 | Fly on the Gallery Wall 
Erin Wigger for The New York Times Danielle Ganek at her book party at (where else?) the Guggenheim Museum. June 3, 2007 A Fly on the Gallery Wall AT a glance, Mia, the self-effacing heroine of “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him,” Danielle Ganek’s catty vivisection of the New York art world, has little in common with her peers. They are “gallerinas,” formidably icy girl Fridays, imperious behind their steel-and-stone desks at Manhattan galleries. In her debut novel Ms. Ganek flicks at these glorified receptionists, “pretentious creatures in intellectual fashion and high heels, dripping with attitude and sarcasm.” Black-clad ravens to Mia’s genteel wren, they trade in impeccable pedigrees, glossy sex appeal and, mostly, information. As for Mia, a failed artist, “I never get the poop,” she says forlornly more than halfway through the book. And then, one day, she does. By the tale’s denouement, she has gleaned enough inside intelligence to impress everyone in her rarefied orbit — the reclusive artists, the pompous dealers, the art-lusting collectors, “horny as teenagers.” And she has enough poop to write a scathing tell-all about the after-hours scheming inside the proverbial Chelsea white box. Like Ms. Ganek, her real-world alter ego, Mia also gets to live out the cherished fantasy of certain striving New Yorkers: A self-described exile with uncommon reserves of cunning and patience, Mia becomes the ultimate insider, penetrating the private recesses of her arcane world. Ms. Ganek, 43, who wore a tailored white shirt, a beige skirt and tan sling-backs for an interview last week, shares more with Mia than her demure wardrobe. Bubbling beneath that studiedly low-key surface is a well of ambition. “I definitely have painted, badly. I can relate to that aspect of Mia’s story,” she said last week, over chilled mineral water on a rooftop terrace at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. Without irony, she added, “I have wrestled with the creative process. Mia, on some level, her story is autobiographical.” But while Mia acquires much of her stinging material sitting behind her concrete slab of a desk, Ms. Ganek gathers hers at the constellation of Chelsea galleries where she is a frequent visitor, and at the art fairs and galas she attends with her husband, David K. Ganek, a hedge fund manager and a Guggenheim trustee. Last year the Ganeks served as chairmen of the Guggenheim’s International Dinner, raising an impressive $4 million for the museum. Ms. Ganek writes at a computer in her duplex, with its four bedrooms and a library, at 740 Park Avenue, one of the city’s most prestigious co-ops. Purchased last year for around $19 million, it houses a collection that includes works by noted art world humorists like Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan and Jeff Koons. Prominent collectors (“Yes, you can read ‘prominent’ as ‘wealthy,’ ” Mia informs her readers), the Ganeks are well acquainted with the machinations of an overheated market, in which, as Mia’s boss observes, “art is the new cocaine,” and the measure of an artwork is its price. Ms. Ganek, the daughter of Frank DiGiacomo, a former financial vice president of W. R. Grace, grew up in Switzerland and Brazil but considers herself a committed New Yorker. Since settling in Manhattan two years ago with her husband, who founded his fund, Level Global, in 2003, she has maintained a quiet presence. But that is likely to change with the publication tomorrow of “Lulu,” which its publisher, Viking, is marketing as the “Devil Wears Prada” of the Chelsea set. Poised to become a hot beach read, the book also promises to ease Ms. Ganek’s transition from working mom and former magazine editor to certified member of A-list society in Manhattan. Her ascent seems assured. Earlier this spring she was one of the most talked about women at a gathering at Sloan Barnett’s Georgian town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Last Wednesday night she was the guest of Lisa Dennison, the Guggenheim director, who gave her a book party at the museum. Her photo frequently appears in The New York Social Diary, a Web site. She has been photographed at dinners in honor of designers to the Uptown crowd, and has overseen charity benefits at her home in Southampton, N.Y. IN her book, the title character, an artists’ muse, is urged to use her hip girl-about-town status to introduce her own fashion label. Clearly Ms. Ganek knows a thing or two about self-branding. “She is a textbook lesson on how to do it,” said David Patrick Columbia, the publisher of Social Diary.” “She takes all of her advantages — her talent, her husband’s financial aura, her involvement in one of the city’s major charities” — City Harvest — “and uses them optimally.” Mr. Columbia maintained that Ms. Ganek has shrewdly applied business techniques to raise her profile socially. Yet Ms. Ganek insisted, “I don’t have any social agenda. If you’re talking about people who go to a lot of benefits, that’s not what I do. It’s very disconcerting to go out and do these interviews,” she added. “I’m basically quite shy.” Still, as Janet Maslin observed in a book review in The New York Times on Monday, Ms. Ganek’s rising stature and “proximity to her subject gives her an insider’s wisdom without seriously compromising her ability to dish.” Ms. Ganek seems to have had little trouble reconciling her new insider status with an exile’s point of view. “As an American living abroad, I have always been an outsider,” she said. Mia, too, seems at first to hover in the margins. Like any self-respecting chick-lit heroine, she skewers her boss, Simon Pryce, a peacock in Turnbull & Asser with an immovable coiffure. At the same time she nurses a crush on a young art adviser, a charmer with lank hair and a camel coat slung over his broad shoulders. ” ‘Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him’ is a genre book,” Ms. Maslin acknowledged in her review, but as a genre book, “it’s better than most.” Ms. Ganek’s tale centers on the fate of the painting that gives the book its strangely weighty title, a 9-by-12-foot portrait of a 9-year-old girl wielding a dripping brush. The work is by Jeffrey Finelli, a one-armed “emerging” artist in his 50s, who has briefly returned to New York from his adoptive home in Italy for the premiere showing of his paintings. On the night of his opening, Finelli steps onto the rain-slicked street in front of the Pryce Gallery and is struck by a cab. With his demise comes the inevitable spike in the value of his work, “Lulu” in particular, and the equally inevitable skirmish as a hive of scheming dealers, collectors and celebrities zoom in for the kill. They include speculators and art trophy hunters like Martin Better, a real estate developer known to drop “five, ten, even twenty or thirty million on a piece with the nonchalant air of a housewife grabbing a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at the Stop & Shop.” There is the greedy collector Connie Kantor, married to a toilet-paper-dispenser magnate, “a moving sight gag” in five-inch heels and hooded mink sweatshirt, carrying the requisite Birkin bag, “so big it looks fake, but Connie doesn’t have the confidence to carry a fake.” Ms. Ganek does not spare the big-ticket artists, flimflammers like Dane O’Neill, known equally for his sprawling installations and for getting naked at parties. She takes aim, too, at operators like the contessa, Finelli’s mistress, regal in black, trailing hashish plumes from her ivory cigarette holder. Her characters have given rise to a flurry of speculation about who might be their real-life models. “Certain people are composites,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. INDEED, a dealer like Simon bears a superficial resemblance to Philippe Ségalot, a New York dealer with a famously leonine mane. Stock figures, Ms. Ganek’s characters nonetheless ring true. They are bound to, Ms. Cappellazzo said: “Sitting in back rooms with someone trying to sell her something, you can’t deny that she has firsthand experience in this area.” Ms. Ganek acknowledged that it is intriguing to play that kind of guessing game: “The art world has such colorful characters, almost costumed in the way they dress.” But while her book reads like a roman à clef, “mine are really made-up characters,” she insisted. “I don’t mean to sound defensive. It’s a fact.” She is more comfortable discussing her family. She has no regrets about moving to New York from Greenwich, Conn., with her husband and three children, now 12, 10, and 5. “We have always been passionate New Yorkers,” she said. When one of their sons was about to enter the fifth grade, “we looked at that as a time to come home.” She is passionate, too, about the artists she is drawn to, those who comment acerbically “on the human condition and who use humor effectively,” she said. Among her treasures is a Cattelan work called “Cheap to Feed,” a tiny stuffed lap dog that sits in the entry of her home. “When people come into our house, they say hello, they interact with it,” Ms. Ganek confided mischievously. “It makes for interesting conversation when I have to explain, ‘No, our dog isn’t dead.’ “
|
|
| The Process of Remembering 
Yarek Waszul RelatedJune 5, 2007 Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required. Blocking out a distracting memory is something like ignoring an old (and perhaps distracting) acquaintance, experts say: it makes it that much harder to reconnect the next time around. But recent studies suggest that the brain plays favorites with memories in exactly this way, snubbing some to better capture others. A lightning memory, in short, is not so much a matter of capacity as it is of ruthless pruning — and the new study catches the trace of this process at it happens. “We’ve argued for some time that forgetting is adaptive, that people actively inhibit some memories to facilitate mental focus,” as when they are trying to recall a friend’s new phone number or the location of a parking space, said Michael Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon. Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the new research, said it was ” important new work because it maps out how this is happening neurobiologically.” The researchers, neuroscientists at Stanford University, used a memory test intended to gauge how well people can recall studied words from among many similar words they have also seen. They had 20 young men and women, mostly Stanford students, view in quick succession a list of 240 word pairs. These included 40 capitalized words, each paired with six related, lower-case words: For example, “ATTIC-dust,” “ATTIC-junk,” and so on. After studying the pairs, the participants were instructed to memorize three selected pairs from each of 20 capitalized words. In effect, this forced them to flag individual pairs, like ATTIC-dust, while trying to tune out very similar, distracting ones, like ATTIC-junk, for half of the total list of pairs they saw. They were told not to memorize any pairs from the other half of the list. The researchers tested each person’s memory several times, and found that scores ranged from about 30 percent accuracy to 80 percent. They also measured how well each person suppressed the distracting word pairs, by comparing recall of those pairs with recall of the half of the list that was studied at first but later ignored. All the testing was done while participants were having their brains scanned by an M.R.I. machine. “We found that the magnitude of the decrease in activity on M.R.I. was correlated to the amount of weakening of these competing memories” when the subjects were recalling the target words, said Brice Kuhl, a graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford and the study’s lead author. His co-authors were Anthony Wagner, Nicole Dudukovic and Itamar Kahn. In particular, the researchers found that the more a study participant had suppressed the memory of distracting word pairs, the steeper the decrease in activity in a region of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex. This neural area is especially active when people are engaged in weighing choices, say, in choosing which card to play in a game of hearts with two or more good options. “From a broader point of view, given what we know about this area, the activity decreases as the task becomes more automatic, less demanding,” said Dr. Wagner, the senior author. People blank on new passwords so often because of the distracting presence of old or other current passwords. The better the brain can block those distracting digits, the easier it can bring to mind the new ones, Dr. Wagner said. This process is extremely familiar to people who have been immersed in a foreign language. In a recent study of native English speakers led by Dr. Anderson, researchers showed that beginners being drilled in Spanish were very slow to link pictures and words in English, compared with more bilingual participants. Those fluent in both languages had resolved the competition between the two tongues, inhibiting the encroachment, for example, of the word “zapato” on the word “shoe.” In all, this research suggests that memories are more often crowded out than lost. An ideal memory improvement program, Dr. Anderson said, “would include a course on how to impair your memory. Your head is full of a surprising number of things that you don’t need to know.” The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding “senior moments,” researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should. |
|
| Sharapova Fends Off Jeers and Two Match Points 
Alex Klein/European Pressphoto Agency Maria Sharapova, seeded second, advanced to the French Open quarterfinals for the third time in her career. She played in front of a crowd that supported Schnyder. June 4, 2007 Sharapova Fends Off Jeers and Schnyder’s Two Match Points PARIS, June 3 — Her long blond ponytail soaked with sweat, Maria Sharapova stood at midcourt Sunday, smiling and blowing kisses to the crowd booing her. The stadium rumbled with jeers as she defeated Patty Schnyder in a tense fourth-round match, 3-6, 6-4, 9-7. Sharapova struck the ball with unrelenting power for 2 hours 37 minutes, eventually saving two match points. Still, the fans, reacting to what they perceived to be an earlier moment of poor sportsmanship, seemed to see nothing but a villain in a blue clingy tennis dress. “It’s tough playing tennis and being Mother Teresa at the same time and making everyone happy,” Sharapova said, unemotionally, after the match. The second-seeded Sharapova advanced to the French Open quarterfinals for the third time in her career. She has never made it past that round. She will play No. 9-seeded Anna Chakvetadze, who defeated No. 25 Lucie Safarova in three sets Sunday. By then, the fans may have settled down. On Sunday, even Schnyder failed to persuade the audience to quell its anger. As the spectators booed, she lifted her right index finger to her lips, to try to hush them. But her effort was useless. In the third set, those catcalls had reached ear-splitting decibels. As Sharapova was serving with the score 7-7, 30-love, a fan shouted. Rattled, Schnyder had lifted her hand to indicate that she was not ready, but the serve had already landed on her side of the net. When the umpire refused to replay the point, and Sharapova did not offer to do so, the crowd erupted. Sharapova said she never considered offering to replay that point, considering the closeness of the match. Later, Schnyder did not complain. “I was distracted, and it was the public’s choice to do it; I didn’t boo,” Schnyder said. “I think we should appreciate the champion she is.” She added: “At the end, she was the big champion. I’m the little one who could not win.” Schnyder, who is ranked 15th in the world, ended the match with a forehand that flew wide. On the opposite side of the court, Sharapova buried her face in her hands, as emotions washed over her. She held her fist to her chest as she looked around the stands, seemingly deaf to the crowd’s angry roars. Though she looked on the verge of tears, she denied it later, saying she was simply grateful to have won. In other fourth-round matches Sunday, Roger Federer, the world’s No. 1 men’s player, defeated Mikhail Youzhny for the 10th time in a row, 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4. Federer will play ninth-seeded Tommy Robredo in the quarterfinals. Nikolay Davydenko, seeded fourth, also advanced and will play No. 19 Guillermo Cañas. On the women’s side, No. 1 Justine Henin and No. 8 Serena Williams both won their matches, setting up a rematch of the 2003 semifinal here. That match four years ago was similar to Sharapova’s match Sunday. There was jeering and a disputed call for time that added to the intensity of a crowd that was already on Henin’s side. Williams left the court in tears. Henin left with her first Grand Slam title. But much has changed since that emotionally charged match, which signified the best moment of Henin’s career and the worst of Williams’s. Both say they have matured since then. “I’ve been through death,” Williams said. “I had surgery I think since then. I’ve been through a lot.” Williams, the 2002 French Open champion, said she had become more cynical since 2003. Her half-sister Yetunde Price was murdered that year. Also, left-knee problems resulted in surgery and have plagued her career. Last year, Williams nearly fell out of the top 100 because of those injuries. This year, though, she came back to win the Australian Open, ranked 81st. “It takes a strong person to be at the bottom of the barrel,” said Williams, 25. “I was really down there, and it’s hard to be able to come back, especially when everyone seems against you and you have so many doubters.” Henin has changed in completely different ways. She has gone from aloof to outgoing. After her 6-2, 6-4 victory against No. 20 Sybille Bammer on Sunday, she turned to the crowd and even giggled as she soaked up the atmosphere. Until recently, Henin had been a loner on the women’s tour. There were reasons for that. Her mother died of cancer when Henin was 12. Afterward, Henin distanced herself from her father and three siblings to make a life on her own. But since separating from her husband, Pierre-Yves Hardenne, late last year, Henin has begun to emerge from behind the wall she had built around her. She said that two weeks ago she restored contact with her estranged father and siblings, whom she had not spoken with in years, calling it “a lot of joy.” “I just tried to become a better person,” said Henin, 25, who added: “I want to get more concerned, more involved, and a lot of things have changed. I feel much better about myself.” Henin said that she and Williams had not discussed that stressful 2003 semifinal. But both players have one thing in common: they want to forget that conflict. They played a final in Miami in March without incident. Williams won in three sets. “I let it go, and obviously she did,” Williams said. “Or whether she did or not, it doesn’t matter anymore. This is a new year.”
|
|
| Surf’s Up 
. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The water conditions at Surfrider Beach in Malibu are poor. 
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times The Figueroa family stays on the beach in Santa Monica June 3, 2007 Surf’s Up, but the Water Is Brown Los Angeles TO the naked eye, Surfrider Beach in Malibu, Calif., couldn’t be lovelier: on a recent Friday, in 60-degree weather, the patch of the coastal mountains behind Malibu Pier was shrouded in morning fog. A flock of birds flew low over a sparse crowd of sunbathers, bobbing surfers and a lifeguard doing abdominals on a beach towel in front of his tower. But Eric Gross, a 28-year-old creative director at his family’s graphic design studio who has been coming to Surfrider since childhood for its smooth, manicured wave, quickly shattered any postcard-quality impressions of this premier surfing beach. Take the stench emanating from the nearby lagoon, where Malibu Creek meets the sea, he noted. “You see discoloration and big brown blobs, like in a sewer,” Mr. Gross said of the days when the lagoon overflows and dumps untreated sewage on the waters he uses three to seven times a week. “Sometimes the water just stinks. You wash off in the shower and you’ve got this smell on you all day.” Then there’s the taste. “Have you ever tasted bong water by accident?” he asked. “It’s just this muck.” And the sore throats. “Sometimes you don’t know if you have a cold or you’re sick from the water,” Mr. Gross said. “Who knows what the long term effects are.” If Los Angeles County conjures images of a warm paradise of curled waves and palm trees, the locals know better. They live along a coast with the dubious distinction of having 7 of the state’s 10 most polluted beaches, according to the latest report card from the environmental group Heal the Bay, which has given beaches like Surfrider a failing grade year after year. Many Southern Californians find contentment just looking at the ocean from their sun decks, grateful for their views and the clean air. But there are those who persist in braving the water, never mind the historic counts of bacteria from fecal matter and other sources that can cause skin rashes, ear infections and gastrointestinal ailments, or the signs that spell out the dangers with warnings like “contact with ocean water at this location may increase risk of illness.” So who are these people? Among the fearless: inlanders escaping the suffocating heat; tourists who don’t know any better; and die-hard surfers who try to protect themselves by taking vitamins, by making sure their hepatitis and tetanus vaccinations are up to date, and by rinsing body cavities with hydrogen peroxide. “You get all your shots, you stay away certain times,” said Mr. Gross’s father, Paul, 60, another longtime surfer who comes out three to four times a week. He matter-of-factly detailed his post-surf regimen: “You take showers here and put hydrogen peroxide in your ears and gargle with hydrogen peroxide diluted with water.” But many tourists come for the lifeguards, or at least settle for them. Gabriel Campos, a lifeguard for the last 35 summer seasons at the beach by the Santa Monica Municipal Pier, which is a perennial environmental underachiever, said the tourists want their pictures taken with a real-life model for “Baywatch.” “I’ve done five shots with people today,” said Mr. Campos, 52. Residents often don’t bother with the water. Investigators studying beach attendance for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission say the beaches of Santa Monica Bay — a 60-mile stretch from Malibu south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula — are drawing almost one million fewer visits each year, largely because of public apprehensions about the water. Water quality typically plummets when it rains, with contaminated runoff from the street and storm drain systems ending up in the ocean. This year’s Heal the Bay report card, released on May 23, found that the state as a whole had above-average water quality because of a drought over the last year, but a dramatic drop in quality in the Long Beach area meant that Los Angeles County retained its status as the state’s leading “beach bummer.” (Right before the Memorial Day weekend, about 5,000 gallons of sewage spilled into the waters off the Venice district of Los Angeles because of a blocked sewer line, prompting a two-day closure of several portions of two popular beaches.) THOSE craving a dip can easily drive to cleaner beaches. Sometimes the closest clean beach is less than a mile away, and 57 percent of Los Angeles County’s beaches still score an “A” or “B” in dry weather. But many of the dirty beaches have their own storied appeal and social scenes. Last weekend, the beach by the Santa Monica Municipal Pier, which sits at the foot of luxury hotels and a bustling commercial district, was packed with the usual mix of tourists, cliques of young people and families, many of them working-class Latinos. “I try not to swallow the water,” said a 26-year-old accountant from Pasadena after taking a dip. The accountant, who adamantly refused to give his name, said he came to this beach to swim as often as twice a week in the summer because it was near restaurants and bars and he could “tan and go party.” “It’s a hub,” he said. “Obviously you want to go where there are people.” But Jameel Chahal, 22, a friend in the accountant’s group who was visiting from Canada, looked around almost in disgust. The water was brown and two dead sea lions had washed up, hardly an enticement to dip in as much as toe. (It was unclear what killed the animals, but a higher level of marine-mammal and seabird deaths this year has been linked to an increase in a naturally occurring toxin produced by algae.) “I’ve never seen this color,” Mr. Chahal said of the water. “If you look out 100 meters, you don’t see water that’s clear. Why jump in the water when it’s dirty like that?” Many beachgoers come for everything but the water. Charlie and Lizette Figueroa said the temperature had reached 80 degrees by midmorning at their home in Ontario, 35 miles east of Los Angeles. They decided to pack up a cooler, shovels and buckets for their two children and drive one hour west to Santa Monica. On the beach, the children, ages 2 and 4, made a hole to bury their father while the couple sat on beach chairs fully dressed, enjoying the cool breeze. No one was getting wet. “We’re here just to relax and for the kids to play in the sand,” said Mrs. Figueroa, 23, a supervisor for a bus company. “My kids would rather go in the swimming pool. My son doesn’t want to go in here. He says that the water looks dirty.” Linwood Pendleton, a professor in the school of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the principal investigator on the study on beach attendance, said that Southern Californians have become unnecessarily fearful of the ocean. He said that the area does a better job at testing water quality than elsewhere in the country, so public awareness of the issue is high. “People should look around at all the beaches and choose the ones with the lowest risk, but don’t stay home,” he said. “The beach in Southern California is our Central Park, our open space.” Mr. Pendleton is co-author of a study, released last year, that said as many as 1.5 million cases of sickness in Los Angeles and Orange Counties each year could be attributed to bacterial pollution in the ocean. Mr. Pendleton said that represented only a 1 percent chance of becoming sick. Even at the worst beaches, he said, the chance of becoming sick is relatively low, 5 to 15 percent. State and county officials say that this area has the most polluted beaches because it is the state’s most populous region, noting that both development and people’s behavior — such as not cleaning up after their dogs — contributed to the problem. The county also is among the first in the state to collect samples directly in front of storm drains and creeks, where the water quality is worse. But the officials said that cities are facing new requirements to limit bacteria at their beaches, and that $135 million in state bonds is going to cover the treatment of storm-related sewage problems at the worst sites. “California is cleaning up its beaches,” said William L. Rukeyser, a spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board. Even Surfrider has been on a roll lately, with a string of passing grades in Heal the Bay’s weekly report card. For surfers like Eric and Paul Gross, forgoing the beach they consider home base is not an option. “No matter what the dangers are,” the elder Mr. Gross said, “this is still one of the best breaks.”
|
|
|
| For the Chronically Late 
Chris Reed June 3, 2007 Career Couch For the Chronically Late, It’s Not a Power Trip By PHYLLIS KORKKI Q. You’re late … again. Why can’t you be on time? A. Contrary to suspicions, most chronically tardy people are not aiming to annoy those around them, said Diana DeLonzor, author of “Never Be Late Again” (Post Madison Publishing) and a former late person. People should not take a co-worker’s lateness personally, she said: “It’s not usually about control. It’s not that they don’t value your time. It’s not that they like the attention when they walk into the room.” She added: “Most late people have been late all their life, and they are late for every type of activity — good or bad.” Surprisingly little scientific research has been done on tardiness, but some experts subscribe to the theory that certain people are hardwired to be late and that part of the problem may be embedded deep in the lobes of the brain. Q. Do tardy people tend to have a certain personality type? A. Ms. DeLonzor says she has found that many late people can be divided into two categories. First there is the deadliner, who, she said, is “subconsciously drawn to the adrenaline rush of the sprint to the finish line.” (That once described herself, she said.) Then there is the producer, “who gets an ego boost from getting as much done in as little time as possible.” Many late people tend to be both optimistic and unrealistic, she said, and this affects their perception of time. They really believe they can go for a run, pick up their clothes at the dry cleaners, buy groceries and drop off the kids at school in an hour. They remember that single shining day 10 years ago when they really did all those things in 60 minutes flat, and forget all the other times that everything took much, much longer. Q. How can chronic tardiness affect a business? A. In schedule-driven jobs, lateness can have a direct effect on a company’s bottom line. Calls go unanswered, deliveries are late or an assembly line can’t operate. In other jobs, the effect is more diffuse but can also be damaging, to both productivity and morale. For one thing, “unnecessary noise and distraction” occur as other employees discuss and work around a co-worker’s tardiness, said Manny Avramidis, senior vice president for global human resources at the American Management Association. It can be especially disruptive when a co-worker continually shows up late to meetings, Mr. Avramidis said. The discussion is interrupted and information must be repeated to the tardy newcomer, wasting everyone else’s time. Q. Can being late all the time hurt a career? A. Yes. At a place like a manufacturing plant or a call center, it can be grounds for dismissal if it occurs often enough. But it can damage a career even in jobs where schedules are more flexible. Tardy people tend to think that they can make up for their lateness by working extra hours, Ms. DeLonzor said, “but they can never overcome the fact that it makes a very bad impression.” Managers, she found in her research, “are less likely to promote tardy employees.” Q. What can someone do to try to be more punctual? A. Lateness is a very difficult habit to overcome, Ms. DeLonzor said, even though it truly hurts the offending person’s life. Telling a late person to be on time is like telling a dieter, “Don’t eat so much,” she said. Here are some steps she recommends to become more punctual: HAVE A STRATEGY Make a commitment to work on the problem every day for at least a month. RELEARN HOW TO TELL TIME Late people tend to underestimate the amount of time their activities take by 25 percent to 30 percent, she said. Write down all your activities and clock how long they actually take. NEVER PLAN TO BE ON TIME Instead, plan to be early. Punctual people build in extra transit time because they know that unexpected delays can occur. Many tardy people — in their naïve optimism — have never learned to do this. WELCOME THE WAIT Bring a magazine, a book or some language tapes so that you can entertain yourself and get something done while you wait. Q. In some cases, shouldn’t a company just appreciate a tardy person’s many other excellent qualities and accept the lateness? A. “Sometimes more creative individuals live by their own clock and find it more difficult to be on time,” said Phyllis Hartman, owner of PGHR Consulting in Pittsburgh. So an employer accepts a noon arrival time in exchange for brilliance and innovation. And as technology enables more salaried employees to work from home, and even on their vacations, some employers are becoming more tolerant of lateness, said George Faulkner, a principal with the health and benefits area of Mercer Human Resource Consulting. They will be more likely to measure productivity based on results rather than hours clocked inside a cubicle. The problem is that if salaried employees are not punctual, but expect their hourly workers to be on time, there is the appearance of a double standard, Mr. Faulkner said. A perception of unfairness can affect morale, so the difference in working patterns needs to be made clear. Among all workers, employers must be aware of any personal situations that may be causing tardiness, Ms. Hartman and Mr. Faulkner said. A sick spouse or child, a transportation problem or a personal problem may be throwing a worker off schedule and require some accommodation in the workplace. As Ms. Hartman said: “When possible I do believe that employers should provide flexibility. But you can’t hurt the work of the company either.” |
|
|
| A Hot-Selling Weapon 
Don Zaidle/Texas Fish & Game magazine On his Texas ranch in February, Ted Nugent, left, showed an AR-15 rifle to Jim Zumbo, an outdoors writer  Graphic
The Tricked-Out Rifle June 3, 2007 A Hot-Selling Weapon, an Inviting Target By ANDREW PARK LAST February, Jim Zumbo, a burly, 66-year-old outdoors writer, got a phone call at his home near Cody, Wyo., from the rock star — and outspoken Second Amendment champion — Ted Nugent. “You messed up, man,” Mr. Zumbo says Mr. Nugent told him. “Big time.” Two days earlier, Mr. Zumbo, a leading hunting journalist, outraged Mr. Nugent and many other gun owners when he suggested in a blog post that increasingly popular semiautomatic guns known as “black rifles” be banned from hunting. Mr. Zumbo, stunned that hunters were using the rifles for sport, also suggested giving the guns, prized for their matte black metal finishes, molded plastic parts and combat-ready looks, a new name: “terrorist rifles.” Gun enthusiasts’ backlash against Mr. Zumbo was swift. He parted company with his employer, Outdoor Life magazine. Mr. Zumbo says on his Web site that he was “terminated”; the magazine says that it and Mr. Zumbo agreed that he would resign. But a week after hearing from Mr. Nugent, who has a devoted following among gun owners, Mr. Zumbo visited him in Waco, Tex., to make amends. For his part, Mr. Nugent was prepared to give Mr. Zumbo a lesson on the utility and ubiquity of black rifles. “These guns are everywhere,” Mr. Nugent explained excitedly in a recent phone interview. “I personally don’t know anybody who doesn’t have two in his truck.” Despite their menacing appearance — and in some cases, because of it — black rifles are now the guns of choice for many hunters, target shooters and would-be home defenders. Owners praise their accuracy, ease of use and versatility, as well as their potential to be customized with an array of gadgets. While the gun industry’s overall sales have plateaued and its profits have faded over the last decade, black rifles are selling briskly, says Eric Wold, an analyst in New York for Merriman Curhan Ford. Moreover, manufacturers say, for every dollar spent on black rifles, gun buyers spend at least another customizing the guns from an arsenal of accessories. All of this has combined to make black rifles a lone bright spot for long-suffering American gunsmiths. Yet Mr. Zumbo is not alone in finding the popularity of black rifles and the trade in them to be disquieting. Gun-control advocates say black rifles are simply assault weapons under a different name — and just as dangerous as they were when Congress instituted a ban on some of them in 1994. The ban did not eliminate black rifles; manufacturers were able to make minor changes to comply with the law and kept selling them. (The ban expired in 2004.) “What you have are guns essentially designed for close combat,” says Dennis Hennigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, who notes that a Beretta black rifle was among the weapons obtained by men suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on Fort Dix, N.J. “If your mission is to kill a lot of people very quickly, they’re very well suited for that task.” But efforts to ban black rifles seem to have only fueled their rise, analysts say. And while some major gun makers were reluctant to defy the spirit of the 1994 ban, dozens of small companies emerged, and their sales surged. (It didn’t hurt that many gun owners feared greater restrictions down the road, a fear that manufacturers were more than willing to exploit.) “Whenever there’s a push like this, business increases as people buy a firearm while they can,” says Mark Westrom, president of ArmaLite Inc., a maker of black rifles in Geneseo, Ill. “If you want to sell something to Americans, just tell them they can’t have it.” EVEN as politicians debate increased gun regulation in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April, gun control advocates say they are pessimistic about the chances of reining in black rifles. Illinois legislators who were trying to pass a statewide assault-weapons ban this spring ran into fierce opposition from Mr. Westrom and several other makers of semiautomatics who argued that the proposed law would cost the state jobs and hurt the economy. (The measure is still under consideration.) The most popular black rifle has been in production since the early 1960s. In response to the Army’s need for a lightweight infantry rifle, ArmaLite had developed the AR-15, which could switch between semiautomatic (only one round per pull of the trigger) and fully automatic firing (continuous firing when the trigger is pulled). The Colt Firearms Company bought the rights to the gun and the military soon adopted it, calling it the M-16. From Vietnam through the Persian Gulf war, the M-16 was the most common combat weapon, and it remains in use by many American forces. Because of restrictions on the sale of automatic weapons, civilians could buy the AR-15 only in a semiautomatic version. But in the 1980s, Colt drew unwanted attention when it was discovered that the gun, which had begun showing up in the arsenals of drug dealers, mobsters and antigovernment militias, could be easily converted to an automatic. Colt redesigned the weapon to make converting it much more difficult, but when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the AR-15 was banned alongside the AK-47, the TEC-9 and 16 other semiautomatic weapons. The act also prohibited semiautomatics that could accept detachable magazines from having more than one of five generic features that were believed to increase the likelihood that the gun would be used in a crime. The National Rifle Association lobbied hard against the bill, but many hunters agreed with the premise that assault weapons were of little use in their sport. “These killing machines are the weapon of choice of drug traffickers, violent youth gangs and the seriously deranged bent on revenge through mass murder,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, then a House member from New York who was one of the bill’s champions, said in April 1994. “They have no place in our society.” But if the spirit of the law was a blow to black rifles, the letter of it allowed them to live on and thrive. Colt focused on supplying weapons to the military and law enforcement. But competitors were already copying the rifle, since the original patents granted to ArmaLite had expired. All they had to do was rejigger their designs to reduce the number of offending features. Demand for black rifles, meanwhile, began to grow. A new generation of hunters, many of whom had fired M-16s in the military, adopted them for shooting predators on rural property and stalking small game. The .223-caliber ammunition they used was inexpensive and easily found. The guns began to get a reputation for being durable despite their light weight; they also loaded automatically (unlike bolt-action hunting rifles) and their recoil was gentle enough for even novice shooters and children to withstand. Once the AR-15 was deemed accurate enough for use in high-powered rifle competitions, it soon became standard issue for target shooters. And with the basic design of black rifles open to industrywide adaptations, gun makers began adding their own innovations and accessories to refine and improve the AR-15′s performance. By 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired, black rifles had emerged as a major category in firearms. But while Colt’s sales had shrunk in the intervening years, output exploded for black-rifle specialists like Bushmaster, Rock River Arms and DPMS. “The little guys perfected the platform,” says Michael Bane, a gun blogger and writer who is the host of “Shooting Gallery,” a program on the Outdoor Channel on cable television. “They had the 10 years of the ban to get their chops down.” But for most of those 10 years, these small manufacturers managed to fly under the radar of many gun owners, including Mr. Zumbo, a self-described traditionalist who says he had seen only one black rifle during a lifetime of hunting. “I had absolutely zero idea of the number of people who are into these types of firearms,” he says. Not so for Mr. Nugent, who stocked up on black rifles before the ban took effect and estimates that he now owns about two dozen. If the boom in black rifles began in spite of the federal assault weapons ban, it has accelerated only in the two and a half years since the ban expired. Manufacturers have been freed to revive once-prohibited features like collapsible stocks, flash suppressors and large-capacity magazines. Analysts say that images from the Iraq war showing American soldiers armed with black rifles have also helped sales, as have concerns about domestic safety after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina. “People on the street want to use what the people in the military and law enforcement are using,” says Amit Dayal, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in New York. Based only on the volume of accessories sold — such as high-powered scopes and flashlights — Mr. Bane estimates that as many as 750,000 black rifles, including about 400,000 AR-15s, change hands each year. Brownells, a company in Montezuma, Iowa, a big seller of firearms parts and accessories, says AR-15 gear has become its best-selling product category. Because all but a few gun manufacturers are closely held private companies, overall sales figures for the black rifle industry are hard to come by. But companies are required to report their overall rifle production to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and based on that, many of the small manufacturers that have specialized in the guns are “on the verge of being big,” Mr. Bane says. One, Stag Arms of New Britain, Conn., opened in 2004 and is already producing 2,500 to 3,000 black rifles a month, according to the president and owner, Mark Malkowski. That would be 30,000 to 36,000 a year, roughly the same number that Colt was producing in the late 1990s. Buoyant demand has enticed a number of established gunsmiths into the market, too. Smith & Wesson, known for its revolvers, has made black rifles a strategic priority in its turnaround. It introduced its first model in early 2006. It was so popular that the company had to supplement manufacturing of the gun, which had been outsourced, just to meet consumer demand. “It’s our hope that we would be the share leader in the category,” says Leland A. Nichols, Smith & Wesson’s chief operating officer. He said that in the company’s own surveys of consumers, its brand outpolled all other black rifle makers before it even had a product on the market. A similar story is unfolding at the Remington Arms Company, long one of the strongest brands in hunting rifles. The company started its first line of black rifles earlier this year. In April, Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that recently made a deal to buy Chrysler, agreed to acquire Remington for $370 million, adding it to the gun maker Bushmaster in the fund’s portfolio and raising the possibility of collaboration between the two companies. “A month ago black guns were not a business opportunity,” says Al Russo, a spokesman for Remington, citing the growth potential that the Cerberus deal offers. “Now they are.” Despite their popularity, black rifles remain a target for advocates of gun control. Seven states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as several major cities, including New York and Chicago, have enacted bans on certain firearms they have deemed assault weapons, including some black rifles. In February, Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat, introduced a renewal of the federal ban on assault weapons that would greatly expand the measure. But few expect the bill to gain any traction. “It’s highly unlikely that any legislation to move an assault weapons ban is going to happen,” says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control lobbying group. “That’s the sad reality on the Hill right now.” MS. RAND says it is hard to know how often black rifles are used in crime, because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has not reported such statistics to the public since 2001. But based on anecdotal evidence, Ms. Rand says, criminals are favoring imported semiautomatics like AK-47s and SKS rifles, which are cheaper to obtain than AR-15s. “We were never claiming that every buyer of an assault weapon is a criminal or is a potential mass killer,” says Mr. Hennigan of the Brady Center. “But the consumers of the assault weapons are going to include a higher percentage of violent criminals than other guns.” Gun rights advocates scoff, saying that a .223-caliber bullet that comes out of a black rifle is the same as one fired from other guns. Mr. Nugent scoffs as well. “It’s just a neat tool,” he says. “Black rifles are cool. Case closed. The more the better.” Mr. Zumbo, chastened by the outcry that his black-rifle comments set off, says he hopes to resume writing about hunting and to revive his popular cable television show, which was put on hiatus when it lost sponsors after the blog post. He says his time at Mr. Nugent’s ranch reminded him that gun owners have to reject banning any firearm, lest it open the door to banning them all. He also says that, like it or not, black rifles are now mainstream. “Having met the people who shoot these things, they were regular folks; they weren’t sinister people who were bent on causing harm, they weren’t hostile people,” he says. “They were interested in the guns because they were fun to shoot.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
|
| Who Came First? |
|
|
|
| History Boys The crucial moment of Peter Morgan’s new play on Broadway, “Frost/Nixon,” about the four ninety-minute interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, comes not during the famous final session, on Watergate, but the night before. Nixon, who has been drinking, places an imaginary but not unimaginable phone call to Frost, who has been agonizing over his abject failure to direct the conversation in the first three interviews. The ex-President, played by Frank Langella, points out that both men rose up from nowhere and, at that moment, as the decade meanders to a close, both seem bound for oblivion. “If we reflect privately just for a moment,” Nixon muses, “if we allow ourselves a glimpse into that shadowy place we call our soul, isn’t that why we’re here now? The two of us? Looking for a way back? Into the sun? Into the limelight? Back onto the winner’s podium? Because we could feel it slipping away? We were headed, both of us, for the dirt.” Frost, played by Michael Sheen, accepts the truth of this but adds, “Only one of us can win.” And Nixon warns him, “I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I’ve got. Because the limelight can only shine on one of us. And for the other, it’ll be the wilderness.” “Frost/Nixon” is about the struggle to control historical memory, with television the medium, self-explanation the means, and redemption the prize. Nixon, with his sterile capacity for insight, understood the reductiveness of historical judgment, and he wanted to head off his own ignominy while there was time. Of course, he failed: only historians and partisans remember what Nixon did before June 17, 1972, and the only one of the Frost interviews that anyone recalls is the session on Watergate. For better or worse, popular memory flattens out the facts. For decades, the Civil Rights Act and Medicare were obliterated from Lyndon Johnson’s record by the glare of napalm. Jimmy Carter is defined by the hostage crisis and a word, “malaise,” that he never uttered. Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet empire. And so on. George W. Bush did four good things last week. He strengthened sanctions on Sudanese companies and officials in response to the ongoing massacres in Darfur. He called on Congress to double the funding for global AIDS programs, to thirty billion dollars. He directed his envoy in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to sit down with his Iranian counterpart and discuss ways of stabilizing Iraq—the most high-profile meeting between top officials of the two countries in years. And he attacked the demagoguery of right-wing critics of the bipartisan immigration bill. Each case has its caveats, flaws, and what-took-so-longs. But it should be noted that the three hundred and thirty-second week of the Bush Presidency was one of the best. Nobody will remember it. Bush’s legacy will be the war in Iraq and, secondarily, the array of decisions on prisoners, alliances, treaties, and preventive war which revolutionized American foreign policy after September 11th. Last year, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked whether Iraq would come to define the Bush Administration, she said, “I think it’ll be bigger than Iraq, I think it will be the Middle East.” This was wishful thinking on the part of the official most engaged in walking the Administration back from its own wreckage: a desire to define the President’s record away from what it has actually wrought in our time and toward a hypothetical future. In fifty years, this thinking goes, a new generation will realize that the war kick-started political change, and forced the Middle East out of its deadly pattern of autocracy and extremism. This exercise in justification by faith posits a visionary President with the courage to ignore temporary bad news. By this light, Bush’s habit of declaring A to be B—for example, claiming that the surge reflects the public’s desire for a change in war policy, or interpreting increased violence in Iraq as a token of the enemy’s frustration with American success—becomes a sign of clarity and resolve, not delusional thinking. When everything is turning to ashes, take the long view. Last December, Senator Richard Durbin, of Illinois, described a meeting at the White House in which Bush discussed Harry S. Truman and the foreign policy of the early Cold War—initially unpopular, ultimately vindicated by history. According to Durbin, Bush implied that he will be similarly remembered. Who knows what the world will look like in fifty years? It’s hard to imagine, but perhaps the Middle East is at the start of a decades-long road toward democracy and stability. If so, though, history isn’t likely to find the prime cause of that happy outcome in the Bush Presidency. Truman established the institutions and policies that guided America to victory in the Cold War. The loss of China, the stalemate in Korea, and the corruption and the domestic upheavals of the late forties and early fifties now seem secondary to the international architecture—the NATO alliance, the doctrine of containment, the legitimacy of democracies as a counter-force to Communism—that Truman left in place. Bush will have no such legacy. His Administration—or part of it—is trying to reverse or restrain his farthest-reaching policies without admitting that anything went wrong with them. We are not present at the creation of anything. A democratic Middle East would bear the same relation to the Iraq war as the United Nations does to the Second World War: the salvaging of a tragedy, not the fulfillment of a vision. Historical legacies are bound up with the nature of the individual: leaders are remembered for the events and policies that express “the shadowy place we call our soul.” Watergate captured Nixon’s deepest qualities, including his uncanny sense of his own failure; at the end of “Frost/Nixon,” as the disgraced former President is pressed for an apology, and Langella’s face is frozen in torment across the multiple screens above his chair, Nixon seems to submit to his fate, which is his character. “Even Richard Nixon has got soul,” Neil Young sang. To see “Frost/Nixon” is to know what a deep decline there has been in public candor and Presidential self-knowledge since the days of Richard Nixon. By contrast, the current President will repeat the same sunny falsehoods and sententious illusions about the war until he leaves office, and then he will go on repeating them in retirement. And that will be his legacy: the war, and the shallow, unreflective character that made it. ?
Illustration: Tom Bachtell |
|
| More Advice Graduates Don’t Want to Hear 
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
June 2, 2007 Your Money More Advice Graduates Don’t Want to Hear Last year at this time, as college graduates walked out into the world, I wrote a column giving advice on how they could save money. In droves, parents sent the column to their children. And some of those children wrote to me to vent. What I suggested was impractical, many said. How would you like to try to live on $40,000 a year in Washington or San Francisco, several asked. What I was proposing was not radical. It was mostly the simple things my mother had drummed into me. It was advice like diverting 10 percent of your income to savings before anything else and ignoring raises and putting them into savings, too. Learn to cook, I said, and never borrow money to pay for a depreciating asset. I also suggested cutting out the latte habit, which was my symbol for those little things in life that when turned into a habit, add up to money that could have been spent on something worthwhile and memorable. Other people, my wife among them, pointed out that I may have been too draconian on that point. Consistent savings is a lot easier if there are small rewards along the way; otherwise, life seems as if it is just one bowl of cold grass porridge after another. Fine feedback, indeed, and my wife’s counsel reminds me that I should have added one other bit of advice: find a partner and stay together. Study after study show that two can live more cheaply together than each alone and that divorce is the great destroyer of wealth. But, dear graduates, the crux of the advice is still compelling. While there may be a debate among economists about how much 50- and 60-year-olds should be saving for retirement, there is little dispute about how much the young should save: more. Saving while young is critical. It isn’t just because of the power of compounding. By that I mean that if you start saving now it will build to a larger nest egg by the time you are 65 than if you wait to start at 45. Or to put it another way, you can save a smaller amount now rather than a larger amount later. Bank $250 a month for 40 years in a I.R.A. or a 401(k) and you will receive about $500,000, assuming a 6 percent return. Start at age 45 and you would have to put in $1,078 a month to generate the same amount by age 65. But there is another compelling reason to get into the habit of saving. (Here is where this column also turns into advice for the older folks who are giving you this to read.) People who save a lot get used to a lower rate of consumption while working, so less money is needed in retirement. Stretching to save a little more yields a double dividend. You accumulate more assets and you lower the amount you will need in retirement because you will not have the habit of spending extravagantly to feel fulfilled. Inevitably though, we return to the question: How can you possibly afford to put away that much? If you are only making $40,000, a not-untypical starting salary for a college-educated professional in a big city, the weekly gross of $769 works down to $561 in take-home pay after income taxes and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicaid. Were you to divert 10 percent of your salary to a 401(k) plan, the bottom line becomes $509. In other words, a regular habit of savings costs you $52 a week. You easily frittered that away last week on things that you cannot even recall this week. A useful exercise that proves the point: For a week, try to list everywhere you spend cash or use your credit card. Could you save another 10 percent a week, or $50? If you do, you are nearly set for life. Can you live on $1,950 a month? Rents being what they are in certain cities like New York, San Francisco or Washington, sure, it will be tight. People do it by finding a roommate and watching their expenses (or asking for an occasional handout from Mom and Dad). There may be another compelling reason to save and that is that while many aspects of retirement savings are predictable, the big unknowable is health care costs. “If you believe in the logic of the life cycle model, then once you get used to peanut butter, all else follows,” said Jonathan Skinner, a economics professor at Dartmouth College who has studied retirement issues and recently wrote a paper titled “Are You Sure You’re Saving Enough for Retirement?” for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “That’s the assumption that I am questioning: Do people want to be stuck in peanut butter in retirement?” He said he came to the conclusion that a strategy to reduce retirement expenses “will be dwarfed by rapidly growing out-of-pocket medical expenses.” He noted projections based on the Health and Retirement Study, a survey of 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 sponsored by the National Institute on Aging found that by 2019, nearly a tenth of elderly retirees would be devoting more than half of their total income to out-of-pocket health expenses. He said, “These health care cost projections are perhaps the scariest beast under the bed.” As Victor Fuchs, the professor emeritus of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, told me, money is most useful when you are old because it makes all the difference whether you wait for a bus in the rain to get to the doctor’s appointment or you ride in a cab. “Saving for retirement may ultimately be less about the golf condo at Hilton Head and more about being able to afford wheelchair lifts, private nurses and a high-quality nursing home,” Professor Skinner said. His best advice for people in their 20s and 30s: maximize workplace matching contributions, seek automatic savings mechanisms like home mortgages and hope “that their generation can still look forward to solvent Social Security and Medicare programs.” • Over the last two years I’ve been dispensing advice in this space about how to spend and save more wisely. This will be my last column for a spell as I am taking on editing duties that give me little time for reporting. But before I go, I want to remind the young graduates, their parents who scrimped and saved to get them there, and anyone else who stuck with me this far that are a few other rules of life worth considering. Among them are the following. Links are available at nytimes.com/business: ¶Never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission. ¶Buy used things, except maybe used tires. ¶Get on the do-not-call list and other do-not-solicit lists so you can’t be tempted. ¶Watch infomercials for their entertainment value only. ¶Know what your credit reports say, but don’t pay for that knowledge: go to www.annualcreditreport.com to get them. ¶Consolidate your cable, phone and Internet service to get the best deal. ¶Resist the lunacy of buying premium products like $2,000-a-pound chocolates. ¶Lose weight. Carrying extra pounds costs tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. ¶Do not use your home as a piggy bank if home prices are flat or going down or if interest rates are rising. ¶Enroll in a 401(k) at work immediately. ¶Postpone buying high-tech products like PCs, digital cameras and high-definition TVs for as long as possible. And then buy after the selling season or buy older technology just as a new technology comes along. ¶And, I’m sorry, I’m really serious about this last one: make your own coffee.
|
|
| Google Keeps Tweaking  Tony Cenicola/The New York Times |
|
| Today’s Papers Classification Problem
By Daniel Politi
Posted Tuesday, June 5, 2007, at 6:24 A.M. E.T. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with military judges dismissing the charges against two Guantanamo detainees. In separate rulings, the judges determined that the detainees could not be tried by the military tribunals because they were not classified as “unlawful alien enemy combatants,” which was a requirement spelled out by the 2006 Military Commissions Act. No one is going to be set free as a result of these rulings, but this latest development is likely to, once again, bring the trials to a halt since all of the Guantanamo detainees have been designated simply as “enemy combatants.” The Washington Post leads with the indictment of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., by a federal grand jury that charged him with a slew of corruption-related offenses. Jefferson is accused of accepting more than $400,000 in bribes and then using his position in Congress to promote the businesses that gave him the money. Jefferson was also accused of trying to bribe a Nigerian official, and thus became the first U.S. lawmaker to be charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. USA Today leads with word that more domestic flights arrived late in the first four months of this year than in any other year since the Department of Transportation began keeping track in 1995. From January through April, only 72 percent of domestic flights by the country’s largest airlines arrived on time. The worst airport was Newark Liberty, and the airline with the least amount of on-time arrivals was US Airways. Pentagon officials said the rulings were based on a technicality and vowed to appeal. But as the LAT notes, the panel that would hear this sort of appeal still hasn’t been created. If the appeal fails, the Pentagon could then start the process of redesignating the detainees so the military tribunals can move forward, but that whole process could take months. As everyone notes, the first attempt at military tribunals was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Opponents of the system said the rulings yesterday showed the military tribunals were put together quickly, and there were calls to lawmakers to review the whole system. For its part, the Pentagon remained undeterred and said the “public should make no assumptions about the future of the military commissions.” Jefferson’s lawyer insists his client is innocent and said that despite the extensive investigation into “every aspect of Mr. Jefferson’s public and private life” there is no evidence in the indictment that the lawmaker “promised anybody any legislation.” If he is convicted on all 16 counts, Jefferson could face up to 235 years in prison, although any sentence is likely to be much shorter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi immediately said the charges “are extremely serious” and if “proven true, they constitute an egregious and unacceptable abuse of public trust and power.” In a move that raised tensions between Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus, Jefferson was removed from his seat on the ways and means committee last year. Now Democratic leaders will consider whether they should remove Jefferson from his last remaining assignment on the small business committee, a move that could further divide Democrats. The Post fronts a new poll that reveals Americans are increasingly frustrated with the Iraq war and are taking out these feelings on Democrats in Congress as well as President Bush. Only 39 percent of Americans said they approve of Congress’ performance, which is a decrease from April when the figure was 44 percent. Bush’s overall approval rating is still 35 percent, and 73 percent of Americans believe the “country is pretty seriously on the wrong track.” Meanwhile, everyone reports that an insurgent group in Iraq released a video that showed what appeared to be the identification cards of the two missing soldiers and said they were dead. Military officials vowed to continue the search. In an interesting piece, the WP‘s Philip Kennicott examines the latest video and says it illustrates how “the advance of professionalism continues, now to the level of tone, drama and pacing.” The LAT fronts, and everyone mentions, the first day of the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who refused to appear in court and fired his lawyer. “I choose not to be a fig leaf of legitimacy for this court,” Taylor wrote in a letter. The judges ordered the trial to continue and began hearing evidence that prosecutors say proves Taylor’s role in supporting rebels in Sierra Leone. Taylor’s letter brought to mind tactics that were used by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during his own war crimes trial. The WP and NYT front news that a federal appeals court determined the Federal Communications Commission can’t penalize broadcasters for what are known as “fleeting expletives,” which are basically unplanned obscenities such as what might be heard during a live event. The court said the FCC hadn’t properly explained why it decided to begin regulating this type of obscenity and even put in doubt whether the agency has the power to regulate language. But figuring out what the case was about could be quite difficult for readers as the papers dance around actually writing the words that were at the heart of the matter. The NYT gets into ridiculous territory with this avoidance when it mentions a part of the decision that cites examples of how President Bush and Vice President Cheney have used the same language that could be fined by the FCC. But the paper doesn’t give much clue as to what these statements actually were, describing how Bush uttered “a common vulgarity” and Cheney “muttered an angry obscene version of ‘get lost’.” The Post doesn’t mention the presidential angle but at least gives readers the best idea of what the case was about when it describes how during an awards show Cher talked back to her critics and said, “[f-word] ‘em.” (Interestingly enough, in 2004, when the WP actually printed the words “fuck yourself” in reporting Cheney’s comments, the paper’s editor defended the decision by saying: “readers need to judge for themselves what the word is because we don’t play games at The Washington Post and use dashes.”) TP is well aware that journalists are constricted by their style guides, but shouldn’t there be some sort of exception when the offensive language is the news? Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
|
|
Comments (2)
I have been visiting various blogs for my dissertation writing research. I have found your blog to be quite useful. Keep updating your blog with valuable information… Regards
this kind of blog always useful for blog readers, it helps people during research. your post is one of the same for blog readers.