Preparing for graduation at West Point, where your first job is the front line.

Intro to Warfare

• By Chris Smith

 

It takes all of about four minutes for 4,300 cadets to file into the West Point mess hall for breakfast. Meals are taken inside a graceful granite building whose arched ceilings, dark wooden walls, and low lighting give it the feel of a Gothic cathedral—one where the parishioners are dressed in gray or camouflage uniforms, and the saints, staring down from massive oil paintings lining the walls, are decorated generals. A rumbling chatter echoes as the cadets are seated, until a clear, forceful voice, coming from a balcony above the main dining-room floor, quiets the cavernous room.

"Please give your attention to the first captain!"

Then another voice, this one belonging to the top-ranked cadet.

"I regret to inform you of the death of First Lieutenant Phillip Neel, class of 2005. First Lieutenant Neel died on 8 April 2007, in Balad, Iraq, when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using grenades. Please join me in observing a moment of silence for this fallen graduate."

Among the silent is cadet David del Cuadro-Zimmerman, 22, a son of Park Slope, who is in his final year at the United States Military Academy. Later that day, he nods solemnly; he remembers seeing Lieutenant Neel on campus not that long ago. "Those announcements seem to come more frequently now," he says. Four years ago, as the war in Iraq began, del Cuadro-Zimmerman's parents, both retired public-school teachers, had offered to pay for whatever college he chose—anywhere that would keep him from going to West Point. At the last minute, though, he picked Army over Boston College. Now he's ready to start flight school and get to Iraq. Yet he can't help wondering what his life would have been like had he taken up his parents on their offer.

Nine hundred cadets will graduate from West Point on May 26. Five are from New York City. After taking in a commencement speech from Vice-President Dick Cheney, and after tossing their caps in the air in the football stadium, the Army's newest officers will scatter for months of branch training. Perhaps before it ends, Congress will cut off money for the war and bring the troops home. Perhaps Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, will prestidigitate a functioning government and police force. But the most likely scenario is that all but a handful of the 900 graduates will be in harm's way by this time next year.

They'll face grim odds. West Point graduates are taking a larger share of casualties than at any time in recent American military history. Of the almost 3,800 military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, 49 have been USMA alumni. That's three times the percentage of graduate deaths in Vietnam, six times higher than what befell former cadets in the Second World War, and thirteen times the proportion of those killed in the First World War. Suicide bombers, IEDs, snipers—it's little wonder that more officers are doing the "five and fly," the term for leaving uniform as soon as the required five years of active duty is finished. The Army is now suffering from a shortage of about 3,000 mid-level officers, which has caused President Bush to gradually increase the size of West Point's entering classes, growing the student body from 4,000 to 4,300 cadets in the past four years.

New York's newest warriors are part of the first class to matriculate after the war in Iraq began. Some were pulled by patriotism; for others, joining the Army was a truly radical form of rebellion. All knew what they were signing up for—although they couldn't have anticipated the questions that would arise about the weapons of mass destruction, or the country's political sea change, or even that we'd still be there four years later. Somehow, they've held onto an inspiring, clear-eyed idealism. Or maybe it's a self-preserving denial. "Everyone is optimistic about what lies ahead," del Cuadro-Zimmerman says. "Dwelling on why the country went to war in the first place is a waste of time. It's about making things right now, or at least doing right from here forward."

Marya Rosenberg had been in the Army for ten days, and she was starving. It was June 2003, the beginning of the introductory summer session for new cadets—and for many, the roughest stretch of their entire four years at West Point. Rosenberg is a naturally lean five foot seven, but she had melted from 134 pounds to 122. Running in the summer heat with a 25-pound pack on her back contributed to the drastic drop, but the real cause was even more basic—and more cruel.

"They wouldn't let me eat," Rosenberg, 22, says of the senior cadets running the indoctrination. "I was screwing up everything at first—I couldn't even march in step. So at meals, they put me at the haze table. They tell you anything you eat has to be small enough to swallow in three to five chews. This went on for two weeks, until my squad started volunteering to switch out with me because they thought I was dying."

 

Rosenberg was 50 miles north of the city and a long way from home. She'd grown up on East 84th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, in a cozy sixth-floor two-bedroom. She could lean over the railing of her apartment's rooftop deck and see the Met. Rosenberg's parents are both semi-retired corporate lawyers with refined literary tastes. She'd gone to Hunter, one of the city's elite public high schools, and a place where a liberal political viewpoint is as assumed as the school building's staying upright.

By tenth grade, Rosenberg was feeling aimless. So when an unsolicited postcard from West Point arrived in her mailbox, along with dozens from conventional colleges thanks to her stellar PSAT scores, Rosenberg was curious, if unserious. "I thought it was hilarious," she says. "It seemed so out of character in terms of everything I was doing. I said, 'Well, I'm not making a commitment if I send in the card.'"

Marya's father, however, was more intrigued. To Richard Rosenberg, West Point seemed a strangely perfect fit. When Marya and her younger sister, Alexandra, were small, their father would read them nightly bedtime stories, selecting the books with care. "I happen to like knight stories," says Richard. "So in the beginning, there was a version of King Arthur, by Sir James Knowles. The last thing I read Marya was Moby-Dick, which I would say is a weird, sad, modern knight story. The medieval romances are, of course, fantasies—but nothing just happens in those stories. Everything is intended to teach—specifically, the values of the warrior class."

Making the decision to go to West Point during a polarizing war is a bold choice for a high-school student living in one of the deepest-blue precincts of a staunchly antiwar city. "Everybody was all busy protesting the war at the time," says Marya. "Hunter is really liberal, and I'm a liberal too. But I had one girl ask me what I was thinking about doing for college, and when I told her, she said, 'How could you do something so immoral?' They made fun of me in the yearbook."

She is regularly reminded that, apart from her parents' place on East 84th, New York is not her home anymore. "There's a graduate of West Point who endowed this great program that sends cadets to the opera," she says. "A couple of years ago, we went to the Metropolitan Opera and The New Yorker wrote an article and they were dubious about the idea. There was a line in the story, something like 'After all, Josef Mengele liked to listen to opera when he was torturing people.' That made me so angry. Do you guys recall who stopped Josef Mengele? It was not reporters at The New Yorker, or people in New York City with correct moral principles. It was people in the Army."

Richard Rosenberg, sitting in his Upper East Side living room, becomes visibly distraught at the thought of his daughter's choice going unappreciated. "I grew up in Liberty, New York, the Catskills," he says. "When a child from Liberty gets into West Point"—his voice breaks—"they get their picture in the paper, you know? They make a big deal of it."

But the reaction Marya got from her Hunter teachers and classmates only confirmed her decision to join the Army. And her sister has followed in her footsteps. Alexandra is now a plebe, finishing up her freshman year at West Point.

Richard glances up at his wife, who is slicing some coffee cake from Greenberg's. "Kate was upset when Marya got interested in West Point," he says.

"I just knew it was going to happen," she says quietly, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses.

"Like the fates had been arranged," Richard says.

The attackers have Mark Zambarda surrounded. They're rushing in, fists flying—first one, then another pair, then a fourth, closing fast. Everyone is taller and heavier than Zambarda. But he doesn't wait, or run away. He charges the nearest man, pins his arms, and uses him as a shield. Punches rock Zambarda's head, but he doesn't panic. He keeps moving, pivoting, warding off blows with the body of one of his enemies, sweat turning his fatigues a dark swampy green.

The whistle blows after two minutes. Zambarda and his attackers—his classmates—suck wind. He's exhausted, but he's upright, staggering across the matted floor inside Arvin gym. "Most kids are crushed the first time," says professor Jason Winkle. "They forget what they're doing and end up cowering or becoming a punching bag. Mark was a natural. He was the aggressor, and he stayed under control. As far as heart, he's one of the biggest kids in the world."

Zambarda, 21, grew up playing with GI Joes in a blue-collar section of Staten Island, the son of an narcotics detective in the NYPD. Family friends died responding to the attacks of September 11, and his father spent days vainly searching for survivors. "I thought I needed to consider doing something to give back to the country. Less than three-tenths of one percent of the population is serving in the military," the cadet says. Zambarda knew that one of his father's few regrets was not serving in Vietnam. "You're 18 years old, you're ready to grab the bull by the horns. Joining the military seemed like a cool thing to do. I still think it's one of the coolest jobs a guy can have," he says. "But the reality of going to war wasn't really a consideration."

The reality of going to war has dramatically changed the experience of West Point. There are still the standard elements of a military education—Introduction to Warfighting, Tactical Leadership, Combined Arms Operations I and II—but the academy has adapted to meet the specific demands of battle in Iraq. The multiple-attacker exercise, which Winkle calls "the Gauntlet," is part of a course called Advanced Close-Quarters Combat; Zambarda took it in the fall of his junior year. West Point hired Winkle as director of combatives in the days immediately following September 11, as one of the first steps in retooling a curriculum for an unpredictable and dangerous new period. He'd spent his career training Navy seals and Army Special Forces units. "West Point has changed almost everything it teaches about on-the-ground combat in the past five years," says Winkle, who is now teaching at Indiana State. "In the Vietnam era, we were doing jungle warfare; in the first Gulf War, it was a lot of air strikes. Now we've moved into an era where urban warfare is predominant. I introduced military operations in urban terrain."

Nine instructors, most rotating through West Point after tours in Iraq, teach the tactics of asymmetric warfare. "When you have to hunt the bad guy in the streets in the middle of people trying to live and exist, you've got some major issues," Winkle says. "People are shooting at us from mosques, but if we return fire, we're the bad guy. It's extremely tough. We do a lot of mind-set training on what it means to be a warrior: When you're terrified and someone's trying to hurt you, how do you not squeeze that trigger? It's critical that we give them an ethical basis to fall back on."

Even as the churning of the leadership ranks has increased the pressure to produce greater numbers of field commanders, the academy has clung tenaciously to its mission—turning out well-rounded adults, not just battle-ready grunts. The debacle in Iraq has made that mission even more important. "The new lieutenants are coming out of four years at the academy, and they're put in charge of guys who've done two or three tours already," Winkle says. "They're expected to show up and lead these soldiers. That's a heck of a thing to hang over some young kid's head." Especially because Iraq is very much a platoon leader's war. Fighting an insurgency means they're out in front, commanding small units instead of working in larger formations directed by senior officials off the battlefield. The first lieutenants have unusual power to exercise independent judgment—but they're also far more vulnerable than in other wars.

West Point has tried to prepare the cadets more thoroughly by expanding its menu of ethics courses—partly as a response to embarrassments like Abu Ghraib, but primarily because its graduates are dropped into the middle of a world of shadowy allegiances and unending stress. The academy has also added courses on terrorism, a subject barely addressed in the curriculum before September 11. It was only in 2003 that the academy opened its Combating Terrorism Center.

In classes like Terrorism: New Challenges, the school attempts to catch up with the modern threat. Inside Thayer Hall, sixteen cadets are riveted to a TV set, watching Dirty Kuffar, an infamous, somewhat goofy jihadist video made somewhere in England. On screen, a black-masked, gun-waving man dances and raps in front of a flag filled with Arabic slogans. The video cuts quickly to American soldiers being shot, to photos of President Bush shaking hands with Ariel Sharon, to a glimpse of a smiling Saddam Hussein.

"We cover the roots of terrorism, how does an individual become involved with a violent organization, the strategic uses of violence," says professor Lianne Kennedy-Boudali, one of five part-time instructors in the terrorism program. "And we want the cadets to have an understanding of how their role fits in a larger strategic picture, both for their own safety and because what they do on a daily basis has an effect on U.S. policy. The cadets are going to end up on the ground in a year, so this is pretty practical information. They need to understand the difference between a Sunni Baathist, what that person wants out of an act of violence, versus Al Qaeda in Iraq, and who each is trying to influence. What changes most is the part dealing with insurgency, about the relationship between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency."

Zambarda was one of Kennedy-Boudali's best students. "Mark and the other cadets are smart; they don't take a lot of things for granted," she says. "And they're kind of cynical, which is good, too."

When a West Point graduate is killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, word passes quickly. Marya Rosenberg had heard about Phil Neel the day before the announcement in the mess hall.

"He was in my company two years ago," she says. "And I was on a team with him in my second year here. I don't want to jump on other people's tragedies, because I didn't know him that well. I'm really sorry this happened for his family. Some of my friends in the company are really devastated by his death. They were close to him, and that was upsetting, to see them upset. Two of my good friends from the class of '05 are in Iraq right now, though thankfully they've been okay so far."

Rosenberg is acutely aware that her hometown believes Neel's death, along with the thousands of others in Iraq, was in the service of a falsely entered, then mismanaged war. But she sticks to the cadet's duty not to publicly criticize the chain of command. Whatever mission she's sent on, she'll fulfill. Still, she doesn't necessarily disagree that the war in Iraq has been misguided. "I don't want to get into criticizing the president or anything," she says diplomatically. "But I have a lot of respect for the retired generals who have spoken out against things that are clearly wrong."

Sometimes, though, after taps is played each night at 11:30, talk in the barracks turns to who is to blame for the mess in Iraq. "People don't attribute the mistakes to any one person in particular," says one cadet. "Well, okay—Donald Rumsfeld. And there's a disappointment with the civilian leadership overall."

Interestingly, though, the leaders who come in for the harshest critiques are the ones in uniform. "The generals haven't spoken up as much as they should have," says a New York cadet. "When you become a four-star general, the expectation is that you're a politician as well as a military leader, and you can't always hold your tongue. Sometimes you have to speak up, and a lot of people feel that hasn't been done. The troops just aren't getting what's needed over there, or they're getting it too late. That's what makes people upset."

Another thing that makes cadets mad is the public's indifference to their sacrifice. Joseph McCarthy, 21, who grew up in the Bronx, was in class at Stuyvesant when the planes hit. "Anyone who's in support of the troops, I'd just like to say, let the troops know, you know?" says McCarthy, who is headed for an artillery unit. "Everyone has different opinions on the war, but at least let the soldiers know you're there for them."

Zambarda loves a good argument; often playing devil's advocate, he constantly turns issues over in his head. He reads the Times every day, and has been closely following the debate in Congress over setting a deadline for withdrawal. "As far as setting a deadline, it's a step in the right direction," he says. "It's forcing the government to evaluate; what is the exit plan? As long as it doesn't come to the point where we're leaving the soldiers hanging out to dry." Still, he says, "if I really wanted to make policy decisions, I should have been a politician. My job is to execute the orders, the lawful orders, of those above me."

At the end of the day, there's simply not much point in debating something that is a fact of life. "The larger Army attitude doesn't really change," says one cadet. "We've all gone through stuff here we thought was pretty unpleasant. So if you stay the four years, you have that attitude: Maybe things suck, but you have to put your head down and keep going. And that characterizes people's attitudes toward the war."

Rosenberg recently went back to Hunter, her old high school, to talk to students about what it's like to be a cadet right now. Mostly the students were respectful; the faculty was another story. "One of the teachers, when I walked down the hall in my uniform, yelled, 'No blood for oil!'" she says, her face reddening. "Um, I had nothing to do with that. Then I talked to my old art-history teacher, who's a sweet guy, and I wanted to tell him I'm taking a bunch of art-history courses now. He was like, 'Oh, so you'll know what [the] buildings are before you drop bombs on them.'"

Lately she's racked up honors that even the liberals at Hunter can appreciate: Scribner chose one of her poems for The Best American Poetry2007. And in April, she was selected for a scholarship to pursue Asian studies, so she'll spend the next year in Hawaii. She's considering studying for a law degree after that, but the Army is making no promises. "To be honest, I don't want to go to Iraq," Rosenberg says. "I'll go if my unit deploys, but I don't want to go there, or to Afghanistan. Sometimes I feel kind of guilty about that, when other people are putting themselves in harm's way."

She's tried to dissuade a few of the cadets she cares about most from rushing into action. "I'm not as worried about myself as I am some of my friends," she says. "A guy that I was dating for a while, that I'm still good friends with, wants to be a pilot, and he's crazy to get into combat. He's just worried that the war's going to be over before he gets there. He was one of the people who was really upset when Lieutenant Neel died, and I said to him, 'This is why I don't want you to be so gung ho about going to combat. And he's like, 'Well, I'm invincible, so don't worry about me.' He's kidding, but…"

Rosenberg's parents are thrilled she'll be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the short term, but the anxiety is still there. One way Richard Rosenberg has tried to cope is by wearing his allegiance on his chest at nearly all times: His closet is full of shirts and jackets emblazoned with the United States Military Academy logo. ("I couldn't quit West Point," Marya says with a laugh. "My father wouldn't have anything to wear.") Still, he swings rapidly from pride at what his daughter has achieved to anguish about where the future will take her. "There's nothing Marya could have done that I would have regarded with greater respect. But the dark side of that is the fear that something bad could happen." He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, tears seep from the corners. "I, I, um, what can one do? These things are worrisome. Fortunately, the Army doesn't allow women in direct combat—artillery, infantry, armor. My own view is that women could do a great job, but I'm grateful for the policy. Because I don't want my baby to get hurt."

Kate Rosenberg interrupts. She wants to make it clear she didn't vote for George W. Bush, either time. Asked what she'd tell Cheney if she somehow got five minutes alone with him at graduation, she shakes her head slowly, biting her tongue so as not to cause any trouble for Marya.

"They have heard much more powerful voices than ours and not listened," Richard Rosenberg says. "So what could we say?"

Perched high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, West Point seems to gleam in the spring sun. Its granite buildings loom like a beautiful fortress over the green grass and slate courtyards. On this April day, as I meet with Zambarda on campus, down in Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is announcing the extension of military tours from twelve to fifteen months.

Lately, with his deployment looming, the possibility of being wounded occupies Zambarda less than the concern that he'll need to shoot someone. "I just went to a class a week ago on the moral justification for killing," he says. "No one wants to deal with, for the rest of their lives, having killed someone. That's scary. Some people accept the idea, that it's my job, I'm the Army. But for anyone who's in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there's a lot of 'Thou shall not kill.' How do you deal with that? It will plague you for the rest of your life. We went over a lot of theory. Whether it proved to me whether I should feel justified killing someone or not—that's not as important as that it got me thinking."

This is Zambarda's primary method for dealing with fear: He tries to think his way past it. He has immersed himself in tactics and practical preparation, and he's majoring in Arabic. "It might give me five seconds to react—extra," he says. "On the front lines, it could save my life, or more importantly, one of my soldiers'. The most potent weapon on the battlefield for me isn't going to be my rifle. It's going to be my brain."

He well knows, however, that Iraq is a place that defies logic. One of Zambarda's best friends is First Lieutenant Daniel Sjursen, who also grew up on Staten Island and graduated from West Point two years ago. Sjursen is now in Baghdad; Zambarda e-mails him regularly, and is troubled by the changes he's seeing in his pal, whom he considers one of the toughest, most competent officers he knows. "He's in armor—that's tanks—and he's had one of the highest platoon attrition rates. He's lost a lot of soldiers," Zambarda says. "It's sad. The kind of fight we're in today, it's not always about how good you are tactically. There's a lot of randomness."

He tries to tamp down the uncertainty by thinking about the men he'll soon be leading. "The thing with being a leader—you're that beacon that all the soldiers underneath you are looking at," Zambarda says, his words rushing out. "As much fear as I may have to deal with, I know that I'd be more afraid of my guys breaking down and everything going to hell." He pauses and looks out the window, at the cadets striding through the sun on their way to class. "It's hard to predict how I'll react when the first bullet goes by my ear and I say, 'Okay, what now?' Everyone's looking at me; I can't be saying, 'What now?' I gotta be telling people what to do."

At times, he uses bravado to get past the worry—especially at home, when he knows he can get a rise out of his mother by saying he can't wait to feel the adrenaline rush of combat. Zambarda's father spent twenty years in the NYPD, and knows what it's like to have a gun pointed at him. "I've only heard the sound of a bullet flying past my head once," says Mark Sr., "and it's not a good sound."

Mark's mother, Nancy, an administrator at Merrill Lynch, absently clutches a large pillow to her chest as she talks about her son's last chance to turn back. Midway through West Point, all cadets must make a decision: They can leave up to two years into their military education, but if they choose to stay, they commit to active duty. "I encouraged him to get out if he could," she says. "As the reality of it started setting in, as a parent, I really got scared. I said, 'If you have any doubt at all, get out.' Many times. Many times." Mark filled out an application to Cooper Union, where his best friend goes to school, just to remind himself he had options. He never submitted it.

Mark's next choice thrilled his mother even less: He wanted to "branch" infantry. Zambarda had excellent grades; why not, his mother suggested, apply to medical school? The Army needs doctors, and five more years in classes wouldn't be such a bad thing. Or, his father said, how about artillery? At least that's twenty miles from the front lines. Infantry, Mark insisted, and, as always, he backed it up with logic. "He sold it to us that, if you're gonna be over there anyway, infantry guys are the best trained," Nancy says. "And if you're going to be career military, infantry is almost a requirement. He sold it to me. A little bit. I'm a little better with it now."

The Zambardas are inviting dozens of friends and relatives to celebrate Mark's graduation. He'll wear his class-of-2007 ring, with an engraved image of the Twin Towers and the class motto ALWAYS REMEMBER, NEVER SURRENDER.

"This coming summer, I have 60 days of leave, and my best friend from back home, he asked me if I wanted to go on a trip with him to the Dominican Republic," Zambarda says. "It's basically seven days and seven nights of drinking and partying. The person I was before I came to West Point, that would have been the perfect trip. But it doesn't interest me now." Instead, he'll use his leave this summer to backpack in Europe, one last spasm of being a regular kid.

Lately, though, he spends a lot of time thinking about the day he departs for Iraq, and what he'll say to his mother and father.

"I will just tell them I'm going to do everything I can to come back alive, and bring every single soldier I have alive," Zambarda says. "I'm gonna do my job. And if I die on duty, that I'm sure I died doing something I'm proud of."

He takes a deep breath.

"I know that if I die, that doesn't affect me so much. It's more worrisome for me that my parents will live the rest of their lives questioning ever letting me apply here."

An old-fashioned diplomatic dispute plays out in cyberspace

e-Stonia Under Attack
An old-fashioned diplomatic dispute plays out in cyberspace.
By Anne Applebaum
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007, at 6:53 A.M. E.T.

And now for a quick quiz: A European country—a member in good standing of NATO and the European Union—has recently suffered multiple hostile attacks on its institutions. Can you a) name the country; b) describe the attacks; and c) explain what NATO is doing about it?

If you can't, don't worry: NATO itself doesn't quite know what it is doing about it, despite the alliance's treaty, which declares an armed attack on one of its members "an attack against them all." For the country is Estonia—a very small, very new member of NATO—the attacks are taking place in cyberspace, and while the perpetrators aren't exactly unknown, their existence can't be proved, either.

Which creates a dilemma—several, in fact: Is this an "armed attack"? Is the NATO alliance obliged to respond? And if so, how? None of these questions have clear answers: Welcome to the 21^st century. And if you thought that terrorists headquartered in ungovernable bits of the undeveloped world were our worst problem, think again.

To add an extra layer of complication to this story, it's important to explain that its origins lie not in the high-tech cyberfuture but in a Cold War-era argument over the past. Several weeks ago, the Estonian government decided to move a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from its place in the center of Tallinn, the capital, to a cemetery outside town, together with the remains of the Soviet soldiers who had been buried beneath it. That might not sound like a casus belli, but to the Russian minority in Estonia, most of whose families arrived in the country after the Red Army drove the Germans out in 1945, that statue had become a rallying point as well as a justification of their right to remain in Estonia. To the Estonians, one in 10 of whom was deported to Siberia after 1945, the statue had become a symbol of half a century's worth of Soviet occupation and oppression. A riot ensued; a Russian protester was killed; hooligans attacked the Estonian ambassador in Moscow; and, a few days later, Estonian government, bank, and newspaper Web sites began to go down one by one.

Elsewhere, this might not have mattered quite so much. A defense information specialist from another newish NATO member state told me, somewhat ruefully, that his country wouldn't be vulnerable to a cyberattack because so little of its infrastructure is sophisticated enough to use the Internet. But Estonia—"e-Stonia" to its fans—practices forms of e-government advanced even by Western European standards. Estonians pay taxes online, vote online, bank online. Their national ID cards contain electronic chips. When the country's Cabinet meets, everyone brings their laptop. When denial-of-service attacks start taking down Estonian Web sites, it matters.

Of course, as is the way of these things, their precise origin cannot be determined: Unlike classic terrorism, the essence of modern cyberwarfare is its anonymity. Though some of the attacks did appear to come from PCs belonging to the Russian presidential administration, others came from as far afield as Brazil and Vietnam. As a result, even the Estonian government's experts have backed away from directly accusing the Russian government. After all, angry hackers can organize a "botnet"—a group of computers that have been remotely hacked and forced, unwittingly, to send out spam or viruses—anywhere. Indeed, "patriotic" Chinese hackers have made a specialty out of this sort of thing, launching cyberattacks at moments of high tension against both Japanese and U.S. government Web sites, using computers based all over the world.

Both the anonymity and the novelty may turn out to be part of the appeal, particularly if, as some in NATO now believe, the attacks are Russian "tests," both of the West's preparedness for cyberwarfare in general and of NATO's commitment to its newest, weakest members in particular. Some believe the Russian government is now playing with different tactics, trying to see which forms of harassment work best: the verbal attacks on Estonia, the Russian oil pipeline to Lithuania that mysteriously turns out to need repairs, or the embargos on Polish meat products and Georgian wine.

If that is the case, then surely the lesson of the last three weeks is that cyberwarfare has a lot going for it: It creates no uproar, results in no tit-for-tat economic sanctions, doesn't seem like a "real" form of warfare, and doesn't get anyone worried about Europe's long-term energy needs. NATO did, in the end, quietly send a few specialists to Estonia, as (even more quietly) did the Pentagon. A few Europeans complained a bit at a summit over the weekend, too. But there the affair will end—until the attacked Estonian government in cyberspace comes back online, better armed for the next battle.

Today's Papers

No Date
By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007, at 6:01 A.M. E.T.

The New York Times and Washington Post lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with Democrats giving up on their quest to include a timeline for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq in the war-spending bill. The decision came after President Bush repeatedly vowed to, once again, use his veto power on any bill that contained a timeline. The WP wastes no time, declaring in its lead sentence that this is a clear victory for Bush.

The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the immigration bill passed its first major hurdle yesterday after senators voted against an amendment that would have removed the temporary-workers provision from the legislation. USA Today leads with a new survey that reveals Muslims in the United States have moderate political views and, for the most part, reject Islamic extremism. This is in contrast to Muslims in several Western European countries who are more likely to be sympathetic to suicide bombers. But the survey also found "pockets of sympathy for extremism" among younger Muslims.

Instead of a schedule for withdrawal, Democrats agreed with Republicans to establish benchmarks for the Iraqi government, which would be tied to reconstruction aid. The LAT notes, though, that Bush would be allowed to waive these requirements. Many anti-war Democrats were angry about the compromise, and even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she's "not likely to vote for something that doesn't have a timetable." To deal with all these unhappy lawmakers, Democratic leaders are planning to divide the war-spending bill into two separate votes. One, which many Democrats will probably oppose, would provide the war money, and the other would focus on the domestic-spending part of the bill. Then the House would combine the bills and send them to the Senate, with the hope that they will reach the White House before the Memorial Day recess.

The immigration reform bill has a provision that would allow 400,000 (and as many as 600,000) temporary workers into the United States for two-year stints. Two Democrats, who say the program will decrease overall wages and create an underclass of workers, brought an amendment to remove the provision, which was defeated 64-31. Democratic lawmakers vowed to come back to the issue of temporary workers and are set to issue an amendment that would cut their number in half to 200,000, which many believe has a good chance of passing.

The LAT, WP, and WSJ front news that British prosecutors accused a Russian millionaire businessman, Andrei Lugovoi, of murdering former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive poisoning. British authorities demanded that the Russian government extradite Lugovoi, himself a former KGB agent, so he can stand trial. Russian officials refused, saying that extradition is banned by the country's constitution. It is widely known that the two former KGB agents met at a hotel bar in London before Litvinenko died.

The day has finally arrived for lawmakers to hear the testimony of Monica Goodling, the former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who was the Justice Department's liaison with the White House before she resigned in April. She agreed to talk about the firings of U.S. attorneys only after she was granted immunity. The LAT fronts, and the WP goes inside with, a look at Goodling, and they both paint a picture of a young and inexperienced aide who suddenly became a powerful figure in the Justice Department. She did not hesitate to use that power and by all accounts was a central figure in selecting which U.S. attorneys were going to be fired. Goodling also apparently used her position to try to prevent the hiring of career prosecutors she thought were too liberal. The LAT mentions how Goodling, along with Kyle Sampson, tried to select candidates for the job left by the resignation of the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles even though there was already a bipartisan commission in place to do just that.

Both the NYT and LAT have good Page One stories that shine a light into the daily lives of U.S. troops in Iraq. The NYT's Damien Cave was traveling with the unit searching for three of their own who were captured Saturday when a bomb exploded and killed one of the soldiers. These types of homemade landmines have recently become more of a threat to soldiers who had gotten used to worrying about roadside bombs. The LAT's Garrett Therolf spent four days with a platoon in western Baghdad that is emblematic of the new security plan that has service members living in small outposts close to the communities they are trying to protect. Perhaps not surprisingly, the soldiers "now openly declare pessimism for the mission's chances."

All the papers mention that thousands of Palestinian refugees escaped from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as soon as a cease-fire began.

The NYT fronts, and the WP and LAT go inside with, a look at how Democratic leaders are having a tough time passing even watered-down ethics legislation. Many are opposed to a provision that would force lobbyists to disclose the contributions that they bundle together from different contributors. Meanwhile, Democrats voted against censuring one of their most powerful members, Rep. John Murtha, who faced claims that he violated the ethics rule that forbids trading votes for earmarks. The controversy began when Republican Rep. Mike Rogers questioned one of Murtha's earmarks. Murtha then allegedly warned Rogers: "I hope you don't have any earmarks in the defense appropriation bill, because they are gone and you will not get any earmarks now and forever."

Wouldn't have been very good gossip … A correction from the LAT: "An article … about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure on the Wal-Mart board of directors said that in early 1992 she told two friends confidentially that her husband … was planning to run for president. The conversation took place in early fall 1991."

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Today's Papers

Cash Flow
By Barbara Raab
Posted Sunday, May 20, 2007, at 5:25 A.M E.T.

With no obvious hard news lead this Sunday, the papers each go their own way with enterprise stories. The New York Times leads with news that the U.S. pays Pakistan roughly $1 billion every year to fight terrorists along the Afghan border, cash that continues to flow even as Pakistan cuts back on patrols in key al-Qaida and Taliban areas. It's a good fit with the Los Angeles Times lead describing a secret CIA operation targeting Osama Bin Laden that, while not producing any fresh leads on his whereabouts, has resulted in important new intelligence about al-Qaida's expanding presence in Pakistan. The Washington Post leads with a stomach-turning report on the vast amount of food coming into the U.S. from China that is unfit for human consumption.

The little-known monthly support payments to Pakistan have totaled $5.6 billion since the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration has no plans to cut off the cash or tie the payments to Pakistan's performance, despite the resurgence of terrorists in the past year and growing evidence that the Pakistani military often looks the other way when Taliban fighters take refuge inside their country. Why? Unnamed officials tell the Times that Washington is fearful of further destabilizing President Pervez Musharraf.

The withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghan border described by the New York Times is a major factor in al-Qaida's resurgence in Pakistan's tribal territories, described in today's LAT lead. The U.S. learned a lot about those efforts from the CIA operation launched last year to hunt down Bin Laden, high-value target No. 1 or "HVT1." The operation has also revealed an alarming increase in the amount of cash for al-Qaida that is coming into Pakistan from Iraq. As for HVT1, "any prediction on when we're going to get him is just ridiculous."

For years, China has been flooding U.S. ports with tainted, toxic, and counterfeit foods, supplements and medicines. Government inspectors catch only a small fraction of these products—"filthy" juices and fruits, "poisonous" swordfish, prohibited products shipped in crates labeled "dried lily flower." But change will be difficult, policy experts say, because tighter rules on Chinese imports could harm many American companies that rely on Chinese goods, and/or want a piece of the lucrative Chinese market for their own products.

Both the WP and the NYT go front and center with heart-wrenchers. The Post's is a profile of Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where 336 Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried (check out the slideshow, too). The mother of one young soldier places iPod ear buds on her son's grave and plays some of his favorite songs. The Times reports on elderly Americans bilked out of their life savings by telemarketing criminals (there are audio examples of actual phone calls) who trick them into revealing their banking information after buying their names from a consumer data-collection company called infoUSA. Regulators say infoUSA knows it is doing business with lawbreakers who prey upon millions of the vulnerable elderly. "I just chatted with this woman for a few minutes," says a 92-year-old widower from Iowa, "and the next thing I knew, they took everything I had."

Last week's revelations of that hospital room drama involving a seriously ill former Attorney General John Ashcroft and extraordinary bedside efforts by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to get Ashcroft's approval for an eavesdropping program he opposed, inspired the Post to front a piece that asserts "something of a reappraisal of Ashcroft by some on the left." Despite the revelation that Ashcroft privately stood up to Cheney and Rumsfeld over the treatment of detainees at Gitmo, TP thinks that's a stretch. Just because Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Wonkette, and People for the American Way give Ashcroft props for holding the line from his hospital bed does not mean they have "reappraised" his pushing for the Patriot Act, authorizing detentions without charges after Sept. 11, defending interrogation techniques some call torture, and getting unprecedented authority to look at private records even in public libraries (not to mention covering up the bare-breasted "Spirit of Justice"). (And why does the WP place Andrew Sullivan on "the left"?)

Also in the papers today: The top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq says military officials think they know who captured three missing soldiers, and that he believes at least two of them are still alive. The Green Zone was shelled during a surprise visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Post fronts what it calls a dramatic shift in tactics by Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who is now wooing Sunnis and repositioning his "brand" as more moderate.

Former President Carter called the Bush administration's foreign relations "the worst in history." He called Blair's support for Bush and for the Iraq war "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient ... a major tragedy for the world."

Playing catch-up with the LAT, the NYT fronts a look at Hillary Clinton's 6-year term as the only woman director of Wal-Mart in the 1980s, and her currently complex relationship with a company that has been harshly criticized for its health-care policies, anti-unionism, and treatment of its workers.

The Times also fronts a crisis in Africa: The nation's best universities are falling apart, creating a brain drain that could further devastate the world's poorest continent.

The LAT looks at the Zetas, a band of cruel, bold, and sometimes stupid hitmen in Mexico's drug cartel wars.

Finally:

The high cost of teens and texting: OMG! (Duh!) The Summer of Love is making a big comeback. So is Pee-Wee Herman. And, not to be missed is the tribute in today's LAT to "My Friend, Jerry Falwell." The byline: Larry Flynt.

Coal Man

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

There's at least one CEO left who is not buying global warming hysteria.

BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Saturday, May 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON--Every good party has its wet blanket. In the case of the energy industry's merrymaking for a global warming program, the guy in the dripping bedspread is a 67-year-old, straight-talking coal-mine owner by the name of Robert E. Murray.

You won't hear many of Mr. Murray's energy-biz colleagues mention him; they tend to avoid his name, much as nephews avoid talk of their crazy uncles. GE's Jeffrey Immelt, Duke Energy's Jim Rogers, Exelon's John Rowe--these polished titans have been basking in an intense media glow, ever since they claimed to have seen the light on global warming and gotten behind a mandatory government program to cut C02 emissions. They'd rather not have any killjoys blowing the whistle on their real motives--which is to make a pile of cash off the taxpayers and consumers who'll fund it.

And yet here's Mr. Murray, killjoy-in-chief at the global warming love-fest. "Some elitists in our country can't, or won't, tell fact from fiction, can't understand what a draconian climate change program will do [to] the dreams of millions of working Americans and those on fixed incomes," says the chairman and CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest private coal concerns in the country. He's incensed by his fellow energy CEOs' "shameless" goal of fattening their bottom lines at the "expense of the broader economy." So these past months he's emerged from his quiet Cleveland office and jumped on the national stage, calling out the rest of his industry's CO2 collaborationists. He's testified in front of Congress; become a regular on television and radio programs; sat for profiles by journalists; and written letters to other energy companies exhorting them to think of the broader consequences.

Ms. Strassel is a Washington-based member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Life in Israel, A Writer's Story

Photograph from David Grossman

The author's son Uri, who was killed last year in the Israel-Lebanon war.

 David Armstrong

David Grossman

 

May 13, 2007

Writing in the Dark

By DAVID GROSSMAN

"To our joy or to our misery, the contingencies of reality have a great influence on what we write," says Natalia Ginzburg in her book "It's Hard to Talk About Yourself," in the chapter in which she discusses her life and her writing in the wake of personal disaster.

It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka's short story "A Little Fable." The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, "Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day."

Indeed, after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka's mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by. And I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation within which he lives. The situation that dictates his life to him in each and every aspect.

And this void never remains empty. It is filled rapidly — with apathy, with cynicism and, more than anything else, with despair: the despair that fuels distorted situations, allowing them to persist on and on, in some cases even for generations. Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it. And the despair that is deeper still — despair of what this distorted situation exposes, finally, in each and every one of us.

And I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay for this ongoing state of war. The shrinking of the "surface area" of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there. The limiting of one's ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally and practically. Hence, you become convinced, I might be better off not thinking and opt not to know perhaps I'm better off leaving the task of thinking and doing and establishing moral norms in the hands of those who might "know better."

Most of all, I'm better off not feeling too much — at least until this shall pass. And if it doesn't, at least I relieved my suffering somewhat, I developed a useful numbness, I protected myself as best I could with the help of a bit of indifference, a bit of sublimation, a bit of intended blindness and large doses of self-anesthetization.

In other words: Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of "mere" humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict's citizens, its prisoners, trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating us.

Kafka's mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the language that describes it. From my experience I can say that the language with which the citizens of a sustained conflict describe their predicament becomes progressively shallower the longer the conflict endures. Language gradually becomes a sequence of clichés and slogans. This begins with the language created by the institutions that manage the conflict directly — the army, the police, the different government ministries; it quickly filters down to the mass media that are reporting about the conflict, germinating an even more cunning language that aims to tell its target audience the story easiest for digestion; and this process ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict's citizens, even if they deny it.

Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its subtleties. And the more this state of affairs goes on, and as the language used to describe this state of affairs grows shallower, public discourse dwindles further. What remain are the fixed and banal mutual accusations among enemies, or among political adversaries within the same country. What remain are the clichés we use for describing our enemy and ourselves; the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves and entrap our enemies. The world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow.

My thoughts relate not only to the conflict in the Middle East. Across the world today, billions of people face a "predicament" of one type or other, in which personal existence and values, liberty and identity are under threat, to some extent. Almost all of us have a "predicament" of our own, a curse of our own. We all feel — or can intuit — how our special "predicament" can rapidly turn into a trap that would take away our freedom, the sense of home our country provides, our private language, our free will.

In this reality we authors and poets write. In Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and Sudan, in New York and in Congo. Sometimes, during my workday, after several hours' writing, I lift my head up and think — right now, at this very moment, another writer whom I don't even know sits, in Damascus or Tehran, in Kigali or in Belfast, just like me, practicing this peculiar, Don-Quixote-like craft of creation, within a reality that contains so much violence and estrangement, indifference and diminution. Here, I have a distant ally who doesn't even know me, but together we weave this intangible cobweb, which nevertheless has tremendous power, a world-changing and world-creating power, the power of making the dumb speak and the power of tikkun, or correction, in the deep sense it has in kabbalah.

As for me, in recent years, in the fiction that I wrote, I almost intentionally turned my back on the immediate, fiery reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin. I had written books about this reality before, and in articles and essays and interviews, I never stopped writing about it, and never stopped trying to understand it. I participated in dozens of protests, in international peace initiatives. I met my neighbors — some of whom were my enemies — at every opportunity that I deemed to offer a chance for dialogue. And yet, out of a conscious decision, and almost out of protest, I did not write about these disaster zones in my literature.

Why? Because I wanted to write about other things, equally important, which do not enjoy people's complete attentiveness as the nearly eternal war thunders.

I wrote about the furious jealousy of a man for his wife, about homeless children on the streets of Jerusalem, about a man and a woman who establish a private, hermetic language of their own within a delusional bubble of love. I wrote about the solitude of Samson, the biblical hero, and about the intricate relations between women and their mothers, and, in general, between parents and their children.

About four years ago, when my second-oldest son, Uri, was to join the army, I could no longer follow my recent ways. A sense of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless. I then began writing a novel that treats directly the bleak reality in which I live. A novel that depicts how external violence and the cruelty of the general political and military reality penetrate the tender and vulnerable tissue of a single family, ultimately tearing it asunder.

"As soon as one writes," Natalia Ginzburg says, "one miraculously ignores the current circumstances of one's life, yet our happiness or misery leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination is more dominant. When miserable, the power of our memory takes over."

It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can at this point, and from the location where I sit.

I write. In wake of the death of my son Uri last summer in the war between Israel and Lebanon, the awareness of what happened has sunk into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it. Nevertheless, the act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of "space," a mental territory that I've never experienced before, where death is not only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life.

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn't frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

I write. I feel the wealth of possibilities inherent in any human situation. I sense my ability to choose between them. The sweetness of liberty, which I believed that I had already lost. I indulge in the richness of true, personal, intimate language. I recall the delight of natural, full breathing when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogan and cliché. Suddenly I begin to breathe with both lungs.

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.

I write. I relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live — the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only. I do my best not to shield myself from the just claims and sufferings of my enemy. Nor from the tragedy and entanglement of his own life. Nor from his errors or crimes or from the knowledge of what I myself am doing to him. Nor, finally, from the surprising similarities I find between him and me.

All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy — this inhumane choice to "be victim or aggressor," without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies' sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity.

Sometimes when I write, I can recall what we all felt in Israel, for one singular moment, when the airplane of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat landed in Tel Aviv 30 years ago, after decades of war between the two nations: then, all of a sudden, we discovered how heavy is the load we carry all our lives — the load of enmity and fear and suspicion. The load of permanent guard duty, the heavy burden of being an enemy, at all times.

And what a delight it was, to remove for one moment the mighty armor of suspicion, hate and stereotype. It was a delight that was almost terrifying — to stand naked, pure almost, and witness a human face emerge from the one-dimensional vision with which we observed each other for years.

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions.

And I write also about that which cannot be brought back. And about that which is inconsolable. Then, too, in a manner I still find inexplicable, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me in a way that would leave me paralyzed. Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die. I cannot grasp how this miracle works. Maybe once I finish writing this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too early.

And I write the life of my land, Israel. The land that is tortured, frantic, drugged by an overdose of history, excessive emotions that cannot be contained by any human capacity, extreme events and tragedies, enormous anxiety and paralyzing sobriety, too much memory, failed hopes and the circumstances of a fate unique among all nations: an existence that sometimes appears to be a story of mythical proportions, a story that is "larger than life" to the point that something seems to have gone wrong with the relation it bears to life itself. A country that has become tired of the possibility of ever leading the standard, normal life of a country among countries, a nation among nations.

We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists.

And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the "official narrative" of our country, nor of fate itself.

We write. The world is not closing in on us. How fortunate we are. The world is not growing increasingly narrow.

David Grossman is the author most recently of "Her Body Knows," a collection of two novellas. This essay is adapted from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, which he delivered at PEN's World Voices Festival on April 29, 2007. It was translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf.

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Today's Papers

Contractor Killings
By Ben Whitford
Posted Saturday, May 19, 2007, at 5:52 A.M.E.T.

The New York Times leads with news that 2007 is shaping up to be the bloodiest year to date for civilian contractors in Iraq, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with President Bush's refusal to set even a flexible target date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Washington Post leads with complaints by China that America's trade policies are too aggressive. The Los Angeles Times leads local with the mayor's decision not to try to gain direct control of the city schools.

According to previously unpublished figures, casualties among private contractors in Iraq are now at record levels, with 146 civilians killed in the first quarter of this year, bringing the total killed since the war began to nearly 1,000. Some observers believe the surge is leading insurgents to seek out civilian targets. The White House rejected calls to set a loose target date for withdrawing U.S. troops as crucial negotiations with congressional Democrats over the war-spending measure ended in deadlock. Meanwhile, violence in Baghdad and Diyala province continues; the Post reports that five U.S. soldiers and two ABC journalists were killed in separate incidents.

The WP reports that China's Vice Premier Wu Yi may boycott this week's trade talks in protest at America's "bullying" attitude, particularly the lawsuits and import tariffs introduced by the U.S. in response to Chinese trade violations. The WSJ plays down the tension, noting several token concessions made by China, including a rare change to currency policy, in the buildup to the talks.

Everyone fronts or teases the continuing tussle over the bipartisan immigration bill, which would allow people already in the U.S. to stay and eventually apply for citizenship. The WP off-leads with skepticism in the GOP ranks: Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Newt Gingrich all blasted the bill, and even Rudy Giuliani didn't have a kind word to say. The NYT goes inside with a look at the candidates' soul-searching and fronts a slightly barbed look at President Bush's newfound interest in political compromise. The WSJ breaks down the tug of war over the details of the plan but praises the bulk of the bill's provisions in its editorial review. The LAT reefers the story.

Everyone but the LAT fronts Microsoft's $6 billion purchase of Internet advertiser aQuantive, with the WSJ arguing that the deal signals the rise of "an oligopoly of huge companies that sell and place the ads users see online". The NYT suggests that the online ad market may have reached a tipping point, with the flow of dollars finally starting to reflect the amount of time people spend online. Below the fold, the WP ponders the rise of technology devoted to serving up online advertising that accurately reflects viewers' interests.

The LAT fronts an exclusive interview with sacked New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who says he believes he lost his job because he was slow to bring voter-fraud charges that would have helped Republican election chances. The WP reports that Alberto Gonzales came under heavy fire at a closed meeting with prosecutors this week; in the paper's editorial pages Eugene Robinson continues to put the boot in.

The WP fronts, and the NYT also reports, a tiff between Estonia and Russia that may have flared into cyber-warfare. The tiny Baltic country has recently been the victim of massive and coordinated attacks on official Wb sites, apparently originating from Russia. The NYT and the WSJ report on the harassment of opposition leaders by Russian police and a continuing state crackdown on journalists. In an editorial, the WP criticizes Condoleezza Rice for not taking a harder line on Russian excesses.

France's newly elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy, appointed his Cabinet Friday; the WP notes that nearly half his appointees are women, reflecting his pledge to diversify French political life. The WSJ reports that Sarkozy, a conservative, took pains to appoint ministers from across the political spectrum, but questions how long a leash they will be allowed. The NYT profiles Bernard Kouchner, the country's flamboyant new foreign minister and the Cabinet's single socialist.

The NYT reports that the White House plans to move quickly to replace Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, but the WP notes that the Wolfowitz affair has led many international observers to question America's traditional right to appoint the bank's chief.

Below the fold, the LAT casts an eye over Hillary Clinton's record as a member of Wal-Mart's board of directors. According to fellow board members, in her eight years as a director, the Democratic presidential hopeful helped promote workplace diversity and better environmental practices but did little to oppose the company's anti-union strategies.

The LAT, NYT, and WP all tease the discovery of a huge treasure trove by a Florida-based marine exploration company. The haul, consisting of about 17 tons of Colonial-era coins, may be the most valuable find to date; the site's exact location is still under wraps.

Continuing in a time-honored tradition of Manhattan media schadenfreude, the NYT takes prim pleasure in the New York Post's decision to dish the dirt on itself. In a juicy Page Six column intended to minimize the fallout from a dispute with a former freelancer, the New York tabloid spilled the beans Friday on everything from its editor's visits to strip joints to allegations that Post owner Rupert Murdoch personally nixed gossip stories he thought might damage his business interests.

Today's Papers

System Overhaul
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 5:57 A.M. E.T.

The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops it world-wide newsbox, with yesterday's announcement that the White House and a bipartisan group of senators have come to an agreement on what amounts to the biggest changes in the country's immigration laws in more than 20 years. The legislation would put in place a system to legalize the current 12 million illegal immigrants and would prioritize job skills and education over family ties for those who want to settle in the United States. The 380-page document is full of compromises and has already drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle.

USA Today leads with an analysis of federal highway data showing that, for the first time in 26 years, drivers in America have started clocking "substantially fewer miles." The price of gas is one reason, but there are also other factors, such as an aging population and a growing trend that has resulted in many people moving out of suburbs and into cities.

If the immigration bill becomes law, it would provide a much-needed policy victory for President Bush, who has talked about changing the system since the beginning of his tenure. But all of the compromises mean the bill will face a steep challenge, particularly when the House takes up the issue in July, as even its supporters acknowledge the bill is not really what they wanted. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said. Part of this compromise is that fully legalizing illegal immigrants would not take place until more stringent border-security measures are implemented, along with new regulations to make sure employers check the immigration status of their workers.

The immigration bill would also allow as many as 400,000 workers into the country on a temporary visa that would be good for only two years. Labor groups and some Democratic presidential candidates have expressed concern over this provision because they say it risks creating an underclass that could decrease wages. Democrats have also begun to raise questions over prioritizing job skills and education over family ties for new immigrants, which represents a major shift in current policy and has been a goal of Republicans for years.

The NYT and WP off-lead, and everyone mentions, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz resigning yesterday after weeks of controversy over a pay-and-promotion package he arranged for his companion when he became leader of the poverty-fighting institution. His resignation is effective June 30, a date many at the bank think is too far away for someone who has lost the trust of much of his staff. To get Wolfowitz to resign, the board agreed to issue a statement that said several people at the bank made mistakes and praised him for his years of service. President Bush is expected to name a successor soon.

Both the WP and NYT front a look into Wolfowitz's time at the bank, where he was the subject of much controversy long before the issue of his girlfriend's pay-and-promotions package became public. Both papers quote people who wonder whether Wolfowitz's tenure was, as the NYT puts it, "doomed from the outset." Besides having the reputation of being a bad manager (he "couldn't run a two-car funeral," a former colleague tells the Post), he had little experience that could have prepared him for overseeing 10,000 employees, and he never seemed to grasp the importance of respecting the bank's bureaucracy.

As the factional fighting continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, the WP fronts word that, on Tuesday, Israel allowed the Fatah Party to bring in as many as 500 troops from Egypt who had been trained "under a U.S.-coordinated program." This illustrates the way in which Israel and the United States are taking sides in the conflict and working to ensure Fatah forces have the necessary resources to fight Hamas. Meanwhile, as retaliation for the repeated rocket attacks, Israel intensified the number of airstrikes in the Gaza Strip and killed as many as nine people between Thursday and early Friday, reports the LAT.

All the papers mention that Senate Democrats announced they plan to hold a no-confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales' performance as attorney general. Also, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter predicted Gonzales would be stepping down soon and Sen. Norm Coleman became the sixth Republican to call for his resignation. (After suffering a nosedive earlier this week, Slate's Gonzo-Meter inched up a notch yesterday, increasing the chances of Gonzales leaving to 57 percent.)

As controversy continues to grow over the safety of ingredients from China, two of the largest U.S. food manufacturers "quietly" announced this month that they don't want any more of their supply to come from there, reports the LAT. Problem is, it's "next to impossible" to comply with that request. In the past few years, the country has become such a dominant supplier of several common food ingredients that U.S. manufacturers may not even realize their products originated in China. The NYT reefers a look into the country's problems with food safety and says several companies are pressuring the U.S. government to demand that China improve its quality control.

Back to the bank … The WP's style section takes a look at the fashion accessory that quickly became a must-have in the grandiose halls of the World Bank's headquarters these last few weeks: blue ribbons. Although the ribbons were first meant to show support for good governance, they quickly became a "symbol of anger, a silent demand for the big boss's resignation." Even Wolfowitz was seen wearing a blue ribbon, which he said was for malaria awareness. Yesterday, "the blue ribbons had become a new symbol–of victory."

To Remake the World

Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this issue is adapted from Blessed Unrest, to be published by Viking Press and used by permission.

Free Music File Sharing,

The Sound of Copy Restrictions Crashing

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, May 17, 2007; D01

The idea of ditching "digital rights management" for music downloads is rapidly changing from dream to business reality-- and faster than anybody might have hoped.

Amazon said yesterday that it would open an online store that only stocks MP3 music files without copying restrictions. That would be huge news, except that Amazon is only catching up with Apple, which announced in early April that it would offer DRM-free downloads by the end of this month.

Both stores have the public backing of EMI, one of the four big record labels, which yesterday also said it would sell unrestricted music downloads at some European sites.

This should delight customers, who will no longer have to worry about being able to listen to their song files on their next music player or their computer. But it must unsettle many music industry executives.

Abandoning the copy-control systems meant to stop people from sharing a new digital purchase on the Internet-- but which also keep buyers from listening to these downloads on unauthorized hardware or software-- remains heresy in much of Hollywood.

But when the biggest music download store, one of the biggest CD retailers and a Big Four record label think they should drop that approach, it means things have changed drastically.

We are no longer talking about shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin of computer-enforced copying restrictions; that sound you hear is the beep-beep-beep of the dump truck backing up to the grave site.

ITunes shoppers won't have long to wait for this liberation from copying limits. Apple says the new downloads will be available by the end of this month at $1.29 a song (30 cents more than for the current, limited versions). Albums will cost the same with or without usage restrictions. These new downloads will also come at a higher bit rate, meaning they should sound better but will take up twice as much space on your iPod or computer.

Amazon customers may face a longer delay, as the Seattle retailer won't specify a launch date more specific than "later this year." It also won't talk about pricing or describe its inventory besides saying the store will carry the catalogues of EMI and "more than 12,000" other labels.

Amazon did, however, offer hints. Bill Carr, the site's vice president of digital media, suggested that the download store would follow the same basic pattern as Amazon's CD store: "A couple of our tried-and-true tenets are broad selection and great prices."

That suggests Amazon expects to sell music from all the major labels, not just EMI. The minor labels, many of which don't share the majors' fixation on copying restrictions, are probably already on board.

A publicist for one Washington-area independent label confirmed yesterday that his employer's catalogue would be carried on Amazon. He put the phone down to confirm the details of that arrangement, then picked it up and said with a laugh, "Apparently, we've signed a non-disclosure act. So I wasn't even supposed to tell you that we're one of those labels."

If Amazon's download store mirrors the outlines of its CD store, you can also expect labels to compete on price -- something Apple doesn't like.

Apple and Amazon should soon have company. In addition to the many sites that stock MP3s from smaller labels -- for example, eMusic, Amie Street and Other Music -- Yahoo has experimented with selling regular MP3s, and MySpace has revealed plans for its own MP3 store.

When copy-restriction routines no longer lock songs to certain players or programs, a few other things will change.

Music buyers can return to treating their purchases as their property -- reselling as they see fit or passing them on to their heirs. They will also be free to choose digital-music formats, programs and players based on their price and quality, instead of being limited to those supported by one download store.

Apple's iPod -- which dominated the market before the arrival of the iTunes Store -- should still do well, as should the Advanced Audio Coding format Apple uses for iTunes downloads. But Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format could be drifting onto the rocks; its biggest fans aren't users but the stores that sell copy-controlled WMA files.

Some of those users will still take music online without paying for it. DRM has yet to make a meaningful dent in that, but convenient, fairly priced and well-stocked download stores like iTunes have.

As people get in the habit of enjoying downloads from various sites on all of their devices--not just some--more of them may wonder why their movies remain trapped inside the usage restrictions that once encumbered their music.

Why, for example, should Apple's iTunes or Amazon's Unbox sell video downloads that can't even be burned to DVD? Doesn't the same logic apply to movies? How long until some enterprising studio makes the same decision as EMI and decides to give customers what they want?

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.

Today's Papers

Going Small
By Daniel Politi
Posted Tuesday, May 29, 2007, at 5:58 A.M. E.T.

The Washington Post leads, and the New York Times fronts, word that President Bush will announce a new set of sanctions against Sudan's government for its failure to stop the violence that has been plaguing the country's Darfur region. The measures include sanctions that target government-controlled businesses as well as two senior government officials and a rebel leader. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how U.S. military leaders are looking for ways to "redefine success" now that they're starting to realize the political goals that were linked to the "surge" in Iraq will not be met. Instead of focusing on the broad national goals, military leaders are expected to start pointing to small, local successes as a sign of progress. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with, and the WP off-leads, the talks between the Iranian and U.S. ambassadors in Baghdad, where the two officials traded accusations of who was responsible for fomenting the violence in Iraq. As expected, there were no real breakthroughs, although both sides characterized the meeting as positive and left open the possibility for more talks in the future.

The NYT leads with the effort by a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers to increase funding for the coal industry, even as congressional leaders are set to introduce legislation to decrease greenhouse gases. The coal industry has been lobbying heavily and insists coal-to-liquid fuels could be a source of clean energy, although opponents counter that much of the technology is still unproven. The paper says the fight illustrates the "tension, which many lawmakers gloss over, between slowing global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil." USA Today leads with an analysis showing that if the federal government were to use the same accounting standards as corporations it would have recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year instead of the official $248 billion deficit. The discrepancy is because the federal government does not follow modern accounting rules that require expenses to be recorded immediately, even if they will be paid for in the future, such as Social Security.

As part of the administration's effort to apply pressure on Sudan, Bush will task Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with getting the United Nations to approve a new arms embargo and to prohibit the government from conducting military flights in Darfur. Bush was apparently ready to announce the new sanctions last month but decided to hold off when the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked for more time to continue pursuing a diplomatic solution. But the NYT reports that Bush is "extremely frustrated" with the situation and decided he shouldn't wait any longer. The WP notes that the announcement is likely to anger U.N. diplomats who have recently said they have been making progress with negotiations.

Of the three broad political goals outlined by U.S. officials when they were touting the increase of troops in Iraq, only the new law to distribute the country's oil revenue might be completed by September, and even that is a long shot. Knowing full well they can't tell Congress that there's been no progress, military leaders are beginning to shift focus away from the central government, saying the initial goals were too ambitious to begin with. Instead, military advisers hope to point to strategies at the local level that are producing results, including agreements with tribal leaders, to emphasize that the situation is improving, albeit slowly.

The main new idea that seemed to come out of the meeting in Baghdad was a proposal put forward by the Iranian ambassador to create a "trilateral mechanism" to discuss ways to reduce the violence in Iraq. The commission would be composed of officials from Iraq, Iran, and the United States. The U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker, said he would forward the proposal, along with Iraq's offer to hold more talks in the coming weeks, to Washington. As had been previously agreed, the only topic was Iraq and so there was no mention of Iran's nuclear program or its recent detentions of U.S.-Iranian citizens.

In other Iraq news, a suicide bomber killed 24 people near a historic Sunni mosque in Baghdad. The Post says there are concerns the attack could lead to retaliations similar to what took place when the Shiite shrine in Samarra was bombed. But the LAT says the site of the explosion appeared to have been chosen at random. Meanwhile, the NYT fronts a look at how Iraqi prostitutes have become an increasingly common sight in Syria as the number of refugees continues to grow.

The WP fronts the story of Allison Stokke, an 18-year-old pole vaulter who suddenly discovered she had become an Internet sensation. All of the unwanted attention didn't start with naked pictures or an embarrassing video, but rather from a seemingly innocuous photograph of the attractive teenager that was posted by a popular sports blog earlier this month. Suddenly her popularity began to spread like wildfire all over the Internet. Stokke first tried to ignore it and then wanted to bring it under control, but she soon realized she was powerless to stop it. "Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning," Stokke said.

Better late … A correction from today's NYT: "A caption on June 8, 1944 … misspelled the given name of the first officer seated at the left side of the table. He was Col. Girard B. Troland of New London, Conn.—not Gerand. The error was called to the attention of the editors by his grandson yesterday."

You don't have to hate your first job

Wild parties under the sun draw crowds

Las Vegas pools seize the day

Today's Papers

Cut and Run
By Ben Whitford
Posted Saturday, May 26, 2007, at 5:15 A.M. E.T.

The New York Times leads on White House plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq by 50 percent next year in a bid to shift the debate away from a specific exit deadline and towards a broader discussion of America's role in the region. The Washington Post leads, and the LA Times off-leads, on claims that during the buildup to war the White House ignored repeated warnings from intelligence agencies about the risks involved. The Wall Street Journal heads its worldwide newsbox, the NYT and the LAT tease, and the WP stuffs news that Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr is back in Iraq. The LAT leads on claims that Iran's efforts to gain nuclear weapons have led up to a dozen other Middle Eastern countries to seek nuclear technology.

The White House is developing "concepts" for drastically reducing troop levels in Iraq once the surge strategy has run its course, according to senior administration officials. The proposals, apparently developed with the backing of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but without the involvement of US military commanders, would see troop numbers fall to 100,000 by the time of the 2008 election, with a new focus on training Iraqi forces and fighting Al Qaeda. "The current level of forces aren't sustainable in Iraq, they aren't sustainable in the region, and they will be increasingly unsustainable here at home," said one official involved in the discussions. America's top ground commander in Iraq warned that any US pullback would have to be conducted slowly and carefully.

The Democrat-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday reported that in early 2003 US intelligence agencies warned that invading Iraq would risk sparking sectarian violence, aiding Al Qaeda's operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing Iran's regional influence. Analysts also told the White House that military action "probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups". The Senate committee's chairman said the warnings "were widely distributed at the highest levels of government, and it's clear that the administration didn't plan for any of them." Meanwhile Moktada al-Sadr, the populist Shiite cleric who heads the Mahdi Army, is back in Iraq after a lengthy stay in Iran; speaking at a mosque in Kufa, he demanded the speedy withdrawal of US troops and called for unity between Shiite and Sunni factions. The deaths of seven more US soldiers were announced Friday, bringing the total for May to nearly 100.

Israel continued to pound Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip yesterday, launching airstrikes on at least eight locations. The NYT teases the story, noting that one of the attacks struck close to the home of the Palestinian prime minister. At least 38 Palestinians have been killed since the operation began nine days ago.

Both the NYT and the WP front reports on Bill and Hillary Clinton's ties to Vinod Gupta, a CEO whose shareholders say he used company money to "ingratiate himself" with the pair. Gupta paid Bill Clinton more than two million dollars in consulting fees, and spent $900,000 to fly the former president and his wife around the world; the case illustrates how successfully the former president leveraged his elite donors once he left the White House - and the extent to which Hillary has been able to tap into the same network. Meanwhile the LAT picks over two new Hillary Clinton biographies, but finds little that's likely to impact on her chances in 2008.

All the papers ponder the implications of the war spending measure, which Bush finally signed yesterday, for the 2008 presidential candidates. The NYT and the LAT report on GOP attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom voted against the spending measure. The WSJ accuses Hillary Clinton of political opportunism.

The WP fronts news that the new immigration bill currently under debate would do away with the "genius visas" that give talented aliens a fast-track route to US citizenship. The new regulations would send top academics, artists and sports stars through the same process as everyone else; a Nobel prize would count for less than a two-year degree.

There's more trouble brewing for Alberto Gonzales; the WP and the LAT both report that the Justice Department weighed political allegiances in appointing more than two dozen new immigration judges, many of whom had little previous experience of immigration law. The practice potentially violates civil service laws, and apparently pre-dates the tenure of former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling.

The WP and the NYT report that Bush negotiators snubbed German calls for deep long-term cuts in levels of greenhouse gases ahead of next month's G8 meeting, citing the US's "fundamental opposition" to the German position.

After a former Tour de France winner admitted doping yesterday, the NYT reports on the peloton of pro racers who have confessed using performance-enhancing drugs in recent weeks.

The WP reports that the prosecutor who won the conviction of "Scooter" Libby in the CIA leak case wants him to be sentenced to more than three years behind bars. The NYT notes that Libby's attorneys hope to persuade Bush to grant a pardon.

With Americans turning away from sticky sodas in favor of quirkier non-carbonated drinks, both the WSJ and the NYT eye Coke's $4.1bn purchase of Glacéau, the manufacturer of VitaminWater. "Growth in the beverage industry isn't going to come from tiny bubbles," said one analyst.

The NYT profiles Iran's departing UN ambassador, who despite being forbidden to travel more than 25 miles from Columbus Circle rose to become one of Tehran's most influential advocates in the United States.

Bush and Impeachment

Why Bush hasn't been impeached

By Gary Kamiya

Today's Blogs

Justice Is Blonde
By Christopher Beam
Posted Thursday, May 24, 2007, at 6 P.M. E.T.

Bloggers analyze Monica Goodling's testimony and express relief that Jordin Sparks won American Idol. They also can't wait to try out a new iPod-themed sex toy.

Justice is blonde: Former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling testified before the House judiciary committee Wednesday, saying she had "crossed the line" by taking political leanings into account when making hiring decisions. Bloggers mostly agree that's an understatement.

Christy Hardin Smith at liberal Firedoglake doesn't buy what she calls Goodling's "if I broke the law, I didn't mean to" routine: "[H]ow can someone who worked in a building full of experienced prosecutors possibly think that is remotely credible? My ignorance of the law made me politicize the hiring of multiple career justice employees? Puh-leese."

Philosophy professor Hilzoy at politically moderate Obsidian Wings thinks Goodling came off as smart and capable, but still "has not said anything to clear up the central question: who put the US Attorneys on the firing list, and why? What she has said just confirms the sense that there was nothing that remotely resembled a good decision-making process." At the Washington Monthly's Political Animal, Kevin Drum marvels at the still-deepening mystery: "Goodling is now the latest high-ranking DOJ official to say that, really, she has no idea why those U.S. Attorneys were fired last year, or who made the choices. The list appeared, somehow, but apparently not from any human hand. It's a miracle!"

During her testimony, Goodling recalled an "uncomfortable" conversation with Gonzales, in which the attorney general may have improperly tried to coordinate their stories. Paul Mirengoff at conservative Power Line isn't convinced that the AG was trying to influence Goodling: "[P]erhaps Gonzales was trying comfort Goodling by indicating that he didn't think she had done anything wrong. Alternatively, perhaps Gonzales was trying to make sure his recollection of the process was correct. In any case, Goodling didn't think he was trying to influence how she would testify." Liberal Don Q. Blogger at Vaguely Logical is pretty sure Gonzales was tampering: "Or else why would he turn a meeting with her into a session where he describes HIS recollection of the Great US Attorney Massacre in some detail and then asks how she remembers it?"

"Maru the Crank Pot" at WTF Is It Now? admires Goodling's ability to play the naif: She's "very good at pretending she has no idea what the hell everyone is so angry about. It's the old "punch someone in the back of the head and look around the room dumbly and say 'who? me?'" trick." At group law blog Balkinization, Marty Lederman parses Goodling's statement that she was "not aware, however, of anyone within the Department ever suggesting the replacement of these attorneys in order to interfere with a particular case … for political advantage." Lederman calls the last three words "suspicious": "One might conclude that Goodling would only add that phrase if she were aware of people (even in the Department) suggesting the removal of the attorneys in order to interfere with a particular case -- but if she did not presonally know whether the interference was designed 'for political advantage.' "

At the New Republic's The Plank, Michael Crowley serves up a new rendition of a classic tune, "I Crossed the Line": "I kept a close watch on this staff of mine/I kept my eyes wide open all the time/I kept the Dems out for their sorry minds/It was a crime, I crossed the line."

Read more about Goodling's testimony. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick writes that Goodling came across "more honest than Gonzales" and calls the Democrats "overmatched."

Jordin rules: Teenager Jordin Sparks beat out Blake Lewis to become the youngest American Idol winner Wednesday. Bloggers are nearly unanimous in their lack of surprise.

"I've had Jordin pegged for many weeks as a possible winner," writes Reed Dunn at Watching American Idol, "though I thought it was going to be Melinda Doolittle from the moment I saw her. When it came down to Jordin and Blake, though, it seemed like a no-brainer." Entertainment blog BuzzSugar is happy: "Normally, I'd be worried about someone so young taking on all the pressures of winning 'Idol' … but she's grown up with fame, and she seems grounded enough to handle all the attention that's going to come her way now."

"Cell Geek" at The Cell Freak thinks the final song was an unfair choice: "Blake Lewis actually started out strong on 'This Is My Now' but once the chorus kicked in you could see he was embarrassed to be singing this and rightly so. No one would expect Eminem to tackle Barbra Streisand, why did they make Blake sing this?" Idolator's Brian Raftery, liveblogging the finale, shares his feelings about the "craptastic" finishing song. Lisa Timmons at A Socialite's Life predicts Blake will be just fine: "[T]hese days, losing on American Idol doesn't seem to have hurt the career of anyone who's managed to stick it out long enough to be get some irons in the fire."

Read more about the American Idol finale. Watch Jordin Sparks' show-winning performance. Slate's Jody Rosen and Katherine Meizel discuss the finale.

Good vibrations: Apple sent a cease and desist letter to Ann Summers, a British sex shop chain, after the store began offering an "iGasm"—a product that hooks up to your iPod and vibrates along with the music. Apple complains that the iGasm ads, which show a curvy silhouette with a white cord running into her undies, violate their intellectual-property rights. Bloggers examine what's rubbing Apple the wrong way.

Brooklyn-based Free Williamsburg doesn't understand Apple's beef: "Seems to us, a product like this could actually HELP Apple sales, but as usual the company is absurdly cagey about their branding."

Ann Summers boss Jacqueline Gold responded cheekily to Apple's threats: "Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put a smile back on their faces!" Hadji at Ernie Schenk Calls This Advertising? reflects: "[C]ome to think of it, I talked with some pretty high level execs from Apple the other day and they did seem, well, happy." Meanwhile, Patrick at PhillyBurbs asks a pressing question: "[I]s it compatible with my eight-track player?"

Read more about the iGasm.

Today's Papers

And the Money Keeps Rolling In
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, May 25, 2007, at 5:34 A.M. E.T.

The Washington Post leads, the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, and everyone else fronts news that, after months of back-and-forth, Congress sent President Bush a war-spending bill without any timelines for the withdrawal of combat troops. Bush vowed to sign the bill, which funds operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until the end of September and includes a series of benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet to continue receiving reconstruction money. The Los Angeles Times leads with President Bush announcing that he supports the Iraq Study Group's plans to make U.S. troops focus more on support and training, but only after they succeed in improving the security situation in Baghdad. "Bush's remarks were the clearest yet on his vision for the long-term U.S. role in Iraq," says the LAT.

The New York Times leads with a poll that shows most Americans support the main provisions in the new immigration reform bill currently under debate in the Senate. By comfortable majority margins, most Americans believe illegal immigrants should be given a chance to stay in the country and are also behind the idea of allowing temporary foreign workers to come into the country. USA Today leads with word that high gas prices are not going to stop a record number of Americans from getting in their cars this Memorial Day weekend. "We are not seeing any indication that motorists have abandoned their holiday weekend travel plans," a spokesman for AAA tells the paper. According to an oil analyst, cars are expected to use up to 190 million gallons of gasoline more this holiday than on a regular three-day spring weekend, which amounts to a whopping 1.2 billion gallons of gas.

September is now the key month for the next debate over war funding, when lawmakers will hear from U.S. commanders on whether the increase in troops has had the desired effect. But as a demonstration that lawmakers will be keeping a close eye on the situation, the bill says President Bush must give a status report on the Iraqi government's progress in meeting the benchmarks by July 15.

Almost all Republican lawmakers voted for the bill, but many Democrats were angry about the lack of a withdrawal plan and reflected that sentiment through their votes. In the House, a majority of Democrats rejected the war-funding portion of the bill, which passed 280-142. The separate bill that included $17 billion in domestic spending, as well as an increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, had overwhelming bipartisan support, and passed 348-73. Both bills were joined in the Senate, where it was approved 80-14. Everyone notes Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama voted against the package.

The new NYT/CBS poll also reveals 51 percent of Americans favor the provision in the immigration bill that would prioritize education and skills over family ties for those who want to settle in the United States. A majority of those polled (61 percent) think illegal immigration is a very serious problem, and most said employers who hire illegal immigrants should be penalized. Although 82 percent believe the government should do more to secure the borders, only 15 percent said that building fences is the way to go.

The House had a busy voting day yesterday, and both the NYT and WP front news that, after much wrangling and diluting, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed new ethics legislation 396-22. Among the key provisions is one that would force lobbyists to disclose the amount of contributions they bundle from different sources, and the reports would be posted online. But as the NYT notes, "lobbyists are not the only bundlers," so the provision won't affect many others who use the fund-raising tactic.

The NYT fronts, and the WP goes inside with, word that cleric Muqtada Sadr is back in Iraq after spending four months in Iran. Everyone agrees Sadr's return is significant, but no one is really sure what it means or what he has in mind for the future. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, tells the Post he thinks Sadr is back to try to "consolidate his power base." There has been lots of talk recently that the rise in sectarian violence is a reflection of divisions within Sadr's militia. So far, Sadr has remained quiet, but officials believe he'll deliver a sermon as early as today.

The LAT fronts, and USAT goes inside with, a prominent group of international scientists warning that exposure to even low doses of some commonly used chemicals while a fetus is developing, or during a child's first few years, could cause a variety of serious health problems. Since use of these chemicals is so widespread, "there needs to be renewed efforts to prevent harm. Such prevention should not await detailed evidence on individual hazards," the scientists wrote.

Yesterday, the WSJ said former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was the lead candidate to become the new head of the World Bank. Today, the Post reports President Bush is not likely to choose a former senator because administration officials want someone who has experience running a large organization. The WP hears that the two top contenders are former U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick and Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt, two men the WSJ also mentioned yesterday.

The Post's Dana Milbank mentions how, keeping up with current trends, the president brought up al-Qaida over and over again during yesterday's news conference. He mentioned al-Qaida a total of 19 times, and, at one point, even focused on how the terrorist group is a threat to everyone, even the children of some of the reporters who were present. "They are a threat to your children David," Bush said to NBC's David Gregory. "It's a danger to your children, Jim," Bush told the NYT's Jim Rutenberg. "This last warning was perplexing," writes Milbank, "because Rutenberg has no children, only a brown chow chow named Little Bear."

Writers Take Out Their Knives

Thuss Farrell

Writers Take Out Their Knives

FOR all those who believe that "Moby Dick" would be great except for the parts about the whale, the British publisher Orion Books will publish this month a set of pared-down classics, cutting about 40 percent of what it calls "padding" from works like "Anna Karenina," "David Copperfield" and yes, "Moby Dick."

It's a well-trodden path, from Reader's Digest to CliffsNotes to "Shrink Lit," and has sparked the inevitable tsk-tsk-ing in literary circles.

But surely, there are some books that could use some trimming. We asked seven authors, all of whom know a thing or two about the judicious use of words, what books they would put on the chopping block.

Their answers, not entirely serious, roamed from classics to modern literature, and even some works that might not qualify for either term. Not surprisingly, Norman Mailer took on an old target, Tom Wolfe, with whom he famously tangled after the publication of "A Man in Full," Mr. Wolfe's 742-page doorstop of a book about the Atlanta real estate and social scene. Mr. Mailer included other contemporary giants like Toni Morrison and John Irving. Then again, Mr. Mailer also suggested that some of his own work could use another go-round with an editor; Neal Pollack and Joyce Carol Oates offered themselves up, as well.

Length in and of itself was not a criterion for cutting: Ann Patchett suggested George Orwell's "Animal Farm," which in the edition Ms. Patchett wrote an introduction for runs only 128 pages. And Ms. Patchett is a passionate advocate for "Moby Dick" — including all the stuff about the whale.

Christopher Buckley, author of "Thank You for Smoking" and "Boomsday"

Might I dare to suggest that L. Ron Hubbard's book "Mission Earth," which clocks in at 1.2 million words, might just be a teensy bit more accessible if it were say, just a million words?

The pre-eminent examples of books that could probably do with a slightly better body mass index would be the works of Ayn Rand. They, nonetheless, stay resplendently in print, but having tried to read "Atlas Shrugged" about four times and "The Fountainhead" about, maybe, twice, these would be definite candidates for the literary liposuction machine and would probably be just as good — or just as bad.

Ann Patchett, author of "Bel Canto" and "Truth & Beauty"

Writers shouldn't necessarily just pick on the long books. There are plenty of short books that are too long as well. I wrote an introduction to a new edition of "Animal Farm," and I hadn't read it since I was 12 and it was awful. Then I reread "1984" and it was beyond awful. Definitely cut that one down.

Suffering is often good for us in literature. I just read "The Wings of the Dove," and it has about 400 of the most excruciatingly boring pages and then 150 pages that are transcendent beyond imagination. When I was saying this to people, they said, "Couldn't you just skip the first 400 pages?"

But it's the suffering that makes reading transcendent. It's like cutting out Good Friday and going straight to Easter. Easter doesn't have the resonance without Good Friday. Sometimes we have to suffer. But then I'm Catholic.

Stephen King, author of "The Shining" and "Lisey's Story"

Certainly the Bible could use cutting; think of all those begats, not to mention minor-league prophets such as Habbakuk (there isn't even a car dealership named after him).

What about "Ulysses"? All that tiresome stream of consciousness could go.

And there is "Gone With the Wind," which I would shorten to this:

"Civil War?" said Scarlett.

"Fiddle-de-dee!"

But Atlanta burned! Rhett left!

"I will think about it tomorrow," said Scarlett, "for tomorrow is another day."

That's so good you could probably fit "Dombey and Son" in the same edition. Or shorten "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" to a National Enquirer headline:

UNFORTUNATE GIRL SLEEPS THROUGH RAPE, IS LATER HUNG.

Neal Pollack, author of "Alternadad" and "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature"

I would cut say 80 percent of "The Notebook" by Nicholas Sparks and turn it into the greeting card that it was meant to be. Given that I'm a basketball fan, and given the recent controversy, I would cut the NBA rulebook by about 40 percent because some of these rules have got to go. I think I shouldn't have added the extra 60 pages to "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature" paperback edition.

Let's cut 40 percent of "The Satanic Verses," not necessarily the stuff about Muhammad, but just because I thought it was too long.

Norman Mailer, author of "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Castle in the Forest"

Mr. Mailer sent in a list without commentary, which he requested be printed in full.

Ernest Hemingway: "For Whom the Bell Tolls"
John Dos Passos: "U.S.A."
William Faulkner: "Absalom, Absalom!"
John Steinbeck: "The Grapes of Wrath"
Thomas Wolfe: "Look Homeward, Angel," "Of Time and the River," "The Web and the Rock," "You Can't Go Home Again"
James Jones: "Some Came Running"
Norman Mailer: "Harlot's Ghost," "Ancient Evenings," "The Executioner's Song"
Tom Wolfe: "Bonfire of the Vanities," "A Man in Full"
Toni Morrison: "Beloved"
John Irving: "The World According to Garp"

Joyce Carol Oates, author of "Black Girl/White Girl"

I can suggest Ernest Hemingway. There's much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go.

And let's say Jane Austen: too many descriptions of furniture and balls and ballroom gowns. I'm sure I could think of many other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own.

Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections"

Mr. Franzen said he can't think of any great work that he would like to see slashed, but tinkered with some book titles, should they be chopped.

"The Pretty Good Gatsby"
"Alyosha Karamazov"
"The Adventure of Augie March"
"Paler Fire"
"Lite in August"
"Shortmarch"

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

 

Darwin Correspondence

OBSERVANT In this previously unknown letter to a clergyman friend in 1860, Darwin initiated a correspondence about deaf cats with blue eyes.

My Dear Fellow Species

The DNA 200

FREE Byron Halsey after new DNA evidence led a judge to throw out his murder convictions last week.

The DNA 200

Missing American Soldiers

By RAVI NESSMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

	raqi motorists drive their cars in central Baghdad, Iraq, as smoke is seen, background, in the al-Sinak district, Wednesday, May 23, 2007. Unknown gunmen opened fire on commercial shops in a drive-by incident in the al-Sinak district, injuring 3 bystanders. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

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BAGHDAD -- Iraqi police found the body of

A man who was wearing what appeared to be a U.S. military uniform and had a tattoo on his left hand floating in the Euphrates River south of Baghdad on Wednesday morning. One Iraqi official said the body was that of an American soldier.

The man had been shot in the head and chest, Babil police Capt. Muthana Khalid said. He said Iraqi police turned the body over the U.S. forces.

The discovery of the body in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad in Babil Province, came as U.S. troops and Iraqi forces continued their massive search for the three soldiers abducted May 12 in an ambush on their patrol near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

The U.S. military said in an e-mail that it was looking into the report, but could not confirm it.

The report of the body found was confirmed by a senior Iraqi army officer in the Babil area. He told The Associated Press that the body found in the river was that of an American soldier. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

In an interview with the Army Times newspaper last week, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he believed at least two of the missing soldiers were alive.

"As of this morning, we thought there were at least two that were probably still alive," he said in the interview, which was posted on the newspaper's Web site on Saturday. "At one point in time there was a sense that one of them might have died, but again we just don't know."

In the Heat of Battle: Iraq War

OBSCURED Basic information like how many civilians have died can be impossible to pin down in Iraq. At left, the aftermath of a suicide bombing.

In the Heat of Battle and Politics, Hard Facts Melt

Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work

Anthony Pellicano

In Court Files, Hollywood's Mr. Fix-It at Work

The Thunderbolt

Six years ago, she was the other woman. Today, she's the ostentatiously adoring wife of the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Judi Giuliani's run for First Lady.

• By Lloyd Grove

CPI)

If everything works out, it may be the last great political deal brokered in a smoke-filled room. On a balmy June night in 1999, Judith Nathan was having a drink at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East 63rd Street. Her companion was Dr. Burt Meyers, an infectious-disease specialist at Mount Sinai hospital and one of the many physicians she had befriended as a hospital sales rep for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Nathan, then 44, was at ease amid the upmarket manliness, a woman of the world among many middle-aged men of the world, including, that night, the mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.

Club Mac, with its wooden Indians, leather sofas, and "state-of-the-art ventilation system," had become a well-known late-night haunt for the mayor. Perhaps it was also something of an escape: He was still living at Gracie Mansion with his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover. Here, he could kick back with a tumbler of Glenlivet and relax with City Hall aides and political associates. Sometimes a woman would approach him, interrupting his cigar-smoking to express her admiration, maybe get an autograph. Perhaps flirt mildly. So it wasn't surprising when Nathan, a pretty woman with rich brown hair, came over and said hello.

This story of how they met had to be pieced together from accounts by Giuliani intimates because the couple refuses to talk about it. Even during their gauzy TV interview this past March with Barbara Walters—who was a guest at their wedding in 2003—which was a custom-made moment to safely peddle this type of personal anecdotage, Judith demurred. "That's one thing I would kind of like to keep private," she said, allowing only that "it was by accident."

A few days after their fateful meeting, the mayor had an aide retrieve Judith's business card from his desk drawer at City Hall, then he phoned and asked her out. They took in a movie at Loews Kips Bay, The General's Daughter, which is about a cover-up at West Point. At dinner afterward, at Peter Luger Steakhouse, they were chaperoned by a couple of City Hall staffers.

Later, on the occasion of their marriage, Giuliani would tell the Times' "Vows" columnist that "our attraction was instantaneous. There was something mystical about the feeling." He evoked an appropriately operatic moment from one of his favorite novels, Mario Puzo's The Godfather, when Michael Corleone spotted his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. "It was," Rudy said, "the thunderbolt."

When she met the mayor at Club Macanudo, Judith Nathan couldn't have imagined the complexity of the relationship she was getting into. At that point, the considerable successes of Rudy's mayoralty were in the past and his future was uncertain. He may have looked like a catch, but he certainly did not look like a potential president. There was talk of a Senate run. Now, in a Cinderella-like reversal, Judith Giuliani, with her husband's help, is auditioning for a vast and contradictory role: romantic partner of America's Mayor, wholesome third wife, definer of gender roles, and emblem of respectable femininity for an entire nation. So far, her attempts to play this impossible part have been riveting, if sometimes comic.

Rudy Giuliani has always been the most insular of politicians, operating within his personal tribe, at odds with most everyone outside. The prime value is extreme loyalty, and for those in possession of that quality (think Bernard Kerik), much else is forgiven. Like George W. Bush, he and his team create their own reality and wait for the world to follow.

Judith Giuliani is the latest to join this coterie, and by far the most important. He's given her influence into all facets of his professional life. He has often referred to Judith as his "closest adviser." In a 2003 TV interview, Rudy claimed that Judith is "an expert we rely on" at Giuliani Partners. "She gives us a lot of advice and a lot of help in areas where she's got a lot of expertise—biological and chemical," Rudy said as Judith watched him and nodded vigorously. "And since we do security work, that's an area of great concern—you know, another anthrax attack, a smallpox attack, chemical agents. She knows all of that." Famously, he told Barbara Walters that Judith would be able to sit in on cabinet meetings, acting at the time as if this were a perfectly ordinary responsibility for a president to give his wife.

At other times, their presentation has been lovey-dovey to the point of queasiness. Their displays of affection got so gooey during the taping of the Walters interview that the ABC News doyenne is said to have joked, "Enough already!" They held hands and cooed; he called her "baby" and she called him "sweetheart" as they kissed on the lips. At one point, after he absolved her of responsibility for his divorce from Hanover and his alienation from their two children ("She's done everything she can. She loves all the children"), Judith, who was serenely feminine in a sea-green sweater, with another, lavender sweater tied casually around her neck over it, French preppy style, reached out to caress his cheek. When Walters asked her if she was "bothered" by her affair with the married mayor, Judith responded, blandly, "It was a rocky road, absolutely. But when you have a partnership that is based on mutual respect and communication, the two of you know what's going on."

Americans have an unresolved relationship with their idea of what a First Lady should be. It doesn't usually involve thunder and lightning. Political consultants know what's easiest to sell: Harriet Nelson, which is to say more or less Laura Bush. More-assertive types, be it the Svengali socialite in couture (early Nancy Reagan), the defiantly unkittenish liberal crusader (early Hillary Clinton), or the aloof and foreign-seeming heiress (Teresa Heinz-Kerry), are more off-putting because it's difficult to identify with them.

Judith Giuliani's biggest drawback—her three marriages—reminds voters of Rudy's own three and the associated tawdry drama. The first, to his second cousin, was annulled after fourteen years. His second, to Hanover, ended with Rudy's televised May 2000 announcement that he intended to separate from her; Hanover's shocked, tearful, also-televised response blamed Rudy's "relationship with one staff member," i.e., his communications director Cristyne Lategano. That was before much was known about Judith. By the summer of 2001, Judith's face, along with Donna's and Rudy's, was plastered on the cover of People magazine with the tawdry headline INSIDE NEW YORK'S NASTIEST SPLIT … THE MAYOR, THE WIFE, THE MISTRESS.

Six years later, the rollout of Judith-as-wife, as potential First Lady, is still tainted by the smoke of that thunderous extramarital night at Club Mac.

Her magazine appearances have tended to be like the one in the March Harper's Bazaar, where she talked about "making him happy, making a happy home" and posed lip-to-lip on Rudy's lap. "I've always liked strong, macho men," she told the magazine. "Rudy's a very, very romantic guy; we love watching Sleepless in Seattle. Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?" But amid their efforts at cozy public normalcy, suddenly Rudy's son, Andrew, told a Times reporter that "there's obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife."

Theirs is a very New York love story, complicated and, frankly, mature. It's hard to say how it'll play in the red states.

In early 2000, as Rudy's Senate race was getting under way, Judith Nathan was a mysterious but constant presence in the campaign entourage. Rudy didn't bother to clarify her role internally, and the few people in the know kept their own counsel. One campaign staffer at first assumed Judith was "some sort of adviser or consultant." Others believed she was a member of his security detail. Finally, by the time Rudy withdrew from the race in May, most folks had figured it out.

The couple was quickly beset by crises: his prostate cancer and then 9/11.

Under Judith's guidance, he considered various treatment options and decided against surgically removing the prostate—the method that produces the most reliable outcome—in favor of implanting radioactive seeds. Called brachytherapy, it's a less common procedure that has its advantages: The risk of long-term erectile dysfunction is lower. "He didn't want the knife down there at all," says an intimate who was privy to Rudy's worries.

Meanwhile, Rudy's divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, acting on his image-battered client's instructions, announced that Rudy's radiation treatments had for the past year left him impotent, making sex with his girlfriend impossible.

"Part of the reason Rudy loves her so much is that she loved him, and batted her eyes at him, even when his very virility was questioned, when his sexual vitality was knocked out," says the former Giuliani associate.

And Giuliani was unquestionably in love.

A few years ago, at a wedding attended by prominent lawyers and judges, Rudy and Judith were sitting at a table where the other guests were having a spirited legal and political discussion. "Rudy was deferring to her the entire evening," says a fellow guest. "They were talking about the war in Iraq, and she was opining. They were talking about the Second Circuit, and she had an opinion about that too. People didn't know what to say. And Rudy, if anything, was drawing her out. 'What do you think about that, baby?' She likes to talk."

A former associate of Giuliani's from the days when he was a mob-busting federal prosecutor says, "Loyalty does mean everything to him. He absolutely adores her. He doesn't need the expensive Brioni suits she has him wear, or the fancy food she has him eat. He was a cheeseburger-and-martini guy. But Rudy defers to her."

Almost immediately after they came out as a couple, Judith accompanied the mayor everywhere, even marching alongside him in city parades. Paparazzi staked out her apartment building and her condo in Noyack. Donna Hanover obtained a court order barring Judith from Gracie Mansion.

She quit Bristol-Myers Squibb in March 2001 and, with the connections supplied by her powerful consort, joined a philanthropic consulting firm, Changing Our World Inc., as a managing director.

Before they were married, he indulged her desire to dine regularly at Le Cirque even though the heavy cuisine tended to make him queasy. "It was almost required daily, going to Le Cirque for dinner, and Rudy used to throw up afterward, because the food was so rich," says a witness. "But she wanted to go, because it was the place to be seen, and the treatment by Sirio [Maccioni, the owner] was incredible."

As you descend from the hilltops on Route 309 into the former Judi Ann Stish's hometown, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, it sparkles like shards of glass in the sunlight. Then—closer in, on the edge of town—the vision loses its luster amid the detritus of a long-abandoned coal-mining economy. You pass a barnlike structure sporting a sign that misspells adult shope, then gigantic Quonset huts, then strip malls, then churches. Since the mines shut down after World War II, Hazleton has struggled mightily. In 2002, U.S. News & World Report labeled Hazleton "a town in need of a tomorrow." Aside from Judi, the city's most famous native is Jack Palance.

Judi's second cousin, retired Hazleton Area schools superintendent Geraldine Stish Shepperson, says the family patriarch—whose surname was Americanized from Sticia—emigrated from Italy to toil in the mines with Irish and Slovak settlers in the early 1900s. "They were all poor working people." Judi's grandfather Frank Stish, a milkman, was paralyzed in an on-the-job accident, Shepperson says, and Judith's 81-year-old father, Donald, is a retired circulation manager for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Judi's mother, Joan, is Polish-American, and these Stishes—including Judi's older brother, Donnie, and younger sister, Cyndy—attended St. Stanislaus Catholic Church, down the street from their modest two-family house on Carson Street in the Nannygoat Hill neighborhood. These days, Donald and Joan Stish spend part of the year in a Palm Beach condo purchased by Rudy and Judith.

"She was beautiful and had long, reddish hair," remembers current Hazleton High School English teacher Mike Saleeba, who was a year behind Judi back in the early seventies. "I remember her face—she had a fantastic complexion. I wouldn't have dared to ask her out." Still, "she would go out of her way to say hello to you. She wasn't one of the snobs."

Saleeba compares Hazleton's atmosphere in those days to the sitcom Happy Days. Saturday nights were spent dancing to live bands at the local YMCA. Afterward, the kids headed for the Knotty Pine—"the Pines," they called it—a popular diner where they pulled up in their cars, flashed their headlights, and the waitresses served barbecue sandwiches curbside. Judi's Hazleton High classmate Mike DeCosmo often dropped her home after a night of fun. "She was one of those people who never had a bad word about anybody, always upbeat, always friendly," says DeCosmo, today an accountant.

Judi was known as a diligent student and an attractive girl who busied herself with extracurricular activities such as the Future Nurses Association, the tennis and ski clubs, the literary society, and the Diggers Club, a volunteer service organization that "brightened the days of many handicapped and retarded children in Hazleton's schools," according to Janus, the high-school yearbook.

In a blue-collar place like Hazleton, nursing was one of the few professions that were seen as appropriate for young women. "There was teaching, and there was nursing. That's all that was offered to us, really," says the school librarian, Theresa Krajcirik.

It also got Judith out. She met medical-supplies salesman Jeffrey Scott Ross and, after two years of nursing school up the road in Bethlehem, married him at the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas. Then they moved to North Carolina.

Their marriage lasted less than five years. By the time of their uncontested Florida divorce on November 14, 1979, husband No. 2 was already in the wings. She married Bruce Nathan five days later.

They had met in Charlotte, where Bruce had moved after selling the Long Island–based office-furniture business founded by his grandfather. For the 24-year-old Judi, who had spent much of the previous five years on the road, demonstrating and selling surgical equipment, Nathan was a catch. Over the course of their increasingly rocky marriage, they lived in Atlanta and Manhattan (while acquiring a Hamptons summer place) and the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. She left him and moved to New York in March 1992 with their 7-year-old daughter, Whitney.

Not surprisingly, Bruce Nathan's friends remember Judi less than fondly. "She was a real opportunist, a real Becky Sharp character," says a Nathan-family friend who shared Thanksgiving dinners with Bruce and Judi. "She was kind of cute, and Bruce was quite handsome—a rich trust-fund kid from Long Island. She was less sophisticated in those days. I think she really desired to be sort of the Junior League type. She basically struck me as having an inflated, self-important view of herself."

AP)

The voluminous divorce papers filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court paint a more complicated picture. In public court documents, Bruce said he and Judi adopted Whitney in March 1985, when they lived in Atlanta, after trying for five years to have a child on their own. In 1987, they moved to New York, renting a series of apartments on the Upper East Side. The formerly Catholic Judi became an active member of the socially prominent Brick Presbyterian Church. The Nathans enrolled Whitney at the elite Madison Avenue Presbyterian Day School and, later on, Spence. In other court documents, there is mention of a Porsche, a Cadillac, antique furniture, paintings, pricey rugs, a place in Southampton, and, according to Judi, Bruce's "trust fund valued at $800,000 to one million dollars." She added, "My husband has had a long history of credit loans to support his lavish lifestyle."

As with all bad marriages, there seems to have been enough blame to go around. In one of the many affidavits filed and cross-filed by the warring Nathans, Judi accused Bruce of "a violent temper," "numerous physical assaults and manhandling of me," including "screaming vile epithets, cursing," and "punching me in the side of my head" in March 1992. After that alleged attack—which Bruce has denied—Judith retreated with her daughter to a neighbor's and called the cops. "I feared for my safety and that of my daughter," she claimed in her affidavit, adding, "I immediately fled California." She went first to Hazleton and stayed temporarily with her parents, then moved in with friends in Manhattan and took a part-time job in a dentist's office before eventually finding full-time work at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Bruce, in his own court filings, claimed that Judi had kidnapped their child and branded her an "unfit mother" and a "social climber" whose "'main goal' in life was being involved with whatever was 'the in thing' at the moment. Whether it was belonging to 'the right church' by converting from Catholicism to Presbyterian; playing bridge with the 'right people' … enrolling Whitney at the 'right schools' in order to further my wife's social aspirations; wearing designer clothes and jewelry; and vacationing at the fashionable Hamptons."

And while "I maintained my Jewish heritage," Bruce alleged that "my wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within Whitney's earshot." When he couldn't afford something, she referred to him as "Jew boy" and other slurs. Mike McKeon, Judith's campaign press secretary, dismisses the "ridiculous" fifteen-year-old allegation. "Anti-Semites don't marry Jews."

Meanwhile, she went on with her life, having various romances. One is said to have been with a French diplomatic staffer. For four years, she and Whitney and clinical psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on East 55th Street.

Years later, after Rudy made Judith the third Mrs. Giuliani and launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Zacharioudakis rhapsodized to the Daily News about his former lover's "passion," "sensual" nature, and "Italian eroticism."

Around the same time, Judith went back to court over custody arrangements for 16-year-old Whitney. She'd fled her mother's Upper East Side apartment to move in with her father, safely out of the limelight.

Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed. For one thing, Rudy's political career was resuscitated. During his illness, Giuliani had become increasingly dependent on her, a relationship that continued into his professional life. "She had to approve his schedule, which had already been finalized weeks before," says an insider. "People eventually knew not to lock anything in until she'd looked at it."

In his best-selling 2002 autobiography, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that his future wife had been an effective mayoral adviser after 9/11 because she "had been a nurse for many years, and afterward a pharmaceutical executive; she had managed a team of people and had many organizational skills. Further, she had wide-ranging scientific knowledge and research expertise." He added that he "put her to work helping me organize the hospitals" to treat the injured from ground zero. His campaign Website, meanwhile, notes, "In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mrs. Giuliani coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94."

But concerning Judith's participation in the city's response to 9/11, public-health and security consultant Jerry Hauer takes exception to the Giuliani campaign's assertions. Hauer—a nationally known bioterrorism expert who was Rudy's first director of the newly created Office of Emergency Management—minced no words about the claim that the mayor's then-girlfriend "coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94."

"That is simply a lie," Hauer tells me. "But Rudy's not shy about rewriting history when it suits him."

Hauer had a bitter falling-out with Giuliani after Hauer endorsed Democrat Mark Green's mayoral candidacy in 2001. "You're done," Rudy told him ominously after he and former police commissioner Bill Bratton staged a press conference endorsing Green.

Rex USA)

"I had left city government before 9/11, and Rudy called me back to help out," Hauer says. "He asked me to relocate the Family Assistance Center from the Armory on Lexington Avenue, which was too small, to Pier 94. We put it together in two and a half days. At that point, he had already announced his separation from Donna and he wanted to get Judith involved somehow. Most people didn't really care. We had a job to do. Where she had opinions, she offered them, and where they were valuable, we listened. The fact that she was the mayor's girlfriend didn't carry a lot of weight with most of the folks working there."

Afterward, Rudy installed her on the board of the Twin Towers Fund.

The Giuliani-Nathan nuptials were a star-studded extravaganza at which the bride wore a bejeweled Vera Wang gown and a diamond tiara, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officiated, and the 400 guests included Wang, Walters, Beverly Sills, Yogi Berra, Joe Torre, Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, Mort Zuckerman and Henry Kissinger, even Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas.

Judith elevated her profile in the charity world by touting various good causes in her column in Gotham magazine. She lent her name to the all-girls Mother Cabrini High School and the McCarton School for autistic children.

In 2003, Judith posed in a cranberry bejeweled Carolina Herrera gown for the cover of the society glossy Avenue. She sported a huge Chopard brooch and Jimmy Choo shoes while reclining languidly in her so-called Moroccan sitting room. From the magazine's excitable perspective, the Giulianis had "created their own Chartwell," the name of Sir Winston Churchill's country house, on the Upper East Side. The article confidently predicted that Judith "could be the most stylish First Lady since another Upper East Sider, Jacqueline Kennedy."

"You have a successful marriage when you have each other as a priority," she told the magazine. "I travel with Rudy. He respects me and involved me in all aspects of his life. We get involved in speechwriting. We make decisions together about which places we are going to go. It's a busy life and we live it together."

They have adjoining offices at Giuliani Partners at 5 Times Square, where she has installed Pilates machines, the better to keep her husband fit. Today, she doesn't like to leave his side, her arm possessively around his waist at social gatherings such as a buffet dinner last July at Ronald Perelman's East Hampton estate, where I saw the two of them navigating the A-list crowd joined at the hip. Manhattan hostesses have long known that if they invite the Giulianis to dinner, they must be prepared to breach protocol by seating them not only at the same table but next to each other, and Rudy's standard lecture contract explicitly requires that his wife be placed beside him in case his appearance involves sitting through a meal.

It's no surprise to veteran Rudy watchers that in recent weeks, senior presidential-campaign operatives have apparently been grumbling about what they consider Judith's meddling in matters outside her areas of competence. "She's, uh, feisty, as they say," a high-level supporter told Newsday. "The staff people go a little nuts."

The story of Manny Papir is a cautionary tale for anyone who doubts that Judith Giuliani is a force to be reckoned with. Papir, Rudy's longtime personal aide, learned the hard way during a trip to Europe when Rudy, taking a 9/11 victory lap in early 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and then was honored with the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden. Among Rudy's inner circle, Judith was fast becoming known for her demanding requirements. Even loyalist Sunny Mindel was overheard joking that whenever they arranged a chartered jet for their principal and his companion, "we need two seats for Judith—one for her and one for her Gucci bag." ("I have no recollection of saying that," Mindel says.)

When Judith asked to stay two nights in Baden-Baden instead of the previously planned one—throwing the intricate schedule into disarray—Papir, who was advancing Rudy's triumphal tour, made the mistake of betraying his impatience. Running into other members of the entourage in the lobby, he muttered, "Let me guess—you're waiting for Princess, too." When the quip was reported back to Rudy and Judith, Papir—who declined to comment—was out of a $200,000-a-year job.

McKeon dismisses the complaints, arguing that Judith is not trying to be a political strategist. "It comes from people who are not on the inside of the campaign. Maybe that's why they're grumbling," he says. "Judith is nothing but an asset, and, as the campaign continues, she's going to be a larger and larger asset."

Her early work on the stump has been marred by occasional gaffes, but he calls her "an experienced public speaker" and says there are no plans to get her a speechwriter. "Her primary role is as a support system for Rudy in a personal way and as a character witness for him in a public way. She knows him as a man, as a husband, and as a good person, and that's what she'll be talking about. She'll be one of our key surrogates."

Judith Giuliani was introduced to the public by the tabloids. But that experience did not fully prepare her for the current one. Friends describe a woman who is hurt and baffled—"freaked out," says one—by the barrage of coverage of her first marriage and the fact that long ago, her job had her demonstrating surgical-stapling procedures on live dogs.

Candice Stark, who's known Judith for twenty years, believes that she's a target of opportunity. "I read these things in the newspaper trying to trash her, trying to make her seem like something that she's not, and I think it's just people looking for anything they can to take Rudy down," she theorizes. "Everything about his life is so well known they can't dig much further, so they're going after her instead. So much of politics is cruel. You've got to be strong."

A confidant of Judith's from the Hamptons, where the Giulianis paid $3 million for a 6,000-square-foot shingled house in Water Mill, complete with swimming pool, wine cellar, and cigar room, argues that she's been unfairly caricatured. "This is a woman, a single mother, who has struggled most of her life, and she married somebody not because he was famous or because she thought he would be the president but because she was in love with him," the friend says. "Now she's very worried that something she will do or say will hurt his opportunity. She loses sleep over it. Reading in the newspapers that she's a liability has been very, very hard for her."

The friend added, "I think Rudy's the one that's sabotaging her. He's out of control. There's too much hand-holding and kissing on the lips, behaving like a couple of 18-year-olds in their first love affair. She doesn't have the political smarts, and I don't think she expected any of this." (Like many people interviewed for this article, this friend asked for anonymity. "No good deed goes unpunished," explained Howard Koeppel, declining to share his impressions of the mayor's then-girlfriend, who was a frequent visitor after Rudy moved out of Gracie Mansion to bunk with Koeppel and his domestic partner, Mark Hsiao.)

Republican fund-raiser and Manhattan hostess Georgette Mosbacher—the ex-wife of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher, who was Commerce secretary under the first President Bush—is a new member of Judith's social circle, along with Walters and Beverly Sills. All three were Judith's guests in December at an intimate ladies' lunch at the Giulianis' East 66th Street co-op off Madison Avenue. "It's a tough role—I've been there," says the flame-haired Mosbacher. "For me, it was horrible, devastating. You don't want to hurt your husband, and everything you do reflects on him. You become hypersensitive and you try to be what you think the press wants you to be so they won't come after you. But you learn pretty quick—at least I did—that you can't win that way. In the end, you gotta be yourself."

Judith, who had been Rudy's constant companion during early campaign swings in New Hampshire, has more recently stayed behind and lowered her profile—and Rudy has urged reporters to cut her some slack, pointing out that "I am a candidate. She's a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction."

When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because "she's up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore." The locution "our daughter" was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna's surname and reportedly didn't bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. ("In the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline," says a Republican strategist. "He can't be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain't gonna cut it.")

As for the brickbats Judith has been absorbing of late, "I tell her it's just like when I was mayor and every day people want to disagree with your policies and criticize you," he said. "Over time, you get used to it."

Wren Abbott contributed research to this article.

 

Shark Reproduces Without Sex

No Need for Dad: Female Shark Reproduces Without Sex

by Agence France-Presse • Posted May 23, 2007 12:15 PM

BELFAST (AFP)—A female hammerhead shark that gave birth without sex has put the bite into conventional wisdom about reproduction among large vertebrates, according to research published Wednesday.

The shark's offspring has no paternal DNA, bemused experts from Northern Ireland and the United States report.

The discovery is the first known case of asexual reproduction in sharks but it also raises concerns about the genetic health of dwindling shark populations, they say.

The investigation was launched after an unexpected birth in an aquarium at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska in December 2001.

The baby's arrival baffled staff, as none of the three possible mother hammerheads in the tank had been exposed to any male hammerhead for the past three years, after they had been caught as babies off Florida.

The research was carried out by scientists from Queen's University Belfast, the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and the Henry Doorly Zoo.

The head of the Queen's research team and the study's co-author, Paulo Prodohl, from the School of Biological Sciences, described the findings as "really surprising."

"As far as anyone knew, all sharks reproduced only sexually by a male and female mating, requiring the embryo to get DNA from both parents for full development, just like in mammals."

Co-author Mahmood Shivji, who led the Guy Harvey Research Institute team, said the research may have solved a mystery about other species of shark having babies in captivity despite not having contact with males.

"It now appears that at least some female sharks can switch from a sexual to a non-sexual mode of reproduction in the absence of males," said Shivji.

But what appears to be a boon for the world's threatened sharks also has a downside.

"Unfortunately, this occurrence is not benign, because it results in reduced genetic diversity in the offspring since there is no new genetic variation introduced from the paternal side," Shivji said.

Females of only very few vertebrate species can give birth to fully formed young without requiring their eggs to be first fertilised by a male's sperm.

This reproductive ability is known as parthenogenesis--but it is a rare event and until now only seen in some species of birds, reptiles and amphibians, never in major vertebrates such as sharks.

Mammals are now the only major vertebrate group where this form of reproduction has not been seen, said Prodohl.

The study appears in Biology Letters, a journal published by Britain's Royal Society

Graduation 2007

The Graduates

by Louis Menand May 21, 2007

On your first sleepover, your best friend's mother asks if you would like a tuna-fish-salad sandwich. Your own mother gives you tuna-fish-salad sandwiches all the time, so you say, "Sure." When you bite into the sandwich, though, you realize, too late, that your best friend's mother's tuna-fish salad tastes nothing like the tuna-fish salad your mother makes. You never dreamed that it was possible for there to be more than one way to prepare tuna-fish salad. And what's with the bread? It's brown, and appears to have tiny seeds in it. What is more unnerving is the fact that your best friend obviously considers his mother's tuna-fish salad to be perfectly normal and has been eating it with enjoyment all his life. Later on, you discover that the pillows in your best friend's house are filled with some kind of foam-rubber stuff instead of feathers. The toilet paper is pink. What kind of human beings are these? At two o'clock in the morning, you throw up, and your mother comes and takes you home.

Religion

Books

Jerry Falwell Dies at 73

..

Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73

Ivy League Crunch

Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., decided not to apply to Ivy League universities.

Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier

Roger Clemens might be worth every penny

Roger Clemens

Dismal Rocket Science
Crunch the numbers: Roger Clemens might be worth every penny.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 12:37 A.M. E.T.

..After Date-->Roger Clemens, the winningest pitcher alive and still an ace at an age when most ballplayers are selling cars, recently stood up in George Steinbrenner's box at Yankee Stadium, like Mussolini at the balcony, and told a cheering crowd that he was coming back to the Yankees. New York sports being New York sports, the muttering started a half-second after the cheering. Did the Yankees just buy another pennant? Or another Kevin Brown? Is Clemens really worth $18 million?

The question has been chewed over in the sports media since the announcement. But what's been missing from the debate is the quantitative question at its base. Four months of Clemens is worth a certain amount to the Yankees. How much?

Let's break it down. First of all, how much money is a playoff berth worth to the Yankees? According to the late baseball statistics guru Doug Pappas, the Yankees' postseason revenues in 2001, a year they made it to the seventh game of the World Series, were $16 million. So, even if we assume that a Rocket-fueled Yankees team will go all the way, Clemens still might not pay back the Yankees' investment.

Of course, fielding a contending team puts more rear ends in the seats during the regular season, too: If the Yankees finish fourth this year, don't expect sellouts for next year's weekday homestand against Kansas City. Revenues coming directly from playoff games don't tell the whole story—there's a value to just being in the hunt, even if Yankee fans of the "nothing but a ring will do" variety won't admit it.

Luckily, Nate Silver has come up with a computation of the cash value of adding wins to your regular-season record. That value depends on which wins you're adding: Going from 56 wins to 62 is worth much less than going from 90 (wild-card contender) to 96 (probable division winner).

So, where are the Yankees starting from? That is, how many games would they win without Clemens? My go-to source for real-time predictions of this kind is Clay Davenport's postseason odds page. His projection uses a so-called Monte Carlo system, which means it operates by running simulations of the baseball season again and again to see, on average, what happens. Every day, starting from that day's standings, his computer runs through 1 million fake seasons, making a best estimate of the odds of each team winning each game. As of this writing, he has the Yankees winning an average of 86.6 games and making the playoffs 36.6 percent of the time. (At the outset of the season, before the Bombers' current struggles, those numbers were 90.8 games and 52.6 percent.)

Starting at 86 or 87 wins is just when extra victories become really valuable: According to Silver's computation, it would take just four extra wins in the Yankee ledger to make the $18 million payout to Clemens a black-ink transaction. Surely the Rocket's going to win four games, right? But that's not the question. He needs to win games the Yankees otherwise wouldn't have won.

Pitchers win games by preventing runs. To determine whether Clemens will help the Yankees win games they would have lost without him, we need to know how many runs Roger Clemens will deny the Yankees' opponents.

If he suits up at the beginning of June, Clemens is likely to make about 23 starts. At his current age, he's averaging just under six innings a start. So, let's say he'll throw 130 innings. Clemens' ERA last year in Houston was a sterling 2.30, best in the National League. His numbers won't be that gaudy in the offense-rich AL East (in his last three years in New York, he posted ERAs of 3.51, 4.35, and 3.91), but there's every reason to expect him to be effective. The most popular baseball prediction systems project Clemens to have an ERA between 3.00 and 3.50 as a Yankee. That means he'd allow between 40 and 50 runs over the course of those 23 starts.

But what we really need to know is how many runs Clemens won't give up—in other words, how many runs would Yankee opponents score in those 130 innings if the Bombers keep sending out the pitchers they're currently using? And now we come to the crux of the matter. The Yankees pitching, already thin, has been brutalized by injury, and the resulting parade of last-minute replacements to last-minute replacements was certainly a factor in Steinbrenner's willingness to open his wallet for a season-saving ace.

Then again, Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina are already off the disabled list, and by the time Clemens is ready to pitch, only one, not all, of the replacements—Kei Igawa, Matt DeSalvo, Philip Hughes, Chase Wright, and Jeff Karstens—will be starting regularly for the Yankees. Some of these pitchers have shown great promise and one (Igawa) has a long record of success, at least in Japan. It's hard to imagine there won't be one of them who's maintaining, at worst, an ERA of 6.00.

If that's the case, that pitcher would give up 87 runs in the same 130 innings we're expecting from Clemens. Assume Clemens saves the Yankees 40 runs over the course of the season. How much does this boost the Yankees in the standings? For this, we need to use a remarkable tool developed by Bill James in the early days of sabermetrics, the Pythagorean formula. Though it has the same name as one, it isn't a mathematical theorem, but it's about as close as you get in baseball statistics—and it allows you to predict the effect a change in runs scored or runs allowed will have on winning percentage. James' formula reads

PCT = RS² / (RS² + RA²)

where PCT is the team's winning percentage, RS is runs scored, and RA is runs against.

This season, the Yankees are on pace to lead the league in runs scored with 900. If we take this 900-runs-scored figure as fixed, then for the Yankees to end up winning 86.6 games, they'd be expected to allow about 840 runs. Take away the 40 runs saved by Clemens and you would get a record of 90-72. In other words, Clemens would get the Yankees those four wins. Thus, in our admittedly rough approximation, Clemens would help the Yankees to the tune of just about what they're paying him.

Of course, whenever you carry out probabilistic computations like this, you're dealing with what Don Rumsfeld would call "known unknowns." If any one of the Yankee spare parts (or a new one picked up cheaply along the way) steps forward and pitches adequately, the benefit of having Clemens could be cut in half. (Though any serious injury to oldsters like Mike Mussina or Andy Pettitte could make adding Clemens seem genius.) If you think Davenport's simulation places too much weight on the Yankees' bad start and expect New York would have won 90 games without Clemens, that brings the break-even point down closer to three extra wins. And if you're certain, as some are, that Clemens would be pitching for division-rival Boston if he weren't in New York, you need to take that into account, too. All of these factors are hard to get a quantitative grasp on.

And then there's the fact that the dollar value of Clemens might not be what's ultimately in question. If Steinbrenner is willing to spend however much it takes to increase the Yankees' chances of winning the AL East, even by a fraction, he may simply not care all that much about the expected cash benefit of signing Clemens. Indeed, the Yankees, for all their on-field success and huge fan base, lost money last year. Adding one of the best pitchers in baseball certainly makes the Yankees better; whether it will make them richer remains to be seen.

Return to article

Update, May 16, 2007: Several correspondents have pointed out that thanks to Major League Baseball's luxury tax, the Clemens signing will cost the Yankees closer to $26 million than $18 million, the latter figure representing his prorated 2007 salary. Strictly by the ledger-book, $26 million is too much to pay for the four wins you'd expect Clemens to add. On the other hand, the same forces that subject the Yankees to the luxury tax mean they may have more to gain from a championship season than Nate Silver's generic formula suggests.

Jordan Ellenberg is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. His first novel is The Grasshopper King.

Amputee Sprinter

"I don't see myself as disabled," said Oscar Pistorius, a former rugby and water polo player. "There's nothing I can't do that able-bodied athletes can do."

An Amputee Sprinter: Is He Disabled or Too-Abled?

New Jersey Wildfire

Strong Winds May Spread New Jersey Wildfire

Deaths of Skier’s Cousin and Officer Divide a Town

At the police and fire station in Franconia, N.H., signs of mourning after a police officer was killed while on duty Friday night.

Deaths of Skier's Cousin and Officer Divide a Town

Soldiers feared captured by al-Qaida

BAGHDAD (AP) - U.S. aircraft dropped leaflets seeking information about three U.S. soldiers feared captured by al-Qaida, as troops intensified the search Tuesday despite a warning from the terror group that the hunt will endanger the captives' lives. The U.S. command said the searchers were trying to isolate areas where they suspect the captives may have been taken after the pre-dawn ambush Saturday in which four American troops and an Iraq soldier were killed. "The captors don't have freedom of movement," said Maj. Kenny Mintz of San Diego. "If they have the soldiers, they can't move them from where they are. We're doing a deliberate search of the areas." On Monday, an al-Qaida front group—the Islamic State of Iraq—warned the Americans in a Web statement to call off the hunt "if you want their safety." The warning could indicate that the presence of about 4,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops in the thinly populated farming area 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad is making it difficult for the captors to move the Americans to a secure location. In a statement Tuesday, the U.S. command said American soldiers have questioned more than 450 people and detained at least 11 since the search began last weekend. A later statement said aircraft had dropped leaflets asking for help in locating the soldiers. Trucks with loudspeakers were roaming the area urging people to come forward with any information. No details of the leaflets or their precise message were released. On Tuesday, the military said the soldiers they were assigned to Company D, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, which is part of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y. At the time of the attack, the soldiers were in two vehicles "at a stationary observation post trying to interdict terrorists who place roadside bombs," a U.S. spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said. "There were other observation posts that were trying to do this in the area. They were not moving in a convoy. The entire unit was out operating in this same area," Garver added. Al-Qaida and other insurgent groups have been active for years in the string of towns and villages south of the capital. The area is known as the "triangle of death" because of frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces as well as Shiite civilians traveling to shrine cities in the south. Last June, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the deaths of two U.S. soldiers whose mutilated bodies were later found in the same area. The soldiers attacked last Saturday were assigned to a small patrol base set up as part of the new U.S. strategy to move troops from large, heavily defended garrisons to live and work among the people. Critics of the strategy had warned that such small outposts are more vulnerable to attack. Last month, nine American soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near a small patrol base northeast of Baghdad. Last week, an embedded reporter for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, who visited the patrol base south of Baghdad, said the soldiers were housed in a rural home with protective razor wire "not far from the front door." "Soon after the base was established, insurgents began testing their new neighbors," the Stars and Stripes said. "In the first months, one convoy came across seven roadside bombs piled outside the front gates. More recently, U.S. officials had gotten reports that a force of more than two dozen insurgents planned to storm the walls" although the attack never materialized. The Pentagon confirmed the dead as Sgt. 1st Class James D. Connell Jr., 40, of Lake City, Tenn.; Pfc. Daniel W. Courneya, 19, of Nashville, Mich.; and Pfc. Christopher E. Murphy, 21, of Lynchburg, Va. The four other soldiers are Sgt. Anthony J. Schober, 23, of Reno, Nev.; Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.; and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. The Pentagon said one of those four was among the dead, but it could not confirm which one. "I'm proud of my dad, because he didn't really fight for himself, he fought for the country," Connell's teenage daughter, Courtney, told Knoxville's WATE-TV. In Michigan, students at Maple Valley High School created a memorial for Courneya, who graduated in 2005 and was well-known in the small community southwest of Lansing. He was a member of the school's track and soccer teams and played clarinet in the band. "It's a tribute of photos, posters, plaques and a picture of him in his uniform," school official Kelly Zank told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Courneya's mother, Wendy Thompson, said her husband, Army Spc. David Thompson, was in Iraq and returning home after learning of his stepson's death. Also Tuesday, at least 51 people were killed or found dead across the country. They included seven killed in a pair of bombings in Baghdad's Tayaran Square shopping area and four who died when mortar shells struck the Shiite area of Sadr City. Under a new government policy limiting media coverage of such tragedies, Iraqi police prevented news photographers and cameramen from filming the scene. The government said the order, announced over the weekend, is aimed at preventing journalists from inadvertently tampering with evidence, protecting the privacy of the wounded and keeping insurgents and militias from keeping track of their success rate. The ban also prevents pictures which call into question U.S. and Iraqi claims of success in quelling violence in Baghdad. Elsewhere, five civilians were killed and 41 wounded when dozens of gunmen attacked a village north of the capital, Iraqi authorities said. A mortar or rocket slammed into the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, wounding five American Embassy contractors, a spokesman said. U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said there were no deaths and property damage was minimal. He said the contractors' nationalities had "not yet been confirmed." Fintor said the embassy was "open and functioning normally." Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Imus Affair Revisited

..> ..>

Nora Ephron Bio

04.16.2007

Not About Imus

READ MORE:I'm really glad I wasn't planning to blog this week, or I might have made the mistake of writing something about Imus. Way too much has been written about Imus, and I'm exhausted from reading all of it, every last word. And the truth is, I have nothing to say. Not that that would have stopped me from writing -- after all, it doesn't seem to have stopped anyone else.

I was never a guest on Imus' show -- so I couldn't have written that what Imus said was inexcusable but on some level I enabled it. Of course I could have written the opposite sort of thing -- a blog in which I confessed that although I knew Imus was nuts, I nonetheless would have been happy to have been a guest on his show because (who are we kidding?) I too had a book to sell; and then I could have gone into some sort of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence about the bully on the playground and how everyone wants to be friends with the bully on the playground because it's like bearding the lion, until it all turns into Lord of the Flies....

You can see it was a good thing I didn't write about Imus.

And then there's Al Sharpton. I would pretty much have had to deal with Al Sharpton. Who needs it? And gangsta rap. Don't get me started. And it's a good thing I didn't get started, because what do I know about gansta rap? To my knowledge, I have never heard gangsta rap in my life. The word "hypocrisy" would have cropped up somewhere in this self-important piece of twaddle I'm not writing, for sure. And the words "nappy-headed hos" -- which would, of course, have been a way of compounding whatever injury existed in the first place. And I deeply hope I would not have used the expression "Does the punishment fit the crime?" but who knows? I might have.

Another reason I didn't write about Imus, incidentally, is that by mid-week, the entry level into the Imus-commentary sweepstakes changed, and since I do not have two daughters, much less two beautiful black daughters, I was ineligible to comment on how Imus' remarks would deeply affect them (if they were old enough to read) or had already affected them so much that they would probably never recover. I might even have made the mistake of talking about Imus' "victims," when actually the victims were the only true winners of the week, and by the way, how bad can it be for the victims that they were insulted by a lunatic but then got to be on Oprah?

Incidentally, late in the week I developed a theory about how Imus could have avoided the whole mess, but since I wasn't going to write about Imus I instead told it to my friend Arianna Huffington and she stole it for her blog. How could I possibly have worked it into anything now that she'd run off with it? Although I suppose I could have put it into parentheses: (My theory: Imus should have walked into the studio Monday morning, apologized, suspended himself, walked out, checked into rehab, and shut up. But of course he can't shut up. Because he's a talk show host. And he can't stop talking.) (This theory might have led me straight into a sentence about the perils of being the kind of narcissist who loves uproar.) (Which might have led me to ruminate about Imus' mother.) (Which would have been a mistake, because it's not her fault.) (It's never the mother's fault.)

So you can see for yourself -- it's just as well I didn't write about Imus.

 

Today's Blogs

Deputy Dogged
By Christopher Beam
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 5:27 P.M. E.T.

Bloggers ponder the resignation of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. They also tweak the military for banning YouTube and debate a BBC journalist's outburst over Scientology.

Deputy dogged: Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty resigned Monday, the latest casualty of the U.S. attorneys scandal. McNulty says he's leaving because of the "financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service." But Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that McNulty had "signed off on the names" of the fired U.S. attorneys. Bloggers wonder what the resignation means for the department.

Liberal Irregular Times isn't particularly enthused: "Sorry, I left my pom-poms home today. McNulty's resignation might be good news for Democratic Party P.R. purposes, but it doesn't give us any new information, and it doesn't change what the Bush administration has already done to invert the meaning of justice in America."

Josh Marshall at liberal Talking Points Memo wonders whether McNulty might spill more now that he's gone: "If I were Gonzales and the White House, I'd see McNulty's departure as a very unwelcome development. Behind the scenes, supporters of McNulty and Gonzales have been increasingly at odds as the scandal has progressed. … [I]t's hard to figure where McNulty gets less forthcoming once he's no longer part of the administration."

Even worse for Bush, now he has to appoint someone to replace him, and that means confirmation hearings. Liberal Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah figures Bush can't dither: "While Bush might postpone nominating a replacement, DOJ is fairly well gutted at this point, with Gonzales sidelined, Monica gone, Sampson's replacement USA O'Connor not yet approved. They're going to need to appoint someone--or else DOJ's efforts to much up the Foggo Wilkes case (and others) may just grind to a halt."

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report looks askance at Gonzales' point that McNulty "signed off on the names": "That's true, but so did Gonzales. Obviously, the Bush gang (which certainly includes Gonzales) wants nothing more than to find a high-ranking scapegoat, but McNulty isn't it."

With McNulty out of the way, Alex Pareene at Wonkette imagines Gonzales "sit[ting] in his office all day cackling and lighting cigars with letters of resignation." Things can only get worse: "McNulty is one of the guys who actually feels sort of bad about this US attorneys scandal, so expect the DoJ to become even more corrupt in his absence."

Faiz at ThinkProgress posts the video in which Gonzales, in their words, "throws McNulty under the bus." The Left Coaster's Steve Soto hopes that Gonzales' "pansy-assed comments today and the sniping from the White House will lead McNulty to say some interesting things in response when he goes before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees later this year."

Read more about McNulty's resignation. Read his resignation letter here.

I want YouTube: A month after cracking down on blogs written by soldiers, the Department of Defense blocked highly trafficked sites like YouTube and MySpace on official computers. Military officials cite the risk of high traffic overwhelming the military's private network and concerns about sensitive information being disclosed. The military will continue to post videos on its own YouTube site.

Kevin Drum at liberal Washington Monthly's Political Animal dubs the bandwidth argument "obviously bogus. There are fairly straightforward ways of allocating bandwidth. … They just want to restrict images of war flowing in both directions." British socialist Anthony Karl Page at Neither Labour Nor Tory agrees: "Considering the sheer amount of money spent bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, I am incredulous that the military can't afford a few more gigabytes of bandwidth for their own soldiers."

Preston, commenting on military blog BLACKFIVE, calls the crackdown "a ham-handed solution. I would have liked to see a 'share the pain' strategy. They could have restricted the bandwidth hogs to a few machines in a morale tent. I'm sorry if that means the Exec's 100th PowerPoint presentation takes an extra second to send. He can wait."

Akinoluna, a Marine sergeant stationed overseas, doubts the ban will do much to prevent the disclosure of sensitive material: "[E]very single servicemember who has access to a military network can simply switch over to using an unblocked website or use their military email accounts instead. And don't get me started on the proxy server links the resident computer geeks will soon share with all their buddies."

Stress test: BBC reporter John Sweeney exploded at a Scientology official while researching a documentary on the Church of Scientology that aired Monday. (See above.) After a video of his outburst leaked to YouTube, Sweeney admitted he made a mistake: ""I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe." In his report, Sweeney claims the church sent people to follow him and eavesdrop on his conversations.

At the blog of the British Telegraph, Ceri Radford admits she feels "a shade of sympathy for the 'exploding tomato.' I mean, if you had been followed about for seven days solid by some implacable drone in a naff suit and reflective sunglasses, wouldn't you be feeling a little tetchy?"

Author Andrew Collins at Where Did It All Go Right? claims he has no quarrel with Scientologists' beliefs: "But to see the media wing of Scientology trying to shut down a BBC investigation, threatening legal action, reporting it to Ofcom over what they see as 150 guidline breaches, and then to use intimidating tactics such as we saw in the film, does them no credit whatsoever. It'll take a personal appearance by Tom and Katie to paper over this one."

Nick at Beyond Hollywood expected better from Sweeney: "Wait, aren't BBC reporters supposed to be better than us? As in, they don't go around screaming into people's faces like a red-faced maniac? … I just love it when British guys act like us Ugly Americans."

Mark Maenell at Qaerentia considers Sweeney's reaction "to a large extent righteous and appropriate. …Scientology's techniques by themselves are sufficient to indicate seriously sinister intent. … Sweeney was quite right to be angry - and it just reminded me that we should get more angry about these sorts of things."

Read more about Sweeney's blowup.

Christopher Beam is a Slate editorial assistant

Sopranos, The Final Season

From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg and Brian Williams
Subject: Week 5: Bush-Soprano Mix 'n' Match!
Updated Monday, May 14, 2007, at 3:30 PM ET

Dear Jeff and Brian,

First, a hearty benvenuto to Brian. Now that you've established you aren't the troubled visionary behind Pet Sounds, I can let go of my resentment against your charging $75 for the 40^th anniversary limited edition action figure. (And that's the unsigned edition!) I am mightily impressed that you've eaten at Pizzaland, but I wonder exactly what you mean when you say you've been to the Bing. It's my understanding that the Bada Bing! strip club is a fictional locale invented by David Chase. Please explain.

I note with mild embarrassment that I'm the only guy in this dialogue who has never reported on the M----. (After seeing what Chris-tuh-fuh did to his writer friend J.T. in Episode 82, there's no way I'm going to spell out that word.) I bet you guys have both eaten at Rao's on 114^th Street, too. Me, I buy the sauce at Whole Foods. I do know somebody named Patsy, but it's short for Patricia, not Pasquale. She's my sister, not a mobster. She never complains about anything I write about her, as Jeff's Patsy Conte does, and her sons are too well brought up to pour sulfuric acid on the feet of deadbeats, as the son of The Sopranos' Patsy Parisi does. Not that I know about, anyway.

Chase's strategy for this final season should be clear by now. He is fixing things so that Tony's downfall could come from anybody, anywhere, at any time. Potential assassins, prosecution witnesses, and miscellaneous catalysts in his ruin now include Phil Leotardo, Paulie Walnuts, Hesh Rabkin, Tony's sister Janice (a favorite theory of Jeff's), Tony's pathetic and resentful son, A.J. (a favorite theory of mine), and now Chris-tuh-fuh. (Brian, you mentioned how Tony insulted Christopher's manhood by criticizing his grilling technique. You might also have mentioned the jealous look Christopher shot in the direction of Tony and Bobby Bacala as the two huddled in a corner of his yard. There was a time Tony's handpicked successor was sure to be Christopher, but now it's looking more like Tony's brother-in-law Bobby will get the job, even though he lacks much experience at icing people.) These days it seems the only friend Tony can really count on is Silvio Dante, whom we haven't seen much of lately. Will Silvio start to turn against Tony in next week's episode? Will he bring in Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons to help finish Tony off? (I still don't know who Southside Johnny played in that earlier episode, but he's lurking out there somewhere, and maybe he'll call in the Asbury Jukes.)

Then there are the Arabs. One theory I'm starting to toy with is that the Arabs really are undercover cops, and that agents Harris and Goddard are asking Christopher and Tony to pass information about them—lest Meadow or Carmela perish under the Hudson as terrorists blow up the Lincoln Tunnel—purely to divert any suspicion about their sting. Didn't Christopher sell the Arabs guns once already? Maybe the game isn't to prosecute Tony as the mobster he is but rather to frame him as a terrorist. That would be a way to end the show realistically (mob bosses never last long) without the Hays Office-style moralizing that Chase has said he deplores. I'm halfway serious about this. Brian, you have inside knowledge. Am I warm?

But now I'm completely contradicting my stern lecture from last week about the evils of trying to guess how The Sopranos will end.

Brian, you mentioned that Carmela was reading Fred Barnes. Specifically, it was a paperback of Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush. I haven't read the book, but apparently it's a paean to Bush's leadership skills that Barnes had the misfortune to publish in January 2006, just as the Iraq war was sending Bush's approval ratings into the Dumpster. Its inclusion in the episode strikes me as a fairly broad joke; though Carm probably votes Republican, I seriously doubt she'd be interested enough in politics to read Barnes' book, or any nonfiction book about public affairs. What's the joke? That Carmela could use a few tips, because the Tony Soprano administration is in an advance state of collapse, just like you-know-who's.

This leads me to propose that we play a little game: Bush-Soprano Mix 'n' Match! Name a past or present member of the Bush administration or family and find the corresponding figure from The Sopranos' cast of characters. None of what follows, of course, is meant to suggest that anyone connected with the Bush administration or family engages in criminal activities, or associates with anyone who does, except for Ken Lay. If you need to refresh your memory on Sopranos characters, click here. If you need to refresh your memory on Bush White House players, click here. (Both lists, sadly, are a little out of date, but they're better than nothing.)

I think we can all agree that Barbara Bush is Livia Soprano. ("People think she's a sweet, grandmotherly Aunt Bea type," Laura Bush quipped at the 2005 White House Correspondents' Dinner. "She's actually more like, mmm, Don Corleone." Reader, if you think she was kidding, read my late wife Marjorie Williams' chapter about the former first lady in The Woman at the Washington Zoo.) The president is, of course, Tony Soprano, but I don't think it would be accurate or fair to say that Laura is Carmela. Condoleezza Rice is Carmela. Just as Carmela decided that a spec house was worth reuniting with her unfaithful mobster husband, Condi decided that the State Department was worth never saying "you're wrong" to her tragically misguided work husband and commander in chief. Or maybe Condi is Dr. Melfi. Like Melfi, Rice is both confidante and enabler. Brent Scowcroft is Uncle Junior, minus the dementia. He may not be a blood relative, but he's the president's father's best friend (not to mention former national security adviser), he's short on hair, and he thinks the don is way too big for his britches.

Vice President Dick Cheney is Ralphie Cifaretto, i.e., the administration's least-controllable hothead. Doug Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, is Richie Aprile, i.e., its second-least-controllable hothead.

George Tenet, memoirist and former Central Intelligence Agency chief, is Paulie Walnuts, a company man with a chip on his shoulder. Like Paulie, Tenet is wary of or outright hostile to rivals for the boss's affection, and like Paulie, he doesn't dare challenge the boss head-on. He's a little too excitable, slow to accept responsibility, and nowhere near slick enough to hide his many liabilities.

John Dilulio, director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during Bush's first term, is "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero. He ratted out the White House for not taking policy seriously and got whacked (which in this context translates to "was silenced quickly").

Alberto Gonzales? Just to make things difficult, the president nicknamed the attorney general "Fredo," an unconscious allusion to the weakest and least-intelligent Corleone family member in The Godfather. (In the Bush administration, the price of loyalty is humiliation.) Gonzales is perhaps Bobby Bacala—unstintingly loyal and none too bright. Though catch me tomorrow and I may say that Andrew Card, the president's former chief of staff, is Bobby.

OK, guys, help me out. I'd love to find a Johnny Sack somewhere in the Bush administration, but it isn't coming to me. No one has Johnny's moral grandeur. Too bad Bob Dole is retired.

Inside the Beltway-ly,
Tim

---

From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg
Subject: Week 6: Comfortably Numb
Posted Monday, May 14, 2007, at 3:30 PM ET

Dear Jeff,

Pretty shocking development last night, eh? We'll get to that soon enough. (Reader, if you didn't watch, I advise that you not continue past my fifth paragraph.) First, let's discuss a Pink Floyd song.

I mentioned previously that I watch The Sopranos with my 14-year-old son, Will. A couple of episodes back, Will pointed out that Tony, while shambling downstairs in his bathrobe, was singing to himself "Comfortably Numb," from Pink Floyd's The Wall. Never having been a Pink Floyd fan, I didn't know the song (Will is rapidly becoming more knowledgeable than I even about music of my own era), and I shrugged off the reference.

But "Comfortably Numb" reappeared in last night's episode, sung this time by Van Morrison with Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and the Band (minus Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel). It's a gorgeous version recorded live in Berlin in June 1990 as part of an all-star restaging of The Wall to commemorate the fall of that other wall seven months earlier. The stage was erected on Potsdamer Platz, which for 44 years prior to November 1989 had stood unoccupied as disputed territory. An account of the staging on Roger Waters' Web site relates that the West German military had to be brought in to clear the site of unexploded ordnance from World War II and that in the course of that search, the soldiers unearthed a previously undiscovered section of der Führerbunker. Martin Scorsese, who (like David Chase) has a genius for incorporating music into his narratives, used the Berlin version of "Comfortably Numb" in The Departed, in the scene where Billy (the undercover cop played by Leonardo DiCaprio) makes love to Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), his psychiatrist and, unbeknownst to him, the girlfriend of Colin (Matt Damon), the mole planted by the Irish mob in the state police.

Even before we look at the lyrics, then, this is a piece of music that's fairly bursting with associations. The numbness (not all that comfortable) of life in East Germany, where before the Communist regime's collapse the Stasi had neighbor routinely betraying neighbor (a surveillance nightmare vividly depicted in the German film The Lives of Others). A similar sense of demise and mutual betrayal pervades this season of The Sopranos. The explosive nature of buried and long-ignored debris echoes in Tony's relationships with just about everyone, most especially Carmela. Hitler's bunker represents evil in its purest form, and last night's development demonstrated that Tony is himself becoming more evil and more spookily convinced that his destiny is to triumph. The love scene from The Departed conjures Tony's sexual attraction to Dr. Melfi and, less literally, his unrequited (and completely undeserved) desire to be comforted and accepted without having to hide his darkest self.

The song itself is about the easing of pain, both in the positive sense of relief ("There is no pain you are receding") and in the negative sense of drifting away from reality ("This is not how I am/ I have become comfortably numb"). Literally, it is about taking a drug ("Just a little pinprick"). As it happens, drug-induced reality bookends this latest episode of The Sopranos ("Kennedy and Heidi").

Chris-tu-fuh is driving Tony back from a meeting with Phil Leotardo, the New York boss, who wants 25 percent of what Tony's getting to dump asbestos in the marshes of New Jersey. (I'm a little fuzzy about the basis of Phil's claim; is the asbestos from sites across the Hudson?) Christopher, having fallen off the wagon in last week's episode, is high as a kite, which Tony notices as the car weaves along the nighttime highway. Christopher pops into the CD player the soundtrack for The Departed, which, being both mobster and cinéaste, he would plausibly cherish, and cranks "Comfortably Numb." The car swerves left toward an oncoming car, then right, drives off the road, flips several times, and comes to a standstill. Tony is bruised. Christopher is more seriously injured, and he's desperate to avoid being detected because "I'll never pass a drug test." Tony eases himself out of the car, walks to the driver's side, breaks the window, and observes that Christopher is barely conscious and bleeding from the mouth. He makes an executive decision. He grabs Christopher by the nose and suffocates him.

Part of the genius of this episode, I think, is that it isn't entirely clear at first why Tony has done this. Was it an act of compassion, based on Tony's calculation that Christopher wouldn't survive his wounds and needed to be put out of his misery? No, we gradually discover. Christopher's wounds were survivable, and Tony can't stop talking about the relief he feels at being rid of his troublesome nephew. He hasn't forgotten the insult of being portrayed as a thug in Christopher's slasher movie, he still feels hurt by Christopher's growing alienation from mob life, and he still feels contempt for Christopher's addiction to drugs and alcohol. One curious omission, I think, is that we never learn whether Tony knew that Christopher shot and killed his scriptwriter friend J.T. That would cause Tony even more agita, because even though Christopher carefully wiped his prints off the doorknob, the cops would immediately identify him as the likely killer. Not a good idea to whack a civilian who is known to have one and only one friend in the Mafia.

Tony being Tony, it isn't enough that he's murdered a beloved relative; he wants to be thanked for it, too. He dreams about telling Melfi. He tries to get Carmela to say that she's relieved that Christopher is gone, which Carmela rejects with apparent sincerity. He tells anyone who'll listen that the baby car seat was destroyed in the accident, a testament to Christopher's irresponsibility, but no one shares his outrage. Even Paulie feels bad about the way he used to treat the kid (though he starts to change his tune when Christopher's wake competes with one for his own mother—or rather, the woman who raised him as his mother but was really, he discovered last season, his aunt).

Tony, who spends his life being comfortably numb about the reality of what he does for a living, can't in this instance abide the hypocrisy of pretending that Christopher died in the accident and that he's sorry Christopher is gone. He escapes to Las Vegas and looks up Sonya, an old girlfriend of Christopher's who's working her way through college as a stripper. (I assume Sonya figured in the show a few seasons back, but I don't remember her. Do you?) They have sex, and then Sonya introduces Tony to peyote. At first it makes him puke, but later they wander, high, into a casino, and Tony soon finds himself winning at the roulette wheel. His streak of bad luck is over, he realizes; killing Christopher ended it. Remember how Tony told Carmela a few episodes back that he was fated to survive Uncle Junior's shooting? The peyote deepens that delusion. The episode ends with Tony and Sonya in the desert, Tony shouting, "I get it." Mario Puzo meets Carlos Castenada.

Tony is good and comfortable with his numbness now. Drugs made Christopher weak, but they make Tony strong. Christopher was a loser, Tony is a winner. This goombah is headed for some kind of serious fall, don't you think?

Uncomfortably,
Tim

---

From: Jeffrey Goldberg
To: Timothy Noah
Subject: Week 6: Tony's Going to Hell
Posted Monday, May 14, 2007, at 7:26 PM ET

Tim,

If Hitchens is wrong and there is a hell, Tony's going. I'm not sure I understand how Hitler's bunker worked its way into your post (I think you might be channeling Ron Rosenbaum here), but Tony's capacity for evil, the way he slips so quickly and naturally into opportunistic murderousness, is something to behold. But before we talk about that, let me first say this: Remember what I said about the possibility of a climactic, End Days clash between Tony and Christopher, or Christopher and Paulie? I think we can safely say that I've been overcome by events. You were right—it's a mug's game, trying to predict the end of this show. For all I know, Meadow is going to end up as capo di tutti capi. And not a bad capo di tutti capi she would be, Brian Williams would say, if he were here.

I'll tell you what I found so interesting about last night's episode, and it wasn't only the death-by-sinus-congestion scene, to which, as a recreational user of Flonase, I could relate.

What I found so horrible is Tony's apparent guiltlessness. I don't think, as you do, that he's comfortable with his numbness; I think he's comfortable with his evil. This is why I tend to agree that he's done for. By celebrating the death of Christopher, he's very plainly inviting the attention of the evil eye. The absence of guilt is a bad omen, in other words. You, as a rationalist, might not understand what I mean, but, as a more atavistic sort—the sort who believes that Hitchens, whom I love, by the way, is inviting God's wrath with that book title of his (and his Tower of Babel-high Amazon ranking is only inviting more divine retribution, I'm afraid)—I tend to think that a person who feels good about getting away with an evil deed will find himself called to account by either the One True God or Phil Leotardo, or Phil Leotardo acting as His agent.

Speaking of Amazon, by the way, I knew that the show's rather ostentatious plug for The Departed soundtrack would move its number, but I didn't guess quite how much—at 10 p.m. last night, it stood at 1,183; this morning, it was at 33; at 5:46 p.m. ET, it had risen to No. 18. Which prompts the question: Why can't Carmela read my book, and not Fred Barnes'? It would certainly fit in with A.J.'s new course of study—the "dicked-up" Middle East.

He's smarter than I thought, that A.J. He's also going to die, I think. That, or kill someone. Do you agree?

Best,
Jeff

---

From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg
Subject: Week 6: A.J.'s Rodney King Moment
Updated Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 11:30 AM ET

Dear Jeff,

Comfortable with his numbness, comfortable with his evil. It amounts to the same thing. Tony's capacity for evil has expanded. He is no longer that nice mobster who, back in Season 1, used to fret about the ducks paddling in his swimming pool. If Chris "God Is Not Great" Hitchens were here, I think he'd agree with me that you don't have to believe in God to believe in evil. And even in a godless universe (where I happen to believe we dwell), the utilitarian logic of cooperation (aka "morality"), which Tony clearly violated when he nose-pinched his beloved nephew to death, generally prevails. What goes around comes around. As you note, Phil Leotardo may be the guy who supplies Tony's comeuppance. (I gather you don't know any better than I what entitles Phil to claim a piece of Tony's no-questions-asked asbestos-removal business.) Who needs God when you've got Phil Leotardo? Not to mention Paulie Walnuts, Hesh Rabkin, Janice Soprano, A.J. Soprano, and—who knows?—a tanned, rested, and ready Uncle Junior. Plus those Arabs, who were very quiet this week. A little too quiet, if you ask me.

We've discussed in the past how A.J., one of the few characters on The Sopranos who is not a murderer, is nonetheless the least sympathetic character in the series. He's spoiled, he's stupid, he's narcissistic, he's a whiner, and he's mean. But maybe not as mean as we thought. He seems genuinely horrified when Jason Gervase and his thug pals beat up a black bicyclist who crashes into Jason's car door. (Needless to say, the Italians call the bicyclist something a good deal less civil than black.) The violence and hatred that A.J. is witnessing with this new crowd is escalating, and he can't take it. "Why can't we all just get along?" A.J. tells his shrink, echoing Rodney King. Is series creator David Chase rendering A.J. more sympathetic so that we'll miss him when he gets killed, the outcome you suggest? Perhaps. But I prefer your alternative notion that, instead of dying, A.J. may kill someone. Or, being A.J., that he will witness a murder.

Here's how I see it going. The cops nab A.J., and he immediately confesses to being an accessory. The district attorney prepares to lock the kid up for years. But there is one way A.J. could get his sentence shortened. Tony could confess to two or three of the many murders the cops suspect him of ordering or committing. "Look, Tony, we know your kid isn't a criminal. He isn't the one who should do hard time. You are." Carmela and Tony fight bitterly over this proposed deal. Tony says A.J. can beat this rap. Carmela is horrified that Tony is willing to sacrifice his son to save his own skin. "You are a murderer, Tony, and if you won't tell them, I will!" The words are too much for Tony to bear. He pummels Carmela with his fists, really beats her up, for the first time in his life. (Unlike a certain recently departed HBO chief I could name, Tony has never assaulted a female.) Bruised and bleeding, Carmela calls the cops. They arrive, and Tony realizes he has no home left to defend. He confesses to three murders to save A.J. to whatever extent he can. The price turns out to be not only Tony's confession, but also Tony ratting out the whole gang—Silvio, Paulie, Bobby, Hesh, Janice, maybe even Uncle Junior. The only Soprano left unscathed is Meadow, who heads off to medical school in a daze, leaving Carmela, black and blue, alone in the house. Carmela's cherished delusion of sustainable mob-funded affluence is dashed. She will lose her house, she has already lost her husband and son, and Meadow may never again want to admit she even has a family. Goodbye, Bloomies; hello, Filene's Basement. Fade to black.

That isn't a prediction. It's just a way I can see the series ending. I doubt that it's Chase's way.

With respect to "Comfortably Numb," I see that I cast the pearl of my exquisite literary and historical analysis before swine. Your punishment for failing to groove on it is that I will not pretend to agree that Carmela Soprano would ever read your book. It's a great book, but it's not Carmela's kind of book. Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck, maybe (not that Ephron needs the sales). But Carmela wouldn't really appreciate it because she has no sense of humor. Surely your wicked passion for Carmela hasn't blinded you to the lady's humorlessness? That has always limited my sympathy for her.

Before I sign off for the week, I want to alert you that my son, Will, e-mailed me yesterday afternoon from the basement (I was three floors up in my home office) to complain that while I gave lengthy consideration to the meaning of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," I gave unacceptably short shrift to the meaning of the album whence it came, The Wall, and to how "Comfortably Numb" fits into that larger work. For enlightenment, Will referred me to this Web site. The Wall is all about self-imposed isolation, Will explained, and there are many parallels between The Wall's protagonist, "Pink Floyd," and Tony Soprano:

The easiest one to see is that they both have traumatizing mothers. Tony has also been involved with drugs. Now, by killing Christopher, Tony is isolating himself from everyone because he obviously sees the situation differently. … Or, if you wanted a slightly simpler reason why the song was used, you could just note that one of the voices in

Venice's Muscle Beach

Famed weightlifter is muscled out

Today's Papers

Enriched Knowledge
By Daniel Politi
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 6:08 A.M. E.T.

The New York Times leads with inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency reporting that Iran has figured out how to enrich larger quantities of uranium. Inspectors discovered Sunday that Iran's main nuclear facility had 1,300 centrifuges producing uranium that could be used for nuclear reactors, when only recently it seemed the Iranians didn't know how to get them to work properly. The Washington Post leads with news that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty became the fourth senior Justice Department official to resign since the scandal over the fired U.S. attorneys blew up earlier this year. Of course, he doesn't mention the scandal in his resignation letter and says he's leaving because of "the financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service."

The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with Iraqi insurgents warning the U.S. military to stop searching for the three missing American soldiers, calling it "a venture in vain." The group that claimed responsibility for capturing the soldiers said their "safety" would suffer if the search continued. USA Today leads with a look at how an ongoing investigation in Texas into the possible use of abusive tactics by guards at state juvenile-detention facilities comes at a time of growing concern about the way teenage inmates are treated across the country. In Texas, four system superintendents were suspended, and in the past few months eight staff members have been arrested. The Los Angeles Times leads with news that gunmen in Mexico City shot and killed the recently appointed head of a drug intelligence unit. Although drug-related killings have become common in Mexico, it's rare for these types of brazen assassinations to take place in the capital.

So far, one of the main goals in European and American efforts to get Iran to suspend its enrichment programs has been to prevent the country from gaining the enriching know-how. Now, the IAEA's latest finding suggests that point has already been reached. Although the purity of the uranium currently being produced is nowhere near what is necessary for a nuclear weapon, if Tehran wanted to, the purity could probably be increased to the necessary levels in a couple of months. It's unclear whether the production can be maintained, and, as the NYT points out, "major setbacks are common in uranium enrichment," but this new information is likely to put pressure on European and American negotiators to rethink their strategy for dealing with Iran.

The NYT says McNulty's testimony before Congress in February, "provided a spark that turned a smoldering issue over the firings of federal prosecutors into a raging inferno." Besides raising more questions than he answered about the White House's involvement in the dismissals, McNulty also said the U.S. attorneys were fired for "performance-related" reasons, which led to several of the prosecutors speaking out to defend their reputations. On a separate note, the WP is the only paper that says the controversy has to do with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The rest of the papers continue to go with eight (the NYT doesn't mention a number), even though last week the former U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., said he was asked to resign in early 2006.

The LAT off-leads, the NYT fronts, and everyone else mentions the World Bank committee has concluded that Paul Wolfowitz broke ethics and governance rules when he arranged a promotion and raise package for his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. The report, which was publicly released last night, also says Wolfowitz tried to hide the package from bank officials and ultimately "saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply." Wolfowitz is set to defend himself to the bank's board today.

In his response to the findings, Wolfowitz says the ethics committee was afraid to confront the "extremely angry and upset" Riza and forced him to deal with the issue. Wolfowitz added that Riza demanded financial compensation for the disruption to her career and threatened to sue. Meanwhile, the Bush administration continued to speak up for Wolfowitz as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made calls to finance ministers to emphasize the findings don't warrant a dismissal. Slate contributor Christopher Hitchens says that Riza is a victim of "the nastiest and dirtiest and cheapest campaign of character assassination I have ever seen."

The WP fronts, and the WSJ goes high with, the Pentagon announcing yesterday that its computers will no longer be able to access popular sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Photobucket, and 10 others. Those blocked include some of the most popular sites for social networking, photo, and video, which are widely used among soldiers and their families. The Pentagon insists these sites have slowed down the department's network, although some believe the ban has more to do with trying to control the flow of information out of war zones. Service members can still access the sites, as long as it's not from a military computer. Yesterday, the military announced the deaths of six more U.S. troops in Iraq, and a Danish soldier was killed.

The LAT fronts a look at the Internet-based reality series Hometown Baghdad, which the paper says is "part documentary, part The Real World–Baghdad." The show is shot by Iraqis and follows the lives of three upper-middle-class young men. U.S. networks weren't interested in the show, and now the short episodes have become a hit on sites such as YouTube, although most in Iraq probably haven't seen it since Internet connections are frustratingly slow. "I hope the show gets a lot more attention," Adel, who is characterized as the "breakout star" of the show, said. "But not here. In Iraq you can get killed for the stupidest of reasons."

Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at ground zero three days after the World Trade Center collapsed

Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani's Legacy

Best of the Web Today - May 1, 2007

No deal is better than one that ignores labor realities.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Today's Papers

Promise Keeper
By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, May 2, 2007, at 6:55 A.M. E.T.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with news that President Bush made good on his promise to veto the $124 billion war-spending bill, which Congress passed last week. "Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible," Bush said after issuing the second veto of his presidency. Democratic lawmakers remained defiant, although everyone notes some sort of compromise is likely since they don't have enough votes to override the veto.

USA Today leads with the results of a six-year international study that shows there has been a sharp decline in the number of deaths and heart failure among patients hospitalized for heart attacks or severe chest pains. Researchers believe the results are tied to an increase in the use of angioplasty as well as new drugs designed to treat heart conditions.

Everyone knew the veto was coming, so Democrats and Bush tried to make the most out of the day with symbolic gestures. Democrats held an atypical signing ceremony that was set to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Bush's speech on an aircraft carrier where, under a banner that read "Mission Accomplished," he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. The LAT notes that at that time 139 Americans had died in Iraq, a number that has increased by 3,213. Bush spent much of yesterday at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, where he was briefed by commanders and spoke before military leaders from around the world. When it was time to sign the veto, the president used a pen that was a gift from the father of a Marine who was killed in Iraq.

Bush will host congressional leaders at the White House today to discuss possible compromises to the bill. Everyone seems to agree Democrats will probably drop the timelines and the next sticking point is likely to surround benchmarks that lawmakers want to impose on the Iraqi government. Republicans seemed open to the idea, and the NYT gets word that Bush might be willing to support them but only if they are nonbinding.

USAT fronts word that the State Department will be conducting a mental-health survey of 1,400 employees who served in Iraq, after it was discovered that many of them suffer from the same symptoms as those that are affecting U.S. troops. With the survey, the State Department hopes to find out how many of its employees are suffering from mental problems because of their work in a war zone. Everyone notes Iraqi officials said the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq may have been killed but U.S. military officials could not confirm the claims.

Everyone goes inside with word that two former World Bank officials said Paul Wolfowitz has misled those who are investigating the pay raise and promotion package given to his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. The former chairman of the World Bank's ethics committee said that, contrary to Wolfowitz's claim, his committee was never fully briefed on the package. The bank's former general counsel claims that Wolfowitz insisted on keeping "professional contact" with Riza, a demand that everyone seemed to find unacceptable. In the end, according to the former official, neither the bank's board nor the ethics committee approved the package that was awarded to Riza.

The WSJ tops its business newsbox, and almost everyone else fronts, news that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. made an unsolicited $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones, the WSJ's publisher. Murdoch's $60-a-share offer represents a substantial premium over the trading value of the stock. The WSJ, which has extensive coverage of the developments, goes high with speculation that Murdoch's move might bring in other bidders. (Slate's Daniel Gross says that if "Dow Jones puts itself up for sale, it could kick off the mother of all auctions.") Wall Street reacted enthusiastically to the news and Dow Jones shares increased more than 50 percent.

The key to whether Murdoch's bid will be successful lies with members of the Bancroft family, who control more than 60 percent of the company's voting power. In a statement yesterday, a representative said that family members who hold more than 50 percent of the voting power would oppose the bid. Murdoch remained undeterred and insisted there is still "plenty of time." Everyone ties Murdoch's desire for Dow Jones with News Corp.'s plans to launch a new financial news channel this summer. In a separate piece inside, the WSJ wonders whether Murdoch's high-priced offer is meant to deter other bids and questions if the mogul views Dow Jones "as a trophy property that would cap decades of media deal making."

Everyone goes inside with word that there was no sign of Fidel Castro during yesterday's May Day parade in Havana. This was the third time in 48 years that Castro missed the march. Before the parade, there was wild speculation that Castro was going to make his first public appearance since undergoing surgery nine months ago. In the United States, yesterday's protests for immigrants' rights across the country were much smaller than last year. The LAT fronts the Los Angeles rally, where the day ended with clashes between demonstrators and police.

The NYT fronts a look at how U.S. officials are trying to figure out a way to prevent British citizens of Pakistani descent from being able to enter the country without a visa. Officials say they are concerned that many of the terror plots uncovered recently involve Britons who have ties to Pakistan, and just like any British citizen they could enter the United States without a visa. For some reason the paper decides to refer to this, in the story and headline, as a "visa loophole."

Bipartisanship is wonderful … Referring to the negotiations on the war-spending bill, Republican Sen. George Voinovich tells the Post that "some kind of compromise has to be worked out. … That's how it's done. Everybody holds their nose and maybe a couple of times vomits, but you get it done."

What happens when a racket turns into a religion? Mormonism.

God Is Not Great
What happens when a racket turns into a religion? Mormonism.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:24 A.M. E.T.

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet's followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate of Abu Bakr, immediately after Muhammad's death, concern arose that his orally transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran safely lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was therefore decided to assemble every living witness, together with "pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and bits of leather" on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's former secretaries, for an authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the believers had something like an authorized version.

If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to Muhammad's own life. But we swiftly discover that there is no certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some say that it was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of Shiism—who had the idea. Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who made the finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this task was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while others became "apocryphal." Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute what really happened in Muhammad's time, Uthman's attempt to abolish disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants like "b" and "t," and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different readings even of Uthman's version were enabled by these variations. Arabic script itself was not standardized until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does. This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in the Koran.

The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of the Koran's compilation, and the sayings of "the companions of the Prophet." Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.

As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of isnads ("A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D"), were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.

The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is "inerrant," let alone "final," is conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous episode of the Koran's alleged "satanic verses," out of which Salman Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-theists and in due course experienced a "revelation" that allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that he must have inadvertently been "channeled" by the devil, who for some reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a "revelation" that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.

In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon." He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the "Burned-Over District," in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.

A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology.

The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good-faith attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible interpretation on the relevant "events.") In brief, Joseph Smith announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a book, "written upon gold plates," which explained the origins of those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin breastplates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought this buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set about producing a translation.

The resulting "books" turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to "Read," Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead.

Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now and open to a "satanic verses" interpretation. But the all-foreseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this day.

Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider. However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three hundred and fifty "names" in the book, more than one hundred come straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it as "chloroform in print," but I accuse him of hitting too soft a target, since the book does actually contain "The Book of Ether.") The words "and it came to pass" can be found at least two thousand times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon "document" as at best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable book in 1973.

Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice and often simply to suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when he wanted a new girl and wished to take her as another wife). As a result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his first disciples and who had been browbeaten into taking his dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes.

It must be said for the "Latter-day Saints" (these conceited words were added to Smith's original "Church of Jesus Christ" in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born before the exclusive "revelation," or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead. There is indeed a fine passage in Dante's Inferno where he comes to rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to "pray in" to their church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi "final solution," and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a "lost tribe": the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion.

Pirates of the Multiplex

The Internet

'Steve TV'

Pirate Bay co-founder and resident boy genius Gottfrid Svartholm, 22, photographed at the site's headquarters, in Solna, Sweden. Photograph by Jonas Karlsson.

I was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005, he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest Internet gimmick that was going to "change my life." Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings about some Web site called UKNova, which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing British TV shows completely free of charge.

I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a "torrent tracker," a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they're shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.

Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Mock if you will, but I assure you that this was nothing but top-drawer telly: a typical evening's viewing schedule might include an episode of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial history of London, the upsetting documentary Rock Family Trees: The Prog Rock Years, and another on postwar British universities that made me feel vindicated for bypassing higher education. And thanks to the many kind souls who are digitizing their dusty VHS stacks for UKNova dissemination, I've acquired all manner of presumed-lost British TV classics, from the sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the groovy 1970 kids show Here Come the Double Deckers.

I began storing all my UKNova downloads on blank DVDs—first on spindles of 10, then 25, then 50. I soon had enough material to program my own TV channel—Steve TV!—for weeks on end; my Time Warner Cable box was switched on only for live soccer games and weekly HBO favorites. This UKNova habit went well beyond the recreational-use stage: according to site statistics, I have downloaded a frankly embarrassing 800 gigabytes' worth of files—well over 1,500 hours of programming. And since UKNova expects members to maintain a decent balance between material uploaded and downloaded, my computer stayed connected to the Internet for, more or less, 18 months straight in order to allow other users access to my file fragments. The cost of two burned-out hard drives seemed like a small price to pay.

Then this BitTorrent junkie discovered that Philips made a DVD player (Model DVP642) that would play, straight from the disc, UKNova files that previously required hours of reprocessing to watch on a standard player. Which is when I started making over-enthusiastic phone calls to my friends.

Surprisingly, not everyone was receptive to my BitTorrent evangelism—in fact, some went as far as to suggest I had turned into some kind of cyber-criminal. Sure, I knew that the Motion Picture Association of America claimed worldwide losses of $18.2 billion to movie piracy in 2005, $7.1 billion of which was ascribed to Internet file sharing. And I knew that even though the U.S. government had shut down prominent Internet operations for violating copyright laws—eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa—there are now many BitTorrent mega-sites that continue to thrive; in particular, the Pirate Bay (ThePirateBay.org), based in Sweden, stands as probably the prime destination for anyone looking to download, unrestricted, the very latest in Hollywood movies, video games, TV shows, music, software, and pornography.

But I was not some snickering teenager looking to get cool shit for free. I was a tasteful, middle-aged gent with a victimless hobby. The sprawling, lawless frontiers of the file-sharing universe looked too much like the Wild West to me—I was happy to stick to the Victorian tea party that is UKNova. In file-sharing terms, UKNova (originally created for soap-opera-craving British expats) is a genteel anomaly, a highly regulated community whose many rules include a strict ban on any material commercially available on DVD. Nonetheless, with its limited membership list and impressive inventory, the site shines through the surrounding chaos as an exemplary—albeit rudimentary—model of digital media distribution.

As my exquisite digital-video library threatened to overrun my apartment, even my original BitTorrent pusher Richard was starting to talk about the dark side of the file-sharing phenomenon: according to him, this fun little application was going to bring about nothing less than the end of the entertainment industry as we know it. Typically hyperbolic, I thought—until my friend cited the damage file sharing had done to his former company, a marketer of left-leaning documentaries. Then again, weren't his products targeted at exactly the same demographic of pesky young troublemakers who have the time and ingenuity to copy DVDs and share them over the Internet?

Without doubt the entertainment industry is feeling the financial effects of Internet-based piracy—but, really, how bad could it get? There will surely always be a huge portion of the population far too busy to learn about intricate new file-sharing technologies, just as there will always be a large category of DVD releases for which only the legitimate version will do. I mean, what self-respecting film snob wants to show off his Criterion classics on a plastic spindle? And what father would give his little daughter a copy of the 20th-anniversary edition of The Little Mermaid with the title scrawled in Sharpie?

When I awoke from my UKNova-induced idyll and looked at the bigger picture, it seemed like Sharpie stock must be on the rise. Legitimate-DVD sales have been slowing down for some time now. The movie studios as a whole are in trouble, and piracy is—along with rising costs—one of the main factors being cited. DVD revenue is a critical component of Hollywood's bottom line, and with theatrical box-office receipts believed to be in long-term decline, DVD sales look set to become an increasingly important revenue stream.

As long ago as November 2005, Warner Bros. abruptly laid off 260 employees (more than 5 percent of its staff) on a single day, this after a very healthy fiscal year. Soon after, Disney announced plans to cut more than twice that many jobs (which it did in summer 2006), and to drastically reduce the number of films on its annual production slate.

The dominoes continued to tumble through late 2006 as we read countless business-section stories about Hollywood's financial woes, along with heart-wrenching tales of movie-star salaries' being cruelly slashed by millions of dollars. When multiplex titan George Lucas came out with the startling announcement that his company had decided that making feature films was now "too expensive and too risky" in the current climate, my friend Richard's apocalypto vision of the show-business future started to seem more plausible than I could have ever imagined.

The industry has assigned the task of repelling the pirate hordes to the Motion Picture Association of America, a body best characterized by a 2006 public-service announcement that shows action-movie oldsters Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger riding twin motorcycles in front of green-screened freeway mayhem. "Let's terminate piracy!" bellows Schwarzenegger. Your more sentient Hollywood graybeards will have flashed back to 1982, when then M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti fired off a warning to Sony about its newfangled Betamax video recorder. This sinister device, said Valenti, would do to the American film industry what "the Boston Strangler did to a woman alone."

The modern M.P.A.A., as if to prove itself capable of a more nuanced approach to the file-sharing threat, recently collaborated with the Boy Scouts of America, who are now offering a merit badge for anti-piracy activities. Another P.S.A. argues that people who buy pirated films are hurting Hollywood's ordinary folks, the humble artisans who toil backstage building pedestals for the stars. The M.P.A.A.'s case might have carried more weight had it not featured the heartfelt testimony of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli.

Showdown

If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood—a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint. Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth, gentle little Sweden—which refers to itself as Europe's "duck pond"—has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 percent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by the country's Pirate Bay site.

Early on the morning of May 31, 2006, Swedish police launched the kind of cleanup operation the M.P.A.A. had long been craving. Law-enforcement officials raided eight locations related to Pirate Bay, with more than 50 police officers involved in arresting the site's operators and seizing their computer equipment. As one Swedish Internet entrepreneur puts it, "When was the last time the Swedish police had 50 people doing anything?"

Pirate Bay's co-founder Fredrik Neij, at the Pirate Bay headquarters. Photograph by Dan Hansson. From SvD/Scanpix.

When Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm first heard that there was police activity at the site's main location, he jumped in a cab and headed straight there, only to be pulled over by a police car with lights flashing and siren blaring. Svartholm's business partner, Fredrik Neij, had also been alerted to the raid in progress, and was able to back up most of Pirate Bay's files before showing up and doing a bit of "who-are-you-ing" with the invading lawmen.

If Svartholm and Neij's experience sounds like something out of a generic mid-90s cyber-thriller, neither of them is exactly leading-man material. Neij, a 28-year-old who is the more gregarious of the pair, is a scruffy, impish type who regards his outlaw status with wry detachment; Svartholm is a sad-eyed 22-year-old with wispy hair and near-translucent skin that positively scream out "Dungeons and Dragons Master."

Although this pair of Internet scofflaws (or criminal masterminds, if you prefer) now live with the threat of prison sentences looming over their heads, neither seems particularly jittery as they conduct a brief tour of their modest empire on a sunny afternoon in Stockholm. The police raids focused particularly on the basement premises Pirate Bay occupies in the back of an office building in Solna, an unremarkable suburb of the city.

Pirate Bay HQ is a shabby, low-ceilinged concrete bunker that bears little resemblance to anyone's idea of a high-tech Death Star that is threatening to annihilate Hollywood. A handful of cheap desks are strewn with standard dude detritus: empty beer bottles, scattered paperwork, take-out-food cartons, and so on. In the middle of the floor stands a red-and-black Honda Super Sprint motorcycle belonging to Neij. It was moved inside after some of the kids in his neighborhood tried unsuccessfully to break the heavy-duty chain around the front wheel; instead, they burned a patch of paint with a lighter. "I don't mind copying," Neij notes, "but I don't like taking."

Neij certainly didn't like it when the Swedish police entered this facility and confiscated 186 pieces of computer equipment, most of which were servers, from him and his partner—particularly since only about 20 of those machines were connected to Pirate Bay. The other equipment belonged to PRQ, the legitimate Internet-service provider from which Neij and Svartholm make their living. In a back room there are now a few replacement servers stacked up in small, uneven piles.

Despite the hardware hardships inflicted by the raids, Pirate Bay managed to find a temporary home in the Netherlands within 24 hours, and, thanks to borrowed equipment, the site was fully functional within three days. Fredrik Neij takes great pride in the way this rapid regeneration wrong-footed the authorities. "The prosecutor didn't know we were back up," he says. "A journalist asked him what he thought, and had to explain that the site was back up. The anti-piracy chief said, 'They won't be back up.' When he was corrected, he said, 'Well, it still works a bit bad.'" The Swedish government had been outdrawn by the fastest guns in Deadwood. (Incidentally, the HBO series of that name continues to be available for free download through Pirate Bay—along with such recent movies as Borat, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, and Night at the Museum.)

Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. "We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden," explains Svartholm. "If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: 'You forgot to take my label writer.'"

In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: "At this point it would be political suicide," he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden's second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden's million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates' behalf.

As Neij pilots his red, rusted Chevy Van 20 toward another scene of the May raids, he explains that he himself is too busy to maintain a serious file-sharing habit. In keeping with the classic computer-geek stereotype, he admits to "pretty much downloading every episode of every sci-fi series that's out there." The late-night animated show Robot Chicken is the entertainment of choice for Svartholm, the Pirate Bay partner who posts diligently bitchy replies whenever the site receives threatening letters from corporate lawyers.

The other locus of the Pirate Bay raids was a giant data-storage facility that is also used by many of Sweden's major banks. It so happened that the company responsible for operating the surveillance cameras at this location relied on Svartholm and Neij's PRQ company for its Internet connection—which may be why grainy footage of the raid appeared on the Internet soon after it happened.

The publicity generated by the Pirate Bay raids gave a huge boost to the site's traffic, which already stood at more than one million visitors per day, and forced the company to hire five new workers to cope with merchandising demand. There are thousands of back orders for the original Pirate Bay T-shirt, which features a skull and crossbones with a cassette tape in the center. When Neij was wearing the shirt on a 2006 business trip to San Francisco, he was surprised to find how far the Pirate cult had spread. "There was a school class lined up outside a museum, a big group of eight- or nine-year-old American kids. And a bunch of them started pointing at me: 'Hey! Pirate Bay! Cool!'"

The New Frontier

As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden's pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm's servers to launch the Swedes' BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. "I hacked a company's service provider and put up obscene messages," says Neij. "The company said work for us or we prosecute." Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, "Because I could!"

By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named "Peter"), the site had effectively outgrown its host. "We had no idea it would happen," says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. "It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker."

With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: "We don't want to reform copyright law—we just don't want the state to enforce it."

Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about "how value is produced in the cultural sector." He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. "This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century," he says. "Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically."

As dryly academic—and, frankly, downright Swedish—as this analysis might sound, it was effectively endorsed several years ago by one of the most consistently innovative figures of the rock era. Speaking to The New York Times in 2002 about the future of the music industry, David Bowie said, "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity."

Another of Pirate Bureau's founders, Marcus Kaarto, believes that the U.S. entertainment industry itself is, ironically enough, responsible for the rise of the BitTorrent protocol that is now sending the Hollywood community into such a tailspin. "The record industry destroyed Kazaa," says Kaarto, referring to the once popular file-sharing service. "They hired companies to fill it with bogus content and viruses—and that drove users to BitTorrent." And the new software happened to be far more efficacious for transmitting video files. What had begun as a music-business problem was now, thanks to sites like Pirate Bay, starting to send gusts of panic across the television and movie industries.

Among the underlying reasons that Sweden became the hub of the burgeoning culture of international file sharing, the most often cited are national copyright laws that were, until fairly recently, relatively lax toward Internet piracy. Other factors include tax benefits offered for purchasing computers and, more important, one of the most developed Internet infrastructures in the world. Kazaa was invented in Sweden by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who together went on to create Skype, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company that they ultimately sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

One of the main engineers of Sweden's Internet pre-eminence is 34-year-old Jonas Birgersson, also known by the nickname "Broadband Jesus." Birgersson is a former military-intelligence prodigy whose tiny Broadband Company became a major telecommunications player in the late 90s by laying fiber-optic cable across much of the country, giving Swedish consumers cheap access to vastly expanded bandwidth.

In 2000, Birgersson was lauded in a Newsweek article that gushed over Stockholm's high-tech success story and anointed the city "a Scandinavian Seattle."

Thanks to the Pirate Bay raids, Sweden's cuddly image has, in the minds of many in the entertainment business, been supplanted by something much more ominous. Birgersson is among those who think the hostility is completely misguided. "Sweden is not the enemy," he says. "Sweden is the prototype of society to come."

A Hollywood Production

Not only had the Swedish police been heavy-handed in their seizure of Pirate Bay's property, they had, on the evidence of a private investigator's report, questioned a female acquaintance of Neij's and searched her apartment. Also hauled in for questioning was Pirate Bay's legal counsel, Mikael Viborg; for some reason police saw fit to take a DNA swab from the inside of his mouth, as they'd also done with Neij and Svartholm. Initial public outrage over the police's actions only increased when widespread suspicion about the raids' origin was confirmed. It turned out that the whole operation was indeed a Hollywood production.

In late 2005, Sweden's Motion Picture Association was imploring the country's justice department to prosecute Pirate Bay for large-scale copyright infringement, but chief prosecutor Hakan Roswall decided that the site's owners were doing nothing actionable concerning American films' copyrights. Shortly after the raids the Swedish media discovered what had inspired Roswall's change of heart.

In June 2006, the Swedish media exposed a leaked March 17 letter from John Malcolm, head of anti-piracy for the U.S.-based M.P.A.A., to Dan Eliasson, state secretary to Sweden's minister for justice. Malcolm's missive referred to an earlier meeting between the pair and urged the Scandinavian official "to take much-needed action against the Pirate Bay." Eliasson's cordial reply was dated April 10.

Malcolm and Eliasson had been brought together in October 2005 by Monique Wadsted, lead lawyer for Sweden's M.P.A.; Wadsted also happened to have been a law-school classmate of Eliasson's boss, Justice Minister Thomas Bodström. Frustrated by the lack of police resources allotted to her ongoing complaint against Pirate Bay, Wadsted successfully suggested that the M.P.A. hire a private detective to put together a file on the site. "We provided information to push on the investigation," she admits.

Wadsted found herself caught up in the public backlash against the Pirate Bay raids when her personal details were posted on the Internet by persons unknown. The lawyer complains vociferously about having her privacy violated, yet she refuses to allow that other Swedish citizens may also have had their privacy violated as a result of the M.P.A.'s scattershot intelligence gathering. "The private investigators haven't done anything illegal," Wadsted insists. "It's a different thing to give people personal information on a lawyer and urge people to harass her. I'm not a criminal. I'm not even suspected of being a criminal."

As it turned out, Monique Wadsted and her local M.P.A. colleagues were little more than supporting players in a global economic power play that, according to many sources, has seen the U.S. government directly interfering in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nation. According to Swedish news reports, just before Easter 2006, a delegation from Sweden's police force and its Justice Ministry visited Washington, D.C., where high-ranking U.S. officials reportedly threatened to put Sweden on a World Trade Organization "priority watch list" if it did not immediately clamp down on the nettlesome Pirate Bay. After initially denying that the raids were a result of these U.S. threats, State Secretary Eliasson relented; he admitted, on-camera, that the consequences of non-cooperation had been "explained" to him and his colleagues in D.C. The M.P.A.A.'s John Malcolm denies advance knowledge of this meeting.

In terms of international-copyright malfeasance, Sweden found itself among some heavyweight company. The U.S. had, for instance, become extremely frustrated that it hadn't insisted on China's compliance with digital-piracy laws before China joined the W.T.O. And the very same issue has been one of the major obstacles to the admission of Russia, a nation where former military bases have been converted to factories that churn out millions of bootleg CDs and DVDs.

On July 5 of last year, with the Swedish government still reeling from the Pirate Bay scandal, and ministers being subjected to investigation, there was momentary relief in the form of a national-newspaper article. The story alleged that Neij and Svartholm had all along been making a healthy financial score off Pirate Bay, in the form of advertising revenue. Posing as a potential advertiser, a journalist had approached the company that sells banner ads on Pirate Bay, and estimated that these must be generating, in Swedish advertising alone, as much as $80,000 per month, and claimed that these funds were being channeled into a front company in Switzerland.

"I wish I earned that!" counters Neij. "Do I look like I have, like, $2 million?"

Neij insists that whatever advertising revenue is generated is severely limited by the fact that the site operates in a legal "gray zone," and Svartholm points out that they lost $60,000 worth of equipment in the raids. "It's not free to operate a Web site on this scale," he adds. In early 2007, one of the companies advertising on Pirate Bay was none other than Wal-Mart—touting DVDs, no less. Svartholm says he doesn't know which third party bought the space on Wal-Mart's behalf (it was an Israeli company), and he continues to maintain that the site yields only enough profit to cover operating costs. "If we were making lots of money I wouldn't be working late at the office tonight," says the pallid Swede. "I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan."

As the M.P.A.'s Wadsted is eager to point out, any conclusive proof that Pirate Bay's owners are businessmen rather than amateurs would alter the complexion of the impending legal proceedings against them. "This would be a more serious matter altogether," she says. "The judge could end up sending both of these guys to prison for five years."

Remote Control

After my fact-finding safari in Sweden, I returned to Paris, where I was temporarily domiciled, and where my personal piracy habit was expanding quite impressively. During a settling-in period in France, my wife happened to mention how much she regretted missing the third season of Project Runway (which was supposedly even better than the first two). Proving that chivalry is not dead, I strayed from the genteel UKNova tea party and downloaded, through the torrent tracker mininova.org, all the new episodes of Bravo's flagship reality series. It didn't stop there: I went on to indulge myself with the pilot episodes (unscreened at that point) of Studio 60 and Knights of Prosperity, among other U.S. network treats.

But I still drew the line at downloading movies. This was mainly because, in light of my irrational dislike of French TV variety shows, I had already prepared for our relocation by augmenting "Steve TV" with several months' worth of illegally copied movies—meaning that I'd rented dozens of DVDs from Netflix and duplicated them using a fun (and completely illegal) little computer application called Mac the Ripper. There may be those who need their Criterion Collection DVDs in the lavish original packaging, but it turned out I wasn't one of them—apparently I've become just another one of the millions worldwide who can't resist the idea of getting stuff for free. "Because I can."

Among the few senior entertainment executives who have been able to absorb this seemingly basic aspect of human nature is Anne Sweeney, president of Disney–ABC Television. In her keynote speech at the October 2006 MIPCOM audiovisual-content market in Cannes, France, Sweeney broke ranks with her boardroom peers to make a bracingly pragmatic statement. "Piracy is a business model," Sweeney said. "It exists to serve a need in the market—consumers who want TV content on demand. And piracy competes for consumers the same way we do: through quality, price, and availability."

The major television networks have been finding it far easier than the Hollywood studios to adapt to the dramatic technological shifts that will be reshaping the traditional media marketplace for years to come. The networks have already enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with different distribution models, from selling episodes on iTunes to the more realistic approach of giving them away on the Web with advertising intact.

It has been more than a year since the 260 layoffs at Warner Bros. confirmed that Hollywood's executive class is anticipating turbulent times ahead. And yet, in the interim, the movie industry's response to digital piracy has been about as effective as a dawn raid by the Keystone Kops.

In terms of offering consumers legitimate movie downloads, disunity and incompetence have been the order of the day. As far back as 2002, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Sony, and Warner Bros. joined forces to launch the download site Movielink, but the paltry fare offered is so hopelessly freighted with protective technical restrictions that BusinessWeek, in a 2006 article, poignantly described it as "difficult or impossible to use." A similarly hidebound rival site called CinemaNow has proved equally unappealing to the millions who already consume their movies online for free.

Last summer, Apple's era-defining iTunes service strode into the movie-download arena amid much fanfare—but it initially offered only a meager inventory of around 75 films from Disney, the only company with which Apple had struck a deal. This is not surprising, given that Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder, as well as a company director. So what is preventing other studios from signing up? One name: Wal-Mart.

As the retailer responsible for shifting around 40 percent of the $17 billion worth of DVDs sold in 2006, Wal-Mart wields uniquely powerful influence over the way in which Hollywood studios choose to distribute their product. Until Paramount announced a deal with iTunes this past January, no studio other than Disney was willing to risk offending Wal-Mart, a company that they fear more than Pirate Bay itself. So even though DVD sales are slowing and online piracy is booming, Wal-Mart can restrict the studios' downloading plans and hold them to a pact of mutually assured self-destruction.

This past fall, Wal-Mart took its first baby steps into the movie-downloading arena, offering a rudimentary service to its online customers—not even the most paranoid Wal-Mart executive would be threatened by the other major legal-download service currently in operation, Amazon.com's Unbox. In its current iteration Unbox boasts a reasonably large inventory of films, but with many unappealing restrictions: the movies it provides can be viewed only on Windows devices (i.e., video iPods not invited); hit-movie downloads are priced slightly lower ($14.99–$19.99) than physical DVDs, but they cannot be burned onto blank DVDs and they self-delete in 24 hours.

In 2004, longtime M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti was succeeded by Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. While Glickman's public pronouncements on piracy can tend toward Valenti-like belligerence, in person he is alarmingly reasonable when discussing Hollywood's piracy problem. Glickman believes that the movie industry will soon give the public "a reasonably priced, hassle-free alternative" to illegal downloading. "Most people, if it's easily available, will not steal it," he insists.

This assertion is not necessarily supported by the available data. For instance, although Apple's iTunes service became known as the savior of the record business by generating millions of dollars a year through its legal, hassle-free downloads, the market share is less than healthy. A recent industry study estimated that iTunes accounted for a mere 2.5 percent of music files downloaded from the Internet. Glickman is undaunted by this grim statistic. "I see the glass half full, not half empty," he states. Though he'll admit that there is "a lot of trial and error going on" during this "digital transition," he insists that Hollywood will soon get its act together.

Glickman supports this positive forecast with two examples, neither of which really stands up to serious scrutiny: Yes, the studios have made BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen guarantee that his site (bittorrent.com) will no longer host any illegal content. So one pirate surrendered—the fleet is still growing by the day thanks to Cohen's original software. Glickman's other ray of hope is Guba, a marginal site that offers visitors a smorgasbord of YouTube-like amusements, plus commercial fare that again comes with severe technical restrictions. January 2007 saw the launch of Qflix, a movie-download system endorsed by all the major studios. Qflix sounded like a promising development and a marked improvement on existing services, but once again there was a catch: most customers would need to purchase a new DVD burner in order to use it.

While the movie business continues to prove itself less than effective in combating the threat of digital piracy, the electronics industry has done very well by joining the pirates' fleet. When electronics giants like Philips, Daewoo, and Samsung are flooding the market with DVD players specifically designed to play raw MPEG and AVI computer files, they are clearly enabling the viewing of illegally downloaded content on domestic television sets. This trend approached critical mass in late 2006 when TiVo unveiled its latest software update, which could play downloaded video files; when Steve Jobs introduced AppleTV in January, all the chatter about the computerization of television seemed to coalesce into an irresistible force.

Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to depict its battle against Internet piracy as an almost biblical struggle between good and evil—much to the delight of its young adversaries in Sweden and elsewhere. These are people who regard the M.P.A.A.'s chest beating as something between a joke and a dare, and they will continue to facilitate mass file sharing simply "because they can."

Sweden's beloved high-tech millionaire Jonas Birgersson derides the U.S. entertainment industry for its futile stand against evolutionary tides; he points out that although something like iTunes is regarded as a major boon to the music business, the innovative service was created by the computer industry. And now that iTunes has leveled the distribution playing field to the great disadvantage of major labels, Birgersson poses the question "What do you need these multi-billion-dollar companies with all their skyscrapers for? We shouldn't sacrifice a lot of these gains to prolong that system for another few years."

At the risk of sounding sentimental—or even, God forbid, anti-progress—there surely has to be a moment for speculation on what could be lost if the current scenario plays out to its logical conclusion. Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier, the man who gave us the term "virtual reality," is one of the few credentialed individuals to have spoken out against the coming age of "digital Maoism." If Hollywood's ancient regime is indeed swept away by unstoppable technological changes, the old patronage system may one day be regarded with nostalgic benevolence in light of the rising mob culture and YouTube novelty-storm that is replacing it.

"There are new business rules, and some art forms won't be able to be supported anymore," Birgersson responds. "I mean, in ancient Rome they used to stage full-scale naval battles in the Colosseum. We don't do that anymore." Sweden's "Broadband Jesus" appears to be suggesting that the sun is setting on the era in which Ben Affleck got paid $15 million for Paycheck.

Birgersson still believes that Hollywood can avoid its own worst-case scenario, but only if it rapidly renounces business practices it has held as eternal verities since Louis B. Mayer was selling scrap metal. This would more or less involve concurring with Anne Sweeney of ABC-Disney that piracy is, in fact, a business model, then finding ways to adapt pirate-model technologies to deliver movie downloads at prices well below the current level.

Should the movie industry decide that any appeasement of file sharers would be tantamount to surrender, and keep trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle, Birgersson believes, it would be virtually guaranteeing its own obsolescence. In a recent briefing to Swedish media executives, he said, "You say you're going to war. Pray that these people don't believe you." Drawing on his military-intelligence background, Birgersson says the entertainment industry's hostile declarations on piracy are entirely counterproductive. "The harder you push people to go in one direction, the harder they'll push in the opposite direction," he says. "And right now the pirates are having the time of their life."

One person who is relishing the idea of asymmetrical warfare with the M.P.A.A. is Pirate Bureau chief Rasmus Fleischer. "Mark Getty [the photo-archive mogul] said that intellectual property is 'the oil of the 21st century'—and oil apparently means war," states Fleischer. "Copyright is so incompatible with so many cultural and technological developments. This is going to be a growing problem for years ahead."

M.P.A.A. chairman Dan Glickman may have erroneously hailed the raids on Pirate Bay as "a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves," because the ultimate ruling in the case against Svartholm and Neij will have virtually no effect on Hollywood's losing war against file sharers.

Regardless of whether the Pirate Bay case is finally judged by the Swedish courts—and sources close to the prosecutor are confident that charges will be brought in May—it is likely that both Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will be replaced as leading facilitators of Internet piracy. And as has happened repeatedly in the past, file sharers will gravitate toward delivery methods that are more powerful and more problematic for law enforcement. Sweden's pirate contingent is already developing a new file-sharing program that will grant a sturdy shield of "anonymization" to its users—whether they be movie downloaders or persons of the darkest criminal intent.

So, the question remains: Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue to escalate its apparently futile battle against the collective intelligence of a million resourceful and highly motivated computer geeks worldwide? (The kind of people who recently unlocked the supposedly resilient copy protection on Hollywood's new HD DVD format.) Once again, the situation was adroitly summed up in the words of Anne Sweeney, no matter how unpalatable they may have been to the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy. In her 2006 MIPCOM speech, Sweeney plaintively stated, "We want to go wherever our viewers are. Viewers have control and show no sign of giving it back.''

I wonder what's on Steve TV tonight?

Steven Daly is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. He is co-author (with V.F.'s David Kamp) of The Rock Snob's Dictionary (Broadway Books).

Las Vegas population growth

Las Vegas area population up 5.3 percent to 1.9 million

April 25, 2007 11:56 AM PDT

Solving a Serial Murder mystery

Charlie Hess in front of the Kwik-Stop where the serial killer Robert Browne met Rocio Sperry

Is Reuters drinking bong water?

Stupidest Drug Story of the Week
Is Reuters drinking bong water?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 6:46 P.M. E.T.

Why don't the hacks who cover the illicit-drug beat just turn their keyboards over to the drug-abuse industrial complex and let them write the stories?

This week, Reuters moved a story based on a government press release about marijuana potency issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy—the office of "drug czar" John P. Walters. The press release and the Reuters story state that marijuana potency has reached its highest level since the government started monitoring it in the late 1970s. The average levels of THC in marijuana now stand at 8.5 percent. (THC is the primary active ingredient in marijuana.) This compares to a little less than the 4 percent measured in 1983.

Headlined "U.S. Marijuana Even Stronger Than Before: Report" on Reuters' Web site, the piece quotes nobody outside of government as it channels drug warrior hysteria.

As this drug-czar chart shows, the average percentage of THC in cannabis samples analyzed by the ongoing Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi has increased over the years. Assuming for just a moment that these findings accurately reflect marijuana potency, I've got a question: So what?

Back in 2002, when Czar Walters warned of the dangers of stronger pot in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, drug scholar Mark A.R. Kleiman of UCLA responded with this item in his blog:

What matters isn't how strong the material is, but how intoxicated the users get. And there's lots of evidence that marijuana users tend to have a target level of intoxication and learn how to titrate dosage to reach that level. Studies that ask marijuana users to roll a joint have found that the average size has halved, from about half a gram to about a quarter of a gram, and there's anecdotal evidence that sharing a single joint has become more common.

So much for the inherent dangers of superpotent weed.

But how accurate are the government's measurements of average THC? Writer Brian C. Bennett notes that the number of drug samples tested in the government study has varied widely, making meaningful comparisons of increased (or decreased) potency difficult. The collection of samples doesn't appear to be as scientific as it does anecdotal. The czar's press release asserts that two-thirds of the samples analyzed in the most recent study came from law enforcement seizures and purchases, and the rest from domestic eradications.

Bennett writes that the kinds of marijuana seized and tested vary from year to year, also. In 2000, sinsemilla, the extra-potent flowering tops of the marijuana plant, constituted 3.66 percent of the tested samples. In 2004, 18.39 percent of the samples were sinsemilla. Guess which year produced a higher average measure of THC? In 2000, the figure was about 5 percent. In 2004, about 7 percent.

The Reuters article also conveys the views of a National Institute on Drug Abuse official in reporting that "60 percent of teens receiving treatment for drug abuse or dependence report marijuana as their primary drug of abuse." Kleiman's blog puts the treatment numbers in perspective by pointing to the University of Maryland's Center for Substance Abuse Research, which reports (PDF) that the increase in marijuana treatment admission is driven by the increase in criminal justice referrals. Marijuana arrests "have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years," Kleiman writes in his blog, "with the vast bulk of those arrests … for simple possession. Other studies show that for juveniles, most non-criminal-justice referrals reflect parental pressure."

None of this is to champion the use of marijuana. I just want journalists to stop regurgitating whatever the drug warriors tell them. Bennett catalogs some of the most ridiculous claims about marijuana potency made by officials and published in the press during the last 40 years. If you take these statements at face value, a single joint rolled from today's marijuana should carry a bigger punch than several tons of yesteryear's Mexican grass.

Addendum, April 29: Via e-mail, I asked Mark Kleiman if his views on potency and potency reports had changed since he wrote his blog item. After I filed my piece, he responded:

In the real world, THC content seems to be continuing to drift up, though I wouldn't take the Mississippi pot farm's unsupported word for it.

In our knowledge, the idea that THC content is the be-all and end-all of cannabis potency now seems to be discredited. The work by GW Pharmaceuticals suggests that the ratios of THC to cannabidiol matters, with high-ratio stuff more likely to generate problematic levels of anxiety. (Cannabidiol seems to be anxiolytic.)

Users can titrate (though of course not perfectly) to avoid getting "too stoned" from more potent pot. But if there's less cannabidiol per milligram of THC, it's more likely that the amount of pot they have to smoke to get as high as they want to get will produce a panic reaction.

My understanding is that hashish, which generally has a higher concentration of THC than unprocessed cannabis, also has lots of CBD and thus a low THC/CBD ratio. Therefore the "Indica" cannabis that increasingly dominates the market is actually more likely to generate bad reactions than is hashish.

It seems to me that the bad faith of the anti-cannabis forces is showing. If the illicit market is creating dangerously potent (or, I would say, high THC/CBD ratio) cannabis, that's an argument for creating a legal market where the potency and the ratio can be known to the user and regulated by the government. There's no particular reason either buyers or sellers in a licit cannabis market should favor especially potent pot, any more than 150-proof rum has a big share of the alcohol market.

******

I've never smoked marijuana and I don't advocate its use. For compelling health reasons, kids should avoid it, and many seem to do just that. According to a Monitoring the Future study, the number of high-school pot smokers remains flat or down over the last decade. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)