February 21, 2007

• Closing Pleas, Clashing Views on Libby’s Role Doug Mills/ The New York Times Lewis Libby Jr., right, and his lawyer arrived at the Federal Court House in Washington today. February 21, 2007 In Closing Pleas, Clashing Views on Libby’s Role By NEIL A. LEWIS WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — Defense lawyers and prosecutors in the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. made their final summations on Tuesday, offering the jury two starkly different ways to evaluate the evidence presented over the last few weeks. In their closing statements, the prosecutors presented a detailed and businesslike summing up of their case that Mr. Libby willfully lied to both a grand jury and F.B.I. agents investigating the leak in the summer of 2003 of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. Theodore V. Wells Jr., Mr. Libby’s chief defense lawyer, countered with an intensely emotional defense ending in a choked sob. He argued that Mr. Libby’s testimony to the grand jury and his interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have contained inaccuracies but that they were the result of innocent memory lapses explained by his pressing schedule of national security issues. Unlike the prosecutors, Mr. Wells stalked about the courtroom during his summation, his cadence and pitch varying, but his tone of outrage constant. “If it turned out that what he said was wrong that doesn’t mean he is a liar,” Mr. Wells told the jury. “It means he may have misrecollected what happened.” Mr. Libby, who faces five felony counts, was Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff in the summer of 2003 when Ms. Wilson’s identity was first disclosed publicly. The jury is expected to begin its deliberations on Wednesday, after final instructions from Judge Reggie B. Walton. In his closing argument, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, said that disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity was used by the White House to discredit her husband’s assertions that the Bush administration had distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq. He said the disclosure of her name cast a cloud over the Bush White House in general and over Mr. Cheney in particular. But Mr. Wells argued for the defense that when Ms. Wilson’s name was first disclosed in the summer of 2003, Mr. Libby had been so preoccupied with growing questions about the inability of United States forces in Iraq to find any unconventional weapons, a principal justification for going to war, that he did not have time to pay attention to the issue of Ms. Wilson. “The wheels are falling off the Bush administration,” Mr. Wells said. “Thousands of young kids are on the ground there. It’s a crazy period.” “This is a man with a wife and two children; he is a good person,” Mr. Wells told the jury in his final words. “He’s been under my protection for the last month. I give him to you. Give him back to me.” With that, Mr. Wells teared up, sobbed audibly and sat down. Mr. Fitzgerald and Peter Zeidenberg, another prosecutor, told the jury that Mr. Libby learned about Ms. Wilson’s role as a Central Intelligence Agency employee from several of his fellow Bush administration officials. He then discussed her with reporters, they said, as part of an effort to discredit the claims made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration had twisted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium from Africa to justify going to war. “Mr. Libby had a motive to lie and the motive matches up exactly with the lie he told,” Mr. Fitzgerald told the jury. “He made up a story and stuck to it.” Ms. Wilson’s identity was first disclosed in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak. Only days before, The New York Times had published an Op-Ed article by her husband recounting how he had been sent to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for its weapons program. He asserted that there was no truth to President Bush’s claim in the January 2003 State of the Union address that there was evidence of Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Africa. Mr. Novak wrote that Mr. Wilson was chosen for the Africa mission by the C.I.A. at the suggestion of his wife. That assertion, echoed by other critics of Mr. Wilson, tended to diminish the importance of his trip, with its suggestion of nepotism. Mr. Fitzgerald seemed for the first time to lend his weight publicly to the assertion by critics that Ms. Wilson’s identity was disclosed to punish Mr. Wilson and undermine his credibility. Mr. Fitzgerald said the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity had left “a cloud over the White House over what happened” as well as a cloud over Mr. Cheney because he had been behind the effort to counter Mr. Wilson’s charges. Neither Mr. Libby nor anyone else was charged with unlawfully disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity. But Mr. Libby was charged with misleading the grand jury and investigators. “Don’t you think the American people are entitled to a straight answer?” Mr. Fitzgerald asked of the jury. He said that “a critic points fingers at the White House and as a result his wife gets dragged into the newspapers.” He said Mr. Libby “made a gamble, he threw sand in the eyes of the grand jury” rather than tell the truth and risk being prosecuted for leaking her name. Mr. Zeidenberg began the day for the prosecution by telling the jury that the parade of witnesses the government had presented demolished the contention of Mr. Libby’s lawyers that he merely had a bad memory and forgot a whole series of conversations he had about Ms. Wilson. “He claims he forgot nine conversations with eight people over a four-week period,” Mr. Zeidenberg said. He was referring to a former spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, a senior State Department official and two C.I.A. officials, all of whom testified that they had informed Mr. Libby in early July 2003 of Ms. Wilson’s role at the agency and three reporters who spoke to Mr. Libby in that period. Mr. Zeidenberg then noted that Mr. Libby had sworn under oath that those people must have been wrong because he learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity days later on July 10 or 11 from Tim Russert of NBC News. Both sides agreed that Mr. Russert’s testimony was crucial to the case. Mr. Wells’s response to the prosecution’s claim of an avalanche of testimony from so many people was to try to convince the jury that only two of the witnesses counted in the indictment, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Russert. Mr. Wells set about disparaging Mr. Russert’s credibility and memory. “In a case where what is at stake is a man’s freedom and reputation, you have to in this situation give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Libby,” Mr. Wells said. Mr. Wells argued that Mr. Libby held one of the world’s most high-stress jobs and was trying to prevent another attack like the ones on Sept. 11, 2001. “He was bombarded with a blizzard of information,” Mr. Wells said, noting the intelligence briefings Mr. Libby received daily. “Those briefings would make your toes curl,” he said. Mr. Fitzgerald countered that Mr. Russert’s testimony was not needed to convict Mr. Libby. “If Tim Russert were run over by a bus and had gone to the great news desk in the sky, you can still find plenty of evidence that the defendant lied,” he said. Suevon Lee contributed reporting.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Arcade Fire. The New Yorker Music Scene   BIG TIME by SASHA FRERE-JONES The outsized appeal of Arcade Fire. Issue of 2007-02-19 Posted 2007-02-12 There is little about the Montreal band Arcade Fire that is not big. The group has seven core members, including its founders, a married couple named Win Butler (who is six feet three) and Régine Chassagne. Onstage, Arcade Fire expands to nine musicians, or more. The band’s unusually polished début, “Funeral,” which was recorded for less than ten thousand dollars and released in 2004, has sold more than three hundred thousand copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This is a robust number for an independent band, especially one whose fans append free MP3s of the songs to their gushing Web posts. (An entry on a blog called “Blinding Light of Reason” commands, “If you are a human being, you owe it to your eternal soul to love the Arcade Fire and see them play live.”) David Bowie has performed live with the band, and, on a recent tour, U2 chose “Wake Up,” Arcade Fire’s apocalyptic sing-along about lightning bolts, to play over the sound system before its performances. (“Wake Up” is also played during pre-game ceremonies at Rangers games at Madison Square Garden.) Arcade Fire speaks to several generations at once. The fervid tenor of the band’s music, always pitching toward some kind of revelation, is a quality of youth. That the songs also sound like U2′s battle calls, or the expansive rumbles of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, may account for its following among older listeners, who might otherwise be wary of musicians singing in French as well as in English, drumming on each other’s heads (prudently helmeted), and citing Haitian history. Arcade Fire earns the right to borrow or steal what it needs; the band is a torrent of energy and ideas, and its edits of the past are sometimes improvements. (Butler’s Springsteen moments involve about half as many words as Bruce would use.) Arcade Fire songs aim, without apology or irony, for grandeur, and, more often than not, they achieve it. But the voices at the heart of the band sound as though they were coming from the congregation, not the pulpit. Arcade Fire’s preference for imperfect, analog recordings and, in live shows, imperfect, analog clothing—like suspenders—will please both those who find MTV glitz outdated and those who never warmed to the idea of bling in the first place. The pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany “Funeral,” including an image of a hand manipulating a quill, signal the band’s commitment to painstaking effort—whether it’s adding complicated horn and string arrangements to a rock song or making a promotional video for the Web in the style of a nineteen-seventies late-night-television commercial. Arcade Fire’s success is probably heartening to the older musicians who inspired it but had to funnel their work through the major-label system, responding to the demands of studio executives. The band’s members own a studio outside Montreal—a deconsecrated church, appropriately—and hold the rights to their master recordings; they release their music by making licensing deals with labels. In March, Arcade Fire will release a new album, “Neon Bible,” on the independent label Merge, and tickets for the five shows the band is playing this week at New York’s Judson Church sold out within minutes in January. (On Craigslist, several fans offered tickets in exchange for sex.) The band’s music is built around simple motifs, but the arrangements are symphonic, even if the portable orchestra of strings, horns, accordions, hurdy-gurdies, and various keyboards sounds a bit ramshackle, like a local repertory production of “The Threepenny Opera” that has gone on the road. Butler frequently establishes a song with a bass line—the guitar is secondary in Arcade Fire’s generous arsenal—and a wobbly, keening voice that recalls Ian McCulloch, of Echo & the Bunnymen, especially when it leaps up in pitch and begins to break. A typical track starts small, with Butler singing over a one-chord drone, which grows into a rosy thrum that could be the product of twenty people. Those who can hear traces of U2′s triumphalism—insistent pedal-point bass lines balanced by piercing motifs octaves above—may also recognize beats and yelps lifted from the Ronettes and Talking Heads, representatives of different eras of big. “Funeral” contains a series of songs entitled “Neighborhood,” each with a different subtitle (“Tunnels,” “7 Kettles,” “Laika”), that deal with images of a family in peril: parents’ hands are covered in ice; a brother named Alex is bitten by a vampire; babies can’t be named, because the singer has forgotten all names; and tunnels are being dug—to shelter the family, the band, or maybe an entire society. One of the album’s most rousing tracks—which should have been a hit but wasn’t—is “Rebellion (Lies).” Over a pounding bass-and-piano ostinato, Butler rails against sleep—”giving in,” in his words—and calls out, “People say that your dreams are the only things that save you. Come on, baby, in our dreams we can live our misbehavior.” When Butler punctuates the verse with the words “Every time you close your eyes,” the band cheerily chants back, “Lies, lies!” (In Arcade Fire, more is always better: if five band members are available to sing, five will sing.) It’s unclear whether the chorus means to call the singer a liar, or whether lies are what surround us as we sleep; the ambiguity saves the song from pomposity. “Neon Bible,” which takes its name from a dystopic novel that John Kennedy Toole wrote when he was sixteen, is no less majestic than “Funeral,” but full-throated exhortations to forge ahead have been replaced with visions of dropping bombs and being chased. Escape is the recurring theme of “Neon Bible”; oddly, none of this makes the band sound any less optimistic. The single “Keep the Car Running” begins with a charging, rackety D chord, as electric bass, mandolin, and hurdy-gurdy alternate between the root and the fifth. The lyrics suggest that Butler is having even more trouble with sleep than usual: “Every night my dream’s the same. Same old city with a different name. Men are coming to take me away. I don’t know why, but I know I can’t stay.” When he sings, “There’s a fear I keep so deep, knew its name since before I could speak,” the band joins in with a barrel-chested wordless melody—”Aaah, aaaaah”—as if setting up a campfire in the middle of a nightmare. The musicians hammer on, only to stop suddenly, just as the noise begins to grow—an atypical move for a band that loves to push songs to cathartic peaks and let them topple. “Windowsill” is more straightforward. The song is largely acoustic, with lyrics arranged in a traditional ballad form, each verse ending with the line “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more.” Butler rejects pop culture and welcomes oblivion—”MTV, what have you done to me? Save my soul, set me free. . . . World War Three, when are you coming for me?”—and states flatly, “I don’t want to live in America no more.” (Butler grew up in Texas and moved to Montreal in the late nineties.) At the end of January, Arcade Fire played three shows in London, at St. John’s Church, a building that typically presents classical music. The church is unadorned, with a single chandelier hanging in the nave. The capacity crowd sat, noisily happy but restrained, on metal and vinyl chairs. The band began the show by marching single file up the right aisle, past the crowd, and onto the stage. Butler wore suspenders, Vietnam-era combat boots, and a blue-and-gray shirt whose sleeves and body came from thrift-store finds stitched together by the girlfriend of the guitarist, Richard Reed Parry. (Butler later described the shirt as “Frankensteined.”) After a shaky opening spent negotiating the murk of ten amplified instruments reverberating in a room built before electricity, the band cohered. Chassagne, a cherubic woman with a pile of dark hair, wore a black dress decorated with silver spangles and red fishnet fingerless gloves. Butler, who was stern and blank-faced during the opening song, a thrilling fever dream called “Black Mirror,” relaxed during the breaks, joking with the crowd and cursing to dispel any lingering piety. (“It’s not like we’re in a church or something,” he cracked.) Chassagne was playful when she took up the role of lead singer during the first half of “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations”—which begins as a lighthearted Beach Boys tribute and gradually sinks into stormier territory—but during the breaks she switched efficiently from the accordion to the hurdy-gurdy and then the drums. Arcade Fire values showmanship; attending more than one performance makes it clear exactly how much. At each concert in London, by the time the band reached “Rebellion (Lies),” in the middle of its roughly hour-long set, the sound was full, as deliberate as a well-rehearsed string quartet but as loose as a liquored-up marching band. “Rebellion” inspires whistles from even a docile crowd, and the band responded each time. The first night, Will Butler, Win’s brother and the band’s keyboard player, rolled up a sleeve and began to whack his left arm with his right. Then he picked up a large snare drum and began to whale away at it, his back to the crowd. Without warning, he threw the drum high in the air, catching it so that it narrowly missed his brother’s head. After repeating the stunt three times, Will fell to his knees and settled for hitting the drum. The next night, Win raised the stakes. Halfway through the second verse of “Rebellion,” he walked into the crowd, climbing from chair to chair. The audience members coöperated by carefully passing the microphone cord over their heads as he made his way among them, singing and drenched in sweat. Cordless microphones are fairly common now. It is hard to imagine Arcade Fire ever using one.

  A Grandchild of Italy Cracks the Spaghetti Code Eolo Perfido for The New York Times Filomena Sciullo Ranallo, a great-aunt of the author, cooks tomato sauce and tagliatelle in Ateleta, Italy. But is her sauce the one her American relatives make? Therein lies a culinary tale Jim and Anne Marie Severson eating spaghetti circa 1954 February 21, 2007 A Grandchild of Italy Cracks the Spaghetti Code By KIM SEVERSON MY Italian is so bad I have a hard time pronouncing gnocchi, but I grew up hearing enough of it to know when I’m being yelled at. And that’s definitely what was happening at a table in a small roadside restaurant in Abruzzi. I had driven through the Italian mountains with an interpreter to find Ateleta, the village where my grandmother Floriana Ranallo Zappa grew up. I had come in search of a recipe. Or more precisely, the evolution of a recipe. For reasons I couldn’t put together until recently, I had been obsessed with tracking a path that began in my grandmother’s village and ended with the pot of red sauce that simmers on my stove on Sunday afternoons. I ended up on the red sauce trail largely because I don’t have a hometown. My parents were dutiful players in the great corporate migrations of the 1960s and ’70s. My dad worked for the Uniroyal Tire Company. His rise through the ranks of midlevel management required a series of moves, which were always euphemistically presented to the children as “transfers.” The company sent us from Wisconsin to California to Michigan to Texas and then back to Michigan, where I finally got off the family train and went to college. Through all that moving, the one constant was my mother’s spaghetti sauce. As soon as we got the kitchen shelf paper laid and she figured out where the grocery store was, she made the sauce. It meant this was home, and that first plate of spaghetti and meatballs made us all feel as if everything was going to be O.K. Now, with several more states’ worth of my own transfers behind me, the first thing I cook in a new kitchen is a big pot of sauce. When my siblings and I visit each other, spaghetti is on the menu. I wanted to know where the recipe came from. And in a way, where I came from. So I became a culinary detective. But back in the Italian village where it all supposedly began, things weren’t going so great. I was sitting with the closest relative I could find, Filomena Sciullo Ranallo, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. We were at a table at La Bottega dell’Arte Salata, the small rosticceria my distant cousins run. They were thrilled each time one of the American relatives came to visit, explaining with great pride how Madonna had tried to find her relatives at a nearby village a few years ago and failed. But not you, they told me. You are luckier than Madonna. I was trying to write down recipes when the old woman grabbed my arm, shaking it hard. Why didn’t I speak any Italian? And even worse, why did I think oregano had any place in tomato sauce? Well, because my mother put oregano in her sauce. But oregano, like the meatballs I add to the pot, was only one of the twists and turns the recipe had taken during nearly a century in America. In fact, it turns out that there is no single iconic red sauce in my grandmother’s village. There are sauces with lamb, an animal the village organizes an entire festival around. There are sauces with only tomato and basil, sauces just for the lasagna and sauces just for grilled meats. Small meatballs might go in a broth, but never in sauce for pasta. In fact, only two things in the village reminded me of anything I grew up with. The fat pork sausages were cooked and served the same way, and my Italian cousins looked just like my brothers. To understand why I made my sauce the way I did, I needed to start closer to home, with my mother. She has been making spaghetti sauce for almost 60 years, from a recipe she learned from her mother, who had been making it with American ingredients since the early 1900s. My grandmother had been shipped to America, literally and largely against her will, to marry an Italian named John Zappa. He ran a dairy farm in a little town called Cumberland in northwest Wisconsin. She was still a teenager, illiterate even in Italian. To the day she died, Grandma Zap spoke only enough English to communicate the most basic things to her bored American grandchildren, of which I was one. In between, she raised 11 children. My mother, Anne Marie, was the second-youngest. Among my four siblings, how mom makes her sauce has been a constant source of discussion. We’re all decent cooks, but none of us can get it just right. When does she put in the paste? Is a little bit of roasted pepper essential? Do you need to use oregano in the meatballs? This is a problem my cousins have, too. Sharon Herman still lives in Cumberland, not far from the Zappa family dairy farm. Her mother (my aunt and godmother, the late Philomena DeGidio) was one of the oldest of the Zappa girls and was considered the best sauce maker. My cousin has lived for years under the cloud of never having mastered the master’s sauce. “I could never figure it out,” Cousin Sharon told me. “I even took her little hand once and made her measure out all the spices like she did and put them in measuring spoons to try to get the exact amounts. It still didn’t taste right.” The master’s secret, perhaps, was that she ran a can of carrots, a couple of celery stalks and the onion and garlic through a blender and then put the mixture in the sauce. My mother doesn’t do this. The master also put in the tomato paste at the end. My mother prefers to brown the meatballs and ribs first and then deglaze the pan with the paste. Getting a recipe out of my mother is like trying to get a 4-year-old to explain what happened at day care. She’s not one of those annoying and cagey matrons of the kitchen who build their power by dangling the promise of a secret ingredient that will never be revealed. She just cooks by hand, so she’s never really able to articulate every step. She can tell you to make sure the meatballs are well browned. (“Don’t put those white meatballs into that sauce!” she’ll warn.) And she can give you tips on the all-important step called “fixing the sauce” — tasting it toward the end and adding a little red wine vinegar or maybe, in a pinch, a handful of Parmesan cheese to smooth out the flavor. But an exact recipe? Not so much. For example, thin-skinned Italian peppers were always around the farmhouse she grew up in, so she likes to use some kind of pepper to give the sauce what she calls “homemade flavor.” She often just uses pickled peperoncini from a jar, which I do, too. Once, when I was out of them, I called to see if she had a substitute. She suggested green bell peppers. “But I never put in green peppers,” I told her. “Well, if you had one you would,” she said. “But don’t go out of your way. It doesn’t make that much difference.” O.K., Mom. Let’s focus. “When do you put the chicken thighs in?” I asked another time. “Oh, honey, I never use chicken thighs.” “But last time I was home, the sauce had chicken thighs.” “Huh — that’s funny,” she said. “I guess I must have had some in the freezer.” These are maddening conversations, but I think they will go on until the day she makes her last pot. If anything, her sauce, like her mother’s sauce, and the sauces from the home village of Ateleta, are about making do. Well-browned meat is the key, but you use the meat you have. Once my grandmother made it to America, there was plenty of meat around. So her sauce became an American version of three-meat ragù, a dish not uncommon in parts of Abruzzi. They would butcher their own hogs and fatten up a few of the dairy cows, so the sauce often simmered with a piece of neck bone or tail or even a steak from a shoulder blade. My mother, who lived through elementary school without a refrigerator, was often dispatched to the cellar to scrape two inches of sealing grease off the top of a crock and return to the kitchen with preserved sausages and pork ribs for the sauce. Mom happily left the farm and married Jim Severson, whose roots are in Norway. My father will never turn down a piece of lefse, the flat bread of his people, but he can still catalog the distinct tastes of almost every Zappa sister’s sauce. As he moved my mom around the country, she fell in love with convenience foods and the big, clean supermarkets of the suburbs. She no longer had to can tomatoes or dry basil and parsley on cookie sheets. And all the meat came on those nice, clean plastic trays. Mom even took to using something food manufacturers call “Italian seasoning.” But she’ll also use a mix of about three parts dried basil to one part dried oregano. My grandmother never used oregano; just lots of parsley and basil. But all the Zappa daughters did. I was stumped about why the family sauce ended up heavy with oregano and meat. So I called Lidia Bastianich, the New York chef who has written much about the transfer of Italian food to America. “This is a cuisine of adaptation, of nostalgia, of comfort,” she said. By overemphasizing some of the seasonings Italian immigrants brought from home, they could more easily conjure it up. And sometimes the adaptations were simply practical. Using tomato paste, for example, was a way to make the watery tomatoes in the United States taste more like the thick-fleshed kind that grew in Italy. My family’s serving style is to pile the pork and beef and meatballs onto a big platter of spaghetti, sometimes with sausage. That mountain of meat might be a homage to my grandmother, who found such abundance when she arrived. Or maybe she was just overwhelmed: on a farm with no refrigerator, not a lot of money and 11 children, she didn’t have time for a separate meat and pasta course. As hard as my mother tried to get off the farm, I am trying just as hard to get back. Like her, I use spareribs and a nice, fatty piece of beef. I try to buy them from local farmers who raise their animals outdoors on pasture and sell them for prices that make my mother shake her head. I would give anything to have a crock of sausage under a layer of pork fat in the cellar. I use fresh basil and fresh bread crumbs instead of Progresso in my meatballs, but I still stick to dried basil and oregano in the sauce. My canned tomatoes come from Italy, even though my mother thinks Contadina or Hunt’s is just fine. It never tastes just like hers, but I keep trying. And maybe that’s the problem. Perhaps I’m too fixated on my fancy-pants ingredients. Or perhaps it’s just a psychological quirk of the kitchen. The one that makes you think nothing ever tastes as good as your mother’s. Around Thanksgiving, my parents moved into a small condominium and were going to sell the family dining table. Instead, I arranged to have it shipped from Colorado, where they live now. It’s a little too big for my Brooklyn brownstone, and it’s not an antique or even an heirloom. My mother bought it during one of our many transfers simply because she needed a bigger table. But it is the table I grew up with. I have eaten hundreds of plates of spaghetti on it. I feel the need to keep it, to pass it on to one of my nieces or nephews. I want to say, “This was your grandmother’s table.” And then I will make them sit down and eat spaghetti, and tell them the story of the red sauce trail.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  The ‘Toyota Way’ The ‘Toyota Way’ Is Translated for a New Generation of Foreign Managers (February 15, 2007) February 18, 2007 From 0 to 60 to World Domination By JON GERTNER 1. Here Comes the Tundra For most of the January morning, the reporters at the Detroit auto show crisscrossed the Cobo convention center like a herd of livestock, moving at least once every hour to feed — sometimes literally, since Lexus offered fresh fruit. All the world’s car companies were unveiling this year’s models. Often, the back-to-back corporate announcements required everyone to scurry clear across the exhibit floor to get a seat at the next press conference. It was hard not to lose yourself in the scenery, however, as you passed by a dazzling showroom exhibit of Maseratis, for instance, or encountered some gleaming Infinitis. The event was a place untroubled by thoughts of traffic jams, long commutes or gas prices. It was also a place where C.E.O.’s like Rick Wagoner of General Motors showed off electric cars like the Chevy Volt that cannot yet be produced — at least until battery technology improves — but that can nonetheless be driven slowly across a stage toward a cluster of photographers. In this context, it seemed, G.M. was not a company that posted a $10.6 billion loss in 2005, nor was Ford a manufacturer that announced plans last year to shed more than 30,000 employees. There were no overwhelming pension and health-care burdens. Shortly after noon that day, in a ballroom just off the convention center’s main floor, the crowd was waiting for Toyota to unveil the latest (and largest) version of its new full-size truck, the Tundra. From where I stood, pinned against a back wall in the darkened room, it was getting hard to breathe. At this point I had been following Toyota and the Tundra for months; I visited the company’s new Tundra plant in San Antonio, its sales headquarters near Los Angeles, its executive offices in Manhattan and its Camry plant near Lexington, Ky. Apart from some recalls of faulty parts (an unusual and humiliating occurrence for the carmaker), Toyota had seemed as close to a juggernaut as any corporation in existence. By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined. When the Tundra finally arrived onstage in Detroit, Jim Lentz, one of the company’s North American executives, told the packed ballroom that this vehicle “changed everything” for Toyota. It was researched, designed, engineered and built in America, Lentz pointed out; and it seemed, from his presentation, to be the toughest, brawniest and most iconically masculine pickup truck anywhere, ever. Such boasts were in keeping with the spirit of car-dealership hucksterism at the show. Still, 50 years after coming to the U.S., Toyota views the Tundra, which arrived in American showrooms earlier this month, not only as another big truck but also as the culmination of a half-century of experimentation, failure, resurgence and domination. And as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Toyota’s strategic history knows, the company never makes rash moves or false promises. Whether Toyota has evolved into the world’s most sophisticated modern corporation — one whose example has challenged the American model of manufacturing and management — happens to be a common topic of conversation among business analysts these days. “It’s influencing just about every major company in the world, in that they’re asking the question: What can we learn from Toyota?” says Jeff Liker, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan who has written several books on the company. Indeed, what you can learn from Toyota is something that even Bill Gates has pondered publicly. And yet deconstructing Toyota means breaking down a corporation that uses all its resources, and more than 295,000 employees worldwide, to construct things that are not meant to come apart. 2. Kaizen Means Never Being Satisfied One of the Toyota executives attending the Tundra’s debut was Jim Press. A tall, lean Midwesterner, Press is the president of Toyota Motor North America, making him the company’s highest-ranking American. Toyota is governed by a large corporate board, which is made up of top executives in Japan and senior managing directors spread around the globe; Press is one of 49 managing officers of the company just below that level. For most of his career, Press worked on the West Coast, at Toyota’s North American sales headquarters in Torrance, Calif. More than half of Toyota’s profits now come from the U.S.; its success here, and its success globally, are so closely related as to be indistinguishable. In the view of one longtime Toyota watcher, Press’s high standing reflects the fact that, more than any single manager, he delivered the American market to Toyota. His efforts helped make the Camry the best-selling car and the Lexus the most popular luxury brand in the U.S. Press, who is 60, never had an ambition to be an auto executive. When I first met him in his Midtown Manhattan office in October, he told me that after college he took a job working for Ford. “My family was in retail,” he said, “and this was a foray into the manufacturing side to kind of learn what goes on in the industry before I went on and became a car dealer.” In 1970, his boss at Ford moved to Toyota and encouraged him to join up too. At the time, Toyota sold a few Land Cruisers and was known mainly for one car, the Toyota Corona. It seemed like a poor career move. “When you’re young and your head is full of ideas, you don’t let facts get in the way,” Press said. So he took a flier, gave up his company car (a new Ford Thunderbird) and went to work at Toyota. When he started, the Big Three completely controlled car sales in the United States. The only foreign company of any prominence was Volkswagen, and as Press recalled, Toyota’s modest sales were lumped with various tiny carmakers as “Other.” Still, soon after he arrived, Press realized he liked the company’s intimacy: he could meet face to face with top managers and exert some influence over marketing decisions. And he liked Toyota’s obsession with customer satisfaction. When he told me about his first trip to Japan, he seemed to be recounting a religious experience. “As a young person, you are searching for this level of comfort, you don’t know what it is, but you’re sort of uncomfortable,” he said. In Japan, as he put it, he found a home, a place where everything from the politeness of the people to the organization of the factories made sense. On that first trip, at a restaurant one evening, he tried a rich corn soup and asked the waitress for the recipe. She checked with the chef, who explained that there was no recipe; it had been handed down from his mother. The next morning, the waitress came to Press’s hotel room: she had found a cookbook with a recipe for the soup. Press, apparently, was still her customer. “That blew me away,” he said. It can be simplistic, and often a distortion, to accept a corporate executive as the personification of a corporation, especially one as large and varied as Toyota. Yet Press serves as an apt representative, and not merely because his career arc mirrors the company’s ascendancy. Like Toyota, he expresses himself in private with modesty and care, yet in public his speeches are bold, declarative and effervescent. In his office, he has an informal, relaxed presence and exhibits just a hint of an avuncular stoop; yet he loves to race cars and sometimes swims 5,000 meters a day. Press also has a fluency in the company’s arcane systems and history. Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.” This phrase should be cause for skepticism, especially coming from a company so adept at marketing and public relations. I lost count of how many times Toyota executives, during the course of my reporting, repeated it and how often I had to keep from recoiling at its hollow peculiarity. And yet, the catch phrase — to enrich and serve society — was not intended, at least originally, to function as a P.R. motto. Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement. Finally, the phrase carries with it the responsibility to plan for the long term — financially, technically, imaginatively. “The company thinks in years and decades,” Michael Robinet, a vice president at CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that focuses on the global auto industry, told me. “They don’t think in months or quarters.” Certainly the most obvious example of Toyota’s long view is the Prius hybrid. Press said he believes that every automobile in the U.S. will eventually be a hybrid. I asked how soon. Not in five years, he replied, “but I think at some point in the not-too-distant future.” I asked whether Toyota developed and marketed the technology years ahead of the other major automakers because it possessed better technical skills. Press instead framed the issue as a matter of philosophy. Ten years ago, he said, at about the same time the Prius made its debut, Ford rolled out the huge S.U.V. franchise. “Both of us had the same tea leaves, the same research,” he said. “One of us bet on hybrid, one of us bet on big S.U.V.’s.” In his view, the wisdom of making big S.U.V.’s — Press left unacknowledged that Toyota eventually brought out its own line of S.U.V.’s — seemed dubious: “First of all, long term, is fuel going to get cheaper or more expensive? Is oil going to become more plentiful or less plentiful? Is the air going to become cleaner or more polluted? And so, do you do something proactive and innovative, to be in tune with where society is going? Or do you hold on to where it has been, and then don’t let go, to the bitter end?” It was never a matter of altruism, he seemed to be saying, but an example of how corporations survive in society. “What’s the right thing to do to sustain the ability to sell more cars and trucks?” he asked. The Prius was not about a fast return on investment. It was about a slow and long-lasting one. The Tundra is hardly green like the Prius, yet it, too, illustrates Toyota’s characteristic patience and belief that it should serve every kind of customer. The biggest-selling vehicle in the United States is not the Camry (448,445 sold last year) or the Accord (354,441) but Ford F-Series trucks (796,039). Not far behind in sales are the full-size trucks from Chevrolet. These are among the most lucrative consumer products around, yielding anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 in profit for every unit sold. “To the American automakers, that’s their bread and butter,” Jeff Liker, from the University of Michigan, explains. “They break even on passenger cars, lose money on small cars. But all their profits come from large S.U.V.’s and trucks. For the American auto companies, this is the last hill that they dominate.” Several auto analysts pointed out to me that G.M. and Ford trucks not only have an extremely loyal customer base; they’re also widely regarded as extremely well built and engineered (often in contrast to their passenger cars). When I asked Jim Press how long the company had been thinking about creating a full-size truck, he said it had been a priority dating to the early 1990s, when Toyota failed with its first big truck, the T100. The company failed again in 2000 when its first (and smaller) Tundra came out; only 124,508 units were sold last year. Within Toyota, there is a rare and secretive designation for certain development projects known as irei, which is roughly translated as “not ordinary” or “exceptional” and refers to vehicles that the company will spend any amount on and go to almost any lengths to engineer, market and perfect. In the early 1990s, the Prius had this designation. When it came time several years ago to begin redesigning the new Tundra, it received the classification, too. The success of G.M. and Ford suggested that it was a product that could eventually reap tremendous profits. It was also a vehicle that could conceivably cement Toyota’s reputation, once and for all, as an all-American company. 3. The Engineers Open the Window on the Big World Out There It’s often noted that American carmakers are hobbled by their obligations to pay health care “legacy costs” to their ranks of retirees. Toyota has only about 1,600 retirees in the U.S., and many of its factories have never been successfully organized by a union. Yet Toyota has other strategic advantages too. For one thing, its enormous cash reserves allow it to spend billions on the pursuit of market share in the U.S. — designing a new car or significantly redesigning an old one usually costs $1 billion, and building a new plant costs between $1 billion and $2 billion — and at the same time to think deeply about where society will be in 20 years. These two pursuits, which might appear contradictory, actually reinforce each other. “Toyota has always gone where the money is, and there’s money in trucks,” says John Casesa, an industry consultant and a former automotive analyst at Merrill Lynch. “This is a company that has, as its mission, to serve any customer. But the other reality is that you’ve got to make a lot of money to develop the research and development for hybrids.” Toyota spends $20 million a day, Jim Press told me, on research and factories. “They are outspending G.M. in R.&D., product development and capital spending,” says Sean McAlinden, an economist at the Center for Automotive Research, a not-for-profit consulting firm in Ann Arbor. “If that trend continues, we’re dead. The problem is, suppose we made a car” as good as a Toyota. “Then we only have a car as good as they do. It’s not just about catching up, or getting into the game. You’ve got to get ahead somehow. But how?” Toyota itself keeps pushing ahead. Under its system, an engineer appointed to lead a new project has a huge budget and near absolute authority over the project. Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert. When I spoke not long ago with the Tundra’s chief engineer, Yuichiro Obu, and its project manager, Mark Schrage, both of whom work in Ann Arbor, they characterized their research for the Tundra as quite unlike what was done for the Sienna. For starters, designing a full-size pickup truck for the American worker is more complex than designing a van for a soccer mom. The way a farmer uses a truck is different from the way a construction worker does; preferences in Texas (for two-wheel drive) differ from those in Montana (for four-wheel drive). Truck drivers have diverse needs in terms of horsepower and torque, since they carry different payloads on different terrain. They also have variable needs when it comes to cab size (seating between two and five people) and fuel economy (depending on the length of a commute). In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver. Finally, they made archaeological visits to truck graveyards in Michigan, where they poked around the rusting hulks of pickups and saw what parts had lasted. With so many retired trucks in one place, they also gained a better sense of how trucks had evolved over the past 30 years — becoming larger, more varied, more luxurious — and where they might go next. Obu’s team, which drew on hundreds of engineers, ultimately produced a pickup model with 31 variations that include engines, wheelbases and cabs of different sizes. Design engineers, however, cannot simply create the best truck they can; they need to create the best truck that can be built in a big factory. In other words, Tundra’s design engineers had to confer with Tundra’s manufacturing engineers at every step of the way to create a truck — or 31 trucks, really — that could be assembled efficiently and systematically. To that end, Toyota spent $1.28 billion to build its San Antonio plant; it has the capacity to produce about 200,000 vehicles a year. The company considers it one of the most advanced manufacturing plants in the world. I visited San Antonio in late November, after the factory had just begun operating. Management theorists who study Toyota’s production system tend to say that it is difficult to replicate, insofar as the company’s methods are not simply a series of techniques but a way of thinking about teamwork, products and efficiency. Still, some aspects of the system were clearly visible in San Antonio. In the Tundra plant, there is no real inventory of parts, which is a hallmark of Toyota’s approach. Once a truck chassis begins its run on the factory line, an order goes out to, say, an on-site parts supplier that provides seats for the interior. At Avanzar, an independent company located in a large workroom adjacent to the assembly line, I watched workers build a car seat from scratch. They chose a raw steel frame with springs, put it on their own minifactory assembly line to add padding, then leather, and then they transferred it (via pulley, over a partition wall) to the Tundra assembly line, where it was installed in the truck. If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist. The idea of actually situating a parts supplier inside an assembly plant is wholly novel. But the methods of low inventory — or what’s known as “just in time” production — are hardly unique to Toyota; these have been emulated with great success by other automakers. The same goes for other processes at the San Antonio plant: the line stoppages and quality checks, the time spent by workers discussing hand and body movements in the hope of shaving a crucial half-second from their work. Over the years, Toyota has assisted competitors, especially G.M., in helping to adopt its system, believing it to be in its interest to share practices, especially in exchange for insights into a rival’s methods. Toyota’s true technological advances, however, are another matter. In San Antonio, for instance, recent innovations in the paint shop that significantly cut production time were considered proprietary and off-limits to journalists. It is a challenge to convey the scale of the Camry plant in Georgetown, Ky., which comprises 7.5 million square feet, or the orchestral complexity of its shop floor, where 7,000 workers assemble some 5,000 parts into 2,000 cars a day. I couldn’t help wondering if a glitch in the flow of door handles, or a broken welding robot, would put a crimp in the entire enterprise. “But that’s what the Toyota Production System is,” Gary Convis, the head of the plant, countered. “You actually create the conditions where things have to work to make it work.” Convis, like most Toyota engineers, mostly wanted to talk to me about Georgetown’s ceaseless drive for improvement. When a plant changes over to a new car design, as Georgetown did for the 2006 Camry, production slows down as parts and systems are updated. The last time Georgetown overhauled the Camry, in 2001, 59 days were needed to fully convert the factory to new-car production; last year, the new model took 16 days. The extra cars probably meant additional revenue of about $100 million. Improving efficiency in the factory, though, doesn’t necessarily lead to greater profits. Savings on the assembly line can mean a nicer dashboard without making the customer pay more for it. “If you’re efficient in the things the customer doesn’t see, then you can put it into the things the customer does see,” Ron Harbour, a consultant whose company rates the efficiency of auto plants, told me. A result is a car more popular with customers. Success on the assembly line, in this way, begets success in the showroom. 4. The Long Road From Rural Japan to California and Beyond Over the past few years, in an effort to amass a physical record of its business experience in the United States, Toyota has been tracking down and collecting automobiles it has sold here since the late 1950s. The Toyota USA Automobile Museum, as it’s known, is located in an unmarked white-brick building on a side street in Torrance, Calif., a few blocks from Toyota’s corporate sales campus. When I visited in early December, I took a leisurely stroll through the museum’s main room, a spacious, high-ceilinged garage filled with Toyotas, Lexuses and Scions, all in immaculate condition, all parked aslant on a concrete floor. The museum is open only by appointment; there were no other visitors. Time was compressed into a few strides. I passed a Toyota Corona (1966), a Corolla built in California (the first Toyota made in the U.S., 1986), a Camry from Kentucky (1989), an early Prius (2000) and an early Tundra (2003). To walk along the rows undermines any notion that Toyota’s success has been sudden; the progression of cars — in styling, popularity and increasing Americanization — was methodical and incremental. “We don’t move in an unpredictable manner,” Jim Press told me a few weeks before my visit to the museum. “We move jojo, a Japanese term, meaning step by step.” Toyota grew out of an entrepreneurial foray by the Toyoda family — which made a fortune building textile looms early in the last century — in the 1930s under the leadership of Kiichiro Toyoda. (That’s also when it was decided that the car company would be better served by replacing the family’s “d” with a “t,” in part because it was deemed easier to write and pronounce. The Toyoda loom works did not change its name.) Toyota’s success has often been attributed to a Japanese quality of persistence and ingenuity. One of the first Western academics to look deep inside the company, Michael Cusumano, now a professor of management at M.I.T., debunked that notion when he compared Toyota and Nissan in the early 1980s. “The founders and the managers created and refined Toyota company culture, which is far more powerful than Japanese culture,” he says. “It does build on many things that are Japanese — precision, quality, loyalty. But the Toyota culture dominates.” Cusumano adds that Toyota’s origins, in a rural prefecture, hours from the international influences of Tokyo, provided a beneficial insularity. The company began growing just after World War II, nurtured by government regulations that effectively shut out big American automakers. Still, the devastated postwar economy in Japan necessitated extraordinary resourcefulness: because there was a lack of materials and parts suppliers, for example, Toyota had to create them from scratch. Since the early 1930s, Toyota engineers have looked everywhere for inspiration while tearing apart American products to see how they work. Toyota’s systems and worldview derive from an economy of scarcity. In 1950, the company’s near-bankruptcy during a difficult year further defined its philosophy of frugality. Toyota soon began to focus obsessively on reducing muda — or waste — and building up a vast storehouse of cash for security. If history teaches another lesson, it is that Toyota’s executives recognized early on that improving the process by which cars are designed and built is just as important as improving the vehicles themselves. In the 1950s and 1960s, this conviction was famously driven by Taiichi Ohno, an engineer who never earned a college degree but who revolutionized modern manufacturing. Ohno was in awe of Henry Ford, but he recognized that the market for cars in postwar Japan — the market for any modern consumer product, he later posited — required greater flexibility as much as the traditional means of mass production. For Toyota to compete with American companies, it had to make small batches of many models (think of those 31 Tundras) that could satisfy all kinds of customers. Ohno, who died in 1990, took an anthropomorphic view of raw materials: just as an employee shouldn’t wait around without a task, neither should sheet metal or molded plastic. And so, at his factories in Japan, parts were created only in response to demand. Every worker was to focus on improving his efficiency, too (along with that of his co-workers). There was no best way to do something, but there were always better ways. John Paul MacDuffie, a Wharton professor of management, points out that the system was a “cognitive reframing of what is possible.” It showed that quality and productivity were not mutually exclusive; Toyota could indeed produce a greater variety of more durable cars more quickly than anyone else. Some of Ohno’s and Toyota’s ideas also had a deeply subversive quality. It is human nature to cover up a problem rather than call attention to it. At a Toyota plant, the identification of a problem became imperative and exciting. Because then it could be addressed. Toyota’s production system first gained wide notice in the U.S. in the early 1990s, after the publication of “The Machine That Changed the World,” which was written by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos and serialized in this magazine. According to Womack, whom I visited in his Cambridge office, creating a new product like the iPod or even the Prius is a far more modest achievement than developing a new process. The former are what we normally think of as inventions, of course. But the latter, at least in Toyota’s case, presents a novel way of thinking about work and the capabilities of human organizations. Womack notes that Toyota’s managerial competence has extended well beyond Taiichi Ohno; the company has been fortunate that the Toyoda family’s descendants, especially the former chairman Eiji Toyoda, have demonstrated tremendous leadership abilities. “They got very lucky with genetics,” Womack says of Toyota. The company also benefited from the savvy of an early sales-and-marketing executive, Shotaro Kamiya. In the 1950s, when Toyota could barely sell its cars to the Japanese public, Kamiya decided Toyota could drive up demand by investing in Japanese driving schools. Kamiya also decided to send three employees to California in the summer of 1957 on a survey mission; a few months later, Toyota set up a small dealership in Hollywood to sell an austere, ugly and underpowered vehicle called the Toyopet Crown — “Toyopet is your pet!” its ads claimed. The car went on sale in 1958 for $1,995; only 288 were sold. That year, the Christmas party, held in the new company’s garage in Hollywood, consisted of about 30 people. The custodian’s wife cooked the food. The first years in the U.S. were in fact a disaster. Toyota sold a few Land Cruisers but eventually withdrew the Toyopet from the market. Meanwhile its engineers in Japan tried to create a passenger car that American customers would actually want. The result was the 1965 Corona, an air-conditioned and modestly priced vehicle. After that, sales grew steadily. A variety of factors helped — currency differences often made Japanese car imports cheap (for consumers) and profitable (for Toyota). Labor costs in Japan were lower, too. But perhaps the most important factor was timing. A few years after Jim Press began working at Toyota Motor Sales in California, the gas crisis of the early 1970s brought legions of customers to Toyota’s more fuel-efficient cars. By the time the company began setting up factories in the U.S. in the mid-1980s (just over half of the Toyota cars sold in North America are now built here), it was gaining respect for the quality as well as the gas economy of its vehicles. Then came the success of Lexus in the early 1990s. “When they really went at the U.S. market seriously, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the product they brought out was far superior to what the Big Three were producing,” Ron Harbour, the efficiency expert, says. “They created this impression and reputation early on. And in the ensuing years, Ford and G.M. have made great strides to make it up. They’ve narrowed a lot of those gaps. But when you lose that reputation, it’s very hard to recover.” Catching up is even harder, moreover, when Toyota’s cars, like those from Honda and BMW, have consistently higher resale values. Let’s go back in time and say you’ve got a guy who in 1985 bought a Camry, Harbour says. That Camry buyer was surprised to find he never had to get his car fixed at the dealership. “That guy never, ever looked back,” he adds. “G.M., Ford, Chrysler — they’ve basically lost a whole generation of Americans.” You might figure that Toyota is elated at the way things have gone lately: its market share in the U.S. has risen in the past couple of years while American automakers like Ford (and to a lesser degree, G.M.) have been in a tailspin. But this assumption is probably only partly correct. “We want them to be strong,” Jim Press says, referring to Ford and G.M. “When you play a ball game, you don’t want to win by errors.” Jim Womack puts it more bluntly: “The last thing Toyota wants is for any of those guys to collapse.” For one thing, it could be politically disastrous for the Japanese company if it were considered responsible for the death of a grand American institution. “But it’s also completely worthless to Toyota in the market,” Womack adds. “They’re selling all the vehicles they can make already. What they actually want is just continuous, slow decline — decline at the same rate that they have the ability to organically expand. That’s the ideal world for them.” 5. Toyota Has It Made in America McAllen, Tex., is a small city in the state’s southernmost tip, which has among the highest numbers of pickup-truck sales in any U.S. market, according to Toyota’s research. That made it an ideal location for focus groups and marketing research: What did these people need? What did they think of Toyota? And what would actually get them to drive a Tundra? Toyota ultimately decided to pursue customers it calls “true truckers.” True truckers aren’t ordinary pickup owners; rather, these men are the Platonic ideal of truck-driving authenticity. They might work on the ranch or the construction site; they might fish for bass every weekend. “They’re the taste makers, the influentials,” Ernest Bastien, a vice president of vehicle operations, told me in San Antonio. “I think all consumers are influenced by professionals. The professional uses a certain tool, and then they want it, too.” What Toyota needed was to find the true truckers, get them behind the wheel of a Tundra and then hope that Obu and Schrage’s engineering would take care of the rest. If the true truckers bought it, their followers would, too. Toyota expects that some buyers will be moving up from its smaller truck, the Tacoma; others will be trading in their weaker, older Tundra for the new model. Still other buyers may be families that view pickup trucks with big back seats (so-called double cabs) as an alternative to an S.U.V.’s But building a new factory in the U.S. for the truck, locating the plant in the heart of Texas pickup country and then flying the Texas flag outside all speak to the company’s focus on severing truck owners’ blood ties to Ford and G.M. These loyal owners are the hardest to woo. Indeed, they may be beyond reach. Just as G.M. and Ford may have lost a generation of car buyers, Toyota may have put off a generation of full-size truck buyers with the T100 and the first Tundra. The company doesn’t think so. In recent years, Toyota has successfully marketed cars like the Prius and brands like the Scion through grass-roots endeavors, which often meant showcasing the Prius to an audience of influentials. With Scion, the company wanted to get the cars in the hands of hipsters who would make them seem desirable and rare to young drivers, a strategy backed by limiting production this year to 150,000 vehicles, even as demand will probably exceed that amount. Some of these techniques seemed appropriate for the Tundra too. “There are so many of these buyers that probably will feel uncomfortable going into a Toyota dealer because they don’t see a Toyota on the construction site and never have and they don’t want to be the first one to show up with one,” Brian Smith, the head of Toyota’s truck operations, told me. So for the past year, the company’s marketers have tried to “soften” resistance to the brand. “Street teams” drive Tundras to big construction sites with water in the summer and coffee and doughnuts in the winter. “We say: ‘Hey guys, you ever been in a Toyota before? Just take a moment to sit in it and tell us what you think,’ ” Smith says. Already Toyota has sent its street teams on hundreds of runs. Toyota focused the marketing of the Tundra on what Smith calls five “buckets”: 1) fishers and outdoorsmen; 2) home-improvement types; 3) Nascar fans; 4) motorcycle enthusiasts; and 5) country-music lovers. Anyone wondering why Toyota has become a major booster of Nascar or a sponsor of bass-fishing tournaments can see the logic. It’s also why Toyota is sponsoring Brooks and Dunn, the country-music duo. And dealers are taking new Tundra trucks to Nascar events, country-music concerts, fishing tournaments and the like. “Parking lots tend to be a long ways away from where the events are,” Smith explains, referring to motocross competitions, “so we have our dealers setting up shuttles.” The plan is to pull up in a Tundra, offer visitors a ride but have them drive to the event on a slightly indirect course (laid out by a Toyota dealer). “At the end,” Smith says, “we say, ‘Thank you, you’re guests of Toyota, here’s a bottle of water, take a lanyard.’ “ Based on the company’s track record, it’s tempting to predict a resounding victory — if not a quick one, then a slow and steady one. But Toyota is by no means infallible. It failed in the large-truck market in the 1990s, and it faltered in the youth market until it came up with the Scion strategy. Its vehicles are sometimes outranked in Consumer Reports in safety and customer satisfaction by other automakers, especially Honda. The company’s growth has sparked tremendous internal concerns about quality-control problems. And Toyota has worries abroad too. Many auto analysts wonder if Toyota has the ability to succeed in emerging markets. “Toyota is fairly weak in what we see as the second-largest growth market in the world, which we consider India,” Ashvin Chotai, a London-based auto analyst for Global Insight, told me. In China, the largest growth area, Toyota expects to have 10 percent of the market by 2010, but the company faces intense competition, from both its American and Asian rivals. Jim Press often says that Toyota is not doing as well as the headlines suggest. The trustworthiness of this claim is debatable — Press also says that G.M. is doing just fine — but it’s undeniable that the company will soon assume leadership in a market that’s both global and brutal. However the Tundra does in the next few months, the company’s history suggests that it never relinquishes a goal before reaching it. And what’s striking is that if Toyota succeeds, it won’t necessarily be because the company has done anything different this time. Toyota has never really caught the Big Three by surprise. Its marketing strategists have been trying to establish an aura of American authenticity since the early 1970s, when Toyota’s TV ads featured four Dallas Cowboys squeezing into a Corolla. When I asked Takahiro Fujimoto, a management professor at the University of Tokyo and a longtime Toyota observer, whether the company’s victories — or the fact that it is now the world’s largest automaker — were hard to envision, he said no: “Since almost everything that happened to this company in the past several decades has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, there have been few surprises.” Toyota’s triumphs are often reduced to spare inventory and just-in-time productivity, but that’s too simplistic; there are many factors at work. Among management theorists, success derives from what they call the Toyota Way — the company’s culture of efficiency and problem-solving. Among historians, Toyota’s supremacy is a product of happenstance, specifically its early years in the rural precincts of ravaged, postwar Japan. For those in the marketing world, Toyota has triumphed in its packaging of brands like Lexus and Scion. On Wall Street, its success is defined by huge profits and driven by low retiree costs and close relationships with parts suppliers. Toyota’s prosperity also owes a large debt to its dealers, the true links to the consumer, who are very good at letting company executives know what customers like and don’t like. And to the fact that Toyota does not award huge stock-option grants or bonuses to its executives. Our culture of excessive compensation has never really caught on there. All this doesn’t make Toyota virtuous. But it does make Toyota different — in some deep, cellular way — from many American companies. Nothing in its DNA, to borrow a fashionable term among business-school academics, is focused on short-term gains. What’s more, the long view as a business outlook seems to link so many aspects of the company’s success. The long view took Toyota to California, and to its most important market, in 1957 and kept it in the United States even after the Toyopet failed miserably. The long view allowed Toyota to understand the need for improvement and the potential rewards of meeting a higher standard. And when it met higher standards, the company looked ahead at the evolution of its American customers, marshaled its resources and tried to figure out what should come next. 6. Getting the Carbon Out of Cars Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, who like all of the company’s top executives is based in Japan, recently declared that his dream for Toyota is to build a car that does not hurt anyone and cleans the air when it’s running. This is not quite as fantastical as it sounds. Several automakers are developing cars with sensors that literally prevent them from crashing (though not from being crashed into). And in the heavy intersections in Tokyo where air quality is poor, Takahiro Fujimoto told me, part of Watanabe’s vision is already real: “The emission gas of some advanced cars is in fact cleaner than the intake air.” The most vexing challenge, though, is what fuel cars will run on in a future where oil is too scarce or tailpipe emissions too dangerous on account of global warming. About 10 percent of global carbon emissions come from cars, S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks. Many automakers, Toyota included, now trumpet their vehicles as “clean,” but this label, while by no means unimportant, refers to engine technology that reduces smog-forming emissions like nitrogen oxides or unburned hydrocarbons. But every gallon of gas burned still produces more than 19 pounds of CO2. What I found within Toyota is that its engineers and executives all take environmental issues seriously, but on their own terms. For many consumers, of course, Toyota’s hybrid innovations established a green halo over the company. Yet the environmental community is more wary of the company’s lauded progressivism than you might expect. Many environmental advocates are dismayed by Toyota’s participation (as a member of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers) in a suit to block California’s new laws curtailing greenhouse-gas emissions. And some view Toyota’s strenuous efforts, especially in the U.S., to sell gas-guzzling trucks and S.U.V.’s as counterproductive. “I think the reality is that Toyota’s focus on the truck market has been to make them look as American as possible, rather than be the global environmental leaders they are on the car side,” Jason Mark, the former head of the vehicle program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. As Mark sees it, Toyota’s activities matter more than any other automaker’s. “First, they’ll be the biggest car company very soon,” he says. “Second, they’ve demonstrated a knack for innovation with the Prius. And third, they’ve demonstrated a commitment for stewardship that I don’t think one could attribute to the domestic automakers.” When I spoke with John DeCicco, an automotive specialist at Environmental Defense, a New York-based advocacy group, he said that in the near term, at least, it’s better not to count on a silver bullet — a drastic changeover to hydrogen-powered vehicles, for instance. There are many reasons that this will remain a long-term goal. One is that cars, especially ones of good quality, last a long time. Another is that automakers are profit-driven public corporations, and any new technology has to be competitive in the marketplace. To see just how long that can take, consider that Toyota began developing the Prius at a time, 1991, when gas was plentiful and cheap. Today, seven years after its introduction in the U.S., it has less than 1 percent of the car market. Higher gas prices or gas taxes may alter this. But for now, environmental advocates like DeCicco urge carmakers to focus on making modest changes to popular vehicles (making S.U.V.’s lighter, for example, thereby increasing fuel efficiency), which could have a more significant environmental impact than a sophisticated new technology. When DeCicco began analyzing total greenhouse-gas emissions from each car company’s American fleet, he noticed that in 2003, for instance, there was a significant change for the better in Toyota’s rate. This wasn’t because of its hybrids but because of its redesign of the Corolla. “When you make a small change in efficiency in a high-volume product like that,” DeCicco told me, “it can have a bigger net effect in your carbon than a major change in a small-volume seller.” Still, more economical cars for the short term cannot solve the long-term problem. Toyota expects to be in business 100 years from now, one person in the company’s West Coast office told me, long after oil has been depleted or rendered unusable because of its carbon content, and for that reason it has placed all its bets on hybrid technologies. Indeed, Toyota created its hybrid systems not so much with the current era in mind, but because it views hybrids as more practical and energy-efficient. Whether the future is in biodiesel, ethanol or hydrogen doesn’t seem to matter; the hybrid system could be adapted to any of those fuels, says Bill Reinert, Toyota’s U.S. engineer in charge of advanced vehicle planning. Reinert also told me that the current Toyota system already has the ability to accommodate the larger battery capacity of a plug-in hybrid, which would use electric power for local trips and fuel only for longer excursions. But those large batteries don’t yet exist. Was that extra capacity put there on purpose? “Hell, yes,” he says. “This company is not stupid.” Reinert adds that every Toyota engineer designing a new car gets an environmental-impact budget as well as a financial one. Designers must consider the total amount of carbon dioxide produced in the design, production and lifetime operation of a new vehicle. This sounds both encouraging and socially responsible. But you have to wonder too if it’s really an equation for sustainability. Right now, Reinert says, there are about three-quarters of a billion cars worldwide; by 2050, if market trends continue, “we could conceivably have 2 billion or even 2.5 billion cars.” Accommodating those cars will entail building new roads and new factories and spending vast amounts of energy to make shipments. All those activities will create enormous emissions on their own. So even with giant strides in clean-vehicle technology, just doubling the number of vehicles could increase the overall environmental effect by a factor of three. To their credit, engineers at Toyota like Reinert do not soft-pedal the immensity of the challenge. And they argue, sometimes convincingly, that Toyota will be a large part of the solution. Jim Press does, too, but his is a different kind of optimism. A few days after the new Tundra made its debut, Press gave a speech to the Society of Automotive Analysts in Detroit in which he seemed confident that this would be Toyota’s century. New technologies are on the way, he promised. And the demographics of the American market look good: boomers are buying more cars. Americans are living longer. And the growth rate of the U.S. population is greater than China’s. Even in the face of what looks like a difficult year for car sales, the industry is on the verge of a golden era. “This is one of the few countries on earth where we have more cars per household than drivers,” he said. “Isn’t that great?” At the beginning of his speech, Press joked to the audience that he was about to reveal the secret of Toyota’s success. He never really did, except to look ahead with relentlessly bright expectations. Jon Gertner, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the economics of making comedy movies in Hollywood.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews Huffaker for The New York Times A SEARCH FOR CUSTOMERS Members of a magazine crew trying to sell subscriptions to shoppers at a strip mall in Oceanside, Calif. Such crews become family, many sellers said, with bonds of shared experience Allen Bryant for The New York Times TROUBLE AND ARRESTS Officer George Dahl estimated that the Louisville, Ky., Police Department had cited or arrested more than 70 magazine sellers in the last two years. Multimedia Graphic Struggling to Stay in the Black February 21, 2007 For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews By IAN URBINA Two days after graduating from high school last June, Jonathan Pope left his home in Miamisburg, Ohio, to join a traveling magazine sales crew, thinking he would get to “talk to people, party at night and see the country.” Over the next six months, he and about 20 other crew members crossed 10 states, peddling subscriptions door to door, 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Sleeping three to a room in cheap motels, lowest seller on the floor, they survived some days on less than $10 in food money while their earnings were kept “on the books” for later payment. By then, Mr. Pope said, he had seen several friends severely beaten by managers, he and several other crew members were regularly smoking methamphetamine with prostitutes living down the motel hallway, and there were warrants out for his arrest in five states for selling subscriptions without a permit. “I knew I was either going to be dead, disappeared or I don’t know what,” Mr. Pope said. After persuading his manager to let him leave, Mr. Pope was dropped off, without a ticket, $17 in his pocket, at a bus terminal near San Antonio, more than 1,000 miles from home. More than two decades after a Senate investigation revealed widespread problems with these itinerant sellers, and despite several highly publicized fatal accidents and violent crimes involving the sales crews in recent years, the industry remains almost entirely unregulated. And while the industry says it has changed, advocates and law enforcement officials say the abuses persist. In interviews over seven months, more than 50 current and former members from almost as many crews painted a similar picture of life on the road. With striking uniformity, they told of violence, drug use, indebtedness and cheating of customers during their cross-country travels, often in unsafe vehicles and with drivers who lacked proper licenses. “The stories about life on crew you hear from these kids are almost unbelievable,” said Officer George Dahl of the Louisville, Ky., Metro Police Department, who estimated that his department had cited or arrested more than 70 sellers for assault, unlawful solicitation or drug possession in the last two years. “But you get them alone and start hearing the same sort of thing over and over from different crews and you start believing them.” In Collinsville, Ill., Daniel Burrus scrolled through digital photographs of bloodied faces as he described how, on a crew he helped manage for several years, men who missed their sales quota were forced to fight each other. In Flagstaff, Ariz., Isaac James sat with his wife and newborn daughter as he told how he and others on his mag crew — as they are typically called — stole checkbooks, jewelry, medicine-cabinet drugs and even shoes from customers’ homes. Last October, Jonathan Gagney joined a mag crew to escape the “crack scene” back home in Marlborough, N.H. But one night last month, he called this reporter from a bus station in St. Petersburg, Fla., to say he had just sneaked away from his motel to run away from his crew. “All I know is this guy got beaten and there was blood all over the motel wall,” Mr. Gagney said, his voice shaking. Earlene Williams, director of Parent Watch, an industry watchdog group, said her organization got about 10 e-mail messages or calls a day, double the number since 2003, seeking help from sellers, their families or lawyers. “Publisher’s Sweepstakes is a lot smaller than it used to be, and so the magazine industry is less able to get subscriptions that way now,” Ms. Williams said, explaining why she was seeing an increase in problems with crews. “And the telemarketing no-call list has also pushed the publishers away from telemarketing and toward door-to-door crews.” Last year in response to a similar increase in calls, the National Runaway Switchboard began training its operators to handle the cases. A Complex Industry Dan Smith, a lawyer for the National Field Selling Association, which represents about 60 percent of the magazine sales industry, estimated that 2 percent to 3 percent of all magazine subscriptions, or at least $147 million worth in 2005, were sold by door-to-door salespeople, up from about 1 percent, or at least $69 million in 2000. But the Magazine Publishers Association disagreed with Ms. Williams and Mr. Smith. It does not believe that door-to-door magazine sales have grown, and estimated that they account for 1 percent of sales. The industry consists of layers. While the bulk of subscriptions are sold directly by publishers and through direct mail, insert cards and the Internet, many magazine publishers also hire clearinghouses. These companies then subcontract with crew managers who hire door-to-door sellers. These layers of middlemen, and the small percentage of total subscription revenue involved, may help explain why publishers, who are always eager to increase readership, have been unwilling or unable to prevent mag crews from operating. Just who uses mag crews is in dispute. Crew members and the National Field Selling Association say many of the largest publishers use magazine crews or clearinghouses that rely on them. But of the five largest publishing companies — Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Reader’s Digest Association, which collectively make up nearly half the industry as measured by advertising revenue — four said they did not use mag crews or did so only sparingly. A representative for Reader’s Digest said, “A portion of our subscriptions come in through third-party agents, who may in turn subcontract to local vendors.” Dozens of magazines are listed on order forms offered by crews, including Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone and Redbook. Rolling Stone declined to comment. A representative for the Hearst Corporation said that in recent years it had stopped hiring clearinghouses that use crews. But when subsequently asked why Redbook, a Hearst publication, appears among magazines sold by one crew, a Hearst representative e-mailed, “We constantly fight unauthorized agents,” adding, “It’s an ongoing battle.” Generally, the clearinghouses get about 40 percent of the subscription money and the publishers about 10 percent. The crew leaders get the other 50 percent, out of which they pay all expenses on the road, including the sellers’ commissions. “Nobody is forced or pushed to do anything,” said Tim Peek, manager and recruiter for New Generation, a crew based in Vero Beach, Fla. Drugs and violence are forbidden, and some sellers make $1,000 per week, which is kept in a savings account for them, Mr. Peek said, adding, “If they don’t want to work, they don’t make money.” John Wigman, the manager of Mr. Pope’s crew, Periodical and Publications Connections, said, “I don’t see why you don’t tell about all the kids on drugs that we help out.” Asked to elaborate, provide names or respond to Mr. Pope’s accusations, Mr. Wigman refused and hung up. Mr. Smith said he viewed most stories of drug use and physical abuse as exaggerations. “I don’t put a lot of stock in them because, to be brutally frank with you, abuse is like beauty. It’s in the eyes of the beholder,” he said. “A loud voice, anything, can be called abuse.” While there may be a few shady operators, he said, the industry has cleaned itself up over the years, and his organization has helped through broad distribution of pamphlets on professional courtesy and ethics, yearly training seminars for members and one-on-one discussions with managers who have problems on their crews. By pressuring members to perform background checks on new hires, the association has cut the number of crimes and cheating perpetrated by sellers, Mr. Smith said. No one is forced to stay on crew, he added, since the association pays for a bus ticket home for any crew member who wants to leave. But labor and law enforcement officials said that since many sellers were runaways or high school dropouts or were from dysfunctional families or poor neighborhoods, they had fewer options and were reluctant to report mistreatment or leave. Many former sellers also said they kept quiet about problems out of fear of violence against them or those they left behind. Sellers reported having adopted fake names upon joining a crew, being beaten if they attracted police attention and receiving mail sent from home only after it was opened by the company’s central office. “What happens on crew, stays on crew” was a common refrain. An escape from small-town boredom or overbearing parents, working on a mag crew is a lifestyle more than a job, and it brings good times with the bad. Like gangs, crews become family, sellers said, and the camaraderie of shared experiences is a bond not easily broken. “You’re involved in bad stuff, you’re seeing bad stuff and they tell you, ‘No negativity,’ ” said Jennifer Steele, 23. In September 2004, Ms. Steele said, she was drugged and raped by two men who were partying with crew members at a motel in Memphis, where her crew, Precision Sales, was staying. When her manager told her to go back to work the next day, she said she “threw a fit.” But she did as she was told, and worked part of the day before filing a police report and having a rape kit performed. She stayed with the crew for another seven months before quitting. “I know it sounds crazy,” Ms. Steele said. “But I believed my manager when he said he would never let that happen again, and I believed him when he said my mom had told him she didn’t care about me.” In January 2006, Ms. Steele left her crew and was placed in the witness protection program during an investigation of her former managers, who were accused in the beating and kidnapping at gunpoint of her boyfriend from a city bus, an incident that was caught on videotape and led to the conviction of one person for kidnapping for ransom and assault with a deadly weapon. “They’re frustrating cases,” said Sgt. Jeanine Lum of the Norwalk Sheriff’s Station in Norwalk, Calif., near Los Angeles, who was involved in the investigation. “The ones we arrest at the doors often just need to be sent home,” Sergeant Lum added, “while the real culprits are back at the hotel or in some office somewhere.” Few Legal Protections Regulating the industry has been difficult because the companies, many of them operating only out of post office boxes, are small and frequently change names. “The local police can’t keep up because the crews leave the state before they get alerted and the feds don’t bother with them because they say it is a state’s issue,” said Connie Knutti, who investigated several crews before she retired in 2005 as manager of field enforcement for the Illinois Department of Labor. The sellers have few labor protections because they are classified as independent contractors, which also insulates the companies from regulation, taxes and liability. Categorized as outdoor sellers, the door-to-door peddlers are also exempt from most federal and state minimum wage and overtime requirements. A majority of former crew members said that while they occasionally made several hundred dollars a week, most of the time they received little more than the daily allowance of $15, while the rest of their earnings stayed on the books to cover expenses. Many also said that subscriptions for magazines were never actually fulfilled. On any given day, said Mr. Smith, the association lawyer, there are probably about 2,500 people, typically ages 18 to 24, selling magazines door to door. But when state and federal labor department officials held a conference in 1999 to discuss concerns about the industry, a panel concluded that the number of sellers was probably closer to 30,000, said Darlene Adkins, vice president of public policy for the National Consumers League’s Child Labor Coalition. That organization ranks traveling magazine sales among the five worst jobs for teenagers. Catherine Barbour said it was the constant traveling and working in dangerous areas that most worried her when her daughter, Tracy Jones, said she was joining a crew. “I told her no, absolutely not,” Ms. Barbour said. “But she was 18, so what could I do?” On Nov. 15, Ms. Jones disappeared while selling subscriptions at a Pilot Truck Stop in North Little Rock, Ark. Ms. Jones was found 11 days later, stabbed to death, in a ditch near Route 61 in southwestern Memphis. Up at 7 a.m., typical crews start the day with a sales meeting where they rehearse their pitches. “We’re selling magazines to earn points in a contest to win a trip abroad” is the standard and sometimes fictitious spiel. Around 9 a.m., the crews pile into vans to be dropped off at the day’s territory. They switch neighborhoods every several hours and often work as late as 10 p.m. “You work hard during the day, but you also party pretty hard at night,” said Stephanie Blake, 23, who wrote an e-mail message in November to Earlene Williams at Parent Watch because she said she wanted to tell the positive side of the work. While she and others used methamphetamine, Ms. Blake said it was mostly marijuana, alcohol and sex that filled the nights. “But there is a lot more to crew than that,” she said, recounting having made some of her best friends, including her fiancé, working on the crew. Coming from Evansville, Ind., Ms. Blake said she relished the chance to see the country. The expense-paid trips to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and a resort in Mexico were more fun than she had ever imagined having, she said. “I still miss it sometimes,” she added. About a half hour into the conversation, however, Ms. Blake’s tone began to shift. “I have to admit, some things did get to me about crew life,” she said. The 100 sit-ups and pushups for every number a seller was below her daily quota felt “cultish,” she said. The beatings were also unsettling. But the most galling part, Ms. Blake said, was the unfulfilled promise of big money. When she and her fiancé finally decided to leave their crew in December 2003, Ms. Blake said, they sneaked away late one night from the motel near Houston where they staying. Asked why she left without demanding to be paid what was still “on the books,” she said, “These aren’t the types who you just go up to and ask to settle up.” Michael Simpson is one reason. For two years starting in February 2004, Mr. Simpson, a stocky former high school lacrosse player from Newburgh, N.Y., worked on several crews as an “enforcer.” His job, he said, was to beat crew members upon a manager’s request. If sellers missed quota regularly or complained about the job, Mr. Simpson, 23, said he hit them while in their room or when they were alone in the van. On more than 30 occasions, he estimated, he and several other enforcers drew blood. In three instances, ambulances were called, he said. Dealing with the police was not a problem. “You have one kid saying he was jumped and 20 others plus two managers saying he stole something or broke into a room and assaulted a girl,” Mr. Simpson said. “Who do you think the cops are going to believe?” Daivet McClinton, 23, an enforcer who worked with Mr. Simpson, said talking in front of others about wanting to quit invited the worst beatings. Asked if they ever went overboard, both men recalled an incident in November 2005 involving an 18-year-old recruit from Dayton, Ohio, named Rudy. “All we were told was that Rudy had shoved and disrespected the manager,” Mr. Simpson said. For 10 uninterrupted minutes in a motel stairwell in San Francisco, Mr. Simpson, Mr. McClinton and four other enforcers beat Rudy unconscious, Mr. Simpson and Mr. McClinton said. One held his mouth shut. Two others pinned down his arms and legs. Tearing off his shirt, they pressed a flaming lighter into his back. Mr. Simpson kicked him in the face and body. “I stopped because I ran out of breath,” Mr. Simpson said. Rudy, they said, was taken away in an ambulance. Darting a glance at his new girlfriend and his chin quivering momentarily, Mr. Simpson explained why he decided to leave last February. “I’d gone from being a kid who was afraid of hitting people in the face to someone who was using objects,” he said. Still, some current crew members said the work had helped them turn their lives around. “I was in and out of juvenile facilities, and now I’m actually going somewhere,” said Jordan Friedley, standing in a shopping mall in Oceanside, Calif., near San Diego, where, for two days, a reporter shadowed two crews, Magnificent Sales and Thoroughbreds, both from Alliance Service Company. “They keep things on the up and up, no drugs or none of that, and I bring in $700 a week.” Asked about incidents in the last five years involving the two crews, including two fatal drug overdoses and the deaths of two crew members in the crash of a crew van, Mr. Friedley fell silent. Crystal Hall, who helps manage the crews, said: “We’ve cleaned things up. Everyone is drug-tested now. They show up dirty, they’re gone. Those who stay have plenty of chance to make money.” The Money ‘Flows Up’ Since pay is purely on commission, Mr. Smith, the association lawyer, said that only the best sellers survived and that about 20 percent of recruits left in less than a month. Matt Ward, a former bookkeeper for several crews, said there were other reasons for the high attrition. “Money in this industry flows up,” Mr. Ward said. “It doesn’t trickle down.” For about two years starting in 1998, Mr. Ward did bookkeeping for several crews with American Community Services, a company with several hundred sellers that is based in Indiana. It is owned by two of Mr. Ward’s brothers, LeVan and Albert Ellis, who declined to answer questions both over the telephone and sent by certified mail. Mr. Ward said that while the company should be commended for sticking to its strict antiviolence policies, he left in 2000 after becoming uncomfortable with what he saw while he was keeping the books. “The sales agents remain almost always in the red while the managers, car handlers and everyone else is in the black almost from the start,” Mr. Ward said between shifts at a restaurant in downtown Washington, where he now waits tables. Of the more than 400 sales agents whose accounts Mr. Ward said he handled, he estimated that fewer than 40 left the company having made money. The rest spent their earnings on the road or, more often, to cover their daily deductions for room expenses, gas and meals. This is not a new criticism. In 1987, during the Congressional investigation of the industry, the Senate committee reviewed the records of one company and found that of its 418 sellers, 413 had finished the year in debt to the company, even though the company itself had reported large annual profits. Ms. Williams, from Parent Watch, said her organization advised customers not to buy from the sellers or to let them in the house, but to offer them a phone to call home or her organization’s phone number to help anyone who might want to arrange a bus ticket home. She said her organization had lobbied for legislation to prevent sellers from being categorized as independent contractors and to provide them with minimum wage and safety and health protections. “Leave these kids off radar as they are now,” Ms. Williams said, “and the abuses will continue.” Bob Driehaus and Sean D. Hamill contributed reporting.   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Chinese New Year Bounty Isaac Brekken for The New York Times At the Bellagio, decorations are displayed to observe Chinese New Year. Isaac Brekken for The New York Times Chinese New Year is one of the most profitable times of the year for Las Vegas casinos like the Venetian, which featured a dragon dance Saturday February 21, 2007 Las Vegas Adapts to Reap Chinese New Year Bounty By STEVE FRIESS LAS VEGAS, Feb. 20 — Zhu Yu was not the least perturbed that faux Italian frescoes — rather than Asian silk screens — decorated the ceiling of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino hallway where he and his family watched on Saturday as a 25-foot-long red-and-yellow dragon shimmied through a traditional Chinese New Year dance. “Oh, it’s nothing like what we did when I was a boy in Taipei, but it’s still very exciting,” Mr. Zhu, 49, said over the din of drumbeats as the dragon paused to send good luck in the direction of those inside the high-limit baccarat room. His three daughters, all younger than 10, stood mesmerized in front of his wife. It was the Zhu family’s fourth straight year ushering in Chinese New Year in Las Vegas instead of in their home city, San Francisco. Their stop at the Venetian’s dragon dance was followed by a visit to a similar one in the pirate’s cove outside the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino on Sunday, the first day of the Year of the Pig, and another dragon dance Monday, this one at the Roman-themed Caesars Palace. “This is a Las Vegas version of Chinese New Year,” Mr. Zhu said. “It’s its own thing, but we love it.” So do casino executives. Chinese New Year, a 15-day celebration that is set by a lunar calendar and that usually falls in late January or early February, has become one of the city’s most profitable events, drawing thousands of Asian and Asian-American visitors and hundreds of millions of their dollars each year. The city’s tourism board does not keep statistics on the event’s economic impact, but executives with Las Vegas Sands Inc., which owns the Venetian, say more money is bet during the two-week period than at any other time during the year. “The Chinese New Year is longer than anything,” said the company’s president and chief operating officer, William P. Weidner, “and we see much higher per-player action.” J. Terrence Lanni, chief executive of MGM Mirage, the city’s largest gambling company with nine properties on the Strip, including the Bellagio and Mirage resorts, said that for his company, the first weekend of Chinese New Year was the second-biggest betting weekend of the year, ahead of the Super Bowl and behind only the conventional New Year’s holiday. (Gamblers in Las Vegas wagered $93 million on last month’s Super Bowl, the Nevada Gaming Control Board reported.) Casinos drape enormous banners with New Year’s greetings in Chinese across their porte-cocheres and add tables for baccarat and pai gow poker, two games favored by Asian gamblers. They hold parties where managers hand invited guests red envelopes stuffed with money or special gambling chips adorned with the animal symbol of the year. At Caesars Palace, Celine Dion and Elton John are given a few days off so that Jacky Cheung, the Canto-pop sensation, can hold forth in the 4,100-seat Colosseum. Most Chinese restaurants on the Strip stay open longer and add traditional New Year’s dishes or rename some regular ones with lucky or upbeat words. It is not unusual for a family to spend more than $20,000 for a Chinese New Year dinner, said Richard Chen, the executive chef at the Wing Lei restaurant in the Wynn Las Vegas resort, which has imported abalone at $2,226 a pound and bird’s nest at $1,600 a pound for this year’s festivities. At the Bellagio, the theme of the 14,000-square-foot Conservatory is changed only five times a year, and Chinese New Year is one of those times. The current display features live tangerine trees, a 45-foot-tall pagoda, and a mechanical pig with a moving eyes, tail and snout. “You’ll see a lot of Chinese lanterns hanging in groups of six because multiples of six are lucky numbers,” said the Conservatory manager, Sharon Hatcher. “Everything here are multiples of six or eight, because those are the lucky numbers. Even the number of koi we have in our pond are multiples of eight. We want to maintain as much positive energy for luck.” Such nods to Asian culture came as hard-learned lessons for Las Vegas properties, which now employ feng shui masters to advise on design and building plans. When the MGM Grand HotelsCasino opened in 1993, patrons walked through a main entrance built to resemble the mouth of a mammoth lion, MGM’s longtime corporate symbol. This incensed Asian gamblers, who complained — and stayed away — because the notion of walking into the mouth of a beast is considered unlucky. The company spent millions removing the lion and reconfiguring the entrance, said Alan Feldman, a spokesman for MGM Mirage. “Everyone has stories about things like that,” Mr. Feldman said. “Over at the Mirage we built a high-limit gaming area that looked like a library. The Chinese word for book sounds like lose so books have an unlucky connotation. Those books were gone within the hour.” While the notion of traveling to Las Vegas for a major cultural event historically known as a time for family gatherings may seem sacrilegious, David Huang, whose tour company, Chinese Hosts, is based here, said the trend reflected a newfound desire among younger, upwardly mobile Asians and Asian-Americans to travel while maintaining an important tradition of the holiday: gambling. “The Chinese New Year has always been a time for people to get together and play games, to celebrate good luck and good fortune,” Mr. Huang said. “People like to get together and spend substantial amounts of money. Vegas helps keep up the tradition.” Las Vegas’s ties to Asia have grown more extensive over the last decade with MGM Mirage, Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts all spending billions on lavish hotel-casinos in the Chinese region of Macau. In 2004, Nevada opened a tourism office in Beijing. And both the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the Community College of Southern Nevada have or are building satellite campuses in China and Singapore. “Growing up in Las Vegas, we never heard about Chinese New Year,” said Bo J. Bernhard, a sociology professor at U.N.L.V. and director of gambling research at the university’s International Gaming Institute. “There might’ve been a nod here or there and a casino host who focused on high rollers 10 years ago. But now the casino industry is being exposed to Asia in a big way, and Asia has been exposed to our casino industry, too.” The importance of Chinese New Year to the casino industry is clear by the lengths to which properties go to court Asian gamblers during the holiday. This year’s Chinese New Year began on the Presidents’ Day weekend, typically a busy time for the city, which was also the site of the NBA All-Star Game and one of the year’s biggest conventions, the men’s apparel trade show. But Mr. Weidner said his company’s top priority was its clients, some of whom the company ferried here from Asia on its fleet of private jets. “This is a merit system here,” Mr. Weidner said. “The highest quality players will get whatever they want. The Chinese are the highest and best quality players in the world, so they’ll have preference. We don’t care how tall you are, how short you are, how fat you are, what color you are. Green is the most important color.”   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  Killed in Action, but Not by the Enemy Bettmann/Corbis Friend Or Foe? Whether it’s on “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam in 1969, left, or in Iraq today, friendly fire is a fact of war. Lance Cpl. Matty Hull, 25, below left, was a victim in Basra, Iraq, in 2003. Related The World: A Sampling From 6 Months’ Worth of Small-Arms Accidents in Vietnam (February 18, 2007) February 18, 2007 The World Killed in Action, but Not by the Enemy By C. J. CHIVERS London OF all the great sorrows that accompany war, few pass with as little public notice as when a member of a military accidentally kills or injures himself or one of his own. Soldiers felled by foes are memorialized. Searches for the missing can last decades. The cases of civilian victims are taken up by their fellow citizens and their politicians, who work in concert with aid workers, journalists and eventually historians to account for tolls upon populations caught in a conflict’s path. Military-on-military mishaps are different. Governments and fellow soldiers are often hesitant to talk about them, and usually few witnesses are available outside of military circles to pull these incidents into the light. Their costs — both to the victims and to combatants whose errors shed their brothers’ blood — typically enter the public discourse only when a mishap is so spectacular or circumstances so unusual that it commands attention. Such was the case of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former N.F.L. player who was killed by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan in 2004, a death the Army initially attributed to enemy action. The conditions for public debate came together again this month with the leak to a British newspaper, The Sun, of a videotape recorded in the cockpit of an American warplane in 2003. The tape shows the confusion and then anguish of two pilots from the Idaho National Guard who had attacked a British armored vehicle near Basra, Iraq. This mistaken strafing, euphemistically labeled a “blue-on-blue engagement,” killed Lance Cpl. Matty Hull, 25. With several London newspapers stoking the outrage, the British public has reacted with anger at this latest up-close view of military bungling. “War at its most stupid,” a headline in The Guardian concluded. What has made this case extraordinary, however, is neither Lance Corporal Hull’s death nor the pilots’ despair. It is the publicity. War has always been accompanied by pointless and bloody mistakes. War always will be. But fratricide is not a palatable theme. Governments prefer to celebrate the virtues of those they send away under arms. Popular imagination often follows the official stance, focusing on war as a backdrop for courage, sacrifice, commitment and skill — an activity that can have purpose and meaning, and be a crucible of character. All of that is true. But combat veterans know something fuller. To go to war is to enter a vast and indifferent lottery, one in which for every soldier whose own actions will determine his fate, there will be others — like Lance Corporal Hull or Corporal Tillman — whose lives will not be in their own hands. The risks, like the promises of aid and protection, can come from the man on your left or right. Forty years ago in Vietnam, an Army captain prepared a document that provided a glimpse at these grim, ineludible facts. Replying to a request from another headquarters, he compiled a list of the small-arms mishaps in which American soldiers were killed or injured in the first six months of 1967. The record he sent back to the United States, of 353 incidents in 172 days that killed or injured 398 soldiers, is a catalog of fratricidal and self-inflicted bloodshed caused by mistakes, negligence, exhaustion, panic, horseplay, dim lighting, dense vegetation, inattentiveness, faulty equipment, poor training, foolishness, ill fortune or some combination of the above. Like the tape from the National Guard cockpit, the report was classified. But eventually the captain’s work found its way into the United States National Archives and Records Administration, where in time it became public, an accidental artifact of one of the often unspoken elements of war. Where the report fits in the larger context of the inelegantly named “friendly fire” in Vietnam is not immediately clear. It does not reveal whether all these victims were from the Army, or from other services, too. It provides no insight into how many service members were killed by other American munitions, in accidental air strikes, for instance, or misplaced mortar and artillery barrages. There are implicit aspects of the report that make direct comparisons to the wars today in Afghanistan and Iraq imprecise. In 1967, the American Army in Vietnam was largely a conscripted force, unlike the volunteer military of the current generation. In 1967, the Army was also distributing a new automatic rifle in the theater, the M-16A1, which the soldiers had scarcely used in training. Moreover, American troops are prohibited from drinking alcohol in Iraq and Afghanistan, and illicit drug use has been stigmatized and punished in the ranks since the 1980s. Alcohol was available in Vietnam, and drug use was not policed with urinalysis. These inhibitors of judgment, alertness and dexterity amplified the dangers of soldiering there. But the record still gives a spare, chilling glimpse into one of war’s darker corners. And it limns an impassive force that has followed combatants into battle since sticks and stones were missiles, and has kept pace with each advance in weaponry, training and fire control. From the death of Gen. Stonewall Jackson, the Confederacy’s battlefield virtuoso who was shot three times by his own pickets at Chancellorsville, perhaps altering the course of the Civil War, to Lance Corporal Hull’s fiery end, such empty losses have not ceased. They never will, although those words can be no balm for the grief of Lance Corporal Hull’s widow. At what rate similar mishaps are occurring today is a question not readily answered. A few friendly-fire instances and other mishaps are known to the public, but the Pentagon’s tight-lipped handling of information about injuries, and often vague public statements about deaths, makes a full outside accounting impossible. Michael S. White, founder of www.icasualties.org, a Web site that tries to track casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the available public records show 219 American military fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan from injuries not caused by hostile action, and apparently not from illness or vehicle and aviation accidents. Nearly half of these are from what the Pentagon has labeled “unspecified causes,” but at least 85 were from non-hostile weapons discharge or ordnance mishaps, according to the data Mr. White has compiled. (There are also seven homicides and at least six suicides; the suicide number would probably be much higher if the military reporting were more detailed, Mr. White said.) But these records are fragmentary, and there is virtually no insight into the number of military personnel who have been wounded, not killed, by American or coalition action. It is also impossible with the publicly available data to measure the inevitable accidental bullet and shrapnel injuries that occur during firefights, which historically are the sort of confused, fast-moving situations in which mishaps occur. From the evidence in the public domain, the raw numbers seem smaller than those for Vietnam, but “without a doubt the number is higher than what is known,” Mr. White said. One day the archives might tell us what we can barely approximate today. For now we have only occasional insights, like the videotape in Britain, and the knowledge that the perennial phenomenon of soldiers injuring their own persists. Anyone who has served in a modern combat unit has heard the deadpan warning. Friendly fire, it goes, is not. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

  2007 Season Calendar Formula 1 Grand Prix   . Rnd Date Grand Prix of Circuit Laps Race Distance (km) Winner 1 18 March Australia Albert Park 58 307.574 2 8 April Malaysia Sepang International Circuit 56 310.408 3 15 April Bahrain Bahrain International Circuit 57 308.238 4 13 May Spain Circuit de Catalunya 66 307.104 5 27 May Monaco Circuit de Monaco 78 260.520 6 10 June Canada Gilles Villeneuve Circuit 70 305.270 7 17 June United States Indianapolis Motor Speedway 73 306.016 8 1 July France Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours 70 308.586 9 8 July Britain Silverstone Circuit 60 308.355 10 22 July Germany Nürburgring 60 308.863 11 5 August Hungary Hungaroring 70 306.663 12 26 August Turkey Istanbul Park 58 309.396 13 9 September Italy Autodromo Nazionale Monza 53 306.720 14 16 September Belgium Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps 44 308.176 15 30 September Japan Fuji Speedway 67 305.721 16 7 October China Shanghai International Circuit 56 305.066 17 21 October Brazil Autódromo José Carlos Pace 71 305.909

  Four bewildering remarks from the Bush administration. Say What? Four bewildering remarks from the Bush administration. By Fred Kaplan Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 6:19 PM E.T. The world might be less stressful if the president of the most powerful nation didn’t so frequently convey the impression that he has no idea what’s going on. Here are three recent examples of his bewildering remarks, plus one from his secretary of state. 1. “If we leave [Iraq] before the mission is complete, if we withdraw, the enemy will follow us home.” This was from a speech by George W. Bush in Lancaster, Pa., last Aug. 16. That’s not so recent, but the comment was repeated just this month by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by Ohio Republican Rep. John Boehner; so someone up high still seems to think it’s true or at least catchy. In fact, it makes no sense whatever. First, it assumes that “the enemy” in Iraq consists entirely of al-Qaida terrorists, when they comprise only a small segment of the forces attacking U.S. troops. Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias are not likely to “follow us home.” Second, if terrorists wanted to attack American territory again (and maybe they do), their ability to do so is unaffected by whether we stay in or pull out of Iraq. It’s not as if they’re all holed up in Baghdad and Anbar province, just waiting for the fighting to stop so they can climb out of their foxholes and go blow up New York. If al-Qaida is a global network, its agents can fight in both places. Third, this is a hell of a thing to say in front of the allies. It’s a crudely selfish message, suggesting that we’re getting a lot of people killed over there in order that nobody gets killed back here. What leader of a beleaguered nation, reading this remark, would seek America’s protection? 2. “What we do know is that the Quds force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. … And we also know that the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. … What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds force to do what they did. But here’s my point: Either they knew or didn’t know, and what matters is, is that they’re there. What’s worse—that the government knew or that the government didn’t know? There are two things worse—that the U.S. government doesn’t know whether the Iranian government knew, and that the American president doesn’t seem to care. This may be unfair; he probably does care. So, what’s really worse—judging from this passage from Bush’s Feb. 14 press conference—is that he doesn’t seem to be doing much to find out. One way to find out might be to open up talks with Iran. Many former officials, of both parties, have urged the Bush administration to engage with Iran on a number of issues, for a number of reasons affecting national security. Here’s one more. If these particularly lethal IEDs known as “explosively formed penetrators” are being supplied with the Iranian government’s knowledge, maybe a deal can be struck to stop the flow; if they’re being supplied without high officials’ knowledge, maybe a deal can be struck to crack down jointly on the rogue agents. One thing is clear from this: The Bush administration doesn’t want to talk with the Iranians on principle. Maybe the Iranians don’t want to talk with us, either. It wouldn’t kill us to find out. (It didn’t kill us to find out, finally, with the North Koreans.) 3. Speaking of not talking to nasty regimes, here’s a remark by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at House hearings on Feb. 16: “We don’t have an ideological problem with talking to Syria. … [T]here just isn’t any evidence that they’re trying to change their behavior.” Rice was responding to a heartfelt plea from Republican Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia. “I beg of you,” he said, “if we’re going to ask a young man or woman in our military to go to Iraq three different times, it’s not asking too much … to send somebody to engage with … the Syrians.” The secretary’s response was a replay of Bush’s response to a similar question at a press conference last August: “We’ve been in touch with Syria,” he replied. “Colin Powell sent a message to Syria in person. Dick Armitage talked to Syria. … Syria knows what we think. … The problem is that their response hasn’t been very positive.” He was referring to a trip that his former secretary of state took to the Middle East back in 2003—and, though Bush didn’t mention this, Syria’s response was positive. Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, had asked Powell to get Syrian President Bashar Assad to crack down on Hezbollah—and Assad did, for a little while, anyway. Then, as now, a follow-up question might have been: How do you know what the Syrians are willing to do until you talk with them and offer them some incentives? Again, maybe the Syrians don’t want to talk with Bush. Maybe they figure that this lame-duck American president shows no sign of changing his behavior, that he has nothing useful to offer them. 4. “George Washington’s long struggle for freedom has also inspired generations of Americans to stand for freedom in their own time. Today, we’re fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life.” On Feb. 19, to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, President Bush gave a speech at Mount Vernon comparing himself to the father of our country and the Iraqi war to the Revolutionary War. In the past, George W. Bush has likened himself to Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. He should stay away from historical analogies. The crises and wars that he’s invoked don’t really correspond to his predicaments, or to the extent that they do, the comparisons tend not to flatter him. Washington is particularly ill-cast as a Bush stand-in. “On the field of battle,” Bush said at Mount Vernon, “Washington’s forces were facing a mighty empire, and the odds against them were overwhelming. The ragged Continental Army lost more battles than it won” and “stood on the brink of disaster many times. Yet George Washington’s calm hand and determination kept the cause of independence and the principles of our Declaration alive. … In the end, General Washington understood that the Revolutionary War was a test of wills, and his will was unbreakable.” Sound familiar? It’s obviously meant to, but it shouldn’t. Here’s an awkward question: By Bush’s own description, which side in the Iraq war most resembles the “ragged Continental Army” and which side the “mighty empire”? I don’t mean to draw moral (or any other sort of) equivalences, because there is nothing at all equivalent about those two wars, or these two presidents, and it degrades the serious study of history to pretend there is. But dragging Washington into Iraq is especially perverse because it’s hard to imagine a war that he would have found more dreadful. Bush quotes him as having once said, “My best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.” Yet Bush leaves out the context in which Washington made this remark. It was when the French foreign minister presented him with France’s new tricolor flag. That is, it was in celebration of the French Revolution. It was not, in any way, an endorsement of going to war to “spread freedom” around the world. To the contrary, in 1793, during France’s subsequent war with much of Europe, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, forbidding American citizens from taking any action that would help one side or another. Nor did Bush say anything about Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796, in which the first president, stepping down from two terms, elaborated his views still further. Washington urged his fellow citizens to avoid “overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.” He cautioned against “excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another.” And he advised, “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” At the conclusion of his Mount Vernon speech, Bush said of Washington, “His example guided us in his time; it guides us in our time; and it will guide us for all time.” Does Bush really believe that, or was he just yakking? And, as he might put it, what’s worse? Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

  Today’s Papers No Right By Daniel Politi Posted Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2007, at 5:07 AM E.T. The New York Times leads, the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, and the Los Angeles Times off-leads a federal appeals court ruling that foreign prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have no constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal courts. With the 2-1 decision, the court upheld the Military Commission Act passed last year by the Republican-controlled Congress. The Washington Post leads with yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that overturned a $79.5 million award in punitive damages against Philip Morris. By sending the case back to Oregon courts, the justices set limits on the extent jurors can consider the harm a company caused to others who weren’t part of the original case. USA Today leads with word that British Prime Minister Tony Blair told President Bush he plans to announce a “phased pullout” of troops from Iraq today. According to the BBC, Blair will say that up to 1,500 of the country’s 7,000 troops currently in Iraq will begin to return home in a few weeks. The LAT leads locally with news that a Superior Court judge declared that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s strategy of dealing with overcrowded prisons by transferring inmates to other states is illegal. Lawyers advocating for the rights of detainees vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, which twice before has said those held in Guantanamo have the right to contest their detention in federal courts. After the last Supreme Court decision, Congress passed the Military Commission Act to make clear that no such right exists. But now, many Democratic congressional leaders have vowed to amend the law in order to spell out habeas corpus rights for detainees. The 5-4 decision in the Philip Morris case avoided getting into whether there should be a limit to the amount that can be awarded for punitive damages. In this particular case, the punitive damages award was 97 times the actual damages given to a smoker’s widow. Regardless, it was seen as a clear victory for big business, particularly for those companies the general public might not view favorably. The BBC, and other British media, said that Blair is planning to reduce to 3,000 the number of troops in Iraq by Christmas (according to the Guardian, all British troops will be pulled out by the end of 2008). The Bush administration described it as a positive step. “President Bush sees this as a sign of success and what is possible for us once we help the Iraqis deal with the sectarian violence in Baghdad,” a National Security Council spokesman said. The NYT fronts and the WP goes inside with a follow-up on the Sunni woman who went on Al Jazeera on Monday night and said she was kidnapped and raped by three officers from the Iraqi National Police. The Times has the most detailed look at the case and focuses on how the rape allegations once again served to highlight sectarian tensions. Shiite leaders condemned the woman while Sunni politicians offered their support and said the case highlights how the Iraqi government doesn’t care about justice. The Post says the allegation illustrates the way Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki handles “damage control.” At first Maliki vowed to investigate but a few hours later condemned the woman, said she was a criminal, and announced the three officers would be honored. Meanwhile, attacks continued and, according to the NYT, killed at least 17 people in the capital. Also, north of Baghdad, a truck carrying chlorine exploded, killed nine, and made more than 150 people “violently ill by the toxic fumes.” The U.S. military announced a soldier was killed in Anbar province. The LAT fronts a look at the difficult decision facing U.S. and Iraqi forces of “when, whether, and how” they should take the new security crackdown to Sadr City, which is home to the Mahdi Army. So far, the troops have focused on Sunni insurgents, but there is mounting political pressure to demonstrate that the new plan will also target violent Shiites. Military commanders are worried about sparking an all-out war between Muqtada Sadr’s Mahdi militia and U.S. and Iraqi troops. Complicating matters is the fact that members of the Mahdi militia have been mostly out of sight lately, and Sadr has actually endorsed the new security plan. The NYT fronts, and the rest of the papers go inside with, the closing arguments in the perjury trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Prosecutors told jurors that Libby intentionally lied to protect his job and save the White House from embarrassment. Defense attorneys insisted any lies weren’t intentional but rather the result of forgetfulness due to Libby’s hectic schedule. The chief defense lawyer was emotional and asked the jury not to let anger over Iraq cloud their judgment and begged them to consider they could ruin a man’s life and reputation. Over on the NYT‘s op-ed page, Peter Funt writes about something that has been conspicuously missing from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—her surname. Funt takes a look at Clinton’s campaign material and notices that the name “Clinton” rarely appears, and when it does it’s usually to make a reference to her husband. “Someone has apparently decided that Mrs. Clinton will be the first major single-name candidate since 1952, when Ike’s P.R. gurus realized that ‘Eisenhower’ was tough to fit on a bumper sticker,” writes Funt. Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

  In Defense of “Loose” Women In Defense of “Loose” Women The latest crisis on college campuses. By Meghan O’Rourke Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 7:54 AM E.T. It is the time-honored duty of the adolescent to alarm adults (parents, in particular) by having wild and often idiotic fun—e.g., streaking naked across campus, playing drinking games, throwing things out windows, hooking up with an acquaintance or a friend who, in a flush of late-night hormones, suddenly looks kind of hot. I went to college in the early days of the “hookup” culture, as it is now called, and my recollection, through the haze of years, was that the whole point of hookups was that they were pleasurable—a little embarrassing, sometimes, but mostly, well, fun. Either I was self-deluded, or things have gotten a lot worse. According to Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, sex on campuses for young women today is a series of joyless encounters engaged in without either short-term pleasure or long-term reward. This pointless hedonism, in Stepp’s view, turns young women into jaded depressives unable to trust or love anyone, secretly wishing Mr. Right would show up on their doorstep with flowers and a fraternity pin. Unhooked purports to be a sweeping look at “hookup” culture on college campuses and several high schools, but, in fact, it is largely limited to a study of Duke University and George Washington University. (“Hooking up,” if you’ve never heard the phrase, is an intentionally vague term that signifies sexual contact, ranging from a kiss to sex.) Stepp, a Washington Post reporter, interviewed “dozens” of young women about their sex lives. The resulting book is the story of nine girls followed over the course of a year. It is heavy on anecdote and generalization and short on information, since, as Stepp herself points out, there is a dearth of reliable evidence about the subject. What she discovered on college campuses troubled her: “Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters known as hookups. Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold or seen as impossible,” she observes. “Some girls can handle this; others … are exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually by it.” Like a good mother, Unhooked strives to be less polemical than concerned. But just below its surface lurk the usual naked (and prurient) fears about girls and sex: Girls who put out are going to get hurt. Instead, Stepp argues, they should admit “the bar scene is a guy thing” and stay home to “bake cookies, brownies, muffins”—after all, guys, she confides, will do “anything” for homemade treats. (Who wants chlamydia when he can have cake?) Certainly, the scene Stepp evokes can seem grim. She watches as packs of girls go out to bars and snap cell-phone pics to remind them who they went home with, then get so drunk they pass out. A lot of the hooking up is motivated not by debauchery but by status: One high-school girl told Stepp that it was “all about getting/hooking up with the hottest, most well-known guys, and girls will spend a lot of time strategizing and manipulating their way into getting those guys.” Sorority life is also a factor. In one case, a sorority event leads to consensual sex the young woman in question doesn’t remember; in another, to what the woman calls “gray rape.” In a shift from victim-oriented 1980s campus culture, these women see themselves as equal or at least responsible partners in the sticky sexual situations their liberated outlook gets them into. Unhooked is suffused with the vague anxiety that is symptomatic of the teens-in-crisis genre, offset only by a handful of concrete ideas about the damage done by hookup culture: specifically, that young women involved in it are more likely to contract sexual diseases (doctors note rising rates of STDs among young women); that they often feel “awkward” and “hurt” as well as “strong, desirable, and sexy,” leading to depression and poor grades; that loveless sex fails to teach women the lessons of intimacy they need for marriage. Some of Stepp’s analysis is supported by students’ testimonies, but, as with all anecdotal journalism, one detects self-selection and data contamination at work. One problem is that Stepp cites no longitudinal work on the subject—these girls are still in college—which means a lot of predictive doom and gloom with little to buttress it. When girls and psychologists defend hooking up—or argue that she’s overemphasizing its downsides—she responds with rhetorical insinuations. After one girl who enjoyed noncommitted sex enthuses, “If sex was that good with Nicholas, imagine what it will be like with my husband,” Stepp responds, “But how would she find that husband?” In the 1950s, parents got concerned when girls “went steady” instead of playing the field, but Stepp is convinced this “new” habit of playing the field will warp girls’ hearts and make it impossible for them to settle down when the time comes. “It’s as if young women are practicing sprints while planning to run a marathon,” she worries. That metaphor of practice for a grueling competition says a lot about both the phenomenon Stepp is describing and her blinkered perspective. What her own reporting suggests, but she doesn’t seem to see, is that if there is a problem, it isn’t that young women are separating love and sex. It’s that they are blurring sex and work: The hookup culture is part of a wider ethos of status-seeking achievement. As one girl puts it: “Dating is a drain on energy and intellect, and we are overwhelmed, overprogrammed and overcommitted just trying to get into grad school.” So they throw themselves into erotic liaisons with the same competitive zeal they bring to résumé-building: “If you mention you think a guy is hot, your friend may be, ‘Oh, he is hot. I’m gonna go get with him,’ ” Anna, a high-school student, reveals. The combination of postfeminist liberation and pressure from parents to “do it all”—as one kid puts it—has led girls to confuse the need to be independent (which they associate with success) with the need to be invulnerable. Thus, they frame their seemingly explorative sex lives in rigid, instrumental terms, believing that vulnerability of any sort signals a confusing dependence. The result? Shying away from relationships that can hurt them—which includes even fleeting obsessions that can knock them off balance. If this is true, the last thing young women need is more assignments from those who view relationships as yet another arena in which they better “win.” In that sense, Unhooked is part of the very problem it’s trying to offset. While noting that a fear of “failing” makes college girls insist that they’ve got matters under control when they don’t, Stepp offers up the same prescriptive diagnoses that get in the way of young women asking themselves what they—as individuals—might really want: “I hope to encourage girls to think hard about whether they’re ‘getting it right,’ ” Stepp says. At the same time, young men get away without such cautionary lessons: Stepp follows a long pattern of leaving them out of the picture. From at least the 1920s (when everyone thought flappers were destroying manners) on through the 1980s (when teen pregnancy rates had everyone alarmed), girls have been hearing that their sex lives are the symbol of generational decadence. The truth is that even the sex-as-work ethic has an upside—one Stepp fails to see. For the first time in ages, young women are actually concentrating, in some fashion, more on their work and on their female friendships than on love and sex, and many do feel empowered by this. One of the studies Stepp cites found that young women feel less pressured to engage in sex than their male peers do. If some have a tough time figuring out what romantic or sexual pleasure is, they are nonetheless hardheaded about their status as pioneers in a new sexual landscape. “If there’s one thing that I know about adults, it’s that they pounce on adolescent sexuality with zeal,” says Alicia, a student at Duke, aptly pinpointing the adult impulse to scold. Stepp couldn’t resist the impulse herself. Buying into alarmism about women, Unhooked makes sex into a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is. The fact is, love is a messy arena, and in it most of us make both wise and foolish choices. C’est la vie, if not l’amour. Meghan O’Rourke is Slate‘s literary editor.

  Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Nightclubs and Bottle Service Christopher Smith for The New York Times Randy Scott, above right, a bottle host at Cain, pours Champagne while Chris Santos, a customer, helps himself to vodka Christopher Smith for The New York Times Artin Bey Archer leads customers up the stairs at Home. February 18, 2007 Wielding Power, Bottle by Bottle By ALEX WILLIAMS AT almost any big nightclub in New York City, it seems that most people — the rappers, the models and the maybe-21-year-old blondes teetering on spike heels — are striving to show they belong near the top of some theoretical pyramid of incandescence. But trying to divine the club status hierarchy, for those concerned with such things, can seem like a game, if not (after more than a few Ketel Ones) something approaching an art. Artin Bey Archer believes he has it down to a science. Mr. Archer, 35, works as a bottle host at Home, a club on West 27th Street. His job is to lure in big spenders, massage their egos and coax them to keep spending. “I have a Rolodex of over 3,000, broken down into different categories — are they five-star, four-star, three-star,” Mr. Archer explained, barking over a throbbing dance beat at the club last Saturday. His criterion for status is simple: the willingness to reserve a table and spend very large amounts of money on drinks by the bottle. Three-star clients are willing to exceed the club’s usual minimum, two bottles of liquor or Champagne at $350 apiece, per table. Five-star clients, many of them men armed with platinum cards, are willing to shatter it. In return, Mr. Archer rewards them with the best tables next to the prettiest women, and showers them with the most attention. “In the ’90s, you had to know the door guy,” he said. “If you did, you were king for a night.” Now, according to Mr. Archer, as well as club owners and patrons, it is the bottle host who is more likely bestowing status to the needy. So if you are looking for someone to focus your resentments on for the indignities of bottle service, bottle hosts might be a good place to start. Clubs’ increasing reliance on bottle service for revenue has placed more importance on the role. While the job is evolving — some are little more than floor managers — in some cases, the bottle host has become the face of the establishment. “It used to be the promoter who was at the forefront,” said Jamie Mulholland, an owner of Cain on West 27th Street. “Over the last three years, it’s very much the bottle hosts who have become the most prominent person in the club.” To critics of bottle service, these hosts are further trappings of a warped system in which the old intricacies of after-hours chic have been vulgarized down to mere spending power. For club owners, bottle hosts who bring in business help them survive in an increasingly competitive industry in which overhead costs like insurance and rents are climbing, scrutiny by the city and law enforcement is increasing, and some clubs are losing revenue as traditional New York patrons pause in their tracks at the sight of the police barricades blocking off West 27th Street, known informally as club row. (Club row took another hit two weeks ago with the death of Orlando Valle, a mailroom worker from the Bronx, who plunged down an elevator shaft at BED in a scuffle with the “Oz” actor Granville Adams, after celebrating his 35th birthday with a private bottle of vodka. BED is now temporarily closed, according to the New York Nightlife Association.) David Rabin, an owner of Lotus and president of the New York Nightlife Association, explained that many customers, particularly wealthy ones, prefer the individualized attention afforded by the best hosts over mass e-mail invitations from a promoter. People appreciate feeling like “they have some sort of service not available to the general public,” Mr. Rabin said. Since bottle service is the most significant revenue stream for many clubs, it is hardly surprising that bottle hosts usually earn more than any other club employee — $350 to $750 a night, plus 5 percent of the waitress tips. “You’re not going to spend $2,000 a week, plus 5 percent tips, on someone to bring in good-looking people,” said Mike Romer, an owner of Room Service, a restaurant and lounge on East 21st Street. “You’re paying them to bring in spenders.” Top clients at clubs typically understand that, at the more exclusive clubs, walk-ups (people who dare approach a night on the town with spontaneity) are rarely admitted unless they are young, attractive and female. The only other way in is usually to know an owner, or more often, to have the bottle host’s cellphone number. Between favored clients and hosts, the relationship is a status tango that pays dividends for each. Last Saturday at the safari-themed Cain, Tolga Kantarci, who works in finance in Manhattan, was standing in the V.I.P. area. Mr. Kantarci, 30, recounted showing up at Cain recently to celebrate a friend’s birthday and finding Randy Scott, a bottle host he has followed from club to club, waiting with balloons and a cake. Many clubs “pretty much play the same music and attract the same people,” Mr. Kantarci said. “It’s the host that makes it special.” Mr. Scott, a tall man with chiseled features in a custom-made black pinstriped suit, glided through the club’s V.I.P. area that night with the commanding air of Sirio Maccioni presiding over the dining room at Le Cirque. He paused to chat up old clients with the practiced calm of a cardiologist, and placed his hand on the shoulder of new ones as if it were a benediction. Mingling among hipsters with sideburns shaped like railroad spikes, members of the ruling family of a West African nation, and many, many models unwinding after Fashion Week, Mr. Scott acted as much like a star as a servant. Hand-delivering a bottle of Champagne to a table of models, Mr. Scott, 38, popped the cork, filled everyone’s flute — then filled his own, settling in for a chat. Smiling with leading-man confidence, he stroked the cheek of a young model from Portugal. A few minutes later, he summarized his customer service philosophy. “It’s all smoke and mirrors,” he said, smiling broadly. The power of the more prominent bottle hosts means that some owners find it important to sign them on before starting a new club, much as the owner of a Major League Baseball expansion franchise might splurge on an All-Star slugger. When opening Cain in 2004, Mr. Mulholland plucked Mr. Scott from Marquee and Jayma Cardoso from Pangaea. A new bottle host can pump up business at an established club, too. George Iordanou, who owns Nikki Midtown, a restaurant and nightclub on East 50th Street, said he recently imported Jon Staffas, the bottle host from a sister club, Nikki Beach, in Sardinia. In four weeks, Mr. Iordanou said, traffic from European expatriates has increased, as have bottle sales, some 15 percent. At Tenjune, a nightclub with zebra-print tables on Little West 12th Street that derives as much as 70 percent of its revenue from bottle service, the primary bottle host is Aalexander Julian. Like a doorman, Mr. Julian will greet clients and let them inside. But his role does not end at the velvet rope. “It’s grabbing them by the hand and taking them all the way through,” Mr. Julian, 32, explained. “It’s making sure the bathroom attendants know who they are.” For out-of-town clients, he often books hotel rooms or restaurant tables. He is, in essence, an insider contact, a valet, a concierge. His efforts appear to be paying off. Mark Birnbaum, an owner of Tenjune, said the club’s 28 tables are usually booked for Thursday, Friday and Saturday by 4 p.m. that day, despite the fact that the average bill for a table is around $3,500, and almost nightly at least one will climb as high as $8,000 or even $12,000. A bottle of Cristal Rosé Champagne alone costs $1,600 there. Which works quite nicely, if not for the customer, at least for the club — and the host. As Mr. Julian put it, sounding satisfied, “You’re only making the money if you’re attracting the money.”   Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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