 | Man With TB Apologizes 
ABC News via Associated Press In an image from ABC News, Diane Sawyer shaking hands with Andrew Speaker during a “Good Morning America” interview airing today June 1, 2007 Man With TB Apologizes for Putting Others at Risk By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and JOHN HOLUSHA The Atlanta lawyer who flew on crowded airplanes while infected with a dangerous form of tuberculosis said today he did not think he presented a danger when he flew and he apologized to his fellow passengers. Andrew Speaker, interviewed on the “Good Morning America” program on the ABC network in his hospital room in Denver, said “I don’t expect those people to ever forgive me. I just hope they understand that I truly never meant them any harm.” Mr. Speaker, 31, flew to Europe for his wedding in Greece and a honeymoon trip last month after being notified he was infected with drug resistant TB, but said he was not flatly forbidden to travel. The dispute appeared to be based on his interpretation of language used by cautious public health officials. Mr. Speaker, 31, said he was told he was not contagious or a danger to anyone, but that officials would prefer that he did not fly. His father, also a lawyer, recorded the meeting, he said. “My father said, “OK, now, are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he’s a risk to anybody, or are you saying that to cover yourself,” he said. “And they said, we have to tell that to cover ourself, but he’s not a risk.” Mr. Speaker, who defied instructions to turn himself into Italian health authorities, flew from Prague to Montreal and then drove to the United States, despite a notice to Customs agents to detain him. Congressional investigators, who plan to hold hearings on how the case has been handled, say that the border agent at the Plattsburgh, N.Y., border crossing with Canada decided that Mr. Speaker did not look sick and so let him go. Russ Knocke, press secretary for the Homeland Security Department, would not confirm the agent’s rationale for releasing the man, saying only that the case was under investigation by the department’s internal affairs and inspector general’s offices. In another twist to a story that seems to grow murkier with each new revelation, Mr. Speaker’s father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a tuberculosis researcher who has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Cooksey said he “was not involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel.” He also said that he was often tested for tuberculosis and had never been found to be infected. The centers said that the strain of tuberculosis that Mr. Speaker has does not match any of the strains in its laboratories. And Dr. Cooksey said, “My son-in-law’s TB did not originate from myself or the C.D.C.’s labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity.” The form of tuberculosis Mr. Speaker has is extremely resistant to standard antibiotics. Although health officials said there was a low risk of Mr. Speaker’s transmitting tuberculosis to his fellow passengers, the case raised troubling new questions about the nation’s ability to defend its borders against the entry of dangerous infectious diseases and about the C.D.C.’s ability to handle such threats, despite extensive training exercises. Mr. Speaker’s odyssey has also set off an international hunt for his fellow passengers. Mr. Speaker came back into the United States at Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 6:18 p.m. on May 24 in a car he had rented at Pierre Trudeau International Airport in Montreal after flying there from Prague on Czech Air. A day earlier, on May 23, the disease control centers alerted the Atlanta office of Customs and Border Protection, a part of the Homeland Security Department, that a man with a serious medical condition might try to enter the United States and the information was entered in the department’s computer system. The department instructed any border control agents who encountered the man to “isolate, detain and contact the Public Health Service,” Mr. Knocke said. If Canadian officials had known about the detention order, a quarantine officer would have isolated Mr. Speaker, escorted him to a hospital and arranged his secure transport back to the United States, said Jean Riverin, a spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada. Also, Italian officials said that they did not learn about the case until Mr. Speaker had left Italy. Cesare Fasari, a spokesman for Italy’s Health Ministry, said that had the Italian health officials been notified in time, they would have “intercepted the man and invited him to be treated in a hospital” with his permission. Early yesterday morning, the disease control centers flew Mr. Speaker, who wore a mask, in a chartered plane to Denver, where he was taken by ambulance to National Jewish Medical and Research Center for definitive treatment of his infection. Dr. Gwen A. Huitt, an infectious-disease expert at the centers, described Mr. Speaker as tired, cooperative, emotional and concerned about the publicity his case was receiving. He was not coughing, had no fever and was “very relieved to be in Denver” for definitive treatment. If tests determine that the infection is confined to one area of a lung, doctors may perform major surgery to remove a part or lobe. Whatever drug treatment Mr. Speaker receives is expected to continue for years and will involve risks of side effects that could damage his kidneys and liver, Dr. Huitt said. Mr. Speaker is being confined to a standard two-bed hospital room that is equipped with special ventilation to suck out air and then pass it through ultraviolet light and a filter that kills microbes. He is likely to be confined to the room for several weeks. After examining Mr. Speaker, Dr. Huitt said she was “very optimistic” about his future because he was young and athletic. At a news conference, Dr. Huitt said her initial impression was that Mr. Speaker contracted the dangerous strain from someone else and did not develop resistance from anti-tuberculosis treatment that C.D.C. officials said he took earlier. Treatment in Denver was expected to start today, she said. Dr. Huitt said Mr. Speaker had traveled extensively over the last six years to countries where tuberculosis is more common than in this country, but she declined to say where. One key test was encouraging. It indicated that Mr. Speaker was at low risk of transmitting the infection to others. The test involved collecting sputum from induced coughing. Dr. Huitt and others added chemical stains to a smear of the sputum on a glass slide and examined it under a microscope. They saw no tuberculosis bacteria. The same findings came from tests performed in Atlanta earlier in the year and at Bellevue Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital in recent days. Dr. Huitt said her team would repeat the test over the next two days, for a total of three times, as is standard practice. In 17 percent of tuberculosis cases, the source is a patient whose smear is negative, according to studies from Vancouver, British Columbia, and San Francisco. Mr. Speaker’s wife is with him. A skin test performed earlier in the year showed that she was not infected. “We have not done any new tests on her,” Dr. Huitt said. Andrew Speaker flew to Paris from Atlanta on Air France Flight 285 (Delta co-share 8517) on May 12 for his wedding in Greece, and planned to return from a honeymoon on June 5. Jason Vik, 21, a passenger on the outgoing flight who just graduated from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, is now waiting for results of a TB skin test. Mr. Vik spoke angrily about Mr. Speaker’s behavior. “He stepped on a plane with 487 people, one of the largest aircraft that Boeing makes, and he put us all at risk, just so he could go get married,” he said. Dr. Mario Raviglione, who directs the World Health Organization tuberculosis department, said that despite technology and communication technology “we’re not there yet, and there is the possibility for infectious people to cross borders without the knowledge of authorities.” Reporting was contributed by Dan Frosch from Denver; Brenda Goodman from Atlanta; Denise Grady from New York; Gardiner Harris from Washington; Christopher Mason from Toronto; and Elisabeth Rosenthal and Betta Povoledo from Rome.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
|
| Today’s Papers A Convenient Warming
By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, June 1, 2007, at 5:21 A.M. E.T. The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today lead, and the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with President Bush’s call for a new set of meetings to discuss ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions globally. Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan as too little, too late. But, as all the papers note, the announcement marked a shift in an administration that had been criticized for its skepticism regarding the need to cut emissions. As the WSJ puts it, the announcement “effectively removes the U.S. as the last doubter among big developed nations on the need for cooperative reductions.” The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the man who is infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed to enter the United States from Canada even though his passport immediately generated a warning to the border-control agent. Adding another strange layer to the story was yesterday’s revelation that Andrew Speaker’s father-in-law, Robert Cooksey, is a researcher at the CDC’s tuberculosis division. In a statement, Cooksey insisted that he had never tested positive for tuberculosis and “was not involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel.” In his announcement, Bush said he wants to hold talks between the world’s top 10 to 15 polluters (USAT has a handy chart that lists who they are) to set up what his chief environmental adviser calls “aspirational goals” by the end of 2008. Bush said he would present his proposal at next week’s G8 meeting, where it was widely expected that his administration would come under fire for its failure to act on global warming. Some think that Bush is effectively trying to “hijack” the ongoing talks about the issue and use the discussions as a tactic to delay any concrete actions until after he is out of office. Environmentalists also immediately picked up on the fact that Bush was not talking about mandatory cuts, which are seen as essential for any plan to be successful. Although some European leaders offered tepid support, it is still unclear how receptive they will be to the proposal since many seem to be ready for a more drastic step. Germany has called for a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, which the administration has said is impractical. The WP points out that yesterday’s announcement is one of several Bush made this week on issues that were bound to elicit criticism at the G8 summit. The NYT says it’s an example “of the kind of policy adjustment that is becoming increasingly common” as Bush’s time at the White House comes to an end. The LAT fronts a look at how mending relations with “old Europe” might be easier now that “Britain, France and Germany are fielding potentially the most pro-U.S. group of leaders to emerge in Western Europe in years.” The border-control agent ignored the warning that said Andrew Speaker was contagious apparently because the 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer looked healthy. Members of Congress said this once again raises questions about the security of the country’s borders and vowed to investigate. Although Speaker had been told by the CDC to stay in Italy, where he was on his honeymoon, he said he decided to take an alternate route back into the United States out of fear that he would be confined to a hospital in a foreign country. He was finally taken to a hospital in Denver yesterday where he will have to stay for months. In an interview with ABC News, Speaker asked for forgiveness for exposing airline passengers, but says he has a tape recording of a meeting with health officials where they allegedly told him it was all right for him to travel. The NYT off-leads, and the WP and WSJ front, the family that controls Dow Jones & Co. announcing that it would consider purchase offers. The Bancroft family said it plans to meet with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to discuss Murdoch’s $5 billion bid but emphasized it is also open to other deals. “Dow Jones & Co.’s 125-year history as an independent media company could be nearing an end,” writes the WSJ. The NYT says some suspect the initial rejection of Murdoch’s bid might have been a bargaining tactic but everyone notes the family seemed particularly concerned about the planned merger of Reuters and Thomson Corp., which could make things more difficult for Dow Jones Newswires. The LAT and WP go inside with Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno’s warning that September might be too early to judge whether the buildup of troops in Iraq is working. Odierno, the top U.S. ground commander in Iraq, said he might ask for more time when he presents his report. In his briefing, Odierno also said that commanders in Iraq now have the authority to reach out to militants and negotiate cease-fire agreements. The Post emphasizes that both Odierno and Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed support for a long-term plan for troops in Iraq that would be similar to what exists in South Korea. The LAT and WP go inside with the head of NASA saying in an interview that he’s not sure global warming is “a problem we must wrestle with.” Lawmakers have criticized NASA for cutting programs that track climate change. The papers report the new spelling champion is 13-year-old Evan O’Dorney from California. His final word was “serrefine.” And this little piggy fought against gay marriage: The LAT fronts a look at Eric Jackson’s quest to publish children’s books that have a conservative message. His first book, Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! sold 30,000 copies, and he’s now looking to publish one that exposes the lies about global warming. Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
|
|
|
Thursday, May 31, 2007 | The Story on Sushi Letter from TokyoMaguro no kaiwa, the almost surgical process of disassembling tuna, is practiced by a tuna dealer. The average bluefin yields 10,000 pieces of sushi. Photograph by Tetsuya Miura. If You Knew SushiIn search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world’s biggest seafood market—Tokyo’s Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises. by Nick Tosches June 2007 It looks like a samurai sword, and it’s almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade. Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices’ daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly. It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old. The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he’s been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo. Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will. The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise. His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter. Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji. Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn’t run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903. Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: “tskee-gee.” (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it’s “pronounced roughly like ‘squeegee,’” but it’s not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.) “I grew up in central Illinois,” Ted told me, “and as a kid I don’t remember ever eating fresh fish. I’m not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else.” Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there’s the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it’s said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren’t available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye. This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the “fishmonger for the seven seas.” Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today. It’s hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad. “My guess, and it is a guess,” says Ted Bestor, “would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day.” Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day. Tsukiji occupies about 22½ hectares on the Sumida River—about 55½ acres, or well over two million square feet: bigger than 40 football fields. Near the Kaiko Bridge entrance, tucked away in relative serenity, an altar bell is rung by rope at the Namiyoke Jinja, a small Shinto shrine whose name can be translated as the Shrine to Protect from Waves. Outside the shrine are stone monuments honoring the seafood that passes through Tsukiji: a big black sculpted fish, a big egg-like roe. Marketmen leave offerings of sake at these deific figures. And for a few yen a miniature scroll of oracular hoodoo can be had. It was thus, after I had genuflected before the uni god, that it was revealed to me that the last dangerous year that a man passes through in life is his 62nd, while a woman is free of danger after 38. At the main gate, not far from the shrine but far from serenity, a sign warns entrants to please pay attention to the traffic and walk carefully because the market is crowded with trucks and special vehicles and the floor in the market is very slippery. Big trucks, little trucks, forklifts. And, everywhere, these things called turret trucks: high-lift vehicles designed to negotiate narrow passages and aisles. Old, diesel-fueled turrets; new, battery-powered turrets: every one of them driven by a single standing man who seems invariably to have both hands occupied with lighting up a smoke rather than with steering as he careens round and among the other vehicles that lurch and speed every which way, a surprise at every turn, over the bloody cobblestones amid the pedestrian traffic of the rest of the 60,000 or so people who work at Tsukiji. While no-hands driving seems to be purely optional, smoking at times does seem to be obligatory, and smokers outnumber by far the many no-smoking signs that are posted everywhere. Only the lowly Chinese stevedores who push or draw carts are deprived of the option of no-hands driving, and they squint through the smoke of teeth-clenched cigarettes as they trudge. Lethal DelicacyWandering through Tsukiji in the good company of Ted Bestor and Tomohiro Asakawa, the senior commercial specialist of the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, I become aware that the full array of the Lord’s fishy chillun on sale here is beyond knowing. There are shrimp from everywhere and of every kind, live and sprightly, in open plastic sacks in Styrofoam boxes with bubbling aeration tubes: red Japanese shrimp, sweet Japanese shrimp (ama-ebi), striped Asian kuruma shrimp, along with Alaskan shrimp and Maine shrimp on ice, and frozen shrimp of every size and sort. Live lobsters in boxes of wood shavings; abalone; fresh and frozen marlin, fresh and frozen swordfish, from Japanese waters or caught off Cape Town or Iran. The swordfish, Tom tells me, is not too popular here for sushi. Most of it goes to mountain resorts that serve it as sashimi to tourists. There are tanks of live fugu swimming madly about. These are the costly blowfish with neurotoxic poison in their genital areas, a sometimes lethal delicacy which a sushi chef needs a special license to prepare and serve. Tetrodotoxin, the poison in fugu, can also produce a sense of euphoria when ingested in less than lethal amounts. The best fugu is from the waters of Kyushu, in the South. In other tanks, live sea bass (suzuki), live sea bream (tai), and live flounder (hirame). There are flying fish (tobiuo), Pacific mackerel (saba), Spanish mackerel (sawara), and horse mackerel (aji). From a profile of “the Controller in Charge of Horse Mackerel” in the corporate literature of Chuo Gyorui, one of the largest wholesalers here: “When Mitsuo Owada joined Chuo Gyorui in 1974, he became charmed by horse mackerel Owada used to eat several horse mackerel almost every day.… Both shippers and buyers … say, ‘Depend on this man for horse mackerel traded at Tsukiji.’” The honored controller moves about 25 tons of horse mackerel through the market every day. There are sardines and there are salmon, fresh from Norway and Japan. The salmon is not to be eaten raw, Tom explains, as its movement between freshwater and salt water renders it the host to many parasites. I ask him why I see no shark for sale. Shark, he says, can be eaten raw when fresh from the hook, but its muscle tissue is loaded with urea, which breaks down fast after death, releasing levels of ammonia that stink and can be toxic. Eels: tanks, barrels, bushels, and bins of eels of all the shapes, colors, and sizes of slitheration, from the prized conger eel (anago) of the seas to the freshwater eel (unagi) of the rivers and lakes. All manner of squid—baby squid, big squid—and all manner of crabs—baby crabs, giant crabs; scallops and oysters and clams; periwinkles, cockles, and—what?—barnacles, yes, even barnacles, going for ¥1,600, or about 14 bucks, a kilo. I’d always thought these black footstalks were only an ugliness to be scraped from the hulls of old wooden ships. “Broth,” says Tom. “Some people make broth with them.” He smiles, shakes his head. He apparently is not one of those people. Giant oysters from Tsuruga Bay, with sea steaks of meat inside them; tairagi-gai, the enormous green mussels from the Aichi waters. Bizarre white fish laced with black, Paraplagusia japonica, known colloquially as “black-tongues.” Sunfish intestines—chitlins of the sea—priced at ¥1,000, or about $8.50, a kilo; grotesque scorpion fish; monkfish; freshwater turtles, which the Japanese much prefer to the saltwater kind. Amid sizzle and smoke, a guy is selling grilled tuna cheeks. From his tuna stall, Tsunenori Iida frowns on him. He says that the cheek of the tuna is eaten by poor young workers. It’s their subsistence and it’s not right to make money from tuna cheeks. Actually, he says, the head and tail of the tuna should be used for fertilizer. Sheets of kombu (kelp) covered with herring roe; big white sacs of octopus roe. Among a biochromatic wealth of mysterious mollusks and other sea invertebrates of unknown nature, I see the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen. Now, that’s a fucking organism. Tom Asakawa looks at it awhile, too. |
|
| Social Climbing to Starting Over: A First Wife’s Lot 
Paul A. Broben/USA Network THE STARTER WIFE Peter Jacobson, left, Debra Messing and Joe Mantegna in this new USA mini-series. In the Magazine: Gigi’s Novel Life (May 22, 2005) 
Todd Anderson/ABC EX-WIVES CLUB In a new reality show, Marla Maples, center, is counselor to Kevin, whose wife had an affair. 
Lifetime Television ARMY WIVES Kim Delaney and Brian McNamara as husband and wife in this new Lifetime series. May 31, 2007 The TV Watch Social Climbing to Starting Over: A First Wife’s Lot Feminism didn’t bridge the divide between men and women, it broke the barriers separating best friends. Betty Friedan made the suburbs safe for sisterhood. By the time “Sex and the City” rolled around, female bonding — especially over fancy cocktails — was as much a part of popular culture as fishing trips and fraternity hazing rites. The fact that nowadays women are allowed to like one another, even at the expense of men, is at the core of ladies-night hits like “Grey’s Anatomy.” So atavistic series like “The Bachelor” and “Desperate Housewives” that play down female camaraderie and instead showcase hissy fits and catfights have a naughty, contrarian tang. That retro allure is what drives tonight’s premiere of “The Starter Wife,” a USA mini-series that explores the plight of the discarded Hollywood socialite. It’s a satire-lite soufflé that follows all the steps of the chick-lit recipe. (If “Jane Eyre” were written according to today’s rules, the orphaned governess would be dragged to a bar by two female friends and a gay male pal and plied with mixed drinks and pool boys until she forgot all about Mr. Rochester and his mad starter wife.) Debra Messing (“Will & Grace”) plays Molly Kagan, whose studio mogul husband, Kenny (Peter Jacobson), tells her by cellphone that he wants a divorce. Based on a best-selling novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer, the wife of the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, “The Starter Wife” is a throwback to “The Women,” Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 play about divorce among the rich and pampered. “The Starter Wife” is set in Malibu and Brentwood, not Park Avenue, so it’s also a lot like the 1940s radio show “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife” and the novels of Jackie Collins. These kinds of tell-all tales mix satirical flicks at the follies of the rich and famous (Kenny prepares their young daughter for school by saying, “Don’t forget to share your cookies with Violet Affleck”) with the voyeuristic spectacle of grown-up women channeling their inner Mean Girls. All soap operas centered on women include vixens and villainesses, so the difference lies mainly in the proportion. Molly Kagan has a few loyal female friends — and a gay decorator — but the juice of her tale comes from the snooty, gossiping frienemies who snub her in restaurants and kick her off charity committees when she loses her status as The Wife of. And the beauty of cable lies in the gradation of expectations. On premium networks like HBO or Showtime, “The Starter Wife” would seem trite and a little too obvious. On USA, it’s an escapist hoot. “The Starter Wife” serves as a comic chaser to “Army Wives,” a more serious, and surprisingly engrossing, Lifetime series on Sunday about what happens to spouses left on base when their soldiers are deployed to combat zones (a lot). It’s a little like “The Unit,” the CBS drama about an elite team of commandos and their wives, but the focus of this Lifetime drama is on the women behind the men in uniform. “Army Wives,” which stars Kim Delaney, examines women of varying age, rank and serial blunder who come together under the stress of military life — and the needling of a few bad women. Not all the bonding spouses are female, however. One member of the clique is an army psychiatrist whose wife returns from a two-year rotation in Afghanistan with a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Female solidarity — or the lack of it — seems to be a popular theme this summer. ABC even ordered up a reality show, “Ex-Wives Club,” featuring Marla Maples, the former Mrs. Donald Trump; Angie Everhart, who was once engaged to Sylvester Stallone; and Shar Jackson, who is the mother of two of Kevin Federline’s children and who lost him to Britney Spears. Those three professional exes lend their expertise to ordinary people who are suffering the pain of rejection. Their methods can be brutal. On the premiere, the scornees are sent to a life coach, Debbie Ford, who runs an emotional boot camp in Palm Springs, Calif. The schedule begins early: “8:00 a.m. — Anger.” But the founding members of “Ex-Wives Club” also offer empathy. Ms. Maples was careful in the first episode on Monday to speak well of her ex-husband, but at times she couldn’t resist a lateral dig. Ms. Maples helps Kevin, a would-be mortgage broker, organize a networking party in the real estate community. “I did this so many years with my ex-husband,” she replies when he thanks her. “And to be here with someone like you who appreciates it …” Tearing up, she breaks off. Molly could use that kind of support. Instead, when Kenny dumps her for a sexy young pop singer named Shoshanna, Molly finds herself shunned by her fellow worshipers at what she calls the Church of Perpetual Upkeep. After losing her gym membership and even her coveted spot in a Mommy and Me class, she runs away. Not far, however. She retreats to the Malibu house of her oldest and hardest-drinking friend, Joan (Judy Davis), who has entered rehab. Lonely, Molly befriends the security guard, Lavender (Anika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls”), who is preoccupied with college loans, not collagen. Molly’s decorator, Rodney (Chris Diamantopoulos), sticks by her, but Cricket (Miranda Otto) is torn. Her husband is a director of blockbuster comedies who wants Kenny’s studio to back a serious film, “The Dutch Bureaucrat’s Son,” and doesn’t want Kenny to think he and Cricket side with Molly. It doesn’t take long for Cricket to come to her senses. Molly’s senses are divided between the flirty overtures of her husband’s boss, Lou (Joe Mantegna), and a buff Malibu beach bum, Sam (Stephen Moyer). “Army Wives” is a street-smart homage to those who also serve because they stand and wait. “The Starter Wife” is not exactly groundbreaking social satire, but it’s a sassy look at those who stand behind their Hollywood men, and are waited upon by servants.
|
|
| Politics and the Mafia 
Salvatore Laporta/Associated Press All but one of the Naples garbage dumps are closed, and residents’ anger rises as fast as the smelly mounds May 31, 2007 Naples Journal In Mire of Politics and the Mafia, Garbage Reigns MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy, May 29 — Business at Pizzeria Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The reasons include eggshells, scuzzy teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, moldy wine bottles — all in an unbroken heap of garbage, at places 6 feet high, stretching 100 or more yards along the curb to the pizzeria’s doorstep. “If you see all this trash, you don’t have much desire to eat,” said the owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days, is very angry at his leaders. For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on their refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into a real crisis, as much political as sanitary: trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump it officially filled up. Then, on Saturday, the last legal dump closed. As the piles rose and the stench spread, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights — one of many trash-related protests that included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. And while a patchwork of emergency measures has eased the crisis in the past few days, even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized. “The people are right,” said Guido Lauria, in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage. “You smell this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they complain.” The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra. But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point here. As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places or ways to get rid of garbage, largely because of local protests or protection by one politician or another. But years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperature rose, creating as much stink as unsightliness). “This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure,” said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of Parliament for the center-left Daisy Party. Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling “to make strong choices” to build new dumps or incinerators. And so, as the world’s news media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets, the nation’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual “extremely energetic appeal” to all levels of government and to politicians of the left, right and center finally to solve the crisis. At stake was not just public order, he said, but “the image of the country.” The president’s office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case Mr. Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town — led by one devout and praying woman called La Passionaria di Parapoti — to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days. That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the surrounding communities to finally begin digging out — and to lower tempers a little, too. Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to a tourist trade it depends heavily on, seems largely clean, and in the last few days, the sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash. But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains, compounding longstanding problems in the poorer south of Italy, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of dingy high-rises already plagued by drugs and the Camorra. On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, drug dealers sat across the street from a Dumpster spilling over with construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot. “It’s never been like this — I can’t tell you why,” said Sabato D’Aria, 37, owner of a small grocery nearby. Politicians, he said, only “talk, talk, talk, but in the end you see very little.” “Unfortunately, here in the south we are always more penalized. Italy is divided.” There is also the problem of the Camorra, which profits extraordinarily in the endless crisis over trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war. The Camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis — and far more harmful than legal ones to humans and the environment. In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been proposed by an emergency commission: greater recycling and the opening of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring provinces. But as has happened in several of the identified towns over the last two weeks, local people protest loudly. “The reaction is very strong,” said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government’s “trash czar.” She called it “an exaggerated Nimby syndrome,” in which the “not in my backyard” protestors get disproportionately shrill media coverage. And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, just north of Naples — and residents there have been complaining too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three grey smokestacks for the region’s only incinerator, set to go on line in several months, rise from the town’s edge. But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attracts clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor’s yard. “Acerra shouldn’t die,” said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. “It should fight.” So the question remains whether Naples is really ready to overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can finally agree where new dumps and incinerators should be located. (Shipping garbage abroad does not seem to be an option: Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy’s trash.) If difficult decisions are not made — and quickly — nearly everyone fears that trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and questions about how this can still happen in Europe. There are many skeptics. Giorgio Lanzaro, a Naples city councilor in charge of the environment, noted how strong the protests had already been in communities where the trash might be stored only temporarily. “I have some doubts whether this is over,” he said. Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.
|
|
| Concussions Tied to Depression 
Jim Davis/The Boston Globe The former New England player Ted Johnson has said that his depression had been linked to concussions. May 31, 2007 Concussions Tied to Depression in Ex-N.F.L. Players The rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired National Football League players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they sustained, according to a study to be published today. The study was conducted by the University of North Carolina‘s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes and based on a general health survey of 2,552 retired N.F.L. players. It corroborates other findings regarding brain trauma and later-life depression in other subsets of the general population, but runs counter to longtime assertions by the N.F.L. that concussions in football have no long-term effects. As the most comprehensive study of football players to date, the paper will add to the escalating debate over the effects of and proper approach to football-related concussions. The study, which will appear in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, found that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said they had been found to have depression. That is three times the rate of players who have not sustained concussions. The full data, the study reports, “call into question how effectively retired professional football players with a history of three or more concussions are able to meet the mental and physical demands of life after playing professional football.” In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors. While consistently defending its teams’ treatment of concussions and denying any relationship between players’ brain trauma and later neurocognitive decline, the N.F.L. has subsequently announced several related initiatives. The league and its players union recently created a fund to help pay the medical expenses of players suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or similar dementia. Last week, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell announced wide-ranging league guidelines regarding concussions, from obligatory neuropsychological testing for all players to what he called a “whistle-blower system” where players and doctors can anonymously report any coach’s attempt to override the wishes of concussed players or medical personnel. The N.F.L. has criticized previous papers published by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes — which identified similar links between on-field concussions and both later mild cognitive impairment and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease — and reasserted those concerns this week with regard to the paper on depression. Several members of the league’s mild traumatic brain injury committee cited two main issues in telephone interviews this week: that the survey was returned by 69 percent of the retired players to whom it was mailed, and that those who did respond were relying solely on their memories of on-field concussions. One committee member, Dr. Henry Feuer of the Indiana University Medical Center and a medical consultant for the Indianapolis Colts, went so far as to call the center’s findings “virtually worthless.” Dr. Ira Casson, the co-chairman of the committee, said, “Survey studies are the weakest type of research study — they’re subject to all kinds of error and misinterpretation and miscalculation.” Regarding the issue of players’ recollection of brain trauma, Dr. Casson said: “They had no objective evaluations to determine whether or not what the people told them in the surveys was correct or not. They didn’t have information from doctors confirming it, they didn’t have tests, they didn’t have examinations. They didn’t have anything. They just kind of took people’s words for it.” According to other experts, the 69 percent return rate was quite high for such survey research, which has been widely used to establish preliminary links between smoking and lung cancer, explore the relationship between diet and health, and track trends in obesity and drug use. After reading the depression study and considering the league’s issues with recollective survey research, Dr. John Whyte, the director of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and an expert in neurological research methodology, said he did not share the league’s criticisms. “To the person who says this is worthless, let’s just discard a third of the medical literature that we trust and go by today,” said Dr. Whyte, who has no connection with either the N.F.L. or the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, which is partly funded by the N.F.L. players union. “Here, the response rate was good and not a relevant issue to the findings. We have some pretty solid data that multiple concussions caused cumulative brain damage and increased risk of depression, and that is not in conflict with the growing literature. “Do I think this one study proves the point beyond doubt? No. Does it contribute in a meaningful way? You bet.” The study, which underwent formal, anonymous peer review before publication, reported that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said a physician found they had depression. Players with one or two concussions were found to have depression 9.7 percent of the time, and those with none, 6.6. (Respondents were on average 54 years old and had played almost seven seasons in the N.F.L. A minimum of two seasons was required for inclusion in the study.) The study considered concussions sustained in high school and college as well, not just in the N.F.L. Because the diagnosis of concussions has undergone substantial refinement since the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the survey respondents had played, a modern description of symptoms — such as nausea or seeing stars following a strong blow to the head, not simply being knocked unconscious — was provided. Members of the N.F.L. concussion committee criticized the use of such a retrospective definition. They also cited a mail survey by doctors at the University of Michigan, results of which were published two months ago in the same American College of Sports Medicine journal, that found the self-reported incidence of depression among retired N.F.L. players to be 15 percent — similar to that of the general population — and that such depression was strongly correlated with the chronic pain many N.F.L. retirees experience. The associate editor-in-chief of the journal who handled the review of both papers, Dr. Thomas Best, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the studies did not conflict. Dr. Best explained that the Michigan study did not consider concussions specifically, and that the North Carolina study in fact used statistical tests to account for players’ chronic pain and found that the strong correlation between number of concussions and depression remained virtually unchanged. “The North Carolina paper is not saying that N.F.L. players are or are not at risk for depression,” said Dr. Best, the medical director of the Ohio State University‘s Sportsmedicine Center. “What we learned from the paper is that there’s a correlation between the number of concussions sustained and depression they experience later in life.” Mr. Goodell said last week that the league’s concussion committee had just begun its own study “to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussions on retired N.F.L. players.” Dr. Casson, the committee’s co-chair, said that players who retired from 1986 through 1996 would be randomly approached to undergo “a comprehensive neurological examination, and a comprehensive neurologic history, including a detailed concussion history,” using player recollection cross-referenced with old team injury reports. He said that the study would take two to three years to be completed and another year to be published. Given that the average N.F.L. retirement age from 1986 to 1996 was approximately 27, a random player from that period would be approximately 46 at the N.F.L. study’s completion, eight years younger than those considered by the paper being released today. Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, the center’s research director and the principal author of the study, said that even with those differences he was confident the N.F.L. study would corroborate his group’s conclusions. “It sounds as if they need to study the question themselves to believe the findings,” Dr. Guskiewicz said. “I think they’re going to be very surprised at what they find, compared with what they’ve been led to believe by members of their own committee.”
|
|
| Giuliani Giuliani’s Unwelcome Birthday Guests.. Here’s an unwelcome birthday gift for Rudy Giuliani, as he travels around the city raising money: protests from fire fighters and family members of September 11th victims. They’ve shown up in the past at Giuliani’s presidential events. Today, they’re gathering in Bay Ridge, and they have plans to follow him nationwide starting sometime around January, according to Jim Riches, a deputy chief with the fire department whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. “We have all the UFA, the UFOA, and the fire members are all behind us — the International Association of Fire Fighters,” said Riches. “And we’re going to be out there today to let everybody know that he’s not the hero that he says he is.” The group’s complaints center on the faulty radios used by the fire department that day and what they say was a lack of coordination at Ground Zero. And Riches disputes the notion that Giuliani provided any form of leadership on September 11 or in the days following. “If somebody can tell me what he did on 9/11 that was so good, I’d love to hear it. All he did was give information on the TV” “He did nothing,” Riches continued. “He stood there with a TV reporter and told everyone what was going on. And he got it from everybody else down at the site.” |
|
| Hillary Clinton  ..paging_filter–> Photo: Getty Images ..paging_filter–> Carl Bernstein: First Nixon, now Hillary. A WOMAN IN CHARGE: THE LIFE OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
By Carl Bernstein
Alfred A. Knopf, 628 pages, $27.95 Carl Bernstein is a rarity in the American electorate: He’s ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. Recent polls show as little as 3 percent of Americans have no opinion of the former First Lady, and the 97 percent that do split almost evenly between favorable and unfavorable. So what to make of a book that exhaustively (over 600 pages of exhaust) plumbs the depths of the known Hillary record—we learn about her prom dress, her religious beliefs, her endometritis, her fears of indictment—only to conclude, lamely, that she “is neither the demon of the right’s perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time,” and, shockingly, “the jury remains out.” Tell it to the Scaife Foundation, Carl. Or, for that matter, to her passionate supporters, who see her not as a mere leader, but as a symbol of national redemption. If the “jury remains out” on Hillary Clinton, it is only because they’re hung. Of course, her ability to polarize is what makes writing a mainstream biography of Mrs. Clinton so difficult. The non-hack must provide enough detail about the numerous Clinton scandals to make news, but cannot dim the lights too much on her considerable accomplishments, lest he derail the one thing that’s truly interesting about Hillary Clinton: She might be our next President. At times, Mr. Bernstein seems self-conscious about the tightrope that he’s walking, taking the time to implicitly distance himself from hatchet jobs like Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary (which he describes as “an ideological screed, which contains barely smidgens—and no context—about what the title promises”), but also to judge, primly, in the style of high wingnuttery, such irrelevant details as the fact that “[h]er ankles were thick,” and to harp on both the “entitlement attitude of” and “holier-than-thou attitude of”—attributes that get their own index entries, along with such weirdly psychographic points of interest as “egregious errors and failures of” (10 references), “friendship capacity of” (eight references), “anger, temper, and hurt of” (23 references) and “clothes of” (25 references). One is tempted to observe that the attention given to these areas says as much about Carl Bernstein as it does Hillary Clinton; though Mr. Bernstein has obvious and strong credentials as a journalist, his skill as an arbiter of what makes a relationship work—or a woman happy—has been rather famously questioned. (Heartburn, a roman à clef by his ex-wife, Nora Ephron, is about Mr. Bernstein leaving her for another woman while Ms. Ephron was pregnant with their child.) Indeed, his investigation of the central mystery of the Clintons’ marriage—what has kept them together—is curiously flat-footed: Apparently, they have some kind of partnership. Or, as he puts it in one of several iterations: “It was obvious that Bill and Hillary could never have achieved what they had without each other.” Not exactly worth a siren on Drudge. Mr. Bernstein’s solution to wrapping the divergent opinions about Hillary—is she pragmatic or an idealist? Spiritual or hard-edged? Politically savvy or tin-eared?—into one neat (or neat-ish) package is not to clarify which view of Hillary might be true, but to proclaim that one doesn’t have to choose. He tells us, repeatedly, that it is Mrs. Clinton’s “extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development” that makes sense of the contradictions in her life, “from Goldwater Girl to liberal Democrat, from fashion victim to power-suit sophisticate, from embattled first lady to establishmentarian senator.” In his grand narrative, events unspool like just-so stories, with Hillary learning An Important Lesson from her triumphs and defeats. When Bill loses his first election (to represent Arkansas in Congress) because—argues Mr. Bernstein—Hillary was unwilling to take a shady contribution, Mr. Bernstein writes: “Subsequently, she would be far less committed to the high road, and much more concerned with results.” This is, however, a lesson she also learned at Wellesley, where “[s]he was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere.” And, just to make sure, she learns it again after Bill first loses re-election as governor, upon which she and Dick Morris adopt a strategy of “do[ing] whatever it took to get elected and us[ing] the same philosophy to govern.” Hillary Clinton was never slow to learn. Mr. Bernstein gets closer to what might be the truth when he observes that her approach is more like “military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly.” She’s less about evolution than adaptation. And as much as Mr. Bernstein wants to talk about “Clinton, Hillary. personal growth and change of” (the index is in many ways more interesting than the book), his portrayal of her is remarkably unsurprising. The aforementioned prom dress “reflected Hillary’s developing perfectionism.” At a debate among the candidates for Wellesley student-body president, she engages in “the same kind of vagueness that would work to her advantage as a candidate for the U.S. Senate,” even as she exhibited “one of her strengths as a leader, still evident today: her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights.” I suspect her quest to “find a better system for the return of library books” went better than health-care reform. Which brings us to health-care reform. Mr. Bernstein’s rehearsal of the opening fiasco of the first Clinton administration goes into extensive detail about an era that most Democrats would prefer to forget. (Mr. Bernstein’s recollection of the sad “Reform Riders” bus tour that was supposed to rally support for the measure is particularly cringe-inducing.) We know how this movie ends, but it doesn’t make the plot points any less pathetic. Her 500-person task force, meeting in secret, inadvertently offered up the first of what would become a destructive pattern for the Clinton administration: a lawsuit, followed by frantic legal maneuvering, followed by more lawsuits, and so on. Mr. Bernstein suggests that “Hillarycare” may even have been the first link in the chain of events that led from Vince Foster’s suicide to the investigation of Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky to impeachment. But as central as Hillary’s mismanagement of health-care reform is to the story of the Clinton Presidency—and of the Clintons—Hillary’s behavior during that period seems to be the one true outlier in Mr. Bernstein’s otherwise unintentionally consistent portrait. The pragmatist who ran the Wellesley student body with an eye toward results and not “philosophy” became embroiled in a political standoff that heightened the appearance of almost unhinged egotism. Mr. Bernstein depicts her as imperiously interrupting the President’s advisors, who wanted her to take a more gradual approach: “You’re right” and “You’re wrong.” Approached by liberal Republican John Chafee with a possible compromise, she barreled through with her plan anyway, setting up a confrontation with Republicans that would make the midterm elections all but unwinnable. Lawrence O’Donnell, at the time a senior aide to Senator Patrick Moynihan, lays at her feet nothing less than ruination: “Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party,” he tells Mr. Bernstein, using the health-care fight as his sole piece of evidence. “Hillary was a disaster for what we were trying to do in government.” A chorus of Democratic Hill staffers insists that Hillary’s good intentions were undermined by arrogance, but that’s hardly what makes the health-care episode unique. (Arrogance, frankly, is right up there with ambition and pragmatism when one looks for her personality’s connective tissue.) Rather, it’s her naïveté and her tactical blunders—errors hardly in keeping with the cool mind that surveys the landscape with “military rigor” and that supposedly engineered the Deal of the Century, post-Lewinsky (i.e., trading the opportunity to leave Bill for a shot at the White House). Mr. Bernstein offers a few possibilities for what made Hillary stumble so badly—she didn’t “get” Washington, mainly—but leaves alone Mr. O’Donnell’s sweeping characterization that somehow she brought down the modern Democratic Party with her. Of course, all sorts of people attribute to her a vast influence. Early on in the book, Mr. Bernstein posits, “With the notable exception of her husband’s libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors of the Bill Clinton presidency … were traceable to Hillary.” (Yes, other than that, Mr. Starr, how did you like the play?) That a First Lady could be held responsible for so much overlooks some practical facts of governing, but it says a lot about the level of awe that she inspires in both supporters and critics. Mr. Bernstein isn’t sure which side he comes down on—and, even more unsatisfying, he doesn’t do much to tell us what the real source of that awe is. In assessing the Clintons’ strengths going into the 1992 election, Mr. Bernstein writes, “the book on Hillary was awfully thin, suspiciously repetitive, and contextually lacking, whether the media narrative in question was admiring, hostile, or an honest attempt to separate the real Hillary from the myth generated by the Clinton campaigns past and present.” I’ll say this for A Woman in Charge: It’s not thin. Ana Marie Cox is the Washington editor for Time.com. Copyright © 2007 The New York Observer. All rights reserved. |
|
| Comedy Business 
Will Ferrell as a destitute tenant facing an unlikely landlord in a modest but extremely popular short video. 
“The Landlord” took 45 minutes to shoot and cost little to produce. It appears on FunnyOrDie.com, where viewers leave their comments. May 31, 2007 Comedy Business Turns to the Web LOS ANGELES — For Will Ferrell, who commands up to $20 million for movies like “Anchorman” and “Blades of Glory,” starring in a short Web video may not seem like the best use of time. But one afternoon in early March, Mr. Ferrell walked to a guest cottage at his Los Angeles home with a small crew that included Adam McKay, who is his production partner and the director of “Anchorman.” With a camcorder rolling, Mr. Ferrell improvised a sketch as a down-on-his-luck tenant being harassed by a foul-mouthed, booze-sodden landlord. The actor playing the landlord was Mr. McKay’s 2-year-old daughter, Pearl. “The Landlord,” which took 45 minutes to shoot and cost next to nothing to produce, was posted on the new Web site FunnyOrDie.com on April 12. As of yesterday, the sketch had been viewed about 30 million times, and the newly posted outtakes have been watched more than 1.6 million times. (This being Hollywood, Mr. Ferrell and Pearl have already shot a sequel: “Good Cop, Baby Cop.”) Another punch line of the story, though, is that Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay started the site with the financial backing of Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that made a name for itself, not to mention billions of dollars, by investing early in YouTube and Google. The Internet, of course, is already filled with cheap laughs — YouTube alone offers a lifetime’s supply of home videos (some funny, most not). But now many experienced comedians, talent agents and financiers are seeing the Web as a way to showcase talent while trying to turn a profit. In January, for example, Turner Broadcasting began SuperDeluxe.com, which features videos created by comedy pros and amateurs. And last year, IAC/InterActiveCorp, controlled by Barry Diller, bought a 51 percent stake in the parent company of CollegeHumor.com for an estimated $20 million. Already, the seven-week-old FunnyOrDie.com, which highlights short videos by veteran comics like Mr. Ferrell as well as videos submitted by amateurs, is in discussions with potential advertisers. The actor and his colleagues have enlisted some famous friends to volunteer their services. Brooke Shields, who is married to Chris Henchy, a writer and partner in FunnyOrDie.com, is a playground mom in one short video. And Bill Murray is planning to make a video, too, Mr. McKay said. Clients of Creative Artists Agency, which helped broker the deal with Sequoia, have also made short videos for the site — including the actor and comedian Ed Helms, who created a series of clips called “Zombie American,” and the boxer Oscar De La Hoya. In an interview last week at his second-floor office on a side street along Hollywood Boulevard, Mr. Ferrell acknowledged that he had been ambivalent about the site at first. “But then we thought, ‘Maybe this could work,’ ” he said. “We are not putting so much pressure on every piece that it be perfect. Everything isn’t, ‘Oh my God! This has to be so funny.’ It’s amusing, observational. We’re trying not to make it so slick.” The pairing of Hollywood talent and Silicon Valley financiers has all the familiarity of a movie sequel. When the first Internet boom reached its peak in the late 1990s, many actors, writers and directors made the pilgrimage to the headquarters of the venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., to seek financing to create entertainment for the Internet. Many of those ventures failed, largely because traditional Web shows were expensive to create and the technology at the time made it cumbersome to watch videos online. Among those that faltered were Pop.com, Digital Entertainment Network and Icebox. Another cruel reality is that it is hard to be consistently funny, even with the help of deep pockets. Last summer, for example, Time Inc. closed its OfficePirates.com Web site, a satirical look at workplace issues, because it did not have a big enough audience. A big change from the late 1990s, though, is that there is now better technology to stream videos, and audiences seem more willing to watch them, leading many investors and Hollywood talent to see a new opportunity. “Our responsibility is to continue to make it better,” said a Sequoia partner, Mark D. Kvamme, referring to FunnyOrDie.com. “If it doesn’t succeed, it is our fault.” The idea for the site started with Mr. Kvamme, who approached Creative Artists in 2006 with his pitch to finance a site for experienced comics. “If you look at all the sites out there, a large portion of them have comedy,” he said, “but it is a mish-mash. There was no place that had a good smattering of professional videos and user-generated content.” Agents at Creative Artists introduced Mr. Kvamme to Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay last year. Then Mr. Kvamme visited the two men on the set of “Blades of Glory” to persuade them to join the new venture. Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay, who had worked together on “Saturday Night Live,” were reluctant at first. “I don’t really know much about the Internet,” Mr. Ferrell said. The reality of having to sit through three weekly meetings and spend hours reviewing videos and writing comments for the site also seemed daunting to them, not to mention a distraction from their more lucrative movie and television careers (the time they are devoting to FunnyOrDie.com is all sweat equity at this point, since they are not being paid). Even so, they came around to seeing the venture as an opportunity to experiment with their own material and to be exposed to ideas from other comics that they could later develop into television shows and movies. Once Mr. Ferrell started making short videos, he enjoyed it. “You get to exercise that same muscle you did at the show,” he said, referring to his days on “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. McKay also came up with the categories that voters use to rate their favorite videos — “immortal” if a video was great, “the crypt” if it was not. And while Mr. McKay and Mr. Ferrell review the 20 most popular videos posted, they also have been careful not to censor the site. When a user posted a video poking fun at Alec Baldwin, whom they know from “Saturday Night Live,” they briefly took it down, but posted it again because they did not want to set a precedent for banning videos that made fun of their friends. “Unless it’s a hate crime or porn, it goes up,” Mr. McKay said. The actor Nick Thune posted a video based on his stand-up routine about masturbation, which became the third most popular video on the site, viewed more than a million times. Mr. Thune said that Mr. Ferrell’s involvement in the site lent credibility to sketches like his. “The thing about YouTube is that it is so broad,” Mr. Thune said. “If Will Ferrell is there, it must be good.” Sequoia and Gary Sanchez Productions — Mr. Ferrell’s company, where Mr. McKay is a partner — declined to disclose specifics about their initial investments, though Mr. McKay said that he and Mr. Ferrell had been given a budget of $5,000 to create their first videos. (The rest of the money — which Mr. Kvamme estimated to be in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” — was spent building the site.) But because of the heavy traffic on FunnyOrDie.com, Sequoia has increased its investment to several million dollars and hired 10 full-time employees, with plans to expand the staff to 25. Mr. McKay says they hope to share revenue with other video makers once the site starts to make money. For now, though, the site gives comics and actors a way to attract potentially huge audiences without the help of a Hollywood studio. Creative Artists, which Mr. Kvamme said also owned a stake in the venture, is already using the site to promote its clients. Michael Yanover, the head of business development for Creative Artists, said that he had approached Mr. Ferrell and his colleagues about creating a video featuring Oscar De La Hoya ahead of his May 5 fight against Floyd Mayweather. They agreed and, in 30 minutes, shot a video, “The Fight After the Fight,” which has been viewed more than 185,000 times as of yesterday. “Basically he got a commercial that someone else financed and shot,” Mr. Yanover said. But Mr. McKay warns that any videos that smack of Hollywood manipulation are going to be a turnoff to visitors. “That’s when a site starts smelling bogus,” he said.
|
|
| Today’s Papers Presidential Intent
By Daniel Politi
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:00 A.M. E.T. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with news that a divided U.N. Security Council voted to establish an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected of carrying out the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. It will be the first tribunal of its kind in the Middle East. The New York Times leads with a new study that reveals that U.S. immigration courts are anything but consistent when dealing with asylum seekers. When deciding who should get asylum, there are troubling differences between courts and the specific judge who hears a case. USA Today leads with word that the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that have been touted as better protection from roadside explosions are vulnerable to a new type of bomb, which is known as an explosively formed penetrator. The military has prioritized getting these new vehicles to Iraq and has vowed to spend millions in the effort, but now it seems they will have to be outfitted with more armor. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with the hundreds of U.S. and Iraqi troops who entered Baghdad’s Sadr City yesterday and aggresively searched for the five British citizens who were kidnapped in Iraq Tuesday. There is growing suspicion that cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia was responsible for the well-coordinated kidnapping. Ten of the Security Council’s 15 countries voted to approve the tribunal, while five, including Russia and China, abstained, saying that it would unnecessarily interfere with domestic politics, which would lead only to more internal conflict in Lebanon. The prospect of a tribunal has caused much debate in Lebanon’s parliament as many pro-Syrian leaders have vehemently opposed an international investigation. Analysts interviewed by the Post predict that violence is likely to increase in the coming months. The LAT, meanwhile, brings up Iraq and notes that, for the Bush administration, “raising tensions with Syria … could prove costly on other fronts.” The study of asylum seekers reveals that courts in some states may be more willing to grant asylum to specific nationalities than others, and the differences aren’t minor. For example, a Chinese asylum seeker has a 76 percent chance of success in a court in Orlando, Fla., while in Atlanta it’s a mere 7 percent. These same striking differences exist between different judges in the same court, as female judges are much more likely to grant asylum than their male colleagues. “Oftentimes, it’s just the luck of the draw,” the executive director of a legal assistance group tells the NYT. The study’s authors say the discrepancies are more disconcerting now because changes instituted by the Bush administration in 2002 resulted in a lower likelihood of successful appeals. Everyone notes that Fred Thompson has stepped up his efforts to seek the Republican nomination for president, and USAT fronts an interview with the actor in which he states his intentions to run. The former Tenneessee senator wants to be seen as an outsider and appeal to people who, like him, are disillusioned with politicians. The Law & Order star hasn’t officially announced his candidacy, but, as the WP and NYT also front, Thompson told supporters that he’s creating a committee to raise money for the race. The conventional wisdom is that no Republican candidate has really stood out as a front-runner, and the news that Thompson was stepping into the fray “sent ripples through the party,” says the NYT. Although he does plan to bring back the famous red pickup from his Senate campaign, he will now focus his efforts on the Internet, which will allow him “to cut through the clutter and go right to the people,” Thompson said. The LAT fronts a look at how the former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Tom Heffelfinger, who was frequently praised as an effective prosecutor, ended up on the infamous Department of Justice list of U.S. attorneys who could be fired. It increasingly looks like Heffelfinger’s work to protect the voting rights of Native Americans was at least partly to blame. His name appeared on the list only three months after his office began questioning a state directive that would have forbidden tribal ID cards as a valid form of identification at the voting booth. Meanwhile, everyone goes inside with word that an internal Justice Department investigation has broadened and will now look into whether party affiliation played a role in hiring decisions in several areas of the department. The WSJ goes inside with a look at how U.S. military leaders are currently assessing whether the “surge” strategy can succeed and what they can do to maximize the effectiveness of the recent troop increase in Iraq. Those reviewing the strategy seem to conclude that the United States must take a more hands-on approach to dealing with the Iraqi government and making sure that things get done. If any politicians are impeding progress, U.S. officials should apply pressure until they’re replaced. “We’ve been too passive and deferential to Iraqi sovereignty,” a military official tells the paper. The LAT is alone in devoting a separate nonwire story to how Bush sees the long-term role for troops in Iraq similar to the presence of the U.S. military in South Korea. American forces have been based in South Korea for more than 50 years, and there are currently 30,000 U.S. troops in that country. The WP and LAT go inside with news that a NATO helicopter crashed in Afghanistan and killed five American soldiers as well as a Canadian and a Briton. The crash is still under investigation, but the Taliban is claiming responsibility for shooting down the helicopter. In honor of Fred Thompson, the WP‘s Style section takes a look at other actors who used their star power to join politics and their legacy. The list includes the obvious (Ronald Reagan) but also some that many might have forgotten about (the mechanic on The Dukes of Hazzard). Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com. |
|
