever deluded enough to compare my prose to Stendhal's, the ratio was even worse.) This would have bummed me out, but there weren't enough letters, good or bad, to affect me one way or the other. Since there was no evidence that I had any readers -- and considering some of the publications I wrote for, that may have been true -- I was able to put my audience pretty much out of my mind.

    Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed. Pieces that in the olden days would have garnered five or six letters suddenly inspired more commentary than a rerun of "Gilligan's Island" in a cultural studies class. The floodgates opened, and in charged the masses -- some filled with fulsome praise, others waving scimitars and dragging siege machinery into place, others ranting about their ex-wives.

    For its part, Salon has thrown in its lot, for better and worse, with reader democracy. Until about 15 months ago, readers could post comments only by e-mail, and Salon editors culled the most interesting and representative ones -- in effect, a compromise between the restrictive old print approach and the open-the-floodgates Web one. No more. Now readers can post letters directly and they go up on the site unedited. (We do remove posts that contain gratuitous insults, ad hominem attacks, obscenities and the like.)

    Like most sites that have gone to an open letters forum, we wanted to democratize, to showcase all the letters we receive. We also did it because we wanted to attract more readers. Online journalism is a highly competitive business. Major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are competing with popular blogs like Daily Kos and established Web sites like Salon for readers. Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh says, "We talked for years about how to get the great letters from readers we all had in our in boxes onto the site and finally set out to do it. But clearly there was also the influence of the blogosphere, where readers expect to participate in the conversation and respond to posts and articles themselves. And we wanted to increase our page views, reader participation and loyalty. Readers come back now not just to see what else we've posted on Salon, but to see what other letter writers have said about their letter."

    Salon's new letters policy is a tiny part of a larger online trend toward massive reader feedback. All of us -- writers and editors and readers alike -- are still struggling to get used to this cacophonous cornucopia of communication. It is a brave new world, filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But it has some downsides, too -- not all of them obvious.

    Let's start with the good news. Ideas and perspectives that never found an outlet before are now shouted from every corner that has a phone line and a computer. This has rocked the journalistic world. The violent uprising of the previously voiceless plebeians has disturbed the perfumed slumber of media gatekeepers, forcing journalists to immediately correct glaring mistakes or abandon insupportable positions. One well-known example was the brouhaha at the Washington Post over its Jack Abramoff coverage, when readers posting on the Post's blog forced ombudsman Deborah Howell to admit that her assertion that Abramoff had "directed' contributions to both parties" -- implying that the Abramoff scandal was bipartisan -- was a mistake. The Post, whose initial response to the attacks on Howell was to shut down its blog on the grounds that many attacks were abusive, later, to its credit, restored the blog.

    And, of course, there has been an explosion of expertise. The information revolution has set off a million car bombs of random knowledge at once, spraying info fragments through the marketplace of ideas. Sometimes it feels as if the Internet has turned the whole country, indeed the whole world, into a virtual New York City, a dense, antimatter-like place where within any four-block grid there are hundreds of people who know more about Miles Davis or Linux or Giorgio de Chirico or the Ruy Lopez opening or Peyton Manning's attack on the two-deep zone than you do. (As a starry-eyed provincial, I like to think of New York this way, even though it's probably an illusion.)

    The reader revolution has also provided an unprecedented snapshot of America. Anyone who surfs the Web looks out over democratic vistas that Walt Whitman could only imagine. The switchboard is lit up and behind each light is a real human being whose opinions and interests can now be heard by all. Is this a good thing? It depends on whether your commitment to democracy, transparency and openness outweighs your desire not to be flooded with noise about Paris Hilton, Brazilian bikini waxing and the profiles on MySpace.

    In some ways, this debate, and indeed the larger argument about the reader revolution, recapitulates venerable debates, which go back to the ancient Greeks, about the virtues of democracy versus aristocracy and oligarchy. This is an age of massive feedback, but it's hard to deny that the collective American mind, now that its amp is turned up to 11, sounds a lot like Mötley Crüe.

    For a writer, this huge, suddenly vocal audience has some significant advantages. For one thing, it serves as an enormous fact-checker. If you make a mistake in a piece, some eagle-eyed reader will let you know, often within minutes. But a far more important effect of the reader revolution is that it has forced writers to immediately deal with substantive arguments and critique. Like most writers who publish a lot online, I've written pieces that a letter writer has sliced up so surgically, with such superior logic and style, that I began searching furtively for a "do over" button on my computer. And the sheer quantity of even less sophisticated arguments, like water poured onto a leaky roof, reveal a piece's weak points. Many writers have told me about extraordinary e-mail exchanges with readers that sometimes develop into ongoing relationships.

    At its best, then, the active audience sharpens thinking and advances the discussion. Even when not at its best, it gives a valuable sense of the range of perspectives that are out there -- at least in the possibly skewed demographic of those who write letters online.

    And, of course, for a writer there is the guilty narcissistic pleasure, which can become an addiction, of wallowing in what other people have to say about you. If you have a blog, as New York Times media writer David Carr noted recently, this temptation is even more powerful. In the Balzacian -- some would say baboonlike -- game of status-affirmation that we are all tempted to play from time to time, the number of letters you get, blogs that deal with you, or the number of times your name comes up on Google is an index of higher rank.

    These are some of the good, or at least furtively pleasurable, aspects of the reader revolution. But there are also a number of bad ones. And like an iceberg, the bulk of them may be below the surface.

    First, and most obviously, is the reality that the newly vocal masses contain not only thoughtful and respectful readers but also large numbers of fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts. Moreover -- and this is a crucial point -- the percentage of letter writers who are fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts has exponentially increased. In the old stamped-letter days, the difficulty of writing in weeded out more of these types; letters tended to be somewhat more thoughtful, and letter writers usually adhered to certain conventions of etiquette and decorum governing communications between reader and writer. Not forelock-tugging subservience to their betters, but simple courtesy. There was a tacit acknowledgment of the implicit contract between writer and reader, one characterized by at least a modicum of idealization and respect on both sides. I don't want to exaggerate this -- certainly there were plenty of ad hominem and intemperate letters back then. But having edited several magazines in the print-only era, I can say that there were far, far fewer. Perhaps the unseen presence of an editor, the slightly formal nature of writing a "letter to the editor," led readers to be on their better behavior.

    Now, in the glorious days of "disintermediation," when writing a letter or posting a blog is as easy as banging away on a keyboard for a few seconds and clicking "Send," that contract has been trashed. Formality? The context of online communication is more like being in your car in a traffic jam than sitting across a table from someone and having a talk -- and it's easy to flip somebody off through a rolled-up window. As a result, the kind of people who are prone to flipping others off, braying obscenities and ranting pointlessly are disproportionately represented in online letters sections and reader blogs. A friend of mine once commented, apropos of drivers who festoon the bumpers of their cars with stickers announcing their political and philosophical beliefs, "I am not interested in the opinions of my fellow motorists." Reading some online discussions, I know exactly what he meant.

    The letters pages of Salon, like every other online magazine that doesn't filter its posts, is a classic spaghetti western -- the good, the bad and a really heavy dose of Eli Wallach. To pull out only one of thousands of possible examples, let's look at a particularly egregious discussion that followed an article by Lori Leibovich about the Yaskulka family of New York, whose father lost his mother on 9/11, and their painful struggle to overcome depression and put their lives back together. A number of readers criticized Salon for running the piece, arguing that it placed 9/11 victims on a pedestal and played into Bush's 9/11-is-sacred agenda. But several went further, criticizing the family itself. "Seems like all they are doing is letting the past rule them," wrote "SR." "They seem to be unwilling or unable to get past it. That's not 'recovery' it's 'wallowing.'" Another writer, "EM," criticized "these showy displays of forced grief" and commented, "The Yaskulkas would probably benefit from focusing more on their futures and less on their past losses, too."

    Other readers jumped in to express outrage at these responses. One wrote that "for others to think that they have the moral right to judge and ridicule a grieving family's coping methods is absolutely disgusting. It makes me so furious that I'm surprised that I can even sit here and type this. Another poster who expressed similar anger to this situation, wrote, "'Christ, we're horrid.' I completely agree. Human nature at its finest." In the end, the family's mother responded herself, writing, "Judge us if you will ... We were not asked by Salon.com to be the 'Poster Family' for 9/11. We were asked how we are doing 5 years later. We are doing the best we can."

    That other readers came to the defense of the Yaskulkas, and Louise Yaskulka responded, shows that letters forums can be self-correcting. But they are not always self-correcting: Sometimes the trolls drive everyone else out. In any case, the damage had been done. This example shows that online, nothing -- not even a grieving family -- is off-limits. Why should it be? An anonymous posting is a communication without consequence. Want to tell someone who lost their mom that they're not grieving the right way? Step right up! They'll never know who you are.

    What should be noted about the Yaskulka comments is that, removed from their context as responses to an article about real people, in a forum where those people are sure to read them, they are legitimate. People are at liberty to judge others, and do so all the time, even regarding matters as intimate as grieving. We've all played amateur psychologist in private about people we know, and writers pronounce judgment on public figures all the time. What made this discussion different, and what many readers rightfully found offensive, is that it was a public discussion of a deeply private matter -- the very definition of callousness. But the letter writers who criticized the Yaskulkas clearly did not see the family as being private anymore: Because they were the subjects of an online story, they were fair game.

    The fact is that anyone who posts anything on the Internet is opening himself or herself up to every conceivable response -- from thoughtful comments to irrelevant ramblings to savage personal attacks. And, in a dynamic unique to discussion threads, those responses have a logic of their own, one that often has far less to do with the piece ostensibly being discussed than with the posters' obsessions and their quarrels with each other. A thread that starts out reading like an exchange in the New York Review of Books quickly degenerates into a brawl on "The Jerry Springer Show."

    Open letter forums create and abet an insider-ish mentality where a certain species of poster can flaunt their egos and sense of superiority. These worthies may see themselves as keen-witted literary arbiters, but in fact they more closely resemble the extras who play outraged townspeople in low-budget vampire movies, oafs in lederhosen milling around angrily and waving burning torches. Besotted with their petty power and egging each other on, they often gang up on a single demonized writer. And if you happen to be that writer, you'd better have a really thick skin -- or have learned to stop reading your mail and Googling yourself.

    The problem is, it's very hard for writers, who want to be read and want to know what readers are saying about them, to ignore letters or blogs about themselves. "Practically every writer I know has gone through the mill with this," says Salon senior writer Laura Miller. "Blogs, often written by idiots, are bad-mouthing you. You go through this cycle where you get interested, then you get angry, then you just stop reading them." But as Miller points out, even nasty comments are addictive. "There's a great Trollope quote from 'Phineas Finn': 'But who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?'"

    Miller, who says the tendency of discussion threads to degenerate is an example of "the tragedy of the commons," believes that the worst online abuse is directed at writers who make themselves vulnerable by revealing intimate things about their lives. "I don't think people who write stuff like that should read their letters," Miller says. "If you write something revealing, people mob up and become predatory." Miller attributes this to a rampant cultural self-righteousness: "It's like a virus in society -- the policing of norms." As every online editor knows, pieces about child-rearing, sexual mores and the like provoke remarkably virulent outbursts of reader self-righteousness.

    Novelist and former Salon columnist Ayelet Waldman is a case in point: Her pieces about child-rearing and sexuality caused a group of readers to become angrily obsessed with her. "For some reason there's a tendency for the very worst of people to be expressed online," Waldman says. "I've done it myself -- I once wrote something really snarky about a writer, and I got back a very thoughtful and hurt letter from them, and I felt really bad."

    Waldman no longer Googles herself or reads reader letters. "From early on I realized that their bile said much more about them than about me," she says. "But inevitably, despite yourself, that viciousness does affect you. It makes me feel bad about myself, and I try to avoid things that make me feel bad about myself. It's too bad because I've also had amazing experiences online -- connecting with women who have lost children, things that have helped me as human being."

    Waldman sums it up succinctly: "The entire blogosphere is a first draft."

    It should be noted that some of these attacks have an ugly misogynistic aspect. At Salon, but I believe not just at Salon, a disproportionate number of nasty posts are directed at women writers. Often, the letter writers delight in using cutesy nicknames to belittle women authors, a tactic seldom used against male writers. It's hard to say whether this is a result of the tendency of women to write more personal essays than men, or simple misogyny (though many of the abusive posters are themselves female).

    It's easy to say writers should just ignore these letters, but it isn't so easy to do it. For one thing, it isn't as if the posts are all simply cretinous vomitings by mouth-breathers; often they make some more or less legitimate point, then launch into their ugly attacks. And the relentless viciousness of the attacks -- a phenomenon that never existed on the same scale before the Internet -- is profoundly demoralizing to writers: They can make their job miserable and affect their writing. "In the old days, the mail had a completely different tenor," says Salon staff writer Rebecca Traister. "Even the hate mail was pretty well thought-out. But this has become about creating a spectacle of hate that everyone will notice. I did laugh at it for a long time. But to open yourself up to it every single time, to wake up at night imagining how someone is going to take what you have written and turn it into a personal attack on you -- it wears away at you." Traister adds, "I cannot say that it does not affect my writing."

    Nasty and ignorant letters affect the reader, too. A few ugly or stupid comments in a discussion thread have a disproportionate impact. Like drops of iodine in a glass of water, they discolor the whole discussion and scare more thoughtful commentators away. They also degrade the image of a publication's readership: Several Salon contributors and staffers have complained to me that our open letters policy leaves the impression that our readership is much stupider and coarser than it really is.

    The larger issue, however, is the effect of massive feedback itself -- not just abusive feedback, or dumb comments on blogs, but all of it -- on writers. Here we approach the ambiguous heart of the issue. It's ambiguous because a writer's relationship with the imagined readership is itself inherently unstable. Writing is an unstable, hybrid form of communication, at once a soliloquy and a conversation. And the sudden onslaught of responding readers has profoundly changed that relationship, in ways that may improve the communal, two-way aspects of writing but may damage its intimate, meditative and one-way nature. Writers may begin questioning themselves, anticipating criticism, internalizing external pressures -- all things that can be positive but that can also lead to creative paralysis.

    Of course, different kinds of writing are more autonomous than others. At one extreme, there is literary fiction. Fiction writers do not aim to communicate facts, make an argument or convince anyone of anything; indeed, it is questionable whether fiction is a "communication" in the sense that a conversation is at all. At the other extreme is a straight "just the facts, ma'am" news story, in which all voice and point of view has been excised. All other kinds of journalistic writing fall somewhere in between.

    Fiction writers are not exposed to as much online feedback as journalists, but they too are exposed. And some fiction writers are beginning to register this in their work. In Richard Powers' latest novel, "The Echo Maker," one of the main characters is a neurologist and writer whose recent books have been criticized. Looking at comments about him on Amazon, he thinks: "Somehow, when he wasn't looking, private thought gave way to perpetual group ratings. The age of personal reflection was over. From now on, everything would be haggled out in public feedback brawls."

    For his part, Powers seems to welcome the age of "public feedback brawls" -- at least as they affect his work. "What's liberating is my books are being talked about by a lot of people in a lot of different forums, from esoteric literary quarterlies to blogs," he said in an interview with Salon's Kevin Berger in the Los Angeles Times. "It's now possible to feel that you're just part of a conversation that's veering and weaving all the time. In a way, it parallels the issues in 'The Echo Maker.' We want to believe the self is a single and a solid thing. But we need to stop thinking about the self as a kind of solid art sculpture and start thinking of it as a river, flowing and changing. Maybe many years ago, I had the idea that a book had an innate quality and was a solid, identifiable monument of unchanging value. But it's clear to me that books, like people, are works in progress. They are constantly being transformed."

    But Powers' view of fiction as constantly in flux is probably not shared by most novelists, who are more apt to see their creations as immutable objects, "artifices of eternity" like Yeats' golden bird in "Sailing to Byzantium." In one sense, this sense of fiction as autonomous shields it from the reader revolution -- but it also leaves it potentially open to being undercut, whittled away. If all the cultural noise and audience feedback is about either nonfiction or the more blatantly attention-getting elements in fiction, will fiction writers have an incentive to stop dreaming?

    Journalism is inherently more communicative, information-driven and dialogic than fiction -- but not entirely so. As a result, the reader revolution has left journalists in a complicated position. They need to respond to their critics more than fiction writers do -- but they, too, sometimes need earplugs.

    The most obvious danger, for a journalist, is that he or she will respond to criticism by avoiding certain subjects or pulling punches. Except in cases of reader abuse, this is the journalist's problem, not the readers'. A writer privileged enough to publish has to be thick-skinned to accept fair criticism, no matter how harsh. Bloggers' denunciation of the "imperial media" can be overblown and paranoid, but it's legitimate to expect journalists to accept criticism. Once you write something and send it out into the world, you don't own it anymore: You offered it to the reader, and the reader has the right to respond as he or she wants. Before the Internet, it was easy for a journalist to behave like a sniper, rising furtively out of a foxhole, firing off a shot, then ducking back down to safety. Now, people are shooting back, and it's a bit much for the sniper to complain. The tale of New Republic critic Lee Siegel, who was so enraged by his online detractors that he adopted a pseudonym, went into the comments section of his blog and began slurring his critics and praising himself, is cautionary. (Siegel was suspended from writing for TNR.)

    But in reality, journalists are human beings who range from bomb-throwing tough guys to tender-hearted wimps. And the reader revolution has definitely made it harder for the wimps. If you want to write polemically about a subject that people feel passionately about, you'd better be ready for a rumble. Whether this is a good development or not is unclear: It's good that journalists can't hide as easily, but there are probably some great stories that introverted writers are less likely to do now.

    However, the real danger posed by the reader revolution is subtler. As writing becomes more of a dialogue and less of a soliloquy, the risk is that it will flatten out. That the new ideals of consensus and saturated information will replace the old ones of creativity and individuality -- what Powers called "the age of personal reflection." A different but equally problematic outcome is also possible: That pugnacity and contentiousness will become the supreme writerly virtues, and journalism will become a gladiatorial enterprise. Again, there is nothing wrong with either rational consensus or pugnacity. But they should not be the only flowers growing in the literary garden.

    Someone might ask, why should massive audience feedback threaten creativity? After all, none of those millions of readers, no matter how nasty or hyper-rational, have the power to prevent a writer from choosing a subject. I think there are several reasons.

    First, writers are increasingly rewarded for provoking noise. The more responses you get, the more impact you have, the more money you make for your publication, and the more editors will reward you. But getting a lot of letters is not necessarily a good sign: It sometimes just means that you pushed an obvious button. It's easier to bitch than praise. Some of the best pieces -- the most thoroughly investigated, clearly argued, beautifully written -- generate very few letters. The reader revolution extends the power of the market into literature and journalism. And disciples of Adam Smith notwithstanding, capitalism is a very equivocal patron of the arts. Just ask our new goddesses, Britney and J.Lo.

    Second, writers are sensitive plants. It's hard to find a good ivory tower these days. If Montaigne was alive today, he might be just another hyperactive blogger.

    There is no easy answer to this problem. The Wikipedia model of journalism, in which a vast community of readers functions as a self-correcting machine, is an incredibly powerful development, and much of it is positive. Who would return to the days when dictatorial journalists handed down pronouncements ex cathedra? There's an old New Yorker cartoon in which a Führer-like figure, standing onstage in front of a huge "Triumph of the Will" crowd, says, "I think I may say, without fear of contradiction..." That pretty much sums up the elite media's relation with its audience before the Internet. We all need to be contradicted when we're wrong -- and we're all wrong a lot. The Führer is dead -- long live the people!

    And yet, it's too easy simply to celebrate the downfall of the elite media and glory in the toppling of the gatekeepers. Yes, they -- we -- could and can be smug and arrogant. Yes, we should be summoned to account when we screw up. And yes, the online revolution has made it easier to do that. But to be part of an elite doesn't mean you're divinely anointed. It simply means you have some aptitude for what you do and have spent years learning to do it, and so you're probably better at it than most people. Not smarter, not a better human being -- just better at your craft. This is true of football players, surgeons, chefs and auto mechanics -- why shouldn't it be true of journalists as well? Forget the word "elite": In our laudable all-American haste to trash bogus royalty, let's not forget there's a completely different category. It's called professionalism.

    And it isn't all about right and wrong, anyway. It's about poetry. It's about cadences and music and allusion and metaphor, about words that someone spends hours weighing until they balance perfectly. A world without soliloquies, without idiosyncratic essays, without pieces that don't know where they're going, without unanswerable questions, without language that bravely stands on its own like a tree or a Coltrane note, would be a barren one. It would be hyperbolic to claim that the reader revolution, one of the great advances in human history, is hurling us into that world. But it would be myopic not to recognize the danger signs.

    Publications will doubtless come up with ways to filter the reader dreck. (At Salon, we have a few simple changes in the works.) But the new paradigm is here to stay. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the newly vocal audience learns to respect the implicit, always fragile contract between writer and reader. For a writer, that contract simply means trying to do your best. It means bringing honesty, hard work, knowledge and passion to what you write -- and expecting that your readers will approach your work in the same spirit. "Write with blood," Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaimed, "and you will experience that blood is spirit." The ultimate elitist, Nietzsche dismissed his readers outright: "Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another century of readers -- and the spirit itself will stink." Nietzsche's wounded and grandiose pronouncement, as usual, contains a grain of truth. Writing is extremely hard work, and it exposes the writer to the world. No one expects the reader to work as hard as the writer did. But the pell-mell rush of information flooding across a million screens has made it too easy for readers to forget that the info-byte they just swallowed was a handcrafted object.

    Pro athletes have a saying: "Respect the game." It may be too much to expect the mouse-wielding masses to embrace that credo. But a little respect would go a long way to restoring the heft of the written word, its shape and dignity. And in an age of weightless information, that would be good for readers and writers alike.

    -- By Gary Kami

     

     

    Houses Found Buried Beneath Stonehenge Site

    By Marc Kaufman
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Tuesday, January 30, 2007; 2:36 PM

    New excavations near the mysterious circle at Stonehenge in South England have uncovered dozens of homes where hundreds of people lived -- at roughly the same time 4,600 years ago that the giant stone slabs were being erected.

    The finding strongly suggests that the monument and the settlement nearby were a center for ceremonial activities, with Stonehenge likely a burial site while other nearby circular earthen "henges" were areas for feasts and festivals.

    The houses found buried beneath the grounds of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site are the first of their kind from that late Stone Age period in Britain, suggesting a surprising level of social gathering and ceremonial behavior, in addition to impressive engineering. The excavators said their discoveries together constitute an archeological treasure.

    "This is evidence that clarifies the site's true purpose," said Michael Parker Pearson of Sheffield University, one of the main researchers. "We have found that Stonehenge itself was just half of a larger complex," one used by indigenous Britons whose beliefs centered around ancestor and sun worship.

    The roughly 90 original slabs of Stonehenge, researchers have long known, were carefully placed to align with the rising and setting of the sun during the summer and winter solstices. The new research, funded in part by the National Geographic Society, concludes that a complementary and larger circle about two miles from Stonehenge had timber posts aligned to mark the solstice in reverse. That monument, called Durrington Walls, was in line with sunset at the summer solstice sunset, while Stonehenge was aligned with the sunrise on that day.

    In addition, the excavation -- undertaken by a team of 100 archeologists from universities around Britain -- uncovered an avenue 100 feet wide that led from the second circle down to the River Avon. That mirrors a similar, but considerably longer, wide path downstream at Stonehenge, leading the team to conclude that the two sites were connected, most likely as part of funerary rituals.

    That finding, said Parker Pearson, is supported by the earlier discovery of cremated remains at Stonehenge and new work indicating that as many as 250 cremated bodies are there. It is also supported by the layout of the Durrington Walls avenue, which leads from the giant circle down to a small cliff along the river.

    "My guess is that they were throwing ashes, human bones and perhaps even whole bodies into the water, a practice seen in other river settings," Parker Pearson said. Of Stonehenge, he said "it was our biggest cemetery of that time."

    The researchers said recent carbon dating has fixed the time of Stonehenge's construction at between 2640 to 2480 B.C. with 95 percent probability -- around the same time that Egyptians were constructing the giant pyramid of Giza. As with the pyramid, the building of Stonehenge was a remarkable engineering feat that involved moving stones weighing many tons as much as several hundred miles.

    The six newly excavated houses within the Durrington Walls were dated to the same period, Parker Pearson said, leading the team to conclude they housed the men and women who worked on the structures, as well as people who came to the site for ceremonies.

    Each house was about 16 feet by 16 feet, had a central hearth and remains of wooden box beds. All of the houses were scattered with human debris of all kinds. The only other similar houses from the Neolithic, or late Stone Age period, found in the region are on the Orkney Islands, off northern Scotland.

    Among the remains found at the Durrington Walls site are many domesticated pigs surrounded by arrowheads -- suggesting a midwinter festival and feast. Whereas the Durrington circle was an area for living, Thomas said, Stonehenge appears to be a monument to the ancestors.

    Two other ancient clay floors were found within Durrington Walls on a slightly elevated section, but they were different in a potentially significant way -- they were entirely cleared of human debris. Another leader of the excavation team, Julian Thomas of Manchester University, said they may have been the homes of tribal leaders or wise women, or perhaps temples for ancestor and sun worship. The eight floors were identified through a survey with magnetomers, which detect unusual magnetic patterns underground, that located the hearths -- a survey that suggests many more undiscovered homes are scattered through the area.

    Earlier Stonehenge investigators have theorized that the structure was built by Celts, Gauls, or even Egyptians. But the current team said the builders appear to indigenous, migratory Britons who used the upland site for only part of the year. But there was at least one exception: Parker Pearson said that one of the cremated remains at Stonehenge is of a man from the foothills of the Alps.