Month: February 2008

Where You Going With That Monet? International Art Heist

Keith Meyers/The New York Times

LOOK CLOSELY And then imagine a Rembrandt and a Vermeer in
those empty frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The
canvases are among those stolen in 1990. More Photos >

February 17, 2008

Ideas & Trends

Where You Going With That Monet?

By RANDY KENNEDY

THE plots of art heist movies are about as multifarious as the canvases of
the paintings pilfered by their main characters — the postmodern heroin-cool of
Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief”; the
playboy-billionaire boredom of Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” But
one thing art theft movies tend to have in common is that they dwell on the
heist and not on the aftermath, for reasons that are probably more than
cinematic: art is an exceedingly dumb thing to steal.

The most valuable examples, usually paintings, are also the most highly
recognizable and therefore almost impossible to resell or to display anywhere.
When thieves try they are often caught. And so most real art bandits don’t exude
quite the élan of a Nolte or Brosnan or even of a good, methodical jewel thief.
In fact, they are often found pretty far down the ladder of professional
purloining, acting on impulse or opportunity in a world in which museums are
still relatively unguarded public spaces. And in many cases, to put it bluntly,
art thieves are just not very good.

They are more like a Dutch man named Octave Durham — a k a the Monkey — who
was sentenced to prison in 2004 for stealing two paintings from the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam two years earlier. He and an accomplice had little trouble
breaking into the museum but then left behind a feast for crime scene
investigators — ladders, ropes, cloths, hats — that easily provided the DNA
evidence that led to their arrests.

In the latest heist to shake the art world, three men wearing ski masks
walked into the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich on Feb. 9, grabbed a Cézanne,
a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet together worth an estimated
$163 million, and tossed them into a van and sped off. Though one thief
brandished a gun, there were signs that the job was probably not up to robbery’s
highest standards: the most expensive of the collection’s paintings were left
behind (the four that were stolen were in one room) and the police said the
stolen paintings appeared to be poking out of the back of the white van the men
used to make their getaway.

“No one theory can fit all examples of art theft, but I think it’s often an
I.Q. test for not-so-smart criminals, and a lot of them fail,” said James Mintz,
the principal of a corporate investigations firm with offices in New York,
London, Zurich and other cities that has handled art cases.

Many of the most notorious art thefts in past decades bear him out and
illuminate a strange disconnect between the enduring mystique of art theft and
the reality of its perpetrators. The theft in Vienna in 2003 of a gold-plated
saltcellar made by Benvenuto Cellini, valued at $60 million, was traced to a
50-year-old alarm-systems specialist with no criminal record. The police, who
caught him after he tried to ransom the sculpture, called him a “funny guy” who
had decided to take the Cellini more or less spontaneously. A divorcé who lived
alone, he kept the sculpture under his bed for two years.

Just last year, two men suspected in the theft of two paintings and a drawing
by Picasso from the Paris home of Diana
Widmaier-Picasso, a granddaughter of the artist, were caught on the street
carrying the paintings, estimated to be worth more than $60 million, rolled up
in cardboard tubes.

Law enforcement officials and officials with the Art Loss Register, a private
database of lost and stolen art, emphasize that there are, certainly, highly
effective art thieves at work around the world, in an enterprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates at
about $6 billion a year in stolen goods. The marquee example remains the 1990
robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the biggest art theft
in American history, with a value estimated as high as $300 million. Speculation
has run high for years that the crime, still unsolved and the art unrecovered,
might have been carried out by the organization of James “Whitey” Bulger, the
Boston crime boss, who remains a fugitive.

In rare cases, it even appears that the most movie-like of scenarios — the
made-to-order theft — may happen. A suspect in the December theft of two
paintings in Brazil told the authorities that the works were to be delivered to
a collector in Saudi Arabia. Derek Fincham, a lawyer who runs the Illicit
Cultural Property blog (illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com), calls
this the “Dr. No situation,” after the 1962 James Bond movie in which Sean Connery does a double-take upon seeing a
recently stolen portrait by Goya hanging on a wall in Dr. No’s lair.

But most art theft experts say that the idea of such an evil connoisseurs’
black market is largely a myth, and that many art thefts are committed with
insurance company shakedowns in mind. (In such schemes, art is held ransom while
backdoor demands are made for insurers to pay the thieves something less than
the insurance value of the work; investigators point to cases in which art is
recovered with little public explanation offered later about how the return was
accomplished or who committed the crime.)

The mundane reality is that many art thieves are simply not the sharpest
grappling hooks in the toolbag; the smart ones choose to steal things that can
be much more easily converted into money — or just money itself.

Thomas McShane, a retired F.B.I. agent who led many art investigations in the
1970s and 1980s, said the motivations and methods of many of the thieves he came
across could only be described as humorous. One man tried for years to fence a
Rembrandt stolen in 1971 from a museum in France, dropping his street price from
$5 million to $25,000, Mr. McShane recounted in his 2006 memoir “Stolen
Masterpiece Tracker,” written with Dary Matera. “His only accomplishment,” Mr.
McShane wrote of the criminal, a would-be Mafioso nicknamed Johnny Rio, “was
expanding the ever-widening circle of people who knew he had it.” (He was caught
and served a short prison sentence.)

And while thieves in other lines of goods tend to know what they’re stealing,
many art thieves often seem not to have set foot in a museum or gallery before
trying to knock one off.

Mr. McShane recalled a 1986 case in which a Queens man, Daniel Kohl, the
owner of an Upper East Side antique shop called Old King Kohl’s, was caught with
accomplices in the act of trying to steal more than $20 million in antiquities
from a Queens warehouse. In news accounts at the time, the caper sounded quite
cinematic. But prosecutors later surmised that much of the art they planned to
steal was probably fake.

“Let me tell you,” said Mr. McShane, “Danny had about as much knowledge of
art as your local hot dog stand man. ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ it was
not.”

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How Obama won over key Clinton supporters in Wisconsin, and why it matters.

Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton

White Men Jumped

How Obama won over key Clinton supporters in Wisconsin, and why it
matters.

By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008,
at 10:32 A.M E.T.

Hillary Clinton has been calling Barack Obama a plagiarist. Now she can call him a thief. Obama won the Wisconsin primary by
stealing support from blue-collar workers, previously a key Clinton bloc.

If Clinton was to survive the string of February losses, it was going to be
by holding on to what her chief strategist, Mark Penn, has called her “durable
coalition.” White women, Latinos, and older voters would be unmoved by Obama’s
flash. No group was more crucial to the Penn argument than blue-collar voters.
Clinton aides argued that not only were they bedrock Democratic voters for
Clinton, but they had an aversion to Obama. “How can the Democratic nominee win
without working people?” asked a top Clinton adviser recently.

In Wisconsin, according to exit polls, Obama placed ahead of Clinton among
those who make less than $50,000 a year and those with less than a college
education. He has now won working-class white men in Wisconsin, Missouri, New
Hampshire, California, Maryland, and Virginia. Obama also ate into Clinton’s
usual margin with white women voters. (Even if
exit polls are tweaked in the coming hours and Clinton winds up with a narrow
edge among these groups, Obama will still have won sizable support in areas
where Clinton was supposed to be strongest.) And his double-digit victory came
without the help of a sizable number of black votes, which Clinton allies had
previously cited as a caveat to his victories in other states.

The blue-collar votes are important, because Clinton is banking on them for
her comeback in the primaries of Ohio in early March and Pennsylvania in April.
They also matter because as the two candidates make the pitch to superdelegates,
who will determine the nominee, it becomes harder for Clinton to argue that
Obama will have a tough general election because his reach is somehow limited.
He is not just the boutique fascination of young people and wealthy elites. He
has now won in every key geographical area and across racial and gender lines.

The Wisconsin result also gives us hints that Obama won’t easily be knocked
off track. For the last week, Clinton and her aides have upped their charge that
Obama is nothing more than pretty talk. A week ago, Clinton started running ads
criticizing Obama for not debating. He’d rather give speeches, she said. As
primary day neared, Clinton’s staff pushed the claim that Obama was a
plagiarist. None of it seemed to dent his momentum.

The competition for the next phase of the campaign started as soon as the
results were in. Clinton, speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, launched a string of
attacks against Obama that didn’t seem to stir the audience. It is often the
custom for the winner to wait for the loser to finish speaking, but watching
Clinton’s attacks on television, the Obama camp sent its man out a little early.
The cable channels switched to his speech and dropped Clinton, as Obama’s people
knew they would. “I guess cable just likes winners,” said a top Obama aide,
coyly.

John Dickerson is Slate‘s chief political correspondent
and author of On Her Trail. He can be
reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

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Totally Spent

Oliver Munday

February 13, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

Totally Spent

By ROBERT B. REICH

Berkeley, Calif.

WE’RE sliding into recession, or worse, and Washington is turning to the
normal remedies for economic downturns. But the normal remedies are not likely
to work this time, because this isn’t a normal downturn.

The problem lies deeper. It is the culmination of three decades during which
American consumers have spent beyond their means. That era is now coming to an
end. Consumers have run out of ways to keep the spending binge going.

The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard
of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle-
and lower-income Americans more buying power — and not just temporarily.

Much of the current debate is irrelevant. Even with more tax breaks for
business like accelerated depreciation, companies won’t invest in more factories
or equipment when demand is dropping for products and services across the board,
as it is now. And temporary fixes like a stimulus package that would give
households a one-time cash infusion won’t get consumers back to the malls,
because consumers know the assistance is temporary. The problems most consumers
face are permanent, so they are likely to pocket the extra money instead of
spending it.

Another Fed rate cut might unfreeze credit markets and give consumers access
to somewhat cheaper loans, but there’s no going back to the easy money of a few
years ago. Lenders and borrowers have been badly burned, and the values of
houses and other assets are dropping faster than interest rates can be
lowered.

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly
wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The
income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three
decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the
richest 5 percent.

Yet the rich devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things
than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of
what they want. Instead of buying, and thus stimulating the American economy,
the rich are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they
can get the highest return.

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans
found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of
ways.

The first way was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into
the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened
up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of
American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970
— to more than 70 percent. But there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain
paying jobs.

So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages.
They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or
she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in
350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously
industrious Japanese.

But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so
Americans turned to a third way of spending beyond their wages. They began to
borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster
from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home
mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a
built-in limit. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are
closing.

The binge seems to be over. We’re finally reaping the
whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth.

The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the
wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs
through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything
purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway.

A larger earned-income tax credit, financed by a higher marginal income tax
on top earners, is required. The tax credit functions like a reverse income tax.
Enlarging it would mean giving workers at the bottom a bigger wage supplement,
as well as phasing it out at a higher wage. The current supplement for a worker
with two children who earns up to $16,000 a year is about $5,000. That amount
declines as earnings increase and is eliminated at about $38,000. It should be
increased to, say, $8,000 at the low end and phased out at an income of
$46,000.

We also need stronger unions, especially in the local service sector that’s
sheltered from global competition. Employees should be able to form a union
without the current protracted certification process that gives employers too
much opportunity to intimidate or coerce them. Workers should be able to decide
whether to form a union with a simple majority vote.

And employers who fire workers for trying to organize should have to pay
substantial fines. Right now, the typical penalty is back pay for the worker,
plus interest — a slap on the wrist.

Over the longer term, inequality can be reversed only through better schools
for children in lower- and moderate-income communities. This will require, at
the least, good preschools, fewer students per classroom and better pay for
teachers in such schools, in order to attract the teaching talent these students
need.

These measures are necessary to give Americans enough buying power to keep
the American economy going. They are also needed to overcome widening
inequality, and thereby keep America in one piece.

Robert B. Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of
California, Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of
“Supercapitalism.”

Susan Sontag’s final wish

Left: Photo by Sigrid Estrada; Right: AP Photo/Michael Probst

David Rieff, left; Susan Sontag at a press conference at the Book Fair in
Frankfurt, Germany, on Oct. 11, 2003.

Susan Sontag’s final wish

She wanted
hope, a reason to believe she would survive cancer. In a candid interview, her
son, David Rieff, discusses his mother’s battle to live and his struggle to hide
the truth.

By Steve Paulson

Feb. 13, 2008 | David Rieff has written a sobering and often horrifying
account of his mother’s final days. In 2004, his mother, Susan Sontag, died from a brutal form of blood cancer,
myelodysplastic syndrome. She fought her illness to the end, implicitly asking
those closest to her, including her son, to lie: She didn’t want anyone to tell
her she was dying. It’s a striking contrast. The celebrated writer demanded
honesty of intellectuals — Rieff says she loved reason and science “with a
fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity” — yet maintained a
willful delusion about her death.

In “Swimming in a Sea of Death,” Rieff wrestles with how to be a dutiful son
to his dying mother while being true to himself. It’s a remarkably unsentimental
account. There’s no gushing between mother and son or deathbed reconciliations.
This is not a portrait of Rieff’s relationship with Sontag, though at one point
he refers to their “strained and at times very difficult” relations. It is a
book about dying, grieving and what it means to survive the death of a loved
one.

Beginning in the 1960s, Sontag became a cultural critic with enormous range,
dissecting everything from camp to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, from
photography to how illness is misread as a metaphor for patients’ psychology.
She was a best-selling novelist and a singular presence — the brainy, glamorous
woman who held her own among the testosterone-filled intellectuals of the
period.

Rieff is a distinguished author in his own right. A contributing writer to
the New York Times Magazine, and a past contributor to Salon, he’s reported on
war-ravaged countries and carved out his own reputation as an acute analyst of
foreign policy. Rieff refers to writing as “the family olive oil business.” His
father, the sociologist Philip Rieff, wrote his own masterpiece, “The Triumph of
the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud.” Sontag married Rieff when she was
17 and left him seven years later. In her later years, she had a relationship
with Annie Leibovitz, whom Rieff avoids discussing in his memoir, except for one
loaded comment about the photographer’s “carnival images of celebrity death.”

“I am not a confessional person,” Rieff insisted. He could be terse when
fielding questions about his relationship with his mother, and he became angry
at the notion she suffered a “bad death.” Still, throughout our interview, he
displayed his own brand of remarkable candor.

When did you first hear your mother had this form of blood
cancer?

It was in the spring of 2004. I was coming back from about a month in Israel/Palestine, where I was trying to do
a story on Yasser Arafat. I have a habit — a
superstition, really — of not calling people I’m close to while I’m on an
assignment that could be dangerous. But I usually check in once I get out. I had
to change planes at Heathrow Airport in London, so I called my mother. She said
she might be ill again, might have some kind of blood cancer. She was trying to
be cheerful. I was trying to be cheerful. Then I flew back. The next morning, I
picked her up and accompanied her to the doctor who gave her the test results.
The physician was not a very empathetic guy. I’m sure he’s a good doctor, but
his human skills were not exactly brilliant. And he told her the bad news. She
had this lethal blood cancer and, basically, there was no treatment.

It was a death sentence.

It was. The standard time between diagnosis and death is nine months, and
there are no drugs that work more than a few months to keep your blood counts
where they’re supposed to be. It turned out that if she wanted to try something
rather than palliative care during the last months of her life, there was one
possibility. It’s a long shot: an adult stem-cell transplant, a bone-marrow
transplant. She found a physician at the great cancer center in New York, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a brilliant man who had all the
human skills the first doctor did not. He said, “If you want to fight, if what
matters to you is not quality of lifeâ€¦” And my mother said, “I’m not
interested in quality of life.” He said, “Well, the best place to have this
transplant would be at the Fred Hutchinson Center at the University of
Washington Hospital in Seattle.”

So she was going to do everything she could to survive.

She wanted to live at any price. When she said, “I’m not interested in
quality of life,” she meant it. She was somebody for whom extinction — death —
was unbearable. So she was going to fight for every breath, no matter how much
suffering that entailed.

Twice before, your mother had cancer and survived. One time, weren’t
the odds incredibly stacked against her?

They were. This was in the mid-’70s, a time when American physicians tended
to lie to their patients and tell family members something closer to the truth.
I was told by her doctors that she would die quite soon. She had Stage 4 breast
cancer that had spread into her lymph system. She had a basis for thinking it
wasn’t hopeless when a doctor said it was.

Yet this time it did seem hopeless.

The chances were indeed stacked against her. But she didn’t want to hear it.
So what do you do, as the person who’s close to someone who wants to live at any
price, when you think this fight isn’t worth it? Do you lie? Do you insist on
telling the truth when it’s perfectly clear the person doesn’t want to know the
truth? Which was certainly true of my mother.

Even though she did say, “Don’t lie to me.”

She wanted to be lied to. I mean, she didn’t want to be lied to, but she
wanted to live. She hoped that I and other people in her life would give her
reason to hope. I felt that I had to do that, whatever my own opinion was.
Before the transplant, I thought the odds were bad. Coming back to my mother’s
previous experience with breast cancer, I thought, “Well, don’t leap to
conclusions here. They wrote her off in the ’70s. Yeah, it’s an even more lethal
cancer, and yeah, she’s even 30 years older, but maybe she’ll beat the odds.”
But when the bone marrow transplant started to go wrong soon after it took
place, I didn’t think she would make it. Yet every signal she was giving me was,
“Give me hope. Help me believe I might make it.” In the end, I chose to do that.
The most important thing I thought was: It’s her death, not mine.

Can you tell me about your mother’s last days?

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong after the transplant. She
suffered like someone being tortured. I found a way to be present but not look
at the way she had become physically. She flew back to New York when it was
clear the leukemia had become full-blown and the transplant had failed, and
spent the last six or seven weeks of her life in Memorial Sloan-Kettering. In
the end she couldn’t even roll over unassisted.

Once she died, I asked the other people in the room to leave. And I really
looked. To be blunt, I took off her shirt. And she was just a sore. Her body was
just a sore from the inside of her mouth to her toes. So the suffering was
extraordinary. But the actual death was comparatively easy in the sense that she
didn’t seem to be in pain. In the last days, she kind of withdrew. And when she
spoke, she spoke about the distant past — about her parents, about people she
was involved with 30 years before. She wasn’t focused on the present or any of
us. Then she lapsed into a kind of somnolence. And then she died. It wasn’t
terrible.

Did not telling her the truth about her condition take a toll on
you?

It exacted a tremendous price. I never got to say goodbye. I don’t want to
romanticize the end of life, but we never had the kinds of conversations I
would’ve liked to have had with her. Conversations about the past. I would’ve
liked to have said certain things to her. We had a complicated relationship.
There were very good times and very bad times between us. I would have liked to
have gone beyond those before she left us. But that’s impossible if you decide
not to acknowledge the fact of dying. So that’s the price I paid. But she made
it very clear what she wanted. I didn’t feel that my interests could be put
ahead of that.

You write that it wasn’t just that she desperately wanted to live,
she was also terrified of dying. Wasn’t there a kind of existential
dread?

There was. In my experience, lots of people are terrified of dying. I’ve also
met lots of people who aren’t. But she was one to whom it was just terrible
news. So I don’t think she was at all unique. Of course, some people of faith
find it easier. But my mother wasn’t a person of faith.

Your mother was an atheist. She refused to accept any consolation
from the hope of an afterlife. How much did that contribute to her
dread?

Well, I’m an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. I think
it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith
purely in the interest of consoling herself. Surely, that would have been the
most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. You
shouldn’t start to believe because it suits you.

But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion,
does the prospect of dying lead to dread?

Well, it sure doesn’t help. I don’t know. There are certainly religious
traditions that don’t believe in an afterlife. So I don’t think we can just take
the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife
are what religious faith is. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism,
neither has an afterlife in that sense. So I’m not sure it’s faith vs. atheism.

These days, there’s a lot of talk about what’s called “a good death.”
Usually this means someone who accepts dying and stops fighting it. There’s a
certain grace that can follow. Not only is there a sense of inner peace, but the
dying person often has meaningful and profound conversations with friends and
family. To use a word you scorn in your book, there is some “closure.” By
contrast, it would seem that your mother had anything but a good death. Do you
see it that way?

No, I think that’s something people say to console themselves. I don’t
believe a word of what you just said. I don’t know whether you believe it or
not. But I know this argument very well. First of all, I think that argument
does a real disservice to human variety. People are very different in their
lives and very different in their deaths. The idea that one good death fits all
seems incredibly reductive to what human beings are all about. It’s like saying
all human beings should be cheerful. I don’t know that being cheerful is better
than being a melancholy person. People have different temperaments. When you say
“grace,” it lets family members off the hook. They don’t have to feel so bad
that the person is going. So I don’t buy it.

I have the impression that this is the way your mother had to die.
Given who she was, there was no other way.

What I’m saying is that the right way for one person to die may not be the
right way for another person to die. And she was somebody who desperately didn’t
want to die. So why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully?
That doesn’t seem right to me.

She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where many famous
writers are buried. You say your mother had a horror of cremation. Do you know
why that was?

Sure. Cremation seemed to confirm extinction. If you have a grave and your
bones are there, it’s somehow less confirming of extinction. I understand that
viscerally. She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she
was. But all the decisions about her burial are decisions that I made, trying to
think through what I thought she wanted. She gave me no instructions of any
kind.

You have just a brief reference to Annie Leibovitz, your mother’s
off-and-on companion for 20 years. You call her book of photos — which
included pictures of your mother as she was dying and after her death —
“carnival images of celebrity death.” There seems to be a good deal of
bitterness packed into that short sentence.

There is, but it’s contained in that sentence. And that’s all I propose to
say about Annie Leibovitz.

You have been a writer for many years, but to my knowledge, it’s only
been quite recently that you’ve written this directly about your mother. Not
only did you write this memoir, you’re also editing her diaries and helping put
out some of her unpublished essays. Why have you taken this active role in your
mother’s work?

That’s a good question. One answer is because I’ll probably do a better and
more responsible job than someone who didn’t know her. If I’m going to edit
stuff about her life in the ’50s, I’m the only one alive who would know about it
directly. Another answer is that if I had her journals in my possession after
she died, and they were simply mine to dispose of as I wished, I don’t think I
would have published them. I don’t know if I would have destroyed them or simply
left them for other people to deal with after I’m dead. But I’m fairly certain I
would not have published them.

But in her lifetime, long before she was diagnosed with MDS, my mother
decided they were going to be public. She sold her papers, including her
diaries, to UCLA. So they were going to appear at some point anyway. And she
didn’t embargo them. So I felt either they would leak out in one way or another
or I could try to edit them to make them coherent. What I’ve left out, people
will be able to go to UCLA and read. It’s not as if I burned anything.

Near the end of the book, you say, “I have preferred to write as
little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her
life, but suffice it so say that they were often strained and at times very
difficult.” Can you explain why they were difficult?

No, I think that explains it. What I will say, though, is that when I wrote
this book, I thought a lot about what I’d say and what I wouldn’t say. And I
decided, finally, that I would tell the truth about anything that I could tell
the complete truth about. That doesn’t mean someone else who was there would
agree with my account.

But I also decided that I was going to leave out certain things. And that may
be because I didn’t want to have a fight with somebody, because I didn’t want to
offend somebody, because I thought I’d hurt somebody’s feelings, or because I
just preferred that something not be known. I’m just not prepared to talk in any
seriously honest and self-revealing way about my relationship with my mother.

So I felt what I needed to do was not give the false impression that somehow
our relations had been very good, but instead to say they were very complicated.
And over that decade, they had very high highs and very low lows. It was
important to have that on the record. But I wasn’t going to say anything more.
I’m not a confessional writer. I’m not a confessional person. This is all very
new territory to me.

It seems that something has changed for you, and you wanted to engage
with your mother more directly in print.

I wanted to engage with her death in print. But I shall not write a
biography. I will write prefaces to these journals, which will contain
biographical material, and a future biographer may find them somewhat useful.
But I didn’t want to write a book about my relationship with my mother, about
her relations with other people, or a literary account of her work.

Do you think you will ever write about your relationship with your
her?

God, I hope not.

Why not?

Because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business. It’s just prurient as far as
I’m concerned.

But you know there will be future biographies of Susan Sontag. You
could set the record straight.

Oh, you never set the record straight. People write what they want to write.
When Max Brod wrote the famous first biography of Kafka, every future biographer
has tried to point out what Max Brod left out. Anyway, I don’t want to write a
biography of my mother. I don’t want to write a memoir of our relationship. But
on the other hand, I’m a realist. I can’t stop people from writing biographies
after her death, any more than she could stop any number of biographies, one of
them extremely disobliging, from appearing during her lifetime. It’s just the
way of the world.

Your book is remarkably self-effacing. At one point you say, “That my
mother both enjoyed and made better use of the world than I have done or will do
is simply a statement of fact.” You also write that you wish you’d complied more
with her wishes during her life and suppressed more of your own. Aren’t you
being awfully hard on yourself?

No, I don’t think so. I think the latter comment is in the context of talking
about guilt that I think all survivors feel. A lot of what I describe in this
book has nothing to do with the particular personality of David Rieff, or the
particular personality, let alone celebrity, of Susan Sontag. From my experience
in hospital wards, talking to family members of dying people, I think that a lot
of what I describe is the common experience of people. I hope the book is
helpful in that way.

So it’s wrong for me to read into this that you wish you had put some
of your own needs aside and accommodated your mother more?

I do wish that. But I know it’s preposterous. I think it’s the commonplace
guilt of survivors. The wonderful doctor and writer Jerome Groopman likes to
quotes Kierkegaard that life can only be understood retrospectively but has to
be lived prospectively. That seems just right. The other part — that she made
better use of the world — I don’t think that’s self-effacing. That’s a fact. If
there’s one thing I’m vain about, it’s that I’m willing to stare facts in the
face. And my mother enjoyed the world more than I do. She did more things in the
world than I do. She took more pleasure in the world than I do. Those are all
facts. I don’t think that’s a particularly strange or masochistic thing to say.

As you look back over your mother’s career, how do you think she’ll
be remembered? How should she be remembered?

I hope she’ll be remembered as a person who did good work, was serious, and
didn’t give in to the kind of cheap easy way outs that intellectuals in our
culture so often give in to. As far as the relevance or importance of her work
in the context of the long history of literature and criticism, I think history
will sort that out. That’s above my pay grade to say.

I interviewed your mother a couple of times late in her life. I was
stunned by how dismissive she was of those dazzling essays that she wrote in the
’60s and that made her famous. When I asked her about one of her early critiques
of the novel, in which she wrote, “I could not stand the omnipotent author
showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful,” she called
that comment “juvenilia,” and said, “It’s really hard to be nailed to what one
wrote 35 or 40 years ago.” And she went on to say that she no longer liked to
write essays, saying, “I can do so much more as a novelist.” Why do you think
she was so dismissive of her essays?

It’s funny. I think she’s right. And the idea that one is going to think the
same thing at 68, or whenever you did the interview, as one did at 31 would
suggest lack of growth.

Do you think her great achievement was the fiction she wrote in her
last years?

I think [her 1992 novel] “The Volcano Lover” is the best thing she ever did.

But she is most famous for those essays she wrote in the ’60s and
’70s. She was a cultural critic of renown who had fascinating things to say
about art and the avant-garde, not to mention various writers. You’re saying
that’s not how she should be remembered in the future?

It’s not for me to say how she should be remembered. I’m not Solon the law
giver. I don’t think, however, that the fact that she became famous has very
much to do with the quality of her work. It’s indisputable, as you say, that
that’s what brought her to national and then international attention. But that
doesn’t mean that was what was most valuable about her work. But I don’t think
she would have repudiated a lot of the essays she wrote. It’s just that she
changed her mind about the novel. She was much more interested in experimental
art when she was young than she became later in life. She didn’t want to be an
essay writer, but she continued to write essays, although they came harder and
harder throughout her career.

Your mother was an iconic figure in intellectual circles, not just
because of what she wrote but how she looked and acted. Women in particular
talked about her enormous cultural significance. She became the model of an
intellectual woman who had both great flair and moral profundity. Why do you
think she gained that stature?

Why people capture imaginations is a mysterious process. I agree with you
entirely that she captured the imagination of a certain time and became famous,
and then I think did really good work and backed it up. But why she became so
celebrated, what the combination of elements were — her public role in the
anti-Vietnam movement and other political events; her looks — I’m sure it was a
complicated combination.

I’m sure you were aware of that mystique as you were growing up, the
fact that your mother cut such a distinctive figure. Did you feel privileged?
Intimidated?

No, not intimidated. It was a complicated experience. I felt lots of things,
not all of them resting easily together. I had very complicated feelings, as one
does about one’s parents. I mean, this book may be of interest because people
have heard of my mother. If that’s what it is, there’s nothing I can do about
it. I hope it has some relevance to people who’ve never heard of Susan Sontag,
let alone of me. But I can’t control how people read a book. In fact, I think
once you write a book, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

I came across a photo of you and your mother that ran many years ago
in Vogue magazine. You were probably 12 or 13 at the time. Her arm is draped
over your shoulder. You’re wearing a John Lennon cap.

Yeah, it’s an Irving Penn picture.

Was it a heady experience to get that kind of attention for a boy at
your age?

You mean the Macaulay Culkin syndrome? [Pause] I took it for granted in the
world that I grew up in. I didn’t think it was particularly odd. I knew children
of well-known people in my school and other places. “Heady?” I wouldn’t have
said.

Do you think you became a writer because of your mother’s
example?

No, I think I became a writer in spite of her. I don’t mean in the sense that
she opposed it. On the contrary, she was very pleased that I was a writer and
encouraged me in every way. I was one of those kids who was always writing
stories and thoughts and all that. Fortunately, I don’t keep my journals. So
after I’m gone, nobody is going to be able to publish them. Also, I wasn’t a
prodigy. My mother was a prodigy as a child.

When I say “in spite of,” what I mean is that when I saw that I still wanted
to write in my early 20s, I thought very consciously, “Oh, if I become a writer,
I will spend the first 10 years of my career having anyone who reviews a book of
mine say, ‘David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s son.’” And I didn’t want to go through
that. And I was too unwilling to pay that price, so it took me a long time to
become a writer and pay that price, which I did. For the first 10 years of my
career, that’s indeed what happened. Eventually, I did enough work so people got
bored connecting me to my mother.

Do you think it’s not an accident that the area you carved out for
yourself as a writer — going to war-torn countries and covering foreign affairs
– was very different from what your mother wrote about?

It wasn’t conscious but it certainly makes sense. I never thought about it.
But I’m sure it’s true. It’s too obvious not to be true.

I’ve heard that your mother had a wonderful and vast collection of
books in her apartment. What happened to those books?

They were sold to UCLA.

So not just her papers, but the books, too?

Yes, the library as well. It’s all at UCLA.

You didn’t want the books yourself?

They weren’t mine to keep. She’d sold them. I have a library anyway. I come
from a line of people who have private libraries. It’s a weird thing in this age
of the Internet. My mother had a big library. My father had a big library. I
have a big library. They’re stand-alone projects.

– By Steve Paulso

I Love You, but You Love Meat

Steve Legato for The New York Times

ACCOMMODATIONS Dynise Balcavage is a vegan; her husband,
John Gatti, is an omnivore

Steve Legato for The New York Times

When they prepare orecchiette with broccoli, he adds anchovies to his
serving.

February 13, 2008

I Love You, but You Love Meat

By KATE MURPHY

SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or
religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was
wheat.

“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread
too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat
gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor
for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat
and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic
relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions
consider interdietary dating taboo.

No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony
Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the
enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”

Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who
eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived
products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has
even sipped honey-sweetened tea.

Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred
to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.

Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said
she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He
had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she
found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.

Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the
beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same
page.”

While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious
of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.

June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time
loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild
game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful
soy stuff,” she said.

Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com
and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those
who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.

Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around
as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no
way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”

Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y.,
lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the
occasional baked potato.

“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she
said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I
want to be able to share.”

A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her,
is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier.
“A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I
love to cook for him,” she said.

Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a
psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science
University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like
rejection,” she said.

As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are
essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your
partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t
about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.

Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency
and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her
omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.

“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She
prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And
she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.

“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices
just as he respects mine.”

In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat
consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more
Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.

In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still
wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is
kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where
he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to
kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms.
Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.

Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26,
a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules.
“We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both
making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”

Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown
into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of
marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years
ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.

“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of
talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University,
in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school
curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to
eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”

Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that
would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their
teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic,
household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms.
Benson said.

So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her
daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr.
Benson goes out of town, she said.

“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same
thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr.
Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They
advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a
side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.

For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an
enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man
who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006,
she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.

“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new
ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at
Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him
after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They
married in September.

Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats
it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie
gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.

MAUREEN DOWD,Today’s Papers,Juke Box,Good Health,Punctuation,

Put Another File in the Jukebox, Baby

The New York Times

February 21, 2008

Basics

Put Another File in the Jukebox, Baby

By JASON TURBOW

IT’S only a mild case of audiophilia, according to the professionals, but
it’s causing me significant discomfort.

Until recently I had considered my appreciation of good-sounding music more
boon than bane, but the moment my wife and I decided to move, I acquired a harsh
new perspective.

I possess a fairly nice stereo (not a problem) and some 2,500 CDs (a
significant problem, according to my wife), but the biggest problem is the
custom-built cabinet I commissioned to house my music. It sits on an astounding
20 percent of the usable space in our living room.

I’m unwilling to subject our new house to that sort of treatment.

I have resisted converting my CDs to the MP3 digital format for two reasons.
The thought of feeding discs into my computer, one by excruciating one (I
believe this was the ninth labor of Hercules), not to mention organizing it once
it is digitized, is painful just to contemplate. More important, I’m entirely
unwilling to sacrifice sound quality in return for less clutter.

Recently, however, trends have been working in my favor. Data storage prices
are in perpetual free fall — at 50 cents a gigabyte, even giant hard drives are
within most budgets — and the FLAC (free lossless audio codec) audio format has
gained widespread embrace by mainstream media hardware manufacturers. Like MP3,
FLAC is a compression standard for music files, but unlike MP3, it is lossless,
meaning it doesn’t degrade sound quality. With it, I could fit 3,000 CDs in a
terabyte of storage.

These are details about which my wife does not care. What she is passionate
about is floor space. I set about seeing how to help us both.

First stop was Logitech in Mountain View, Calif.

Logitech recently bought Slim Devices, which makes the Squeezebox, a handy
little $299 unit about half the size of my desktop keyboard. It relays music
from computer to stereo system and then, if the user so wishes, around the rest
of the house.

It’s a viable solution, but it still puts me back at my computer, ripping my
CDs while I grind my teeth down to the nerve. Even if I outsource the job, with
ripping services like Ready to Play (www.readytoplay.com) and Riptopia (www.riptopia.com) that charge about $1.60 or so
for each disc, that’s an extra $2,500.

Logitech makes three products — the Squeezebox, the $399 Squeezebox Duet and
the $1,999 Transporter — which do more or less the same thing at varying levels
of quality.

The first two items are extremely compact. The Duet receiver is just
two-thirds the size of the Squeezebox. The Transporter offers a higher quality
of sound from a typical size stereo component. All three connect wirelessly to
the server — in most cases, a computer — and must be run through an amplifier or
powered speakers.

A similar wireless audio-streaming device is the Zone Player 100 ($499) from
Sonos, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. Unlike the Logitech devices, it has an
integrated amplifier, so all one needs is an audio source and a pair of
speakers.

For those who prefer to power their music through an existing stereo system,
the Zone Player 80 ($349) is an amp-free alternative. Each unit is commanded
through a feature-laden remote control ($399), complete with scroll wheel and
full-color screen.

While Sonos does a capable job of retrieving one’s own stored music, the
company is banking on users obtaining music online, both from services like
Rhapsody and Napster — which are essentially fee-based online
jukeboxes — and Internet radio.

But I did not build a CD collection just to ignore it. More exploration was
in order. Second stop was the high-end test drive.

There is little argument that McIntosh makes among the best — and most
expensive — audio components. So when the company came out with the MS750 last
year, my ears perked up. Knowing much of the $6,000 price tag was going toward a
level of sound quality that may well be lost on my good-but-not-great stereo
system, I proceeded with caution.

From an ease-of-use standpoint, the McIntosh was exactly what I was looking
for. A simple interface allows for automatic CD ripping (into FLAC or a variety
of other formats) in about four minutes.

“I have people write in all the time and say, ‘You know, I could do the same
thing with a $400 computer and this program or that program,’ ” said Ron
Cornelius, a McIntosh project manager. “And they’re absolutely right — they can.
But try to use it every day. If you’re not a computer geek, forget it. It’s just
not a friendly portal.”

The MS750 is named for its 750-gig hard drive, big by most measures but still
only enough to handle about two-thirds of my music in FLAC format. And this is
where my dreams of a McIntosh began to evaporate. I could buy another MS750, the
pair connecting wirelessly as if they were a single machine.

Clearing a $6,000 piece of machinery with my wife will be tough enough;
doubling that price tag would be akin to asking for a divorce. The fact that the
MS750 needs a video screen to use its navigation fully — it can be run through a
TV or a laptop, but I would more realistically have to buy a devoted L.C.D.
screen — adds to the cost.

Third stop was Olive Media Products, San Francisco.

At first blush, Olive’s product line is not dissimilar from the McIntosh —
internal hard drives, easy ripping of CDs and high-end circuitry. Like the
others, Olive’s highest-capacity machine, the Opus N°5, comes with a 750-gig
drive. Unlike the others, however, it has a U.S.B. 2.0 port with which to attach
an external hard drive, letting users more than double its capacity for less
than $200. Why doesn’t every system have this?

Additionally, the front-panel display is fully navigable, without need for an
additional screen. The Opus connects to the Internet, allowing not only for
online radio, but giving users remote control once its included software is
installed on a touch-screen P.D.A.

The main downside is that Olive does not offer a device to deliver music into
additional rooms, though industry whispers hint that could change within the
year. Perhaps the biggest bonus is that Olive will rip my CDs for me. The first
300 are included in the price of the machine, and the rest can be done for as
little as 50 cents each. I can send my CDs to Olive and the machine I order will
be delivered with my music already on it.

If there’s anything closer to my pipe dream, I can’t imagine what it is. With
the Opus N°5 priced at $3,999, even if I choose to outsource my ripping I can
still be home free at just over $5,000.

Seems like a small price to pay for a happy marriage and a bigger living
room.

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

Cary Conover for The New York Times

Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him
plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon

February 18, 2008

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

By SAM ROBERTS

Correction Appended

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting
subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the
train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches,
an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information
department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good
news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in
exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and
journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely
jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books
advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but
require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a
comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a
semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do.
Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at
Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the
yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers
accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York
City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the
55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before
graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later
received a master’s degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use
them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was
inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who
taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the
columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever
encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr.
Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise
punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San
Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay
marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon
instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker,
pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California,
Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring,
opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think
would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s
the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages
and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still
live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and
other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in
some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the
semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the
title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of
proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not
“Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

Today’s Papers

The Big Steal

By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 20,
2008, at 6:32 A.M. E.T.

The Washington Post and USA Today lead with Sen.
Barack Obama’s decisive victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary. With almost
all the precincts reporting, Obama managed to get 58 percent of the vote to
Clinton’s 41 percent to mark his ninth-straight victory since Super Tuesday. On the
Republican side, Sen. John McCain continued racking up victories over Mike
Huckabee in Wisconsin and Washington. During his victory speech, McCain acted as
if the Democratic nominee had already been decided and pointedly criticized
Obama for offering “an eloquent but empty call for change.” As was widely
expected, Obama also won the Hawaii caucuses by a landslide, according to
early-morning wire reports.

The Los Angeles Times and the
Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox lead with, and everybody
fronts, Fidel Castro’s announcement that he will step down as Cuba’s head of
state after holding on to power for almost 50 years. “The resignation
closes a singular chapter in modern political history,” says the Post. Leaders
in Washington emphasized there aren’t likely to be any modifications in U.S.
policy toward Cuba, and most believe there won’t be any big changes in the
island while Castro is still alive. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the winners of
Monday’s election made it clear there are lots of changes in store, says the
New York Times in its lead
story. The leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party said his party would seek to
hold talks with militants in the country’s tribal areas and move away from a
reliance on the military that is widely seen as following orders from the United
States. He also said the new parliament would quickly restore independence to
the judiciary and get rid of restrictions on the media.

The most revealing aspect of the Wisconsin vote was how Obama continued to
take away voters from Clinton’s base, which could spell trouble for her in the
Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. The candidates pretty much split the votes
from women, while Obama had a significant advantage among men. Also, Obama defeated her
by a wide margin among voters with incomes of less than $50,000 as well as those
without college degrees, two groups that had been essential to Clinton’s past
victories. Slate‘s John
Dickerson says that by winning “in every key geographical area and
across racial and gender lines” Obama has proved that
“he is not just the boutique fascination of young people and wealthy elites.”

The NYT says Clinton will now need to pull off
“double-digit victories to pick up enough delegates to close the gap.” If
Wisconsin is any guide, “the next two weeks could be the most negative of the
Democratic race,” says the Post. After
losing yesterday’s primary, Clinton didn’t mince words and launched what the LAT calls “her most
lancing election night critique of Obama yet.” But the line of attack was hardly
new, as she once again chose to call attention to Obama’s inexperience, which,
as the NYT points out, is an argument she has made many times before,
but it doesn’t appear to be resonating with voters.

The Post says McCain’s victory “signaled a
coalescing of a Republican electorate that has struggled for a year to find a
candidate it likes.” It was one of his best nights, but, as the NYT
emphasizes, exit polls showed that many still have doubts about whether
McCain is conservative enough. Huckabee continued to carry the vote of those who
described themselves as very conservative, even as the majority also said they’d
be satisfied with McCain. Slate‘s Chadwick Matlin suggests Huckabee
may actually be helping Republicans get some free publicity, because if he were
to drop out, “McCain’s victories would be completely empty—and completely
unnewsworthy.”

It is widely expected that Fidel Castro’s 76-year-old brother, Raul, will be
Cuba’s next president. But some are suggesting there might be a surprise when
Cuba’s National Assembly meets on Sunday, particularly since Castro didn’t
specifically mention his brother in his resignation letter. The LAT
also notes that Castro has recently suggested he might want to hand power
to someone younger. If someone other
than Raul were to be selected, speculation centers around Vice President Carlos
Lage, whom the WSJ describes as the country’s “economic czar.” Other
possibilities include the foreign minister and the president of the National
Assembly (the LAT has brief profiles of the four possible successors).
Regardless, the NYT emphasizes that any decision on a successor “remains in
the hands of the Castro brothers and their inner circle.” And certainly Castro
himself will still play a significant role in the government as a leader in
Cuba’s Communist Party, a member of parliament, and overall behind-the-scenes
adviser. This is why there appeared to be few signs yesterday that Cubans
expected much to change in the near future. “This isn’t news,” a Cuban dissident said. “It was
expected and it does nothing to change the human rights situation. … There’s no
reason to celebrate.”

At least some sort of change might be inevitable, though. In a profile of
Raul Castro, the WP notes that if he becomes president, he “is almost
certain to preside over a government based more on a collective style of
leadership, and less on personality.” The NYT points out that he has “a
reputation as a manager who demands results from his cabinet members.” In recent
months Raul has been encouraging more debates about policy and has hinted that
changes are on the way, even if no one really expects them to come quickly. In a
separate Page One story, the LAT says that the changes “may at best resemble
Chinese economic reforms, except on a tiny, Cuban scale.”

The resignation is also likely to intensify debate within the United States
about whether the long-running economic embargo should continue. But any big
changes would probably have to wait until President Bush leaves the White House,
and even then, the three presidential candidates “offered little sign that they
will break with the pillars of existing policy,” says the Post inside. “We
always knew the embargo would topple the 49-year-old regime of the 81-year-old
Fidel Castro someday,” jokes the Post‘s Al Kamen. “Patience is finally
being rewarded.”

The Pakistan Peoples Party, which was led by Benazir Bhutto, seems to have
won the most seats from Monday’s elections. But the “emerging political
landscape was far from clear” yesterday, notes the Post. Neither of
the two main opposition parties received a majority, and there doesn’t appear to
be an obvious candidate for prime minister from either one. The WSJ
interviewed President Pervez Musharraf, who insisted he has no plans to step down from power
even as some, including former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, called for his
impeachment. Whether Musharraf survives will largely depend on what the ruling
coalition will look like, but it’s clear that his power has been greatly
diminished.

Back to the U.S. presidential campaign for a moment: Barack Obama writes an
op-ed piece for USAT where he answers criticism that he has gone back
on his pledge to use public funding in the general election if his Republican
opponent also agreed to shun private money. Obama insists he
will “aggressively pursue such an agreement” if he’s the nominee but emphasizes
that it cannot “be reached overnight.” Obama writes that an agreement would have
to commit the candidates to “discouraging cheating by their supporters” as well
as refusing help from outside groups so that it “results in real spending
limits.” He also suggests that it might have to include what McCain will spend
while the Democratic primaries continue. In a related story, the NYT
notes the Obama campaign will report today that it collected $36
million in January, which is $4 million more than previous estimates.

After missing out on some of the most exciting weeks of the political primary
season, Saturday Night Live is back this weekend. One of the biggest
concerns of SNL‘s producers right now is that the show “is bereft of a
Barack Obama mimic,” notes USAT. Auditions are
ongoing, and someone will probably be picked this week. “Finding a way to get
people to laugh at him is complicated right now,” the executive producer said.
“People aren’t seeing the cracks yet, but it will happen.”

Daniel Politi
writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

Tags:

Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well

Mike Mergen for The New York Times

FRISBEE, ANYONE? Exercise is linked to living longer.

February 19, 2008

Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Living past 90, and living well, may be more than a matter of good genes and
good luck. Five behaviors in elderly men are associated not only with living
into extreme old age, a new study has found, but also with good health and
independent functioning.

The behaviors are abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes. The study reports that all are significantly
correlated with healthy survival after 90.

While it is hardly astonishing that choices like not smoking are associated
with longer life, it is significant that these behaviors in the early elderly
years — all of them modifiable — so strongly predict survival into extreme old
age.

“The take-home message,” said Dr. Laurel B. Yates, a geriatric specialist at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was the lead
author of the study, “is that an individual does have some control over his
destiny in terms of what he can do to improve the probability that not only
might he live a long time, but also have good health and good function in those
older years.”

The study followed more than 2,300 healthy men for as long as a
quarter-century. When it began, in 1981, the subjects’ average age was 72. The
men responded to yearly questionnaires about changes in health and lifestyle,
and researchers tested their mental and physical functioning. At the end of the
study, which was published Feb. 11 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, 970 men
had survived into their 90s.

There was no less chronic illness among survivors than among those who died
before 90. But after controlling for other variables, smokers had double the
risk of death before 90 compared with nonsmokers, those with diabetes increased
their risk of death by 86 percent, obese men by 44 percent, and those with high blood pressure by 28 percent. Compared with men
who never exercised, those who did reduced their risk of death by 20 percent to
30 percent, depending on how often and how vigorously they worked out.

Even though each of these five behaviors was independently significant after
controlling for age and other variables, studies have shown that many other
factors may affect longevity, including level of education and degree of social
isolation. They were not measured in this study.

Although some previous studies have found that high cholesterol is associated with earlier death, and
moderate alcohol consumption with longer survival, this study confirmed neither
of those findings.

A second study in the same issue of the journal suggests that some of the
oldest of the old survive not because they avoid illness, but because they live
well despite disease.

The study of 523 women and 216 men ranging in age from 97 to 119 showed that
a large proportion of people who lived that long and lived with minimal or no
assistance did so despite long-term chronic illness. In other words, instead of
delaying disease, they delay disability.

Dr. Dellara F. Terry, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine
at Boston University, said the study showed that old age
and chronic illness were no reason to stop providing thorough treatment. “We
should look at the individual in making treatment decisions,” Dr. Terry said,
“and not base our decisions solely on chronological age.”

To Catch a Thief MAUREEN DOWD on Election 2008

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

February 20, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

To Catch a Thief

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Lenny and Squiggy were nowhere in sight.

But Hillary was doing her best to come across as a “Laverne & Shirley”
factory girl as she headed away from not-a-chance Wisconsin and on to gotta-have
Ohio.

She was drinking red wine and talking up the virtues of imported Blue Moon
beer with a slice of citrus on her plane and putting up an ad in Ohio about how
she works the night shift, too, just like the waitresses, hairdressers, hospital
workers and other blue-collar constituents that she’s hoping to attract.

And she doesn’t mean that being married to Bill Clinton is what keeps her up
all hours. She’s talking about burning the midnight oil in her Senate office.

At any minute, she might break out into the “schlemiel, schlemazel” “Laverne
& Shirley” theme:

“Give us any chance, we’ll take it.
Give us any rule, we’ll break
it.
We’re gonna make our dreams come true.
Doin’ it our way.”

Doin’ it her way, Hillary huffed to reporters on her plane: “If your whole
candidacy is about words, they should be your own words.”

I guess that means if your whole candidacy is anti-words, you don’t have to
use your own words.

The Clintons are known political cat burglars. They pilfered Republican
jewels in the ’90s, and Hillary has purloined as much as she can stuff in her
pantsuit from her husband and Barack Obama.

She changed to Change. She co-opted “It’s time to turn the page” and “Fired
up and ready to go.” She couldn’t wait to shoplift the words “yes” and “can”
from Obama’s trademark “Yes, we can!” — (which he appropriated from Cesar
Chavez) — even though she was cagey enough to put them in separate slogans,
“Yes, we will!” and “Americans still have that can-do spirit.”

Bill, master thief, got in on the act, too. After Obama said that his
election would tell the world that America is back, Bill said that Hillary’s
election would tell the world that America is back.

Although the only solid voting bloc in Wisconsin Hillary seemed to get was
women over 60 years old, she did seem happy that the press had “finally,” as she
put it, scrutinized him. America’s pretty boy was getting muddied up.

The Clinton camp has spent days trying to undermine Obama’s chief asset, the
elegant language that has sparked a generational boom.

“We’re seeing a pattern here,” Hillary enforcer Howard Wolfson said, in a
conference call with reporters Tuesday. Yeah, we are. She’s losing, and looking
for anything to bruise Obama.

Obama swiped a couple distinctive riffs about words and aspirations — his
supposed specialty — from his pal Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts,
thereby violating the new cardinal rule not only of politics but of life: Don’t
do anything you don’t want to see on the top favorites of YouTube.

He had credited Patrick in the past, and Patrick had channeled Obama when he
ran for governor in ’06, so basically they’re like two roommates sharing
clothes. Or two politicians sharing a strategist. Obama’s chief strategist,
David Axelrod, worked for Patrick in the gubernatorial bid.

“You may know that both Deval Patrick and Senator Obama have the same
consultant and adviser,” Hillary told reporters, “who is apparently putting
words in both of their mouths.”

It wasn’t campaign shredding, as when Joe Biden absorbed Neil Kinnock’s Welsh
inflection and life experiences in ’88. But it was sloppy. If you’re going to be
hailed as the messiah and sermonize about offering a “hymn that will heal this
nation,” you should come up with your own lyrics.

Obama is basing his campaign on his freshness and integrity and honesty, so
he shouldn’t cut corners, as he seems to have done with crediting Patrick and
explaining the extent of his relationship with his sleazy former fund-raiser,
Tony Rezko.

The attribution problem might be small beer compared with Michelle Obama’s
comment in Milwaukee on Monday: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am
really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but
because I think people are hungry for change.”

It’s a discordant note for the stylish, brainy 44-year-old Princeton and
Harvard Law School grad. Cindy McCain showed that Republicans would jump right
on a line like that, and twist it into something that sounded extremist and
unpatriotic.

Michelle made another of these aggrieved pronouncements at a rally in Los
Angeles before the California primary: “Things have gotten progressively worse,
throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it
hasn’t gotten better for regular folks.”

Given the way the Clintons unfairly turn the tables, we’re only moments away
from Hillary asking Obama: “Can’t you control your spouse?”

Fans in a Monastery, Women in the City,Hot Water From Tap,Britney Spears,

Needing a Hail Mary, Fans Find a Monastery

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The Benedictine nuns are converting their 10-bedroom spiritual retreat into a place to stay for Super Bowl fans

January 31, 2008

Needing a Hail Mary, Fans Find a Monastery

By KATIE THOMAS

PHOENIX — There is no sauna, no heated pool, no chauffeur or sommelier. In fact, no alcohol is allowed on the premises, and guests share a bathroom with their next-door neighbor.

But for $250 a night in a city where Super Bowl rentals are topping out at $250,000 a week for a mansion in Scottsdale, the sisters at Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery figure they have an offer that cannot be beat.

In debt from the recent purchase of a nearby parcel, the Benedictine nuns are hoping to make a dent in their mortgage by converting their 10-bedroom spiritual retreat into a crash pad for Super Bowl fans this weekend.

“A Super Bowl doesn’t happen in a city very often,” said Sister Linda Campbell, the prioress of the monastery where rooms usually go for $105 a night. “Then we heard of all the folks that were renting out homes and we thought, wow, that would be something that would be beneficial to the monastery and help us to help others.”

With 125,000 fans expected to arrive from out of town this weekend, even midlevel hotels are charging more than $500 a night for rooms. A Hampton Inn, for example, is sold out for the weekend at prices up to $799 a night. Not far away, a Residence Inn by Marriott on Wednesday still had a two-bedroom suite available for $999 a night.

With its posters of Mother Teresa, vinyl tablecloths and second-hand furniture, the monastery’s offerings do not match up to some of the Super Bowl packages that nearby hotels and resorts are offering, with free cocktail hours, personal concierge service and sometimes even a meet-and-greet with N.F.L. players. Though there is no curfew at the monastery, some Super Bowl visitors may be dismayed to learn that along with the ban on alcohol (forget about keg stands or late-night drinking games), overnight guests cannot smoke.

Guests at the monastery will sleep in single beds in rooms named after Saints Hildegard, Helen, Monica and Ann. Most of the rooms sleep three people, and there is no telephone or television in the rooms.

Still, the retreat has its charms. The nine-year-old monastery is only three and a half miles from University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and is nestled improbably in a working-class suburban neighborhood. Bottlebrush and palm trees shade the monastery, and a peacock roams the grounds. A yellow Labrador named Bonito greets guests at the front door.

Clint Mills Jr., 38, of Shrewsbury, Mass., said he knew he would travel to Arizona if the Patriots won, but he was dreading the cost of a hotel room for him and his 6-year-old son, Clint Mills III. This will be Mills’s fifth Super Bowl, and he was aware that even the most basic hotel rooms would be $500 a night. Then he saw a story on his local television station about the monastery.

“When I saw it on the news, I was like, Oh my god,” Mills said. “I don’t have to worry about who’s coming down the hallway at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning.”

Sister Linda, 59, works as a guidance counselor at St. Mary’s High School, a local Catholic school, and lives at the monastery with another nun and a live-in associate, a woman who has dedicated herself to a spiritual life but has not taken vows to join the order. Throughout the year, the sisters play host to church groups, nonprofit organizations and individuals who arrive seeking spiritual renewal and contemplation. The retreat is so popular that it has outgrown its space, and the order spent $550,000 on a nearby parcel last April so the monastery could be expanded.

The mood at the monastery may seem more prayerful than pumped up, but football fans will find a kindred spirit in Sister Linda, who has season tickets to the Arizona Cardinals and loves to lose herself in the shoves and grunts of a hard-fought game.

“It is violent, but not as violent as some others,” she said. “Now, I’m not into boxing or some of those. But football, yeah, I like football. For the most part, it’s a down time for me, and a time to just sit back and just enjoy it.”

Sister Linda said she admired Eli Manning and Tom Brady — “they’re both talented men,” she said of the two quarterbacks — but added that she was rooting for the Patriots. “They’ve had a perfect season, and it would be so sad to lose at this point,” she said.

Seven of the 10 rooms are already booked. None of the guests were bothered by the ban on alcohol or the monastery’s subdued setting, Sister Linda said.

“I think there’s a uniqueness about the people who are coming,” she said. Some of the guests, including a nun from New York, are Catholic; others are not. “It’s just like there was a reason for them to come to this area, for this purpose.”

The arrangement worked perfectly for George Huntoon, a Patriots fan from Dover, Mass., who does not drink alcohol and was shocked at some of the hotel prices he saw when planning his trip. “You know it’s going to be nice and clean,” said Huntoon, who is 50 and owns a building-supply store. “It’s a good thing just to get a little peace of mind before the game. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

If those who arrive seek spiritual guidance, Sister Linda and her colleagues can provide it. But if they just want to enjoy the game, she said, that is O.K., too.

Still, several visitors have told her they would like to participate in Sunday Mass. If the guests pray for their own team to win, Sister Linda will understand; she admitted to praying once or twice for her beloved Cardinals.

“The way I do it is I pray for them to do the best they can,” she said, before offering a word of caution.

“Everyone has to understand,” she said, “that God listens to both sides.”

Sex in the City

Dwight Eschliman

A billboard over Wilshire Boulevard will feature an image from Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series

Dwight Eschliman

Louise Lawler’s 1979 installation at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica is recreated for the “Women in the City” exhibition.

January 27, 2008

Style

Sex in the City

By SUSAN MORGAN; Photographs by DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN

‘As an art dealer, I’ve always liked to be involved in big productions,” says the curator and gallerist Emi Fontana. “I’m not particularly good at selling small things that end up in the living room.” Fontana’s current big production, “Women in the City,” which goes up Feb. 9, is the debut of West of Rome, her newly founded nonprofit arts organization based in Los Angeles.

On view in more than 50 locations — ranging from video billboards along Sunset Strip to the Huntington Library’s botanical gardens — “Women in the City,” with support from the Broad Art Foundation and the François Pinault Foundation, presents breakthrough work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. During the 1980s these artists utilized popular forms, cannily borrowing the look of movies and advertising, to articulate sharp questions about power, the representation of women and contemporary society. Sherman’s poignant black-and-white photographs, “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), featured the artist as an isolated character in some anonymous melodrama; Holzer’s “Truisms,” aggressively hyperdeclarative phrases gleaned from everyday life, surfaced on posters, stickers and patches; Kruger’s signature collages displayed a bold graphic style — red, white and Futura Bold Italic — and an unabashedly confrontational tone; and Lawler transfigured existing images to subvert conventional meanings.

In 1979, Lawler presented “A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture” at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. As the full-length soundtrack of “The Misfits” played, the silver screen remained unremittingly blank. In Marilyn Monroe‘s last performance, her final line wavered in the auditorium. “How do you find your way back in the dark?” she asked, a tentative voice without an image.

“Of course, one of the inspirations for the show’s title was ,” says Fontana, a native of Milan and a former interviewer for cultural programs on the state broadcasting network in Italy. “I interviewed him and went to the set of ‘City of Women.’ ” In Fellini’s 1980 film, Marcello Mastroianni, the director’s alter ego, encounters feminism in a Freudian phantasmagoria about male anxiety and fantasy.

“When I watched it again recently,” Fontana recalled, “I noticed that all the women in the movie have cameras. They are the ones taking the pictures.” SUSAN MORGAN

The Claim: Never Drink Hot Water From the Tap

Leif Parsons

January 29, 2008

Really?

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

THE FACTS

The claim has the ring of a myth. But environmental scientists say it is real.

The reason is that hot water dissolves contaminants more quickly than cold water, and many pipes in homes contain lead that can leach into water. And lead can damage the brain and nervous system, especially in young children.

Lead is rarely found in source water, but can enter it through corroded plumbing. The Environmental Protection Agency says that older homes are more likely to have lead pipes and fixtures, but that even newer plumbing advertised as “lead-free” can still contain as much as 8 percent lead. A study published in The Journal of Environmental Health in 2002 found that tap water represented 14 to 20 percent of total lead exposure.

Scientists emphasize that the risk is small. But to minimize it, the E.P.A. says cold tap water should always be used for preparing baby formula, cooking and drinking. It also warns that boiling water does not remove lead but can actually increase its concentration. More information is at www.epa.gov/lead or (800) 424-5323 (LEAD).

THE BOTTOM LINE

Hot water from the tap should never be used for cooking or drinking.

scitimes@nytimes.com

Mom: Britney Spears resting at L.A. hospital

art.lynn.gi.jpg

Britney Spears, left, and her mother Lynne Spears pose at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards in New York.

..>

Mom: Britney Spears resting at L.A. hospital

Story Highlights
Troubled pop star resting, mom says, after large police escort
L.A. Times: Britney Spears placed on “mental health evaluation hold”
Hold prompted by call police got from Spears’ psychiatrist, Times reports
Incident is second time in weeks the singer has been taken to a hospital

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Pop star Britney Spears was resting at UCLA Medical Center on Thursday, her mother said, hours after police escorted her to the hospital from her Hollywood home.

A long convoy of police and a Los Angeles Fire Department ambulance transported the 26-year-old singer to the hospital after midnight, acting on what the Los Angeles Times reported was a “mental evaluation hold.”

It was the second hospitalization for Spears this month. The police operation was planned far in advance and, according to the L.A. Times, followed a phone call to police from Spears’ psychiatrist.

Asked if her daughter was resting, mother Lynne Spears said “Yes” to a throng of reporters as she departed the medical center. Watch scene at Spears’ home »

The pop star’s father Jamie Spears and her manager Sam Lufti also appeared at the hospital, neither choosing to speak to reporters.

The latest incident in the troubled performer’s saga began about 12:55 a.m. on Thursday when the North Hollywood Police Department sent about eight officers to Spears’ hilltop house in Studio City, California, according to a law enforcement official, who asked not to be identified because he’s not authorized to comment publicly. See Spears timeline »

The group at Spears’ house included plainclothes officers, motorcycle police, ambulance crews and some police “brass,” the official said.

It took the better part of the day to arrange the transport plan, the officer said.

On January 3, Spears was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she reportedly underwent a psychological evaluation. Watch how mental evaluations work »

Andrew Blankstein, a Los Angeles Times reporter who was at the scene of Thursday’s incident, told CNN that a police convoy, stretching the length of a football field, accompanied the ambulance as it drove down Coldwater Canyon Boulevard — in part to keep the paparazzi from getting too close. Watch police motorcade at Spears’ home »

Spears was whisked out a side entrance to her house.

“You couldn’t really see what was going on [when officers first swept into the residence] but on the police radio, there was some reference to ‘The package is on the way out,’ ‘We’re leaving now. Go, go, go,’” Blankstein said.

A few hours earlier, two officers were sent to investigate a report of a large group gathered outside the singer’s home, said David Grimes, watch commander for the west division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The two officers found 20 to 25 people near the house around 11 p.m. Wednesday and they asked them to leave, he said.

ABC-TV host Barbara Walters reported on Monday’s “The View” that she had been contacted by Spears’ manager and “good friend,” Lufti, who told her the pop star has seen a psychiatrist and “is suffering from what he describes as mental issues which are treatable,” according to The Associated Press. Watch experts discuss Spears’ behavioral issues »

During Spears’ earlier hospitalization, in addition to the psychological evaluation, she was examined for possible influence of alcohol or drugs. Police had been called to her home that night to mediate a custody dispute.

A day later, a California court refused to grant Spears visitation rights with her two children — Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1 — at least until mid-February.

Spears has been in a heated dispute with ex-husband Kevin Federline over custody of their sons. Federline, Spears’ former backup dancer, holds primary custody of the children.

Spears has been in trouble with the court earlier concerning her compliance with court orders in the custody case.

After filing for divorce in November 2006, Spears was frequently seen enjoying Hollywood nightlife. Her behavior became increasingly erratic; in February 2007, she shaved her head as paparazzi looked on, then spent a month in rehab.

CNN’s Saeed Ahmed and Ninette Sosa contributed to this report.

All AboutBritney Spears • Kevin Federline

Safe in Las Vegas, Microsoft’s Yahoo Buy,Giants Parade,Google v.s. Microsoft,Max Von Sydow

Playing It Safe in Las Vegas

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Scott Doctor/Splash News

ACT NATURALLY Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag at a tame photo session at the Jet nightclub.

February 3, 2008

Playing It Safe in Las Vegas

By STEVE FRIESS

LAS VEGAS

FOR some time now, Michael Jackson and his children have lived at the Palms resort here while he records a new album in its studio.

This might not be so surprising, considering Mr. Jackson’s nomadic ways as well as the affinity that celebrities have for this city.

What is stunning, however, is that the star managed to live at the Palms for at least two months before a local gossip columnist wrote about it on Jan. 16.

How is it that the whereabouts of a tabloid target like Mr. Jackson could stay concealed for so long? Well, one might have noticed what did not happen after Norm Clarke’s article appeared in The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

No swarm of paparazzi descended upon the Palms. No enterprising photographer sneaked inside to snap Mr. Jackson heading to an elevator. No hotel guest made a cellphone video to sell to TMZ.com or to post on YouTube.

“Does that surprise me? Not really,” said Larry Fink, public relations director for the Palms. Citing the privacy of guests, Mr. Fink would neither confirm nor deny Mr. Jackson’s presence. “The celebrity media here is — I don’t want to say they’re well behaved — but there’s a certain level of respect between us and them,” he said.

It’s true. Despite the constant star visits and red carpet events in Las Vegas, few if any images of pantyless pop stars, married actors getting lap dances or even paparazzi mobs chasing celebutantes into limousines have appeared online or in publications.

The most notorious illicit video out of Las Vegas in recent years was last summer’s footage of an intoxicated David Hasselhoff crawling on the floor of his hotel room while trying to eat a hamburger. It was shot by his daughter and leaked by a member of his family.

Las Vegas is a city where stars can avoid the aggressive breed of stalker photographers who shadow their public events in Los Angeles and New York. At the very least, stars exert more control over their exposure. Ensconced in the protective resorts, and guarded by private security teams, the stars find the celebrity news media in Las Vegas far less invasive.

“In Vegas, I don’t have to worry about photographers waiting outside my house every day because they can’t wait outside my hotel room,” Spencer Pratt, a star of the MTV reality series “The Hills,” said in early January as he and Heidi Montag, his co-star and girlfriend, posed for photos on a red carpet on the way to an event that they were paid to attend at the Jet nightclub at the Mirage.

“When we travel here we have bodyguards, there are people with earpieces making sure there aren’t any photos we don’t want, making sure there’s no problems,” Mr. Pratt said. “I’m sure a lot of celebrities come out to Vegas because it’s like a hide-out, it’s a getaway.”

Indeed, as the city rolled into the year’s biggest betting weekend, the Super Bowl, stars aplenty were expected to be in the nightclubs and sports books. But they were not expecting to be trailed by what Robin Leach, the former host of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and the unofficial dean of the Las Vegas celebrity news media, refers to as “wild roaming packs of paparazzi.”

“All of our photographers are known to the casinos almost as if they’re registered,” said Mr. Leach, who writes the Vegas Luxe Life blog for Las Vegas Magazine. “If a photographer breaks the spirit of the unidentified terms of his access, that’s the last time he gets red carpet or nightclub privileges.”

That powerful, lingering threat is the difference between Las Vegas and other cities. The casino mega-resorts are private property. Many have private elevators, tunnels and garages for those not wishing to be seen.

The celebrity photos that do emerge from Las Vegas are generally less compelling because stars rarely go about their everyday business here, said Harvey Levin, managing editor of TMZ.com, which specializes in candid videos of stars driving recklessly or teetering out of nightclubs. “I don’t think Julia Roberts walks down corridors at Caesars Palace without her makeup on,” he said. “When a star goes to Caesars Palace, they tend not to go out or shop in malls. They’ll make appearances at clubs or events, but it’s much more event-driven.”

Even when celebrities do embarrass themselves here, their actions rarely receive widespread coverage. Last February, the hotel magnate Steve Wynn fell to the floor after bumping his head on a boom mike while walking a red carpet for Elizabeth Taylor‘s 75th birthday party. Mr. Clarke reported the incident in his column, but no images of the fall emerged, even though many photographers were present.

“There’s more to shooting than getting someone falling down a staircase,” Robin Roth, a photographer and writer for the Web site Entnews.com, said in late December as she waited for Beyoncé and Jay-Z to arrive at the opening of the rap star’s new sports bar, the 40/40 Club, at the Palazzo resort. “They’re here to promote this event and that’s what we’re here to shoot. So we’re trying to get the best of them. I’m going to try to get the nicest shot of them.”

The level of control by resorts — and the acquiescence by the celebrity news media — is extensive.

One Friday in early January, a dozen photographers were ushered into the Bank nightclub at the Bellagio shortly past 11 p.m. by special elevator, ordered to stand by in a small, dark corridor and then given about five minutes to take pictures of the singer and songwriter John Legend posing before a backdrop with the Bank’s name on it.

ONCE Mr. Legend had had enough, the photographers were whisked away. The star’s entourage was seated in a V.I.P. area of the club, while a single photographer — on the club’s payroll — was allowed to shoot his birthday party for the celebrity news service WireImage.

“A publicist at one of the properties once told me he’s surprised with all the members of an entourage traveling with these stars and all the people having sex in rooms, that somebody doesn’t take a picture of an A-lister laying next to a stripper,” Mr. Clarke said. “I’m amazed I don’t get more of that, too.”

The handful of folks who actually do shrug off the yoke of the staged photo opportunities wonder where everybody else is. Preston Warner, a photographer who has sold images of Paris Hilton dancing provocatively on nightclub tabletops for five-figure sums, called the red carpet scene “mind-numbingly boring.”

“They’re standing out there for six to eight hours waiting for a celebrity to show up so 20 of them can get the same shots for their photo services,” Mr. Warner said. “I guess they do it because they’re star-struck or it’s a hobby for them.”

Even if the paparazzi aren’t out in force, what about the thousands of visitors with camera phones? Gary Morgan, chief executive of the celebrity photo service Splash News, doubts Las Vegas visitors understand the value of what they may have. “In L.A., people snap a picture and go, ‘Oh, oh, oh, I’ll give it to someone,’ ” Mr. Morgan said. “A lot of people are in Vegas to have fun, gambling and drinking, and they’re not in the mind-set.”

All this may soon change. The syndicated entertainment-news show “Extra” has opened a bureau in Las Vegas (and was the first to broadcast the video of Mr. Hasselhoff with the hamburger). In 2006 People magazine placed a full-time employee here for the first time. And RawVegas.tv, a Web-based video site devoted to celebrity news with 14 reporters and producers, made its debut last year.

“Extra” opened its bureau here, said Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, senior executive producer of the show, because she “got tired of having to have crews and reporters get on planes” to cover the many celebrities visiting the city. “There was this giant curtain over Vegas and nobody knew what the secret code was to get inside, but now we feel we own Las Vegas because we’re here all the time,” Ms. Gregorisch-Dempsey said.

“Extra” has a deal with the Planet Hollywood resort to run an Extra lounge in the casino, where stars can regularly stop for interviews. Although celebrities may not see this as an encroachment on their privacy, the notion of Las Vegas as a safe area may be fading slowly. In October, Ms. Hilton attended a costume party in army fatigues and flippantly said she wore the outfit to support American troops in Iraq. RawVegas.tv reported the remark, which caused a small stir.

“The celebrities are probably wandering the streets of Vegas going, ‘Man I can’t believe this is the last place on Earth where I’m not being photographed by telescopic lenses,’ ” said Peter Castro, deputy managing editor of People. “They’re probably thinking, ‘What’s the catch here?’ ”

But he predicted that this would soon be brought to a close by the public appetite for celebrity scandal. “There’s too much money in it for that to last,” he said.

Microsoft’s Yahoo Gambit

By MICHAEL S. MALONE
February 5, 2008; Page A17

Sunnyvale, Calif.

Yahoo, be coy, but take the Microsoft deal.

Microsoft’s interest in buying Yahoo had been rumored for so long that when the bid — $44.6 billion — was finally made last week, it managed to surprise just about everyone in the high-tech world. With merger rumors fading and Yahoo slumping, it was generally assumed that cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang and his team were hunkering down to cut their losses with layoffs and then embark on a major re-organization.

Microsoft’s offer has changed everything. Within minutes after the news broke, the mainstream media and the blogosphere were on fire with speculation on what it all meant. Here in Silicon Valley, and other high-tech enclaves around the world, the debate was a welcome respite from the increasingly depressing news that always accompanies the industry’s quadrennial slide into recession.

The announcement also brought to the surface a lot of old emotions, including Silicon Valley versus Seattle, corporate capitalism versus entrepreneurship — but most of all, the fear of Microsoft as an unstoppable force crushing all competitors before it. Pundits instantly started asking if the feds would even allow such a merger. Meanwhile, at Yahoo’s photo-sharing subsidiary Flickr, members are throwing a collective (and characteristically clever) tantrum about being handed over to their new overlords.

The low point came on Sunday when David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, darkly summoned the ghost of Microsoft past. “Could Microsoft,” he asked ominously on the company’s Web site, “now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” He was dangling the bait in front of the Federal Trade Commission to see if it would nibble — all while conveniently ignoring the fact that if there is any monopoly at work in the digital world these days, it is Google’s absolute dominance of Internet searches. Its market share surely equals IBM in computers, Intel in microprocessors and, yes, Microsoft in PC operating systems at their peaks.

Still, you can understand Google’s paranoia. Company CEO Eric Schmidt has twice fought Microsoft in the past — at Sun and Novell — and been crushed both times. At Google he has triumphed at last by forcing Microsoft to play to his strategy, only now to see Microsoft try to change the rules. That’s got to make you sleepless and edgy.

The rest of us don’t have the same excuse. Years ago on a Sunday morning news show, Bill Gates made perhaps his most prescient comment ever. If you look at the history of technology companies, he said, none have ever been able to stay at the top for long. This is Microsoft’s moment, he continued, but it won’t last forever.

He was right. If you look at Microsoft with an objective eye, it becomes apparent that it is a giant company past its prime. It is big and rich, but increasingly toothless. It is able to use its money to put on a great show at the Consumer Electronics Show, underwrite an interesting market initiative — or buy another big company — but it no longer has the fire of ambition or the addiction to risk to ruthlessly execute on those desires any more. As has been noted before, once you look past all of the high profile moves (such as MSN, MSNBC, Zune and XBox), Microsoft has only really been as successful as it reputation would suggest in just two businesses: Windows and Office. Most everything else is flash.

Even Microsoft’s full-out assault on Netscape (which, ironically, will officially die on March 1) for control of the Internet browser industry — justly earning it the sobriquet “Evil Empire” — in retrospect was less a brilliant maneuver by Gates & Co. to capture a hot new industry and more a desperate (and questionable) scramble by a market leader caught napping.

That corporate somnolence, rather than its more-remembered ruthlessness, has far better characterized Microsoft over the past decade. Even the Vista operating system, the most recent upgrade of Microsoft’s core product line, managed to be so late that it almost crippled the personal computer industry. It finally arrived to a chorus of boos, most of them undeserved (it’s a pretty good operating system), but some dead-on (it’s a technological hop when it should have been a leap). Microsoft lost its killer instinct a long time ago. On the rare occasions when the mood resurfaces, the company doesn’t have the chops anymore to execute on its desires.

And that brings us to the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For all of the excitement, this is just big, rich, but slow-moving giant looking to buy another slow-moving giant, the latter having stuck to an obsolete business plan too long and lost its way. The scheme is less predation than it is desperation: In the world of search, Google owns these two lumbering monsters.

Microsoft understandably covets the sheer size of Yahoo’s subscriber rolls, believing it can accomplish what Yahoo has failed to do: convert more of those 130 million monthly visitors into real, paying customers. But Microsoft has hardly shown it can do that at MSN. So, can it really find a solution to Yahoo’s structural problems?

That remains to be seen — and Microsoft’s one genius is as a late adopter. The real problem Yahoo — and perhaps soon Microsoft — faces is that those legions of Yahoo users don’t want to be stuck inside a small corner of the Web, not getting all of the experiences and services (like live TV and first-run movies) they were promised. Especially not when they can run around and find all of those things, in abundance, elsewhere on the Web. Microsoft is even less prepared to solve that problem than Yahoo.

That leaves search, which is probably the real reason Microsoft wants Yahoo. Combining the two search engines would, in terms of sheer numbers, represent the biggest challenge to Google to date. But the sum of two also-rans is almost never a winner — unless the newly merged is very, very lucky in its competitors. That’s what happened with HP and Compaq: Who’d have guessed that Dell would suddenly fall on its face?

Incredibly, the same may happen with a Microsoft-Yahoo deal if it happens. If you look at the stock market, peruse the industry gossip blogs, follow the departure of key employees, or read about the various new initiatives (energy?) the company is pursuing, it becomes increasingly apparent that Google is a company about to have an early midlife crisis. Microsoft-Yahoo may turn out to be a pedestrian idea with absolutely brilliant timing.

If that is the case, and the merger proves successful, it will have more to do with Google than Microsoft and Yahoo. Which is why the feds should stay out of it.

So, Yahoo: Take the deal (unless a better one comes along). Microsoft: Let this be the first of many high-risk moves. Treat Yahoo as a heart transplant, not a skin graft. And Google: This new competition should be a warning to stop fooling around and get back to business.

Mr. Malone is the Silicon Insider columnist for ABCNews.com.

Fans Throng Lower Manhattan for Giants Parade

February 5, 2008, 10:33 am

By Ken Belson

On the ninth floor of 100 Broadway, across from Trinity Church, office workers looked out their windows as the Giants parade passed by. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Updated, 3:55 p.m. | The weather forecast said showers in New York on Tuesday, but the Giants got deluged in paper, cheers and virtual hugs instead.

Tons of confetti and toilet paper rained down on the team as it rode north on Broadway through the Canyon of Heroes with the Super Bowl trophy it claimed by upsetting the New England Patriots on Sunday in Super Bowl XLII.

For a few hours, the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, the symbolic center of the financial world, turned into party central for legions of football fans celebrating the city’s first sports championship since 2000.

“I’ve been to Mardi Gras, New Year’s Eve in Times Square and Carnivale in Rio, and this beats them all,” said Lori Pletenik, who flew back on Monday night from Arizona, where she had gone to see the game.

The crowd was good-natured and was filled with teenagers, many of whom were in diapers when Giants last won the Super Bowl, in 1991, although the police did report some arrests for disorderly conduct. The fans were in such a good mood that they even cheered the sanitation trucks that drove up Broadway (with their snow plows down), chanting, “clean those streets” as they passed.

At 11 a.m., when the parade was set to begin, a man in a white robe and yellow cape emerged from Trinity Church, climbed a ladder and hoisted a Giants poster. The bells of the church rang out. The crowd bounced in anticipation, waiting for Eli Manning, Antonio Pierce and the rest of the team to glide by.

The first to arrive were the police motorcycles, then Gov. Eliot Spitzer in a red convertible (with a New Jersey license plate), then a bagpipe and drum corps. Drivers in the parade honked their horns. The fans responded with horns of their own.

Fans on both sides of Broadway tossed rolls of toilet paper back and forth, mixed in with “Let’s go, Giants!” cheers and chants of “18 and 1,” an allusion to the Patriots and their near-perfect season.

Finally, the players arrived, a few to a float. Brandon Jacobs. Plaxico Burress. Amani Toomer. Then the fourth float: Eli Manning, Michael Strahan, Coach Tom Coughlin, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and team owner John Mara, all of whom took turns hoisting the Super Bowl trophy.

The crowd hit full roar near 120 Broadway, roughly midway through the route, which started at Bowling Green and ended at Chambers Street. Office workers in newer buildings pressed against windows that did not open. Others tossed bales of confetti out of those that did. Strahan, who many thought would retire before the season began, jumped up and down on the truck in glee.

The rousing City Hall celebration for the victorious Giants ended around 1:50 p.m. after the team’s quarterback and the Super Bowl’s most valuable player, Eli Manning, gave a rousing address to the assembled fans, steps away from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who presided over the city’s first ticker-tape parade since 2000 — and the first such parade of the Bloomberg administration.

“On behalf of the team, I just want to tell you all how proud we are to be able to bring a championship back to New York City,” Mr. Manning told the cheering fans. “I believe that we play football for the greatest city in the world, and all of you all deserve to have the greatest football team in the world. It’s been an honor to play with this group of guys, who have such character, such closeness amongst us, coaches who prepare us for every game. We’ve had our ups, we’ve had our downs, but everything we’ve gone through this season has made it so special.”

The City Hall ceremony — at which members of the Giants were each presented with the key to the city — ended a three-hour celebration of New York’s first Super Bowl championship since 1991.

Throughout the morning, thousands of excited fans crowded the sidewalks along Broadway. The ticker-tape parade made its way up Broadway from Battery Park toward Chambers Street, starting at 11 a.m.

George Wendt (not the actor) and his two sons — Brandon, 12, and Tyler, 11 — came to Lower Manhattan from Jersey City this morning to watch New York City’s first ticker-tape parade since 2000: a celebration of the Giants’ upset of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. The Wendt family members were all decked out in Giants’ T-shirts bearing the numbers “18-1″ — an allusion to the Patriots, who were on their way to a perfect season before encountering the Giants at the Super Bowl.

Mr. Wendt is a lifelong Giants fan. His son Tyler is a Patriots fan, but he wore an Eli Manning jersey for the occasion. (Perhaps his father had expressed concern for his younger son’s personal safety.) The two boys took the day off from school. After the parade, the Wendt familiy planned to take the PATH commuter train back to Exchange Place in Jersey City — where Mr. Wendt’s wife will pick up her husband and sons and drive them out to East Rutherford, N.J., for an afternoon celebration of the Giants at the Meadowlands.

Asked if it was hard to keep his boys home from school, Mr. Wendt replied, “School’s open, but how often is this going to happen?”

The crowd was pretty good-natured and was filled with teenagers, many of whom were in diapers when Giants last won the Super Bowl, in 1991. For example, Michael Miele, 19, left her home in Washington, N.J., at 4:30 a.m.

Buses traveled down Broadway in front of Trinity Church, at Wall Street, as crowds gathered in advance of the ticker-tape parade for the Giants. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Fans on both sides of Broadway tossed rolls of toilet paper back and forth, mixed in with “Let’s go, Giants!” cheers and also cheers of “18 and 1.” Vendors sold Giants T-shirts for $10.

The fans were in such a good mood that they were even cheering the sanitation trucks that drove down Broadway in preparation for the parade.

Earlier in the morning, on a No. 1 subway headed south toward Rector Street at 7:30 a.m., the atmosphere was half fraternity house and half train load of weary commuters. As workers headed for Wall Street, dozed, or read newspapers, teenagers wearing Giants jackets and plastic helmets listened to hip-hop music and screamed “18 and 1.”

The teenagers screamed support when other teenagers in Giants paraphernalia boarded the train, a middle-aged man pointed at a compact-disc player belonging to one of the teenagers and looked as if he was going to say something disapproving. Instead, he asked, “Can it play ‘New York, New York?’ You know, Sinatra?” Everyone in the train laughed.

The facade of City Hall, a neoclassical edifice built in 1811, was draped with blue bunting and banners emblazoned with the Giants’ logo. Workers raised tall lights that were pointed at a stage with a lectern set up on the steps of City Hall. A raucous, jubilant crowd thronged Broadway, just west of City Hall, holding up signs. Passing trucks and buses sounded their horns and the crowd roared in response. Shortly before 9 a.m., some fans were permitted to enter through the tall iron fence that rings City Hall, many wearing Giants jerseys or T-shirts commemorating the Super Bowl triumph.

Among them was Justin O’Donovan, 25, a landscaper who lives Suffolk County. He said he had been standing on Broadway when he was handed a pass and beckoned through a gate by a city official. Mr. O’Donovan said he was thrilled to get a chance to attend such a celebration, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as the host of the event. “This is the best sporting event of my life so far,” Mr. O’Donovan said. “The Giants are a New York team. I don’t care if they play 10 miles into Jersey.”

Colin Moynihan and Anthony Ramirez contributed reporting.

Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo

Brian McGuiness/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Microsoft made a $44.6 billion bid on Friday for Yahoo, the popular search engine based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Yahoo’s rival, Google, has been working behind the scenes to stop the deal.

February 4, 2008

Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MIGUEL HELFT

Standing between a marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo may be the technology behemoth that has continually outsmarted them: Google.

In an unusually aggressive effort to prevent Microsoft from moving forward with its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo, Google emerged over the weekend with plans to play the role of spoiler.

Publicly, Google came out against the deal, contending in a statement that the pairing, proposed by Microsoft on Friday in the form of a hostile offer, would pose threats to competition that need to be examined by policy makers around the world.

Privately, Google, seeing the potential deal as a direct attack, went much further. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, placed a call to Yahoo’s chief, Jerry Yang, offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies, people briefed on the call said.

Google’s lobbyists in Washington have also begun plotting how it might present a case against the transaction to lawmakers, people briefed on the company’s plans said. Google could benefit by simply prolonging a regulatory review until after the next president takes office.

In addition, several Google executives made “back-channel” calls over the weekend to allies at companies like Time Warner, which owns AOL, to inquire whether they planned to pursue a rival offer and how they could assist, these people said. Google owns 5 percent of AOL.

Despite Google’s efforts and the work of Yahoo’s own bankers over the weekend to garner interest in a bid to rival Microsoft’s, one did not seem likely, at least at this early stage.

For example, a spokesman for the News Corporation said Sunday night that it was not preparing a bid, and other frequently named prospective suitors like Time Warner, AT&T and Comcast have not begun work on offers, people close to them said. They suggested that they did not want to enter a bidding war with Microsoft, which could easily top their offers.

A spokesman for Time Warner declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Comcast. A representative for AT&T could not be reached.

In the meantime, people close to Yahoo said that the company received a flurry of inquires over the weekend from potential suitors. Some people inside Yahoo have even speculated about the prospect of breaking up the company. That could mean selling or outsourcing its search-related business to Google and spinning off or selling its operations that produce original content, these people said.

“Everyone is considering all kinds of options and a deal on search is one of them,” a person familiar with the situation said.

One person involved in Yahoo’s deliberations suggested that “the sum of the parts are worth more than the whole,” arguing that its various pieces like Yahoo Finance, for example, could be sold to a company like the News Corporation for a huge premium while Yahoo Sports could be sold to a company like ESPN, a unit of the Walt Disney Company.

Executives at rival companies were less optimistic about such a breakup strategy. “No one can get to a $44 billion price,” one executive at a major media company said, “even if you split it into a dozen pieces.”

In making its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft is betting that past antitrust rulings against it for abusing its monopoly power in personal computer software will not restrain its hand in an Internet deal.

In the United States, a federal district court in Washington ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had repeatedly violated the law by stifling the threat to its monopoly position posed by Netscape, which popularized the Web browser. The suit, brought during the Clinton administration, was settled by the Bush administration. But as a result of a consent decree extending through 2009, a federal court and a three-member team of technical experts monitors Microsoft’s behavior.

In 2006, for example, after Google complained to the Justice Department and the European Commission that Microsoft was making its MSN search engine the default in the most recent version of its Web browser, Microsoft modified the software so that consumers could easily change to Google or Yahoo.

In Google’s statement on Sunday, it said that the potential purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft could pose threats to competition that needed to be examined by policy makers.

Google’s broadly worded concerns lacked detailed claims about any anticompetitive effects of the deal, and the company did not publicly ask regulators to take specific actions at this time.

“Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?” asked David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer, writing on the company’s blog.

Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment Sunday on Google’s actions. Earlier on Sunday, Microsoft’s general counsel, Bradford L. Smith, said in a statement: “The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling No. 2 competitor for Internet search and online advertising.”

Google’s effort to derail or delay the deal on antitrust grounds mirrors Microsoft’s own actions with respect to Google’s bid for the online advertising specialist DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, announced in April.

The strategy is not surprising, considering that any delays would work to Google’s benefit. “Google can tap into all of the ill will that Microsoft has created in the last couple of decades on the antitrust front,” said Eric Goldman, director the High-Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

The outcome of any antitrust inquiry will hinge, in part, on how regulators define various markets. Microsoft-Yahoo, for instance, would have a large share of the Web-based e-mail market, but a smaller share of the overall e-mail market.

“The potential concern would be that Microsoft, if it acquires Yahoo, could do on the Internet what it did in the personal computer world — make technical standards more Microsoft-centric and steer consumers to its products,” said Stephen D. Houck, a lawyer representing the states involved in the consent decree against Microsoft.

Yahoo has not made a public statement about the proposed deal since Friday, when it said it was weighing Microsoft’s offer as well as alternatives and would “pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”

Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, said an antitrust review of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal could take a long time and “may well bleed into a new administration with an entire new view on antitrust than the Bush administration.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

In the Name of the Father

Julian Schnabel

The actor Max Von Sydow.

Julian Schnabel

The actor Max Von Sydow.

January 27, 2008

Style

In the Name of the Father

By LYNN HIRSCHBERG; Photographs by JULIAN SCHNABEL

For years, Julian Schnabel had “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” by Jean-Dominique Bauby, on his bookshelf. The autobiography of a man with “locked-in syndrome,” a rare form of stroke that paralyzes the body while the mind remains intact and vital, Bauby’s memoir, which was published in 1997, having been painstakingly dictated by a blink of his left eye when the correct letter of the alphabet was read aloud, is a glimpse into the other side of consciousness. It is a surprisingly ebullient, liberated view of a man approaching what would seem to be a terrible fate. When Schnabel eventually read the book — it was pushed on him by the performance artist Laurie Anderson when she was staying at his house in Montauk and she grabbed it from the stacks — he began to see the cinematic possibilities, the ways in which reality could be blurred with memories and dreams. Schnabel’s two other films, “Basquiat” and “Before Night Falls,” were both about artists and the ambitions that can thwart the creative process. “Diving Bell” could be, among other things, a further, more intense examination of how the creative mind can take flight, even in the face of a grim reality.

And yet, Schnabel still put the book aside. In 2003, his elderly father, Jack, became gravely ill with cancer. Like his son, Schnabel’s father had never been sick, and he was terrified of death. In his last year he came to live with Julian and his family and, at that time, Schnabel was sent the script for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” by Ronald Harwood. The material suddenly seemed entirely relevant. “I wanted to help my father not to be scared of death,” Schnabel told me recently. “It was the only way I failed my father. And I didn’t want to be scared of death, either. I wanted to make the movie to overcome that fear.”

Max von Sydow, who plays the pivotal role of Bauby’s aged father in the movie, didn’t know about Julian’s father and his importance until the actual day of shooting. Although Bauby is surrounded by a group of caretaking, devoted and beautiful women in the film, it is his singular relationship with his father that cements the audience’s understanding of him. In their first scene together, an able-bodied Bauby shaves his 92-year-old father’s face; it is the only time in the film when Bauby is not the center of attention.

“After Julian sent me the script,” von Sydow remembered over lunch this winter, “we didn’t discuss it very much. He didn’t tell me that, in some ways, I would be playing his father. But movies are like that — I had never met Mathieu Amalric (who plays Bauby) until the day of our first scene, and he had to shave me. It was rather intimate, and he did cut me. But it’s always that way: you’re supposed to be involved with someone in the film and you’ve just met them for the first time and then, 10 minutes later, you say, ‘I love you,’ and you are in bed.”

Von Sydow, who is 77, is tall and imposing. On this chilly day in Manhattan, he was dressed in black pants and a sweater and all that darkness accentuated his large, noble head, close-cropped gray hair and rumbling voice. Von Sydow was accompanied by his wife, Catherine, who is French and lively. “When I was making the film, it was impossible not to think about my father,” von Sydow said as he ate his salad, the first course of a three-course lunch. “I was born in Sweden, and my father, who was a professor of Scandinavian folklore, was 50 when I was born. When I was 20, he was 70, and on the day of his 70th birthday, he had a little stroke. Small strokes followed for the next four years. That changed him. And I regret that I was not more curious about him at that time. All the questions I would like to ask today, I haven’t asked.”

Although von Sydow’s father saw his son perform in municipal-theater productions in Stockholm, it was another father figure, Ingmar Bergman, who recognized his acting potential. From “The Virgin Spring” in 1960, his fifth movie with Bergman, von Sydow became an international star. “I actually know the moment I became known,” von Sydow said. “It was at the Cannes Film Festival, when they showed ‘The Virgin Spring.’ I walked into that theater as one person and I walked out as another.”

Almost immediately, he was offered roles in Hollywood movies. “They sent me ‘Dr. No,’ ” von Sydow recalled. “They wanted me to play the villain. I said no. And then they offered me the part of Jesus in ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ I said yes to that. For years, Hollywood only asked me to play a villain or a biblical figure.” Von Sydow, who has long lived in Paris, always returned to Bergman, who made a film nearly every year in Sweden. “It was not exactly a tonic,” von Sydow explained, as he ate some grilled fish. “But working with Bergman was always worthwhile. He was critical, but he had a wonderful way with his actors. He had extraordinary discipline about the work.” Von Sydow paused. Bergman’s death in 2007 affected him deeply. “He had been ill for almost a year, but we had been in close contact over the phone. . . . ” Von Sydow’s wife interrupted him. “Tell about the last time he spoke about you,” she said. Von Sydow paused again. “He said, ‘Max you have been the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands,’ ” von Sydow recalled. “We loved each other, and I know when he stopped working, when he became ill, he missed it. He missed his actors.”

As much as anything, “Diving Bell” is about that kind of longing. In his final scene, Bauby’s father phones his son in his hospital room. The sorrow and the compassion in von Sydow’s voice is overwhelming. “I understood then that this relationship was very personal to Julian, that the text as written contained many things that his own father had told him,” explained von Sydow as a slice of chocolate cake arrived at the table. “The words were very simple, very direct, but the connection between parent and child was unmistakable. Usually, I find playing a part can be cathartic. But this film was different. I had great difficulty getting rid of my emotion after making this movie.”

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More Fun Than Root Canals? It’s the Dental Vacation

Courtesy of the Gates family

VIVA MEXICO Tyler Gates at a dental clinic in Mexico.

Courtesy of the Gates family

Scott, Tyler and Jennifer taking advantage of the vacation portion of the trip to sample some of Mexico’s other amenities.

February 7, 2008

Skin Deep

More Fun Than Root Canals? It’s the Dental Vacation

By CAMILLE SWEENEY

JENNIFER GATES, 40, a hairstylist and makeup artist from Northern California, hadn’t seen a dentist in a decade when she got the call last spring. Her father, Jerry Halley, 64, phoned to say he desperately needed crowns for a few back teeth and other work. Without insurance, Mr. Halley, who owns a landscaping business in Oregon, would have to pay the estimated $8,000 bill.

“We all needed quality dental care, fast,” said Ms. Gates, whose own dental-work estimate was $20,000 and whose immediate family was also uninsured. “So, I started planning.”

Ms. Gates found a reputable dentist through friends of her parents who had traveled to Mexico for care. Six weeks later, Ms. Gates flew to join her parents for a week of massages and tanning in San José del Cabo, Mexico, punctuated, in her case, by daily visits to Dr. Rosa Peña for five procedures including a root canal.

In the last year, Ms. Gates, who had a tooth so deteriorated she could touch its nerve with her tongue, has returned with her parents, husband and 14-year-old son to scuba dive and to open wide for Dr. Peña. Her 20-year-old daughter and son-in-law also have made a trip. All told Ms. Gates’s extended clan has had 12 crowns, 6 dental veneers, 4 root canals, over half a dozen fillings, 6 whitening treatments and 2 broken teeth fixed at a savings, they say, of tens of thousands of dollars. “Dr. Rosy is now our family dentist,” Ms. Gates said.

Perhaps this is not everyone’s idea of a worry-free family getaway.

Nevertheless, for at least two decades, medical tourism has been an increasingly popular alternative for the uninsured desperate for care, and for middle-class Americans willing to travel to secure affordable health care.

Roughly half a million Americans sought medical care abroad in 2006, of which 40 percent were dental tourists, according to the National Coalition on Health Care, an alliance of more than 70 organizations. That’s up from an estimated 150,000 in 2004, said Renee-Marie Stephano, the chief operating officer for the Medical Tourism Association, a nonprofit organization that researches global health care.

Dental bridges and bonding ranked No. 1 and 2 on a list of most sought-after procedures for Americans traveling abroad for medical care, according to a report just published by HealthCare Tourism International, a nonprofit group that tracks health care.

In the latest twist on this trend, families are traveling abroad together, turning an annual vacation into a cost-effective checkup for the brood. Two reasons are at play, according to industry experts: a higher demand for elective dental care like bonding and veneers, and second, the growing number of medical travel agents who vouch for the foreign doctors they recommend. Agents help patients choose between sightseeing-cum-dental packages from Hungary to Mexico and can even arrange a foreign baby sitter for parents in need of fillings.

“You can see where this could be a perfect opportunity to incorporate dental care — not typically treatment that will leave you bed-bound — and a family tour of a new country,” Ms. Stephano said.

There are 75 medical travel agents based in the United States, she estimated, a number she suggested will double by the end of this year.

To allay new customers’ fears, many dentists abroad, some of whom have trained in the United States and use the same equipment as American dentists, rely heavily on word of mouth from satisfied customers. Their Web sites include testimonials, and stateside references are provided.

Although the American Dental Association has no official warning against foreign travel for dental care, a spokesman, Dr. Edmond Hewlett, said, “Dentists abroad are not held to the same standards as in the U.S.”

“Teeth are not just appliances,” added Dr. Hewlett, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Dentistry. “They’re not like a car you take in for an annual tune-up. Your oral health affects your general health and vice versa.”

There are two main groups of family-oriented dental travelers, said Neil Patel, the founder of HealthCare Tourism International. Immigrants have long returned to their countries of origin for dental and medical care and to spend time with relatives. But now there’s a more recent wave of patients, interested in taking their families to a far-flung location to make the best out of what is essentially a rather unpleasant chore.

“Call it multitasking, if you will,” said Mr. Patel, who added that he was also seeing improvements in risk management, the transfer of medical records and translator services.

Sometimes patients take relatives along to nurse them (if they need it) and to city-hop with them (if they don’t). That was the case when Robert Mucci, 55, a utilities manager from Valley Stream, N.Y., contacted Dental-Offer, a dental tourism agency, to book a trip to Mosonmagyarovar, Hungary, a hot spot for tooth travel.

“I had no idea how I was going to feel, and I wanted to have my family with me as a support system,” said Mr. Mucci, who had several teeth extracted, bone grafting and implants. “It turned out the pain was totally manageable,” said Mr. Mucci, who went with his wife, 24-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. He still paid a third of what he was told he would have to pay at home, and that included flights. And, since the work was done in less time than he was told it would take at home, he had plenty of time to sight-see in Vienna, Bratislava and Prague.

Most medical tourism agencies do not specialize in tooth travel for families, but it is fast becoming a staple of their business. Just a year ago, Steve Gallegos, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who used to coordinate health care for military families abroad, opened Medcentrek, a medical tourism agency in San Antonio. He has already had dozens of requests for family dental travel.

“We make recommendations not only on the health care end, but also where to stay, what to do, parasailing, deep-sea fishing, you name it,” Mr. Gallegos said. “As people get comfortable with the idea, this kind of family dental vacation could become an annual thing.”

In years past, the farthest that Leona Denison, 30, a cosmetologist from Albuquerque, usually went for a getaway was Arizona. This year, her family of four went to Costa Rica, where she got nine dental implants and three crowns.

“It took a lot of coaxing on my part to get my husband to agree, but Medcentrek helped with all the arrangements,” Ms. Denison said. “We saw waterfalls and volcanoes. My husband went rafting. Being from New Mexico, my girls really loved the ocean.”

Even with travel expenses, she paid $6,000 less than the $21,000 price a local dentist had quoted for the work.

Remarkably, some patients argue that a flight and a few hours in the dental chair is less hassle than having to rush back to the office half-sedated. For others, turning a trip to the dentist into a family vacation takes their mind off pending procedures. Lori Sullivan, 43, an administrative assistant in a home health care agency in Port Angeles, Wash., admits that she fears dentists.

Last spring, when she found out she would need an expensive root canal, she decided to book a diverting trip with her 8-year-old daughter to Tijuana, Mexico, through PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency based in Los Angeles.

“I had heard of this, but had never considered it an option,” Ms. Sullivan said. “Then, I did my research. The procedure went fine and the price was right.”

Her agency hired a baby sitter for her daughter during her root canal, and, she said, they “even arranged to have us driven down to Baja one day where we had lobster and walked along the beach. It was a long weekend we’ll never forget.” She added: “Now, I’m saving up to go back for veneers. My daughter can’t wait.”

His City, Lost and Found Modern New York City

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Dima Gavrysh/Associated Press

February 3, 2008

His City, Lost and Found

By NATHANIEL RICH

I RECENTLY went into Manhattan with a friend to visit her younger brother’s new apartment on 52nd Street and the East River. The brother, Ariel, had just graduated from college and had been hired by a prestigious financial firm in Midtown. His two roommates had followed the same path, and so, apparently, had everyone else who lived on their long, fluorescent-lit hallway on the 32nd floor.

There was a good reason for this. As Ariel explained to me, his firm had negotiated a deal with the building’s real estate agents, and every employee who rented an apartment got a 6 percent discount on the brokerage fee. Each weekend, and especially over the summer, the young bankers moved in, while families and elderly people moved out.

The apartment building next door, meanwhile, was filling up with lawyers. Doctors lived in a third building, the one closest to the river. “It’s like special-interest housing, but for professionals,” Ariel said.

It was Friday night and Ariel’s hallway was busy with pre-party chatter. One guy no one had ever seen before knocked on the door, inviting us to a party on the next floor. An hour later, two women showed up asking whether we ourselves were having a party.

Ariel and his roommates were elated. They finally had their own place, and one within walking distance of work. Everyone else on their hall was young, friendly and new to the city. It was like freshman year again.

The neighborhood’s transformation seemed stark and total. It was as if a new city had erupted overnight, devouring the old one in a panic of hunger. The suddenness of the change came as a surprise to me, because I thought I knew this particular corner of the city pretty well. After all, I grew up there — on East 51st Street, one block from Ariel’s apartment.

Later, walking west on 52nd Street, I recognized a grim sushi restaurant on First Avenue. I had never seen anyone eat there, but that night a line of recent college graduates extended out the front door and down the block. The people standing in line probably weren’t aware that just a decade ago, the luxury high-rise behind them, on the corner of 51st and First, had been a shelter for homeless and mentally ill women.

Nor is it likely that the throngs on Second Avenue realized that the glossy nightclubs had just a few years ago replaced a row of moribund pizza and taco joints; or that, in the 1970s and ’80s, this was one of the city’s most widely known gay hustling districts, the inspiration for the Ramones‘ “53rd and 3rd.” (“53rd and 3rd/ Standing on the street/ 53rd and 3rd/ I’m trying to turn a trick.”)

I was born in 1980, so my view of the changes that have come to Manhattan is relatively limited. I can’t credibly mourn the transformation of the Lower East Side from a wanton, crack-depleted borderland filled with burning trash cans and random knifings into a slick paradise of Avenue C wine bars and Ludlow Street fashion boutiques. I have vivid memories of 1980s Times Square (my parents worked in offices there), but I never got to experience the distinct pleasures of all-night grind-house double features or live sex shows.

I certainly don’t remember the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, or the Bowery of the punk era, or Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SoHo, though I’d like to imagine that I passed through the latter, at least in a stroller.

I do remember going to the 24-hour French diner Florent in the meatpacking district in the late ’80s, when its pink neon marquee was the only commercial storefront visible in any direction. It was after a dinner there, as my parents searched for a cab, that I saw my first real-life prostitute (also my first real-life transvestite).

Florent is still holding on, but these days it’s hard to spot. As the Web site of the new Hotel Gansevoort describes the neighborhood, it is now an “eclectic mix of meat warehouses and retrofit storefronts.”

On Gansevoort Street, as well as on West 42nd Street, and to an ever greater extent in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen and around Columbus Circle, it’s impossible for someone like me, born and raised in Manhattan, not to feel like a tourist. Not because these parts of the city feel like a foreign country; just the opposite. From the billboard advertisements to the neon marquees to the new streamlined architecture, Manhattan has embraced the dominant gestures and exclamations of American mall culture.

WHEN tourists gaze up at the lights on 42nd Street, they see themselves, and their own towns and cities, but as if through the wrong end of a telescope, the images having suffered some kind of grotesque magnification. I’m not any less in awe myself; I look up, too, mesmerized by the lights.

This used to disturb me, so I understand why there’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the past few years about the transformation of Manhattan, particularly over the loss of what some call the city’s bohemian spirit.

In an essay in The New Yorker last year called “Gothamitis,” Adam Gopnik wrote, “New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular.” Inigo Thomas, writing in Slate in 2005, began a week of columns about the history of the city’s bohemian past by declaring, “There is no bohemia in today’s New York.”

New York magazine and Time Out New York regularly run articles about new neighborhoods that promise to be the next frontier of New York cool, now that Manhattan has priced out all artists, youth, ethnic communities and nonbankers (“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Cool by Now” was the title of an article in New York extolling the hipster virtues of Jersey City).

Most of the points made in these reports are valid. Yet the articles often seem plagued by an easily discernible peevishness, irritation and even depression over the way Manhattan has changed. There is also, on the part of those displaced to the poor boroughs, an element of competitive bristling. It’s as if Manhattan has to be disgraced and humiliated for any other borough to gain ascendancy.

I OFTEN wonder whether the worst of this griping comes not from native New Yorkers but from people who didn’t grow up here, the same people who, when they arrived, made immense financial, psychological and physical sacrifices to land a bunk bed in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. They did it because in their minds, Manhattan was synonymous with the big city.

This is the class of people who moved to New York believing that if they didn’t live on the main island, they might as well have stayed in Pasadena, or Raleigh, or even Jersey City. These are the same people who, after enduring a year of Manhattan poverty, decide to move to Brooklyn, or even Queens, and then extravagantly praise the virtues of their new, down-market neighborhood while castigating their old, expensive one. In other words, they secretly wish they could still afford to live in Manhattan.

I don’t share that desire, but for the first 21 years of my life I was no less of a Manhattan snob. My own internal map of the city was informed entirely by the subway map. I didn’t realize until an alarmingly late age that the map was not to scale but schematic (and highly Manhattan-centric). In other words, I didn’t know that Queens continued for another five miles after the end of the F line, or that the little green hexagon of Prospect Park was actually more than two-thirds the size of Central Park, or that Staten Island was almost three times as big as Manhattan (and was part of New York).

In my teens, my own Saul Steinberg view of the city began at the southern end with the World Trade Center (where I used to go on tedious class trips in grade school) and jumped north to St. Marks Place (where I shopped for used records), then to a friend’s apartment in Stuyvesant Town, and finally, taking up the bulk of the frame, the swath that ran from Times Square up to 96th Street. (At the private high school I attended on the Upper East Side, my friends considered my apartment on 51st Street “downtown.”)

In the outlying portions of my mental map of the city drifted the continents of Shea Stadium, Randalls Island and the Meadowlands. There was also a small island at East 116th Street where, when my family was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic one summer night on the F.D.R. Drive, returning from a visit to some friends in the suburbs, a man threw a large rock through the window on the passenger side and stole my mother’s wallet. I was 9 at the time, sitting in the back seat with my younger brother. Glass flew all over the car, and my mother’s thigh was bleeding. I remember thinking that it was my first brush with the real New York.

Ever since I moved to Brooklyn five years ago, first to Greenpoint and then to a 300-square-foot garret just south of Atlantic Avenue, I’ve had a new map of the city. (It’s a good thing, too; even metropolises can become claustrophobic.)

Uptown has crept from the Upper East Side down to Union Square; the Upper West Side has moved to Brooklyn Heights (with Zabar’s morphing into Sahadi’s, the emporium of Middle Eastern food on Atlantic Avenue, and Citarella into Fish Tales on Court Street); the old Lower East Side to Red Hook, or perhaps Sunset Park; Battery Park to Brighton Beach; Midtown to Metrotech.

And Central Park to Prospect Park. My brother, who has just moved to Brooklyn, went into Manhattan with some friends one recent weekend, to play touch football on the field behind the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, near 84th Street. It was a 40-minute commute, but they had always played football there as kids.

Yet as soon as they took to the field a park security guard came by and asked them to leave. The park, it turns out, was trying to grow its grass, so park officials didn’t want anyone to step on it. After being kicked off four different fields, my brother and his friends headed back to the subway in a state of bewilderment.

“The whole borough of Manhattan is a museum now,” he told me that night. “I like that there are fewer murders, but sometimes you want to play catch.”

Brooklyn, of course, is changing, too, to no small degree driven by Manhattan. A luxury high-rise goes up on the Bowery, and a Richard Meier luxury apartment goes up in Prospect Heights. Rents skyrocket in Battery Park and then on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene.

Fairway has opened in Red Hook; Trader Joe’s is coming to Cobble Hill. The construction of the Atlantic Yards development (and the destruction of the prewar residential buildings that now stand on its site) is under way. Neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and Fort Greene are nearly as expensive as several areas in lower Manhattan.

Yet the essential warp of Brooklyn has remained intact. The village-scale neighborhoods bear no resemblance to the canyons of Manhattan. There are still a couple of slaughterhouses within walking distance of my apartment, where I can order the execution of a chicken (or a rabbit), and there is a seaman’s bar whose décor (and to only a slightly lesser extent its prices) seems frozen in 1955. What I’ve lost in Manhattan I’ve found in Brooklyn, so it seems mawkish to mourn.

MOST of the concerts and almost all the parties I attend are in Brooklyn. I often run into friends on the street, which makes sense, because I have only about five friends my age left in Manhattan. If I didn’t have to commute to an office downtown, I’d rarely cross the river.

There are still, of course, reasons to do so. Recently I went to Midtown for an event at the New York Public Library. As soon as I came out of the subway, I regretted my decision. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree had just been unveiled, and a crowd of overjoyed people, perhaps emboldened by the padding of their winter coats, immediately began to coalesce around me.

Barricades had been set up not only along Fifth Avenue, but also along many of the side streets. Police officers ordered the heavy pedestrian traffic to advance through Saks — literally through the department store, passing between the makeup counters and scarf racks — to get from 50th Street to 49th. “Blame the tree,” one of the officers shouted, “not me!”

Yet for the most part, the people seemed happy to be there: They had come from all over the world to experience Holiday Season New York.

I was running late, however, and as I tried to make my way through the scrum, I found myself throwing elbows and cursing at the city. Only later that night, when I looked up at Times Square, did I stop to admire the museum that Manhattan has become. The hysterical wattage of the billboards had turned the night sky over Broadway a pale blue — a kind of artificial, perpetual dusk into which the New York I once knew has floated, never to return. I watch that New York float farther away all the time, marveling at the sparkle, but relieved to live in a different city.

Nathaniel Rich, an editor at The Paris Review, is the author of “The Mayor’s Tongue,” a novel to be published by Riverhead Books in April.

Now, About Your BMW

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

February 3, 2008

Now, About Your BMW

By LAWRENCE ULRICH

SOME customers waiting patiently for a new BMW have received unhappy news: 122 were totaled during a rough North Atlantic crossing that damaged 430 of the vehicles.

The Courage, a car carrier headed to New Jersey from a North Sea port in Germany, rolled in heavy winter seas on Jan. 2, breaking BMWs from their lashings and sending them pinballing around a cargo hold. The ship docked in Newark on Jan. 11.

“Once one car broke loose, it all started going downhill,” said Tom Plucinsky, a BMW spokesman. “They just beat each other to death.”

The smashed cars included 30 examples of one of the year’s most anticipated models: the high-performance M3 coupe and sedan. Mr. Plucinsky said the M3s were not customer models, but were designated for dealer introduction events.

The 732 BMWs aboard also included 3-, 5-, and 7-Series models, X3 sport utilities and the first 1 Series coupes for the United States. The 1 Series, a new model, goes on sale in March.

Mr. Plucinsky said BMW had contacted the customers affected. For models whose damage is less than 3 percent of its value, buyers can choose to accept a repaired car or a similar model, or have a new car built to order.

Repairable cars with more than 3 percent damage will be driven by company employees. They will eventually be resold as certified used cars, with full disclosure of their history.

BMW estimated that the retail value of the totaled cars was more than $6 million.

An Open and Shut Marriage

David Chelsea

February 3, 2008

Modern Love

An Open and Shut Marriage

By COLETTE DeDONATO

AT an upscale pub in our small Northwestern town, one of the mothers seated around our table made an indissoluble confession: she told us she had been having a very serious crush on a man who was not her husband. She said the crush bothered her. Besides making her feel guilty, it also made her unsure of the status of her marriage. As she spoke, red blotches formed around her neck.

Being new in town and newer still to this tradition of a ladies’ night out, I had little at stake in the relationship and felt free to question her about her potential indiscretion. I was also halfway through my second glass of pinot noir on an almost empty stomach.

“It doesn’t seem very realistic to be attracted to only one person for the rest of your life, does it?” I said, hoping to put her at ease.

“It doesn’t,” she said. “But the fact that I keep making excuses to go see this man makes me question my motives.”

“What are your motives?” I asked.

My question was met by silence. She either didn’t know or couldn’t form a response. So the rest of us quickly filled the void by musing about the different people we’ve had crushes on: the guy who makes our soy latte every morning, the local celebrity politician, the obviously gay tailor, the friend of a college-bound nephew.

Nearly all of us agreed it was O.K. to “crush out” on someone, and even to tell our partner or husband (or our couples therapist) about it in an effort to be honest, and thus mature, in our relationships. The unspoken assumption was that it was not O.K. to act on it.

Despite my general attitude of acceptance when it comes to people questioning their most troubling emotions, I’ve learned to tread carefully on the conjoined subjects of fidelity and monogamy. My experience tells me that it’s a minefield and that no one except Dr. Phil-inspired talk-show exhibitionists and the admittedly polyamorous are ready to talk openly about it.

I don’t belong to either of those groups. But, to be fair, I’ve given polyamory my best shot.

In graduate school, when my boyfriend then — a touchy-feely, anarchist performance artist type — announced he wanted to see other people because monogamy was “a bourgeois construct,” I reluctantly went along with him for about a year, thinking that dismantling the dominant paradigm was the right, countercultural thing to do.

Mostly what it did, however, was make me paranoid about getting a sexually transmitted disease, despite our practice of safe sex. I began to imagine every woman I encountered in his circle of friends as the one who might have had sex with him just hours before.

My respect for him dwindled as I viewed his need to see other women less as a political stance than simply his sexual overdrive combined with a lack of impulse control. We eventually split up, and I looked for someone who wanted to have an old-fashioned relationship. The emotional trafficking that being “poly” required was just too exhausting, using up energy I needed for school and two jobs. I saw no benefit, anyway: the men I broached the idea with were just freaked out by it.

Later, when I found the man I wanted to spend my life with, and he and I started talking about marriage, we discussed our worries of signing on to something that had an almost 50 percent failure rate. We wanted to believe in marriage as a viable option without being duped by the fairy tale expectations of it. I know people who have been married three and four times, and it always makes me wonder: Why keep marching down the aisle and making the same promises?

Historically, of course, marriage was a business arrangement, with infidelity (at least for men) being the acceptable loophole. It wasn’t until the 18th century that love gained credibility as a reason for marriage. And now, in the 21st century, marriage is supposed to do it all for both husband and wife — love, companionship, family and work — a supposedly one-size-fits-all answer to a couple’s every emotional and sexual need for 40, 50, even 60 years.

Skeptical of buying into such grandiose promises, we approached marriage with an open mind, knowing that we loved and trusted each other and that we were determined to be honest no matter what, even if that meant admitting that we might occasionally be attracted to other people.

Sublimating our inner desires seemed like a recipe for obsession and deceit. We were just trying to be realistic about an institution we had always viewed as being a little sanctimonious, one that made more sense when human life expectancy was about 43, and when, financially speaking, women needed to be taken care of.

So, several years into our marriage, when a good friend of mine told me that she had a crush on my husband (and I’d sort of figured that his interest in her photography career had developed into more of an interest in seeing all of her tattoos), I knew that all of our theorizing about what makes a successful life partnership was about to face its first real-life application.

I didn’t feel particularly threatened by this friend. I trusted her, and I never imagined her to be a woman for whom my husband would leave me. In fact, I never thought he would leave, period. I reasoned that since he and I could be so open with each other, our marriage must really be invincible. And if I were to give the two of them permission to “explore their feelings,” it would also give me a chance to dawdle in the feelings I’d developed for a colleague at work. We’d all take baby steps — nothing dramatic — and see how it went.

But we immediately faced logistical concerns. If my husband was out with her, what should I be doing? Did I need to plan my time with my colleague to coincide with the time he spent with her? Did my husband and I need to tell each other whenever we planned to spend time with the other person?

A FEW solid rules would have been helpful, but without knowing how either relationship might progress, we didn’t know how to set them. It seemed odd and presumptuous to be negotiating rules for relationships and situations that were themselves unknown and unpredictable. So what would the boundaries be? Was kissing allowed? More?

We knew lying was not an option. We had agreed that lying is what made it “cheating,” leading to hurt and distrust and causing the real damage to the relationship. But how much truth could we realistically handle? I wasn’t sure how much I really wanted to know about what they were doing.

As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about with me. My flirtation quickly died under the weight of my friend’s moral discomfort. After a few lunches he grew uneasy about the gray zone we had entered. There was one late evening of sushi and cocktails, but it was I who felt guilty and decided to go home so my husband wouldn’t be waiting and wondering. The next day my colleague called and told me he couldn’t do it anymore. His friends had advised him against the situation; he didn’t want to get hurt.

Meanwhile, my good friend and my husband were continuing to have good times taking pictures and going back to her apartment to develop them and continue their mild flirtation. Then one night, when it had gotten too late for my comfort zone, he called to say our Volvo wagon wouldn’t start. I knew the car to be unreliable, but I couldn’t deny a nagging doubt: Could he be lying about the car just to spend the night with her?

That, for me, was the breaking point. It didn’t matter if he was telling the truth. I doubted him anyway, so the result was the same. I further realized that I couldn’t handle the thought of them spending the night together, sleeping in the same bed, even in a Bert and Ernie arrangement. My imagination ran wild. I felt as if I were imploding.

What had I expected? That spending the night with her would send him running back to me? That honesty would override any feelings of possessiveness or hurt?

Several arguments and 10 therapy sessions later, we thanked each other for allowing that kind of creative romantic safari into our lives but vowed never to do it again. We weren’t bored with each other. And despite our ostensibly progressive notions about marriage, we were not impervious to the full range of human emotions — rage, jealousy, fear of abandonment — that tend to surface when we cross the boundaries of love.

As one might imagine, the good friend and I did not remain good friends. That bond was the weaker one, it turned out. She and I tried several times to talk it through in the hope of preserving our friendship, but we finally agreed that once the door had been left open, too many flies had come in and spoiled the ambience.

I’ve known many people who have had successful open marriages, and I admire their intentions — some of them, anyway. You have to want to go the distance on that emotional seesaw, and it takes great courage. You have to commit to spelling out every rule and consideration clearly and with great enunciation. You can’t just glide over the syllables.

Back at the pub, our ladies’ night out was breaking up, and I offered to walk the confessor home. I didn’t tell her about my experiences. Instead I asked what marriage meant to her. Could she let go of the “rules” and her expectations enough to at least be O.K. with everything she was feeling?

She didn’t know, but we both agreed that having a crush gives you a much-needed adrenaline rush. Somebody is treating you the way your spouse did oh-so-many years ago, looking into your eyes without wondering if you cleaned his favorite shirt, or paid the mortgage on time, or will turn out to be his mother. Looking at you with nothing but passion and a sense of possibility.

Tonight I’m going to try to look at my husband the same way. He’ll probably be watching one of our favorite shows, “Big Love,” in which case I’ll watch with him and we’ll laugh at the same lines. We love to laugh together. It keeps us sane.

Colette DeDonato lives in Oregon.

Today’s Papers

The Long and Winding Road

By Daniel Politi
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 6:23 A.M. E.T.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox lead with the latest from the Democratic presidential race. There was little time to rest after the biggest primary day in history as Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign claimed she came out on top becaues of her victories in big states, while Sen. Barack Obama’s aides pointed to his wins in more states as proof that he was the one who came out ahead. Clinton revealed that she had lent her campaign $5 million in late January and she asked supporters to give $3 million to her campaign over three days. Obama’s campaign gave word that he raised more than $3 million yesterday, on top of the $32 million he had raised in January. The Los Angeles Times goes with a two-story lead looking at the reasons behind Clinton’s victory in California and Sen. John McCain’s continuing problems with trying to get the conservative Republican base on his side. Some say the only way McCain can get their support is to pick a very conservative running mate.

USA Today leads with a dispatch from Mosul, where U.S. troops will probably have more trouble rooting out al-Qaida in Iraq because the militants have apparently learned from their mistakes and are cultivating better relationships with regular citizens. In Mosul, al-Qaida militants warn civilians before bomb attacks and are not enforcing strict Islamic laws, which is a marked contrast with how they acted in other parts of the country. This makes it less likely that the residents of Iraq’s third-largest city would want to join the U.S. military to fight the insurgents.

As Clinton and Obama get ready for the next phase of what will undoubtedly be a long contest for delegates, both campaigns are trying to describe themselves as the underdogs in the battle. But it’s clear that Clinton is losing ground in the battle for dollars, and the papers report that several members of her campaign staff have agreed to work without pay this month. The NYT points out that Clinton is in a tighter spot financially largely because of “fatigue” among her donors, who have been hit up for money since her Senate re-election campaign in 2006. Still, Obama said yesterday that Clinton had the clear advantage because of her well-known name and a slight edge in superdelegates.

There was probably no sweeter win for Clinton than California. There were predictions that the race would be close but she easily won the state thanks largely to the support of Latinos, who accounted for 30 percent of voters, and women. Obama tried to reach out to Latino voters by emphasizing his support for issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But some now think Obama’s assumption that Latinos would care deeply about licenses was mistaken and he could have received more traction by talking about education and the economy.

So, who won Tuesday? Depends on who you ask. As USAT notes, there were several different delegate counts going around yesterday because of the complicated formulas used by the Democrats that “could give a certified public accountant a migraine.” The WP cites the Associated Press numbers and says Clinton won 737 delegates yesterday and Obama got 699, with almost 300 still to be awarded. The NYT says Clinton has a slight edge with 892 delegates to Obama’s 716. The WSJ prefers to go with 1,000 delegates for Clinton and 902 for Obama. (Slate‘s Christopher Beam takes a look at the different numbers.)

Every day that passes seems to bring more questions about whether the Democratic contest will go on until the convention in August. The NYT reports that the party’s chairman, Howard Dean, came out yesterday to say that the candidates should do everything possible to prevent that scenario from materializing. Dean estimated there will be a nominee “in the middle of March or April” and emphasized that if one hasn’t been selected, “then we’re going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement.” What kind of arrangement Dean has in mind that would make either candidate want to drop out of such a long (and expensive) race isn’t clear. Everyone points to the likelihood that the candidates will continue trading victories in the upcoming states as Obama has an edge in the next few contests this month, but Clinton is favored to win more states in March.

Amazingly, the LAT is alone in fronting news that the White House said water-boarding is a legal interrogation tactic and President Bush could authorize its use in the future. The LAT says the statement came as a surprise, particularly since many don’t understand why the adminisration seems eager to open a debate about such a controversial issue it had previously refused to talk about and that many considered closed.

All the papers front a story or picture about the dozens of tornadoes that hit five Southern states and killed at least 55 people. Many expect the death toll to climb in what is being described as the deadliest tornado disaster in nearly a decade.

The WP fronts news that Senate Democrats failed to make progress on their stimulus package that is broader and more expensive than the one that was already approved by the House. After much back-and-forth, Democrats fell one vote short of the 60 needed to advance the bill as most Republicans stood together in opposing the measure. This makes it virtually certain that the House bill will pass Congress, although the Senate might still try to change some provisions in the package.

The NYT goes inside with a look at court documents made public yesterday that make clear the CIA destroyed the interrogation videotapes at a time when a federal judge was still actively seeking information about the interrogation of one of the al-Qaida operatives.

The New York City medical examiner announced yesterday that actor Heath Ledger died of an accidental “abuse of prescription medications.” The combination of six drugs, including painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, a sleeping pill, and an antihistamine, led to “acute intoxication.” Some speculated that perhaps Ledger had become addicted, and the LAT points out the actor had frequently talked about how he used prescription drugs. But, as the WSJ points out, doctors warn that “patients are often woefully unaware of the potential serious consequences of the additive effects of prescription medications.”

The NYT notes that, based on 2007 fund-raising figures, no one got a bigger bang for his buck than Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor won 156 delegates at a cost of approximately $45,000 each. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, spent $654,000 per delegate. But that’s chump change compared with Rep. Ron Paul, who has lined up five delegates at a cost of about $4 million each.

Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com

Trend Spotters,Romney Exits. ,Toddlers,Current State of Fashion,Maureen Dowd

Putting Trend Spotters on the Spot MAISON ET OBJET Paris

Richard Harbus for The New York Times (lights and Mr. Harbus); Nigel Dickinson for The New York Times (bowl)

Left: Vanessa Mitrani’s pierced vase; Center top: Bocci lights; Center bottom: a Friedemann Bühler bowl; Right: Jean-Philippe Prugnaud, a Parisian trend spotter

Nigel Dickinson for The New York Times

COLOR AND FANTASY For Lladró, the British design team Committee created figurines of a couple covered with pastel flowers

February 7, 2008

Putting Trend Spotters on the Spot

By SABINE ROTHMAN

MAISON ET OBJET, the semiannual home furnishings trade fair, which took place outside Paris last week, is one of the largest events of its kind in Europe and one of the most influential in terms of what new designs will make it to market.

So it is not surprising that editors of design magazines and others whose work involves understanding the vagaries of the home furnishings market flock to the show. Or that, once there, moving among more than 3,000 vendors spread out across 1.3 million square feet of exhibition space, many of them turn for guidance to the so-called Maison et Objet Observatory, a panel of architects, designers, stylists and trend forecasters who regularly produce a book and three product-focused installations for the fair to identify emerging trends.

But this year the theme for the installations was “dreamy,” and two of the three were as abstract as the quasi-poetic language that the observatory’s members generally use in their written trend assessments.

François Bernard, a Parisian home furnishings forecaster, presented a series of entirely white rooms with very few products from the show; the rooms were described on the show’s Web site as a place to “lose yourself and lose your bearings in the radical maximalism of a whiteness that resists overflow.” In one room, a white resin sculpture depicted a suite of Louis XV furniture being absorbed by a wall; in another, a ceiling-mounted video screen over a big white bed showed a slowly undulating red whale.

Elizabeth Leriche, a Paris style consultant and designer, tried to “promote new thinking about ways of consumption,” she said, with her observatory exhibit of one-off pieces and limited editions by artist-designers, including a park bench sprouting sinuous wood tendrils and tufted leather blobs that looked like melted furniture.

The one installation that showed a wide variety of products from the fair, by Vincent Grégoire of the Nelly Rodi trend forecasting agency in Paris, was something of a grab bag. It did not go far toward identifying any trend beyond “random combinations,” with its mix of glass vases constrained by metal cages, printed packing tape, large-scale fashion photographs and a pillow showing Margaret Thatcher.

“Faced with an unappealing daily existence and uncertain future,” text on the wall explained helpfully, “it’s time to strike a new attitude!”

In the absence of much practical direction from the official sources, and given the disparate merchandise visitors had to sort through in a few days (Jan. 25 to 29), the Maison et Objet seemed like a good opportunity to put the discipline of trend forecasting to the test.

Would journalists and forecasters at the show reach a consensus, independent of outside influences, about where things are headed, or would they pick out patterns that suited their own tastes, looking for “the trends you want to see,” as Michelle Ogundehin, the editor in chief of British Elle Decoration, put it?

Ms. Ogundehin and four others whose business it is to spot what’s coming next were asked to accompany a reporter on separate rounds of the show and to describe trends they were seeing.

Results of this exercise may surprise skeptics. Choosing different examples and using different words, the five broadly agreed on a few distinct currents in furnishings design and on some reasons behind them.

There were conflicting readings, too, of course, particularly in the realm of color . And there was quasi-poetic, abstract language worthy of the observatory.

But five hours with five forecasters was enough to persuade one skeptic that forecasting trends in the design world — finding order and meaning in the mishmash of consumer culture — is as much legitimate discipline as bogus science.

Honesty

“With what appears to be a recession, people are not moving, so they are not buying lots of furniture,” Ms. Ogundehin said early in her tour of the fair. “But they are making smaller purchases to update their houses” — purchases, she believes, that have to do with “value, care, and having things that mean something.”

In design, as in politics, we are apparently ready for things that embody what Ms. Ogundehin calls the new honesty. The term seems to refer to visible wood grain, for one thing, and evidence (or at least the suggestion) of the maker’s hand, for another.

As an example, she offered the Orizuru, or paper crane, a sculptural plywood chair from the Japanese Yamagata Koubou workshop folded like a half-finished piece of origami.

Michelle Lamb, the chairman of Marketing Directions, a forecasting company in Eden Prairie, Minn., that focuses on the home furnishings sector, was drawn to the same features on a smaller scale, in wood bowls by Friedemann Bühler of Germany.

Mr. Bühler’s surprisingly thin bowls, which Ms. Lamb described as “the eco trend being expressed freely in found wood,” are an earthy blend of raw material and refined craftsmanship, with vivid, fingerprintlike grain. Occasional star-shaped cutouts come as a result of removing knots or branches; there are no gratuitous decorative gestures.

Silk panels hand-painted in traditional wallpaper patterns from de Gournay, a British company, also charmed Ms. Ogundehin with their artisanal authenticity, as did tiny handmade porcelain bowls from Studio Potomak, a ceramics studio outside Venice.

Each sample featured a different colored glaze that had been swirled in the bottom of the bowl, leaving a pool of color at the bottom and a trail to the rim: honest evidence of their process.

The “look of the hand” is nowhere more in demand than in the luxury market, said Jean-Philippe Prugnaud, the president of the Mint Group, a buying consultancy with offices in Paris and Milan and retail clients like Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Right now, it’s hard to pinpoint one dominant design direction,” he said. “But things that are obviously well crafted with unusual combinations of materials are extremely desirable, since so much is mass-produced.”

He cited a group of little boxes made of metal, bronze, shell and stingray by the Paris designers Ria and Yiouri Augousti, and their new tables with semiprecious stones set into bronze.

At the hipper end of the style spectrum, Mr. Prugnaud was drawn to a line of suspension lights made of amorphous porcelain elements hand-molded by the Canadian firm Bocci, which, he said, expressed the same idea.

Libby Sellers, who runs a traveling London design gallery and is a former curator at that city’s Design Museum, also talked about honesty, pointing to the products and packaging of a year-old Danish company called Mater, which proclaims a philosophy of social responsibility based on the 10 principles of the United Nations‘ Global Compact.

As much as she liked Mater’s brass bowls and trays and wood-and-marble candelabra, the sustainably produced boxes they came in, printed with simple symbols announcing what was inside, where it was made and what it was made from, interested her most. “We don’t have such faith in the structures that run the world,” Ms. Sellers said. “So it’s nice to have some sense that someone is not trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

Not that all examples of the honesty trend were so aboveboard. Ms. Sellers also liked a line of outdoor furniture in lacy, powder-coated metal by Patricia Urquiola for Emu, an Italian manufacturer, based on a 1950s design from the company’s archives. She was particularly taken with the way Emu used advanced technology to build in a certain measure of variation from piece to piece, an approach she credits the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius with pioneering.

“It’s mass-produced,” Ms. Sellers said, “but they can add in quirk.”

Ms. Lamb, of Marketing Directions, noted another aspect of the cult of authenticity in new countercultural design, like the pierced glassware of a French designer named Vanessa Mitrani — glasses and carafes studded with rings like a young Goth’s tongue — or the NEO collection of knitted rubber bowls and pillows by Rosanna Contadini. In an era of homogeneous design and manipulative marketing, Ms. Lamb said, “they have resonance for young adults, especially when the pieces are so well designed and executed.”

Fantasy

It is not only through the rigors (or veneer) of honesty, though, that designers are rebelling against sameness and corporate culture; some are resorting to surrealism, Ms. Sellers observed.

Zaha Hadid‘s hugely overscaled planters for Serralunga, for instance, were nearly as dreamlike as the observatory’s morphing art-furniture. Ms. Sellers also offered the example of Lladró, the Spanish ceramics company known for kitschy figurines, which has drawn attention in recent seasons by asking young designers to reinterpret the pieces in its archives.

At Maison et Objet, the Lladró stand displayed a fanciful and somewhat uncanny series of figurines by the British design team Committee, in which a couple is slowly overtaken from head to toe with tiny pastel flowers.

There were also tiny boxes in pale blue that bore the impressions of Lladró figurine faces (taken from the molds used to make the figurines) on their tops.

Mr. Prugnaud, too, was interested in fantastical design, which he saw in the work of Jean Boggio, a French jewelry and furniture designer, for Franz, a Taiwanese manufacturer.

Mr. Boggio, who styles himself a créateur de rêves, or dream weaver, on his Web site, showed whimsical metal consoles and enormous ceramic vases bearing motifs of wildly stylized jungle leaves. “It’s Alice in Wonderland going through the looking glass,” Mr. Prugnaud said. “It’s Jean Cocteau‘s surreal Art Deco Orpheus. It’s objects that teach you without telling you.”

Color

“The metallic trend is so prevalent it has almost peaked, but not quite,” Ms. Lamb said, pointing out a sofa (unmissable, really) by Aimé-Cécil Noury and Pierre Dubois of the French design team Les Héritiers, which was covered in a brushed polyester-vinyl fabric embossed with a damask pattern and printed with silver ink.

Ms. Ogundehin agreed: “Last year we wrote about using metallic accents as a way to inject a jolt of gorgeousness into our homes. Now we’re seeing them everywhere, even in upholstery.”

And Mr. Prugnaud seemed almost to despair. “Things are so shiny they can’t get any shinier,” he said. “We’re in an age of narcissism. People want to see themselves literally as well as metaphorically in the things they own.”

Despite such definitive statements, metallic turns out not to be the only color idea in the air. Ms. Lamb spoke of her attraction to periwinkle-hued glass vessels by Anna Torfs, a Czech designer.

“The combination of purple and gray is an established trend, but we’re nowhere near finished exploring purples,” she said. “I’m looking at red-cast blues, blue reaching out to purple.”

Meanwhile, Caroline Till, a trends analyst with the Future Laboratory, an agency based in London, discerned “a decline in patterning, with large blocks of color and bright primary accents instead.” She said, “I’m seeing a lot of green, almost acidic, primary brights and fluorescents as accent colors.”

In fact, she added: “I’ve been seeing fuchsia and lime green for a while now. They started last year as accents. Now we’re seeing them used over entire pieces, and often together. It’s fresh and contemporary.”

It is the color discussion that could lead the skeptic back to questioning trend spotting as a science. Or at least into re-examining the arty work of the observatory, and of Mr. Bernard in particular, whose white rooms seem so easy for the practical-minded trend hunter to dismiss.

Their descriptions on the fair’s Web site — “a moment of domestic re-enchantment” and “another way of dreaming one’s inner life” — sound like trade-show hokum with a French accent.

But Mr. Bernard, who has interviewed many consumers about what they want in life, is quite serious. Behind the ethereal language is an earnest trend forecast, and what may be one of the more compelling responses to a globalized, oversaturated market offered at the fair.

“I’m trying to think what will happen next year, or the next next,” he said. “There are a lot of sunny colors now, which you’ll see if you walk these halls. But in the near future, we’ll have white at home, a blank canvas on which you could write something new for the future.”

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Mitt Romney announced his withdrawal from the presidential race at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Thursday.

Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Mitt Romney on Thursday in Washington after announcing that he is dropping out of the presidential race.

February 7, 2008

Romney Exits, Saying He Has to ‘Stand Aside for Our Party’

By JOHN SULLIVAN and MICHAEL LUO

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who sought to position himself as the true conservative choice for the Republican presidential nomination, announced Thursday afternoon that he had ended his campaign.

His chief rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, congratulated Mr. Romney on his efforts and reached out to conservative voters who had thrown their support to the former governor and whose support, Mr. McCain said, was “indispensable to the success of our party.”

Mr. Romney, who had vowed to press on despite disappointing results in the Super Tuesday primary contests, announced his decision to drop out at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

In a speech that touched on the messages of his campaign, Mr. Romney said he had come to his decision to help unify the Republican Party, and he charged that Democratic candidates, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, would not pursue the war in Iraq.

“Because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I have to stand aside for our party and our country,” he said.

Mr. Romney had hoped to use Tuesday’s results to narrow Mr. McCain’s lead. Instead, he saw Mr. McCain widen the lead at the same time that Mr. Romney’s campaign lost ground to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who racked up solid gains.

Mr. Huckabee, on his way to an appearance on “The Tyra Banks Show” in Manhattan, said Thursday afternoon that he hoped that Mr. Romney’s conservative supporters would back his campaign.

“I know that a lot of the establishment, Washington-type folks are going to be going with Senator McCain,” he said. “I understand that. but the people of this country need a choice. And right now, I am going to be their choice.”

Mr. Romney said he would have preferred to continue his campaign until the Republican convention.

“You are with me all the way to the convention,” he said before an enthusiastic crowd at the conference, hosted by the American Conservative Union. “Fight on, just like Ronald Reagan did in 1976.”

But by fighting to the convention, he said, “I’d forestall the launch of a national campaign and, frankly, I’d make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.”

Mr. Romney faced a series of enormous challenges in the campaign, not the least of which was trying to reconcile the moderate political views he espoused as the governor of Massachusetts, a liberal state, with the more conservative views he championed on the campaign. That tension — and his decision to change positions on a number of emotionally charged issues, including renouncing his past support for abortion rights — led his rivals to continually lambaste him as a flip-flopper.

Then there was the question of his Mormon religion. After the candidacy of Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, took off in Iowa, where it was fueled by evangelical voters, Mr. Romney was moved to give a major speech in Texas defending his faith and denouncing the rise of secularism.

And although Mr. Romney, a former management consultant, ran what many described as a textbook campaign, he never really recovered after failing to execute the original strategy of winning the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and using those wins to build momentum. Iowa went to Mr. Huckabee, and New Hampshire to Mr. McCain, who tried to paint himself as a straight talker to contrast with Mr. Romney’s flexibility.

As the campaign progressed, Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain exchanged increasingly bitter attacks. Mr. Romney charged that Mr. McCain was “outside the mainstream of conservative political thought.” Mr. McCain pointedly noted that Mr. Romney had changed his position on important issues for many conservative Republicans, including as abortion rights and gun control.

Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference several hours after Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain sought to heal some of the wounds inflicted in the primary battle. Acknowledging the differences he had with many conservatives on such issues as immigration, Mr. McCain repeatedly said his overall political record was conservative. Before a crowd whose enthusiasm seemed to increase as his speech continued, Mr. McCain listed those of his positions — including those on abortion, gun control, tax cuts and the Iraq war — that he said were in line with conservative values.

“I am proud, very proud, to have come to public office as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” he said.

Noting that the differences within the Republican Party were far smaller than those the party had with the Democratic front-runners, he called on conservative Republicans to unite in support of his campaign.

“This election is going to be about big things, not small things” he said.

Mr. Romney, in his speech, emphasized his agreement with Mr. McCain’s position that the United States needed to continue to pursue the war in Iraq. Arguing that the war is a critical part of the country’s battle against terrorism, Mr. Romney said the Democratic candidates “would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequences of that would be devastating.”

Coping With the Caveman in the Crib

Nola Lopez

February 5, 2008

Well

Coping With the Caveman in the Crib

By TARA PARKER-POPE

If there is such a person as a “baby whisperer,” it is the pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, whose uncanny ability to quiet crying babies became the best-selling book “The Happiest Baby on the Block.”

Dr. Karp’s method, endorsed by child advocates and demonstrated in television appearances and a DVD version of his book, shows fussy babies who are quickly, almost eerily soothed by a combination of tight swaddling, loud shushing and swinging, which he says mimics the sensations of the womb.

Now Dr. Karp, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, has turned his attention to the toddler years, that explosive period of development when children learn language, motor skills and problem solving, among other things. The rapid pace at which all these changes occur is nothing short of astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming to little brains. A wailing baby is nothing compared with the defiant behavior and tantrums common among toddlers.

In his latest book, “The Happiest Toddler on the Block,” Dr. Karp tries to teach parents the skills to communicate with and soothe tantrum-prone children. In doing so, however, he redefines what being a toddler means. In his view, toddlers are not just small people. In fact, for all practical purposes, they’re not even small Homo sapiens.

Dr. Karp notes that in terms of brain development, a toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven, instinctive creature that has yet to develop the thinking skills that define modern humans. Logic and persuasion, common tools of modern parenting, “are meaningless to a Neanderthal,” Dr. Karp says.

The challenge for parents is learning how to communicate with the caveman in the crib. “All of us get more primitive when we get upset, that’s why they call it ‘going ape,’ ” Dr. Karp says. “But toddlers start out primitive, so when they get upset, they go Jurassic on you.”

Improving the ways parents cope with crying and tantrums isn’t just a matter of convenience. “The No. 1 precipitant to child abuse is the kid who cries and gets upset and doesn’t settle down and whines and whines,” says Robert Fox, professor of psychology at Marquette University and director of the behavior clinic at Penfield Children’s Center in Milwaukee. “It’s a real vulnerable situation for abuse.”

Dr. Karp’s baby program has been endorsed by several government health agencies, leaders of Prevent Child Abuse America and others. Dr. Karp will discuss his toddler program in an address to the Early Head Start program, which provides early childhood services to low-income families.

But Dr. Karp’s method of toddler communication is not for the self-conscious. It involves bringing yourself, both mentally and physically, down to a child’s level when he or she is upset. The goal is not to give in to a child’s demands, but to communicate in a child’s own language of “toddler-ese.”

This means using short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again.

For instance, a toddler throwing a tantrum over a cookie might wail, “I want it. I want it. I want cookie now.”

Often, a parent will adopt a soothing tone saying, “No, honey, you have to wait until after dinner for a cookie.”

Such a response will, almost certainly, make matters worse. “It’s loving, logical and reasonable,” notes Dr. Karp. “And it’s infuriating to a toddler. Now they have to say it over harder and louder to get you to understand.”

Dr. Karp adopts a soothing, childlike voice to demonstrate how to respond to the toddler’s cookie demands.

“You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ “

It’s hard to imagine an adult talking like this in a public place. But Dr. Karp notes that this same form of “active listening” is a method adults use all the time. The goal is not simply to repeat words but to make it clear that you hear someone’s complaint. “If you were upset and fuming mad, I might say, ‘I know. I know. I know. I get it. I’m really really sorry. I’m sorry.’ That sounds like gibberish out of context,” he says.

On his DVD, Dr. Karp demonstrates the method. Within seconds, teary-eyed toddlers calm and look at him quizzically as he repeats their concerns back at them. Once the child has calmed, a parent can explain the reason for saying no, offer the child comfort and a happy alternative to the original demand.

Dr. Karp also offers methods for teaching children patience, and he suggests regularly giving children small victories — like winning at a game of wrestling. “If you give them these little victories all day long, when you want them to do something for you, they’re much more likely to do it.”

Sometimes, excessive tantrums can signal an underlying health problem, so parents with a difficult child should consult with a pediatrician.

“The thing about toddlers is that they are uncivilized,” Dr. Karp says. “Our job is to civilize them, to teach them to say please and thank you, don’t spit and scratch and don’t pee anywhere you want. These are the jobs you have with a toddler.”

E-mail: well@nytimes.com.

The Vanishing Point Current State of Fashion

Eric Johnson for The New York Times

NOW YOU SEE THEM Sascha Kooienga, left, and Artem Emelianov represent the current silhouette on the men’s wear runway

February 7, 2008

Fashion Diary

The Vanishing Point

By GUY TREBAY

CREDIT Hedi Slimane or blame him. The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean. The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes.

Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.

Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.

The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.

“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”

Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana’s look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.

“The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago,” Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.

“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.

“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.”

What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.

“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast.”

For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. “When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50,” said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.

“That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male,” Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.

“At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy’s department,” Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. “I’m not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now,” Mr Nguyen said.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 ½ in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.

Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.

Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.

“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore.”

In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”

For Patrik Ervell’s show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. “We had to measure their thighs,” Mr. Brown said.

For models like Demián Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.

Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”

Darkness and Light Maureen Dowd Decision 2008

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

February 6, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Darkness and Light

By MAUREEN DOWD

LOS ANGELES

Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:

Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.

I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.

Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

“I think we should never be derisive about somebody who has the ability to inspire,” Senator McCaskill told David Gregory on MSNBC on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve had some dark days in this democracy over the last seven years, and today the sun is out. It is shining brightly. I watch these kids, these old and young, these black and white, 20,000 of them, pour into our dome in St. Louis Saturday night, and they feel good about being an American right now. And I think that’s something that we have to capture.”

Tuesday’s voting showed only that the voters, like moviegoers, don’t want a pat ending. Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro. Her argument to the Democratic base has gone from a subtext of “You owe me,” or more precisely, “Bill owes me and you owe him,” to a subtext of “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”

Hillary’s strategist Mark Penn argued last week that because the voters have “very limited information” about Obama, the Republican attack machine would tear him down and he would lose the support of independents. Then Penn tried to point the way to negative information on Obama, just to show that Obama wouldn’t be able to survive Republicans pointing the way to negative information.

As she talked Sunday to George Stephanopoulos, a former director of the formidable Clinton war room, Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble.

“I have been through these Republican attacks over and over and over again, and I believe that I’ve demonstrated that much to the dismay of the Republicans, I not only can survive, but thrive,” she said.

And on Tuesday night she told supporters, “Let me be clear: I won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia, as well. His visceral reaction to Obama — from the “fairy tale” line to the inappropriate Jesse Jackson comparison — is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill’s legacy is protected. If Obama wins, he’ll be seen as the closest thing to J. F. K. since J. F. K. And J. F. K. is Bill’s hero.

For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic? Will he have the muscle to take on the opposition, from Billary to the Republican hate machine to the terrorists overseas?

“I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I’m tough,” he told a crowd of more than 15,000 in Hartford the other night, with the Kennedys looking on. “I’m from Chicago.”

The relentless Hillary has been the reticent Obama’s tutor in the Political School for Scandal. He is learning how to take a punch and give one back. When she presents her mythic narrative, the dragon she has slain is the Republican attack machine. Obama told me he doesn’t think about mythic narratives, and Tuesday night in Chicago he was reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”

But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.

Microsoft Yahoo Buyout,Lipstick Jungle,Georgia Refinery Blast,Novel in Las Vegas,Federal Reserve

Microsoft and The Yahoo Buyout

February 2, 2008

Talking Business

A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is

By JOE NOCERA

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

This may seem like an odd way to characterize a company that just announced its willingness to plunk down $44.6 billion to make its first hostile takeover ever. A company that will probably generate somewhere around $60 billion in revenue when its fiscal year ends in June. A company whose market share in its two core products is still so high — despite recent inroads by a certain flashy competitor — that it qualifies as a monopoly.

But this is Microsoft we’re talking about, and if its proposed acquisition of Yahoo signals anything, it serves as a confirmation that Microsoft’s glory days are in the past. Having failed to challenge Google where it matters most — in online advertising — it has been reduced to bulking up by buying Google’s nearest but still distant competitor. In many ways, the company has become exactly what Bill Gates used to fear the most — sluggish, bureaucratic, slow to respond to new forms of competition — just as I.B.M. was when Microsoft convinced that era’s tech behemoth to use Microsoft’s operating system in its new personal computer.

The I.B.M. PC was introduced in the summer of 1981. Here we are nearly 27 years later, and Microsoft’s core product is still its operating system, now called Windows — that and its suite of applications, called Office, that run on Windows. They generate billions of dollars annually for the company. The most recent version of Windows, released almost exactly a year ago, has already been installed in 100 million computers. Yet in technology, 27 years is a lifetime, and there is a powerful sense that while it has spent enormous effort over the years protecting its monopoly, the world has passed it by. In particular, the technology world now centers on the Internet, where Google reigns supreme, and Microsoft has never succeeded in making serious inroads. Years ago, it started its own online service, MSN. It has made efforts to develop a search engine that could compete with Google’s. It has developed an advertising infrastructure to both place ads on other Web sites —another Google specialty—and to generate its own ad revenues. In every case, it has come up a day late and a dollar short. For instance, only 4 percent of Internet searches worldwide are done with Microsoft’s engine, compared with over 65 percent done with Google’s.

“Of its five major divisions,” said Brent Thill, the software analyst for Citigroup, “the online division is the only one that loses money. They are software engineers at Microsoft,” he continued, “and their DNA is very different from the DNA of someone who builds online assets. It’s just a different mind-set.”

Besides, the old strategies that once worked so well for Microsoft — strategies that worked when the world still revolved around Windows — have no place in this new world. In the mid-1990s, when Netscape posed a threat to Microsoft’s hegemony, Microsoft created its own competing browser, Internet Explorer, made it an integral part of Windows, and used its desktop monopoly to fight back. Eventually, Netscape was reduced to also-ran status — and the Justice Department took Microsoft to court on antitrust violations.

Today, Microsoft lacks both the weaponry and the nimbleness to compete with Google. Its operating system monopoly gives it no advantages in this battle. People can use Microsoft’s operating system and browser to get to the Internet — and to Google — or they can use Apple‘s. It truly doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, with every new Internet fad, like the current frenzy over social networking, Microsoft is invariably caught flat-footed and has to race to just get a foot in the game. But that’s always the way it is when companies get big — and it is why real innovation always comes from small companies that don’t have a predetermined mind-set, or monopoly profits to protect.

Will the purchase of Yahoo — assuming it goes through, which is far from a foregone conclusion — be a game-changer for Microsoft? Anything is possible, I suppose. I spoke to a number of technology experts Friday who were convinced that it made some sense. Andy Kessler, the technology investor and writer, called it “a smart offensive move.” Mark Anderson, the president of Strategic News Service, said, “They are getting the No. 2 online guy in the ad business at a good time and a good price.” Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group told me that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a bid for Yahoo — “and it makes sense that it’s Microsoft.”

But let’s be honest here. Microsoft isn’t exactly buying a high-flier. Even after a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Google would still have twice the search market of its competitor. Its ad placement service is superior to either Microsoft’s or Yahoo’s. And Yahoo has struggled enormously in the last few years. It, too, could have been early in social networking; its chat rooms could have lent themselves easily to something that might have rivaled Facebook. Just like Microsoft, it missed the opportunity. It is quite clearly a company that has lost its way, and the question of whether Microsoft can refocus into a viable Google competitor, well, let’s just say I’m dubious.

I also have to wonder about what Yahoo gets out of the deal — other than a premium for its depressed stock. “Does it help their brand?” asked Mark Mahaney, who covers Yahoo for Citigroup. “No. Does it give them better search technology? No. Does it give them a better ad sales force? No. I suspect this is the question being asked in Yahoo’s boardroom right now,” he added.

What was most striking to me Friday was Microsoft’s own expectations for the deal. To put it bluntly, they are awfully low. When I spoke to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president for strategic partnership — and the man who had been driving much of its online efforts in recent years — he never once talked about crushing the competition, or even catching up.

A Yahoo deal, he told me, “will be good for consumers who want another search engine, Web publishers who want another ad placement service, and syndicated advertisers” — who also want a choice other than Google. He continued: “Because of Google’s heavy volume and its algorithms, they are a very efficient buy. But people are rooting for a credible No. 2. We got lots of calls today from Web sites and others saying, ‘We’re with you.’ “

Was he really saying that Microsoft would be content as a “credible No. 2?” I had a hard time believing it. But when I pushed him on this point, he reiterated it. “Online advertising revenues are going to be $80 billion within a couple of years,” he said. (They’re about $50 billion now.) “That is going to mean a tremendous opportunity to all players. There has to be a place for another credible player.”

I think back to the fall of 2005, when Bill Gates visited The New York Times, and an editor asked him if Microsoft “would do to Google what you did to Netscape?”

“Nah,” laughed Mr. Gates, “we’ll do something different.” This ain’t it.

Six Dead in Georgia Refinery Blast

Carl Elmore/Savannah Morning News via European Pressphoto Agency

An aerial view of the Imperial Sugar plant in Port Wentworth, Ga.

February 8, 2008

Six Dead in Georgia Refinery Blast

By JOHN HOLUSHA and RACHEL POMERANCE

Six bodies were recovered in the ruins of a sugar refinery near Savannah, Ga., that was rocked by an explosion Thursday evening and burned all night.

John Oxendine, the state’s fire and insurance commissioner confirmed in a broadcast interview that search crews had found the remains of six workers in the lower levels of the Imperial Sugar plant where they had evidently sought shelter.

Earlier in the day police and fire officials made it clear they did not expect to find any survivors when they said the actions at the plant had been converted from a rescue effort to one of recovery. In addition to the dead, who had earlier been listed as missing, dozens of others remained hospitalized, many of them in critical condition with extensive burns.

Michael Berkow, the chief of the Savannah Metropolitan Police Department, said that authorities planned to meet with the families of the six workers.

Officials said efforts at the plant on the Savannah River in Port Wentworth said recovery efforts were impeded by the unstable condition of the plant, parts of which were still burning.

Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Lynn of the Coast Guard said the river was closed to ship traffic from the Port of Savannah, about six miles downstream, while the river was searched for possible victims. None had been found. Charles Middleton, the Savannah fire chief, said the “instability of the building may hamper recovery operations, but they are anxious to get the process moving.” He said he did not want to expose rescue crews to any “more danger than absolutely necessary.”

Eighteen of the more than 40 plant workers injured in the blast and fire were airlifted to the Joseph H. Still Burn Center in Augusta, Ga., for treatment, said Beth Frits, a spokeswoman for the hospital. As of Friday morning, 15 were listed in critical condition and three were listed as serious, Ms. Frits said.

Some 30 to 35 additional patients were being treated locally, and burn specialists from medical centers outside the city were being sent to help. Dr. Jay Goldstein, an emergency room doctor at Memorial University Medical Center said in a televised interview that most of the plant workers had “significant burns.”

Officials had not determined what caused the explosion, which happened shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday night, but said they were suspicious of sugar dust, which like grain dust, can be volatile.

“There was fire all over the building,” said Nakishya Hill, a machine operator who said she escaped from the third floor of the refinery, according to The Associated Press.

“All I know is, I heard a loud boom and everything came down,” said Ms. Hill, who was uninjured except for blisters on her elbow. “All I could do when I got down was take off running.”

Kelly Fields, 40, who worked the night shift at Imperial Sugar for five months, handling 10-pound bags of sugar, was among the victims with burns over 70 percent of his body.

Just two months ago, Mr. Fields was married at a church in northern Georgia by Glenn Burnsed, 36, a former pastor. Mr. Fields, was airlifted from Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah last night to the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, where Mr. Burnsed told reporters that his brother-in-law lies bandaged, unconscious, and in between surgeries.

Mr. Burnsed said he and Mr. Fields’s boss, have taken to teasing the victim, in the hope of encouraging him.

“Me and Jimmy are here, and we got a lot of stuff for you to do,” he described them as saying. “He’s got to hurry” back to work. “If any of that’s getting through, I hope that helps,” Mr. Burnsed said.

“It’s just difficult to see them bound up and laying there with a lot of stuff in and out of them,” he said, noting that not all the victims’ family members here wanted to see their loved ones.

But for Mr. Burnsed, who struck an optimistic chord in relaying his relative’s state, his faith and the nascent community of survivors’ relatives are a lifeline.

“I think for us and a lot of the families involved, we’re leaning on our faith,” Mr. Burnsed said. “We’re Christians, and we’re calling on our Christian faith to say a lot of prayers, asking God to give the doctors wisdom. I think you see kind of a community forming in the waiting room. I don’t know if camaraderie is the right word, but a lot of helping each other out and sharing each other’s stories about how their loved one is doing.”

Mr. Burnsed said he and his wife had signed a three-month lease on an apartment near the hospital today because they were told to expect that Mr. Fields might be here that long.

Dr. Fred Mullins, the medical director at the burn center, said 17 others from the sugar plant were patients at his center, 15 of them in critical condition.

Dr. Mullins said most patients with such severe burns usually require a year to several years of outpatient rehabilitation to strengthen muscles and optimize their range of motion. .

He went on to say that when someone’s body is 70 percent burned, that means nearly everything but their feet and ankles are involved. It means the person uses up their “protein stores” to fight the burns and becomes very weak. Someone very muscular will leave the hospital very thin, Dr. Mullins said.

Emile Delegram, 58, a board member of the Southeastern Firefighters’ Burn Foundation, was at the hospital looking for family members of burn victims and giving them his business card. He talked to Mr. Burnsed, about supporting his rental costs for his stay in Augusta.

The foundation has set up a center near the hospital with food, computers and a rest area for the victims’ families, he said, adding that it is working with more than 60 churches that to bring meals to the families. Mr. Delegram estimated that four to six people were at the hospital to accompany each patient.

The plant is owned by Imperial Sugar and is known in Savannah as the Dixie Crystals plant. Imperial markets some of the country’s leading consumer brands, Imperial, Dixie Crystals and Holly, as well as supplying sugar and sweetener products to industrial food manufacturers.

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta. Rachel Pomerance contributed from Augusta, Ga., and John Hulusha from New York.

Characters Adrift on the Fast Track to Nowhere A Novel Set in Las Vegas

Suzanne Barker

Charles Bock

William P. O’Donnell/The New York Times

February 7, 2008

Books of The Times

Characters Adrift on the Fast Track to Nowhere

By JANET MASLIN

Skip to next paragraph

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN

By Charles Bock

417 pages. Random House. $25.

Among the lost souls drifting through Charles Bock’s avidly seedy Las Vegas novel, “Beautiful Children,” there is a loner named Kenny. There are three things about Kenny that the reader needs to know.

First of all, he has an inner life that is embodied by the detritus in his car. “He saw segments of tangled ribbons from cassette tapes,” Mr. Bock writes, as Kenny gazes around. “He saw loose magazine subscription cards and the hardened remains of deformed french fries.” There are diner place mats, burger wrappers and the detached metal spine of a spiral notebook. Ominously, there are also a couple of shotgun casings buried in this mess.

Second: Kenny earns the playful nickname “Chester the Molester” from the 12-year-old Newell Ewing, a bratty, disaffected kid who devastates his parents when he chooses Kenny’s company over theirs — and then fails to come home. “He’s gonna take me out tonight and abuse me,” Newell jokingly tells his mother just before he vanishes. “He told me so.”

Third: Kenny has hidden talents. Along with the book’s other principals he shares a love for all that is lurid, cartoonish and profane about popular culture, with comic books and pornography at the red-hot center of his enthusiasm. So Kenny has taken an image from one of his father’s stash of hard-core magazines. He has focused on a woman’s face. And he has carefully, fastidiously reproduced it as a pencil drawing.

Kenny has done this with such disproportionate skill and tenderness that the image, while impressive, is way out of whack with its squalid subject matter. Mr. Bock has written his ambitious debut novel in much the same way.

“Beautiful Children” purports to see something new in the woozy, wasted lives of its principals, most of whom are rootless young drifters on a fast track to nowhere. It eagerly amplifies even the most negligible things they do. Using sleaze as his trustiest resource Mr. Bock establishes a workaday honky-tonk world that is only marginally different from the stereotypical Las Vegas fantasyland.

With a slight shift of emphasis, for instance, he can describe Newell’s mother, Lorraine, and stress something other than her gaudy days as a showgirl. Instead, in what passes for authenticity and grit (Mr. Bock grew up in the city’s equivalent of a real world), he can explain what happened after Lorraine quit dancing, dropped into domesticity, lost her son and began compulsively taking in stray cats.

“Revealed in her eyes,” the book says, with one of its not infrequent, not subversive dashes of soap opera, “a pain that would not end.”

Mr. Bock puts most of his emphasis where the smart money goes: on tattoos, piercings, comics, stripping, drugs, nonconsensual sex and various shocking states of delirium. (“She was pretty baked, her thoughts vomiting forth, shooting straight from her brain into her mouth.”) He appears to have done considerable research in order to get these details right.

So his book’s most compelling characters include Cheri Blossom, a stripper whose stage act is admiringly described. (“Remaining perfectly still while completely naked and surrounded by a roomful of horny guys, this took a certain amount of poise.”) This book is intrigued, in seemingly equal measure, that Cheri peels off a girl’s Catholic school uniform for the delectation of her customers — and that she imagines she is being guided toward moral redemption by a nun.

Cheri’s boyfriend, who goes by the name of Ponyboy and has so many studs in his face that they resemble pimples (though what he’d really like for personal decoration is a triple-A battery stuck through his nose), is another strongly envisioned figure — with another kind of conventional characterization hidden beneath his hipster trappings. Ponyboy is devoted to Cheri, but he can’t resist the opportunity to exploit her. When he winds up behaving badly even by the decadent standards that prevail here, Ponyboy seems guided more by the book’s desperate need for dramatic momentum than by any human failing.

And “Beautiful Children” has no real built-in trajectory. Beyond knowing that his characters are en route to trouble, Mr. Bock has few clear destinations in mind for any of them. This book’s structure is so slack that it seems like a string of overlapping individual sketches, some much better than others. At his most revealing Mr. Bock creates a bravura riff for a drifter named Lestat, after Anne Rice‘s vampire. (One place he has drifted haplessly is to New Orleans, in vain search of his favorite author.)

Late in the book Lestat gets lost in the midst of a desert concert, an evocatively described panorama with “fans bouncing up and down like human bingo balls in a popper” and mass anxiety in the air. After he wanders through both this literal landscape and his own interior, he becomes Mr. Bock’s most eloquent stand-in.

“Lestat wanted to be someplace safe and warm where he could write down everything he had ever seen,” the book says. “He wanted to write a book that would change the world.”

With “Beautiful Children” Mr. Bock expresses that same desire. He even makes fun of it: one character here is a famous, jaded comic-book illustrator, Bing Beiderbixxe, whose cheesy ideas include a variation on the “Beautiful Children” plot.

But in the end Mr. Bock knows more about easy anomie than hard-won resolution. “Each and every one of us moves toward fates we cannot possibly know,” he writes in conclusion. “Each of us struggles against the pain of the world, even as we are doomed to join it.” And each character in this covertly mundane novel winds up asking some version of Kenny’s ultimate and pointless question: “Just what am I supposed to do now?”

Making Lipstick Jungle

Chatting with Brooke Shields about growing up famous.

By Andrew McCarthy
Updated Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 7:32 A.M. E.T.

From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: It’s a Miracle This Show Got Off the Ground
Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 5:34 P.M. E.T.

Nov. 8, 2007—I am sitting at a table in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, about to do a table read of the first two episodes of Lipstick Jungle, a new television show for NBC based on Candace Bushnell’s novel of the same name. At any given point in the last six months, I would have told you that the odds of my sitting here were 50-50—at best. Candace is the person responsible for creating Sex and the City, and because of that, there has been a lot of time and attention focused on Lipstick Jungle in the hope that lightning might strike twice. But the history of this project has been fraught—even by television’s fickle standards.

We shot the pilot in March, were picked up in May, and were scheduled to begin shooting in late July. Then, just over a week before our start date, I got off a plane and checked my messages; there were calls from my agent, my manager, and Tim Busfield, the man responsible for the show’s day-to-day operation. I knew I hadn’t been fired; if that were the case, I would have received only one sheepish call from whomever had drawn the short straw. But something was no doubt up.

As it turned out, a few weeks earlier, NBC had changed leadership, and the new regime decided to replace the writer/producer on the show. The upshot: We were “shutting down” while a new team could be put in place. For the next few weeks, phone calls and rumors flew as everyone speculated on what had happened and what it meant for the future of the show. Eventually a new writer/producer was hired, and we were told that the show would go forward.

No one I spoke with actually believed that.

There are a lot of ways to bury a show, and having been disappointed more times than I care to admit over the last 25 years, it was easy to see what was happening—or so I concluded with defensive pessimism. Then, one of the lead actresses announced she was pregnant, and the show was officially pushed to late November.

I looked for other work.

But as the weeks turned to months, word occasionally filtered out that scripts were being written, and by the time the writers went on strike, just a few days before the table read, we were sitting on six production-draft scripts, enough to take us to early February before we ran out of material. Earlier this week, I had the obligatory medical exam—a ritual of insurance protocol. Next came a wardrobe fitting and camera test—during which Candace announced, “I wouldn’t fuck you in those shoes,” and then walked out for a cigarette—and now here we are, in early November, sitting around three tables pushed together. And there is no one here more delighted about it than me. As an actor, you know when a character suits you well, and the truth is, no part has fit me this well since I did St. Elmo’s Fire 20 years ago. The ideal meeting of actor and role does not come along that often, and so when it does, you want to grab at it.

Traditionally, table reads are notoriously dull affairs in which the director, writers, actors, and producers, along with various crew members, hear the script aloud for the first time. It can be a stressful moment—up to this point, the show has just been words on a page, and it can be nerve-wracking when it suddenly begins to take on three-dimensional life. Typically, actors react in one of two fashions: They either mumble their lines into their laps, or, worse, “perform” them with a gusto that I always find embarrassing. For years I had been a mumbler (most young actors are), until somewhere along the line I realized that I was going to be judged by everyone anyway, so I might as well speak like a normal human and be heard by the 20 or so assembled in the chairs lining the walls around us. After a brief introduction by Tim, the large cast, crammed close at tables cluttered with scripts and coffee, launches in. Perhaps it’s the relief of finally beginning after such a long and uncertain path, but there is a gathering momentum in the room as the pages turn. The scripts read very well—they’re funny, and sharp, and poignant—afterward, the room is filled with excited chatter.

The only thing left to do now is shoot.

From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: Things You Never Want To Hear From Your Director
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, at 7:41 AM ET

Nov. 16, 2007—I’ve always said that on a shoot, there is the first day, and then there is every other day, and it’s best to just get the first one out of the way. But maybe because I already played the part of Joe Bennett—the billionaire who has the world by the tail—when we shot the pilot eight months ago, there are none of the usual first-day nerves this time. Like many actors I know, my mundane, doomsday anxieties about work (will this be the time I can’t pull it off? Will I be fired?) can manifest as anxieties about physical appearance, which means the first morning in any hair and makeup trailer can get complicated. But today I glide through the rituals with surprising ease.

The vanities of film and television acting—and more specifically, my inability to let them go, to get past them—I continue to find very disquieting. But there is not an actor I know, male or female, who is not at the mirror’s mercy. As men, we have it relatively easy: Just don’t get too fat, and if you can keep your hair, even better. Women are subject to much more scrutiny. It’s no wonder so few ladies in Hollywood are able to move their foreheads.

The scene to be shot is a fairly straightforward one in which I drop off lunch at my girlfriend Victory’s apartment. Victory, as embodied by Lindsay Price, is a fashion designer and one of the three powerful women around whom the show centers. Wendy, a movie studio head, and Nico, a magazine editor, played by Brooke Shields and Kim Raver, respectively, round out the trio. When we shot the pilot, Lindsay and I discovered that we had an easy, workable chemistry, which is something you have no idea of until you’re on the spot. Acting with a new partner is a lot like a blind date. You either click or you don’t. When you do, it can carry you a long way, and when you don’t, no matter how hard you work, the struggle always shows. Talent is great, but chemistry just works.

After a few technical rehearsals, the director, Tim Busfield, calls, “Action” from the far side of the sound stage. The days of the director sitting under the camera and watching an actor’s performance with the naked eye are long over. Usually he can be found at the distant end of a thin, winding cable that leads to a remote corner, where he watches the performance on a small, often grainy, monitor while wearing headphones to hear the dialogue. I have become so accustomed to this setup (which I initially found unnerving in its remoteness) that on the rare occasion when a director does sit and watch my work up close and in person, I feel scrutinized and self-conscious. “Go back behind your box and leave me alone!” I want to shout.

The thing that most directors fail to realize is that during the time between “action” and “cut,” the actor is in a vulnerable state (hopefully), and the first words spoken after the take is over fall on very sensitive ears. I have seen offhanded feedback—”Cut. Again. Right away!”—affect an actor like a cold slap of water, whereas a few words of simple encouragement—”Cut. Okay, good. Let’s do just one more.”—will wash over and ease him into a more relaxed state, helping him to feel like he is a part of a whole, instead of an isolated fool in front of the camera with everyone waiting for him to get it right so they can go to lunch. It’s just simple psychology, but you’d be surprised how few directors put themselves in the actor’s shoes enough to realize it.

(Nearly as bad as negative feedback is false praise. Nothing makes me feel more unsafe in the hands of a director than when he goes up to an actor and overenthuses, “Great, great!” for what anyone can see is just plain bad acting. In a case like this, when he approaches with his next suggestion, you simply say, “OK, good idea”—and then ignore him and protect yourself. It’s not a very satisfying way to work, and it happens more often than you might think.)

Perhaps directors are just too busy. It was only after I had directed a film myself that I realized the director is rarely, if ever, entirely focused on what the actor is doing. He is worried about myriad other things: After all, he has a movie—or in this case, 42 minutes of television—to get in the can. And the motivating force behind many of his decisions is the need to expedite things so he can make his day. But a good director, like an overextended but attentive parent, will catch the important moments.

So naturally, when Tim calls out, “Cut. Great! Print. Moving on” after just the first take, I proclaim him one of the good ones, and after a few more shots from different angles, I’m back in the van on my way home after a few less-than-grueling hours.

From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: The Acting Skills of New York City
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2008, at 8:48 AM ET

Nov. 20, 2007—One of the unique things about being an actor based in New York for so long is my relationship with the city: Certain locations are forever set in my mind as touchstones. I can never walk past the boat pond in Central Park without thinking of the day when I pushed a young kid into the water for a scene during the shooting of Weekend at Bernie’s, and it’s impossible for me to go to Coney Island and not remember kissing Mary Stuart Masterson under the boardwalk in a scene from Heaven Help Us, and I always think of that weird indie film I shot in a warehouse way over in the far western reaches of 42^nd Street whenever I’m in that neighborhood. The town is peppered with these memories, and whenever I pass one such spot, I feel a small, private flash of pride and twinge of gratitude.

Today we are on a very congested Upper East Side. And something you need to always keep in mind when shooting in the city is, if you fight it—the noise, the traffic, the chaos—you can’t win. But when you give in, it’s your best friend. It’s the extra character, often the most important (and interesting) one in the scene. And it can reveal things that the text alone cannot. Today, for example, we’re shooting my side of a phone conversation. (We shot Lindsay’s half the other day in the studio, and I’m chatting now on the phone with the script supervisor who is reading Lindsay’s lines to me from over by the monitor.) There is nothing particularly memorable about the scene—I’m just inviting her to dinner—and after a rehearsal in which I simply walk down the sidewalk talking into my cell, I wonder aloud if it might not be more interesting for me to cross the street during the conversation. We try it, and as I cross, I stop in the middle of the road to chat. Cars pile up behind me and drivers honk and shout. Not only is New York—in all its glory—brought into the scene, but the moment reveals a lot about what kind of a guy my character is. (As in, it’s Joe’s world.) And a scene that was simply functional becomes playful, funny, and revealing.

There are certain types of scenes that remind me of, and reignite, the infatuation with filmmaking I felt when I starting making my living as an actor, nearly 100 jobs ago. One that has always thrilled me is the night shoot on the streets of Manhattan, and next up we shoot Lindsay and me taking an evening stroll under the old-fashioned street globes of Central Park. It is a scene that is at once romantic and sophisticated and simple—the kind of thing that Hollywood has done so well since the movies began nearly 100 years ago. It’s the kind of scenario that people can identify with—and yet it all somehow seems so much better on-screen.

Our crew has lit up the facades of the brownstones along East 79^th Street, and since cinematographers love their light shimmering, the pavement glistens with the fresh sparkle of a wet-down. New York has its best face on, and the city feels much like it does when one is first falling in love—there’s a sense in the air that “It’s all for us.” Once again, Manhattan has done most of the work, and the only way to fuck it up would be to try too hard. So after a few takes in which Lindsay and I meander arm in arm, chatting freely, everything falls into place, Tim calls out “Cut. Print. Wrap,” and Fifth Avenue and 79^th Street is added to my list of private landmarks.

From: Andrew McCarthy
Subject: Chatting With Brooke Shields About Growing Up Famous
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 7:32 AM ET

Nov. 30, 2007—New director today. It’s a phenomenon unique to episodic television; every episode has a new man or woman behind the camera. It’s an odd thing, really—the one variable is the person at the center of the wheel—but it works because, in television at least, once the machine is up and running, the director doesn’t have as strong a voice in the outcome as you might think. Once actors have done a particular show for a while, they tend to become “director-proof.” After all, they live with the characters week in and week out, sometimes for years, and the director is often just passing through. But he still needs to come in and take charge without stepping on toes, not always the easiest thing in the world.

I remember being a guest star on a show and watching as a prima donna lead actor poisoned the atmosphere on an entire set. The director could do very little. But none of that ego/fear exists on Lipstick Jungle, at least not yet. Everyone is getting on well, and the work is flowing fairly easily and quickly. The other night, “the girls,” as Brooke, Kim, and Lindsay are called around the set, lit the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and announced that the show will begin airing on Feb. 7 at 10 p.m., in the E.R. time slot. The best way to know how much the network believes in a show is to look at the time slot it assigns. This news is better than anyone had hoped, and there is a quiet excitement that feels in keeping with what is happening day in and day out.

After the scene I shoot today—Lindsay and I chattering away in the back of a limo—I run into Brooke in the makeup room. I mention to her that I was in the Guggenheim the other day and saw a famous photograph of her that was taken when she was a young child. In it, she is standing in a tub of water, naked. Her body is that of a prepubescent girl, but her face and hair are made up to appear much older. It is a provocative, unsettling image that was made famous when Richard Prince photographed the original photograph, making a piece of appropriated art out of it—that is what now hangs in the museum. “I remember that day,” she tells me. “It didn’t seem like anything, taking that picture. Weird.” We launch into a discussion of fame and how it affects and alters people, especially the young, before they are even aware of it.

I mention to her that only in hindsight was I really conscious of the degree to which I had become popular figure for a certain generation. And we both acknowledge there was no great plan at work in our careers. “I just took what came next,” she tells me, and I nod my head in agreement. But despite the accidental nature of this kind of success, mutations and repercussions inevitably follow. Early in her career, Brooke became a unique figure of youthful sexuality and exploitation, from Pretty Baby and the Calvin Klein ads onward, something she simply shrugs off: “It’s just the way my life was,” she says. “I never thought about it.”

As we talk, I become conscious that the usual chatter that fills the makeup room has fallen silent as people bend an ear. And I’m made aware that this is a conversation that can only be had by people who, however different the details of their specific lives, share an innate understanding and a mutuality of experience that is fairly unusual.

During our conversation, Brooke has been going through a pile of faded clippings—comic strips and articles and photos from her youth—in which she was featured, both flatteringly and otherwise. It seems she was clearing out a drawer at home and is deciding what to throw out and what she wants to keep, in case her children might someday be interested in what kind of an existence their mother had way back when. It’s a different life, and one she seems at home in—I like her a lot.

Andrew McCarthy plays Joe Bennett on Lipstick Jungle.

O Wise Bank, What Do We Do? (No Fibbing Now) Federal Reserve

Dave Plunkert

January 27, 2008

Exposed

O Wise Bank, What Do We Do? (No Fibbing Now)

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

THE Federal Reserve’s surprise early-morning interest-rate cut last Tuesday has calmed, at least for now, a stock market storm that began in the Pacific Rim and roared around the world a day earlier. It was the Fed doing what it does best — simultaneously reducing the cost of money for the nation’s financial institutions and signaling to investors that it would act quickly to counter fears of a consumer-led recession.

But for all its power, the Fed cannot change this troubling fact: trust in much of the financial system — banks, brokerage houses, ratings agencies, bond insurers, regulators — has been severely damaged by the subprime mortgage crisis. And that damage cannot be reversed with a quick cut in interest rates.

It is not just a matter of attracting fresh capital from overseas to replace some of the $100 billion lost or written off so far — a figure that is sure to grow. The underlying problem for some of the world’s largest financial firms is restoring confidence, among big institutional investors and 401(k) nest-egg holders alike. That’s what has to happen if the capital markets are to run smoothly over the long term.

It is easy to see why the executives and directors of blue-chip firms like Merrill Lynch and Citigroup lost sight of the importance of risk management and vigilant oversight. Their companies have been prodigious profit machines for so long that complacency had set in.

For generations, while other industries experienced booms and busts, financial services pretty much kept chugging along, making money off the swings and shifts in the economy. Standard & Poor’s index analysts said 2001 was the only down year for financial sector earnings since they began collecting data in the late 1980s. Even the recession of 1990 did not interrupt the industry’s rising profits.

But analysts estimate that financial company profits fell 25 percent in 2007 (the year’s actual numbers aren’t yet in), and financial stocks experienced a significant decline, losing 21 percent of their value, the biggest drop since 1990.

Richard E. Sylla, professor of market history at New York University‘s Stern School of Business, said one had to go back to the Great Depression, a period of regular bank failures and relentlessly falling stock prices, to find a time when losses at a broad swath of financial firms were as profound as they were last year.

“I don’t think it will be as bad this time because we have better management by the Fed,” he said. “But people are much more skeptical of the wisdom of these banks now. There will be less trust.”

The Federal Reserve that investors have learned to rely on so heavily was created after the Panic of 1907, a classic bank run that began when the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York could not satisfy its depositors’ calls for their money. Like many panics, this one began with the ruin of a single speculator, F. Augustus Heinze, who had tried to corner the market in United Copper Company shares.

His failure might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that Mr. Heinze was president of a bank and deeply involved in the world of New York finance. One of his business associates was the president of Knickerbocker Trust and when that relationship emerged, the bank’s depositors clamored for their money. One day in October, Knickerbocker tellers paid out more than $8 million in three hours, then had to close its doors.

The financier J. P. Morgan stepped in, asking a committee of bankers to examine the trust’s books. He decided not to bail it out, choosing instead to help another institution, Trust Company of America, that was less troubled. Later, Mr. Morgan persuaded bankers to put up $25 million to rescue problem banks and trust companies. The crisis abated.

With the exception of the Depression, which saw the failure of thousands of small banks unable to withstand demands from depositors, panics have been rare since the Fed’s creation in 1913 set up a national system of banks serving as fiscal agents of the United States Treasury. One of the Fed’s marching orders is to protect the nation against such liquidity crises. Lowering interest rates and injecting money into the system are powerful tools because they help skittish banks get back to the business of lending.

Warding off a credit crisis like the one created by the lax lending of recent years is quite a different matter. The Fed cannot turn a bad mortgage loan into a good one. And it may not be able to convince investors that their money is safe in institutions whose risk management was so lax that their shareholders have absorbed billions in losses.

Indeed, while the Fed’s rate cut soothed investors, it treated only a symptom of the ailing markets, not the ailment itself. That illness is the loose lending that produced complicated securities whose risks were vastly underestimated by the institutions that bought them.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the current woes, and a reason that this crisis is unfolding in slow motion, is the inability of these sophisticated institutions to assign accurate values to their holdings. Morgan Stanley shocked investors last month when, just a few weeks after estimating its mortgage-related write-downs at $3.7 billion, it added another $5.7 billion to the figure.

Firms have had difficulty computing their losses because the securities central to this mess are complex, even incomprehensible. A share of stock is a stake in a business. But a mortgage security includes thousands of loans, some more risky than others.

Investors who bought these securities clearly did not know what they were buying; they relied on credit rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings to tell them whether their stakes were risky or not. But the rating agencies were disastrously wrong in their risk assessments and spent late 2007 downgrading securities they had recently rated as solidly AAA. Their reputations have been tarnished.

“In the latter part of the 1970s and early 80s we had the problems of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico not paying their debts,” said the economist Henry Kaufman. “Those were kind of nice, isolated items and could be clearly defined. They weren’t as opaque and they weren’t as heterogeneous as the problems in the credit market now.”

Even though the credit crisis has been unfolding for almost a year, the complexity of the securities and the fact that their ownership is not easily tracked means new losses are still being tallied. Just last week, Credit Suisse analysts said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored buyers of home mortgages, may face losses of $16 billion because of declines in values of subprime mortgages on their books.

Last November, Mike Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities, estimated that losses from falling values of subprime mortgages could reach $400 billion. But that figure does not include losses in other areas of the credit market, like those that may crop up in prime mortgage loans or corporate debt.

In other words, it is likely to take many more months to plumb this well of losses. And it will far exceed the $150 billion federal stimulus plan being hashed out in Washington.

“The financial markets have become more and more opaque and so we don’t know enough about where the weaknesses are and what the magnitude of those weaknesses may be,” Mr. Kaufman said. “So far the Federal Reserve and other supervisory authorities have done little about removing the opaqueness and setting new ground rules for financial disclosure. And I have not heard a call from Congress for an investigation where it will ask the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal and state banking regulators, ‘What did you miss and why did you miss it?’ “

Certainly, greater disclosure of the risks in these complex securities and the institutions that hold them is in order. And investors must be confident that the values assigned to these holdings reflect market reality. So far, no one has come up with a plan to correct these market shortcomings.

“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders six years ago. Unfortunately, this crisis’s outgoing tide has exposed some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. Naked truths like these are never a pretty sight. And even after the tide comes back in, they are not likely to be soon forgotten.

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN,Israel bomb in Syria?,Bond Markets ,Who’s Website,Exxon Profit

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN A Novel Set In Las Vegas
Rodgio Corral
February 3, 2008
Leaving Las Vegas
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Skip to next paragraph
BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
By Charles Bock.
417 pp. Random House. $25.
Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, spent much of his childhood behind the counter of his parents’ shop, staring out at desperate adults as they hocked their most precious possessions in hopes of restoring their luck. “From the back of the store,” he recalls on his Web site, “I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved — to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone.”
After he left town, ending up on the East Coast for an M.F.A., Bock retained his searing memories. Now in his late 30s, he has spent a decade transforming them into his first novel, “Beautiful Children.” In it, he brings together the intersecting lives and innermost thoughts of parents and adolescents, strippers and pornographers, runaways and addicts, gamblers and comic-book illustrators, setting them against the neon-lit, heat-parched backdrop of Nevada, where “high walls and gated communities” join together in the night, “shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean,” and the colored towers of the Vegas Strip resemble a “distant row of glowing toys.” What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo.
Like a whirling roulette wheel, “Beautiful Children” presents a mesmerizing blur. Imagine each vivid slash of color as a character, with his or her own impetus toward loss and stubborn striving. Bock slows or stops the wheel at will, bringing each slot into saturated individual focus: “The lens zooms in, then draws back.” There are far too many to describe in detail — a grieving salesman, cold-shouldered by his wife, consoling himself with porn at the office; a slender nameless teenager known only as “the girl with the shaved head,” who has a near-terminal case of attitude and seeks perilous thrills at a desert rock concert; a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies; a midget convenience-store clerk; a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips. So let’s fix on just one: Ponyboy, a buff, tattooed, opportunistic wastrel, salivated over by drugged teenage girls as “Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful,” and leered at by an obese porn distributor nicknamed Jabba the Hutt.
At the age of 20, Ponyboy pictures himself as a “pimped out Jedi” knight with a “kung fu grip” as he delivers X-rated videos to porn shops by mountain bike. He revels in the whine of the tattooer’s drill each time he gets new ink: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravangza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.”
Bock’s evocation of experiences most people will (mercifully) never share, and his depiction of each man, woman and child’s personal mythology is ravishing and raw. Each time he sets the wheel spinning, the mind races, tracking memories of distinct images amid the whir. As in a casino, all sense of time — and of day or night — disappears, as we wait to see where the ball will land.
The story revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old on a hot Nevada night. The boy, Newell, is the son of Lorraine Ewing, a prudish former showgirl, and her husband, Lincoln, a casino sales rep who gave up his dream of playing with the Dodgers when the “halfhearted low fives” of his teammates showed him he would never cut it: “Lincoln had the curse of being good enough to see just how much better he needed to be.” Trapped in his “own personal cage,” he lacks the will to rein in his son’s rebellion.
“You hit a certain point in your life, fact is, you clemently rejoice in your son’s truancy, you actually want your child out on the town, disobeying orders, breaking his curfew,” Lincoln tells himself. “Tasting his first beer. Chasing a good time. Trying to eat the world.” Sometimes, Lincoln rationalizes, in order to bond with a child, you have to let him go. But what if your child goes and, like thousands of American kids each year, doesn’t come back? What if, many months later, the last proof you have of his existence is a washed-out image of a “slouching, unexpressive child,” Photoshopped and “circulated in e-mail attachments, faxes and flyers,” tacked up in “arcades and student unions and youth hostels; in post offices and convenience stores and drop-in centers for the homeless and indigent,” his age eventually replaced by his date of birth because “nobody can say how long a child will be missing.”
Newell’s mother torments herself, endlessly revisiting her son’s room, wondering what clues she missed: “How were you supposed to know? A 12-year-old boy is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm. Saying no when any idiot could see the answer was yes. If every boy with a short attention span and a propensity for smart remarks abandoned his life, who would be left?”
Newell vanishes on a Saturday night during a sullen joyride with his greasy-haired teenage outcast friend, Kenny, whom he bullies and patronizes. As Kenny drives, Newell cracks open the window, looking for passersby to blast with a stolen fire extinguisher and thinking of all the things he wants to be when he grows up: “jet-setting billionaire secret agent with a heart of stone; superhero who sneaks around in darkness and comes up behind terrorists and slits their throats; international jewel thief on a Harley with mounted laser guns.”
Children don’t understand the reality of the future. “Adulthood,” Bock writes, “with all its responsibilities and implications, is as impenetrable to a child as Martian trigonometry. That is one of the beauties of youth. And it is why someone has to be there, vigilant.” The fact that adults can’t always be vigilant — can’t anticipate the moment when the kid they’re trying not to alienate will make the awful, wrong decision — is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this splendid, disturbing novel. As Bock also shows, adults can’t even protect themselves from awful, wrong decisions.
Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin’ Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, “Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.” Newell isn’t impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe’s ironies, he’s bored. “Honestly, it wasn’t exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe,” he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn. “From the looks of things, Newell wasn’t alone in this opinion. The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced.”
Reading that scene, I remembered the time, last fall, when I unwittingly stumbled on Charles Bock, reading from this book at a now-defunct club called Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction. Bock had chosen a selection about the girl with the shaved head and the attitude, and as he spoke, transmitting her self-consciousness, slick with the clichés that are as much a part of a teenage girl’s wardrobe as lip gloss, I couldn’t anticipate the art that lay behind the larger work. I pouted like Newell, didn’t get it. Coming across the scene again in the novel, I sheepishly saw that its “limitations” were only the natural ones of a girl who could be no wiser, at 15 or 16, than she was.
In “Beautiful Children,” Bock’s vision and voice create a fictional landscape as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival — illustrating what he calls “the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won.”
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

What did Israel bomb in Syria?

Annals of National Security
A Strike in the Dark
What did Israel bomb in Syria?
by Seymour M. Hersh February 11, 2008
Israel and the U.S. have avoided comment on press reports about a nuclear facility.
Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—”is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”
It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”
However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.
A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—”nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:

How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?

He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”
When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—”before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”
Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.
But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.
Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—”fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—”we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—”all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won. And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.” ?
ILLUSTRATION: GUY BILLOUT

Pete Townsend and The Who’s Website
Cultural happenings in New York and elsewhere, both online and off.
February 8, 2008
Who’s on First
The Who may be a classic-rock dinosaur, but when it comes to the Internet, its front man, Pete Townshend, was an early adopter. Which is putting it mildly: some reports have him claiming that he, in Al Gore fashion, invented it. He’s also had trouble with the law over his surfing habits. Lately, he’s been working with his girlfriend, the singer Rachel Fuller, to produce a live Internet festival this summer called Atticfest. And now it looks like his other bandmates are getting onboard—sort of. Roger Daltrey has posted the following message on the band’s Web site:
Welcome to The Who’s first online home. I feel about as useful as a pork chop in a synagogue with all this Internet bollocks. I suppose it keeps millions of people in virtual conversation, which saves them getting too burned by reality, but as you may have gathered I’m not a big fan of it. I’m always ready to be won over though and will endeavour to give it my best shot to keep it interesting.
It’s a bit of an empty room here at the moment (not all the furniture’s arrived yet) but it’s a start, which will evolve and grow to be a useful resource for you to keep up with what The Who is up to. And it’s great to have our music and our history as a band and as individuals in one place. Even if it is virtual.
I hope you enjoy it. But do me a favour; leave the screen turned off sometimes. Go out. Get a life.
Be lucky,
Roger
In terms of following Daltrey’s advice, it appears that Fuller, who used to have an Internet music show called “In the Attic,” in which she travelled around in a nineteen-fifties Airstream trailer and interviewed musicians, has given up that effort. Her Web site for the show has been shut down.—John Donohue
John Donohue | Night Life | Permalink

Exxon Sets Profit Record: $40.6 Billion Last Year
February 2, 2008
By JAD MOUAWAD
By any measure, Exxon Mobil‘s performance last year was a blowout.
The company reported Friday that it beat its own record for the highest profits ever recorded by any company, with net income rising 3 percent, to $40.6 billion, thanks to surging oil prices. The company’s sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.
Exxon Mobil earned more than $1,287 of profit for every second of 2007.
The company also had its most profitable quarter ever. It said net income rose 14 percent, to $11.7 billion, or $2.13 a share, in the last three months of the year. The company handily beat analysts’ expectations of $1.95 a share, after missing targets in the last two quarters.
Like most oil companies, Exxon benefited from a near doubling of oil prices, as well as higher demand for gasoline last year. Crude oil prices rose from a low of around $50 a barrel in early 2007 to almost $100 by the end of the year — the biggest jump in oil prices in any one year.
“Exxon sets the gold standard for the industry,” said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Company in New York.
Oil companies have all reported strong profits in recent days. Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, said Friday that its profits rose 9 percent last year, to $18.7 billion; Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday reported net income for 2007 of $31 billion, up 23 percent and the largest figure ever for a British company.
The backlash against the oil industry, which has periodically intensified as gasoline prices have risen in recent years, was predictably swift on Friday.
One advocacy group, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, called the profits “unjustifiable.” Some politicians said Congress should rescind the tax breaks awarded two years ago to encourage oil companies to increase their investments in the United States and raise domestic production.
“Congratulations to Exxon Mobil and Chevron — for reminding Americans why they cringe every time they pull into a gas station,” said Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York.
Exxon vigorously defended itself against claims it was responsible for the rise in oil prices. Anticipating a reaction, Exxon has been running advertisements that highlight the size of the investments it makes to find and develop energy resources — more than $80 billion from 2002 to 2006, with an additional $20 billion planned for 2008. The company says that in the next two decades, energy demand is expected to grow by 40 percent.
“Our earnings reflect the size of our business,” Kenneth P. Cohen, Exxon’s vice president for public affairs, said on a conference call with journalists. “We hope people will focus on the reality of the challenge we are facing.”
Given the darkening prospects for the American economy, which may be headed toward a recession, some analysts said oil company profits might soon reach a peak. Oil prices could fall this year if an economic slowdown reduces energy consumption in the United States, the world’s biggest oil consumer.
Such concerns have pushed oil futures prices down about 10 percent since the beginning of the year. Oil fell 3 percent, to $88.96 a barrel, on Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Exxon shares fell a half-percent, to $85.95.
Some analysts said high oil prices, and the record profits they create, were masking growing difficulties at many of the major Western oil giants. Faced with resurgent national oil companies — like PetroChina, Petrobras in Brazil, or Gazprom in Russia — the Western companies are having a hard time increasing production and renewing reserves.
As oil prices increase, countries like Russia and Venezuela have tightened the screws on foreign investors in recent years, limiting access to energy resources or demanding a bigger share of the oil revenue. At the same time, many of the traditional production regions, like the North Sea and Alaska, are slowly drying up.
Western majors, which once dominated the global energy business, now control only about 6 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Last year, PetroChina overtook Exxon as the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.
Recently, a quarrel over a major new field in Kazakhstan was resolved after an international consortium, which included Exxon, allowed the Kazakh national oil company to double its stake in the multibillion-dollar venture. In Venezuela, Conoco pulled out of a large heavy oil project last summer after failing to agree on new and much more restrictive terms with the government of President Hugo Chávez. Exxon has filed for arbitration in a similar case.
Speaking at an industry conference last month, Tim Cejka, the president of Exxon’s exploration business, acknowledged that access to oil fields was becoming increasingly challenging. But he said that the global oil industry has been through similar periods of restricted access.
“Access comes in cycles,” Mr. Cejka said, “and I have got to admit, it’s tough right now.”
Excluding acquisitions, Exxon was the only major international oil company with a reserve replacement rate exceeding 100 percent from 2004 to 2006, meaning it found more than one barrel for each barrel it produced, according to a report by Moody’s Investors Service, the rating agency. Exxon said it would release its reserve replacement figures this month.
Exxon increased its hydrocarbon production in the fourth quarter by 1 percent, thanks to growing natural gas output from projects in Qatar. Natural gas production rose 12 percent in the fourth quarter, to 10.4 billion cubic feet a day. Oil production fell by 6 percent in the last quarter, to 2.5 million barrels a day. Because of the structure of some of its production-sharing contracts in Africa, Exxon is entitled to fewer oil barrels as prices rise.
Exxon also spent $35.6 billion for share buybacks and dividends last year, $3 billion more than in 2006.
The OPEC cartel, which was meeting in Vienna on Friday, left its production levels unchanged, resisting pressure from developing nations to pump more oil into the global economy.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is set to meet again next month, and the cartel signaled it would be ready to cut production then to make up for a seasonal slowdown in demand in the second quarter. OPEC’s actions mean the cartel is determined to keep prices from falling below $80 a barrel, according to energy experts.
OPEC said in a statement that the uncertainties in the global economy required “vigilant attention to their impact on key market fundamentals.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The Crisis In Bond Markets
The Financial Page
by James Surowiecki February 11, 2008
If the ongoing turmoil in the world’s financial markets has made anything clear, it’s that the list of things that can go wrong in those markets is a very long one. Month after month, it seems, another potentially disastrous problem rises to the surface. The latest looming crisis is the possible implosion of a group of companies called monoline insurers. If you haven’t heard of monoline insurers, don’t worry: until recently, few people, even on Wall Street, were all that interested in them. Yet their problems have become a serious threat to global markets. Rumors that monoline insurers, like M.B.I.A. and Ambac, were in serious trouble helped spark the vast market sell-off that prompted the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cut two weeks ago, and, only a few days later, rumors of a government-orchestrated bailout of these companies set off a six-hundred-point rally in the Dow.
Monoline insurers do a straightforward job: they insure securities—guaranteeing, for instance, that if a bond defaults they’ll cover the interest and the principal. Historically, this was a fairly sleepy business; these companies got their start by insuring municipal bonds, which rarely default, and initially they confined themselves to bonds with relatively predictable risks, which were easy to put a price on. Unfortunately, a sleepy, straightforward business wasn’t good enough for the insurers. Like everyone else in recent years, they wanted to cash in on the housing and lending boom. In order to expand, they started insuring the complex securities that Wall Street created by packaging mortgages, including subprime ones, for investors. This was a lucrative business—M.B.I.A.’s revenues rose nearly a hundred and forty per cent between 2001 and 2006—but it rested on a false assumption: that the insurers knew how risky these securities really were. They didn’t. Instead, they gravely underestimated how likely the loans were to go bad, which meant that they didn’t charge enough for the insurance they were offering, and didn’t put away enough to cover the claims. They’re now on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in potential losses, and some estimates suggest that they’ll need more than a hundred billion to restore themselves to health.
Obviously, this is bad news for the insurers—at one point, M.B.I.A.’s and Ambac’s stock prices were down more than ninety per cent from their all-time highs—but it’s also very dangerous for credit markets as a whole. This is because of a peculiar feature of bond insurance: insurers’ credit ratings get automatically applied to any bond they insure. M.B.I.A. and Ambac have enjoyed the highest rating possible, AAA. As a result, any bond they insured, no matter how junky, became an AAA security, which meant access to more investors and a generally lower interest rate. The problem is that this process works in reverse, too. If the insurers lose their AAA ratings—credit agencies have made clear that both companies are at risk of this, and one agency has already downgraded Ambac to AA—then the bonds they’ve insured will lose their ratings as well, which will leave investors holding billions upon billions in assets worth a lot less than they thought. That’s why so many people on Wall Street are pushing for a bailout for the insurers. It may be an abandonment of free-market principles, but no one has ever accused the Street of putting principle above profit.
Normally when companies make bad decisions and fail to deliver value, it’s just their workers and investors who suffer. But monoline insurers’ desire to grab as much new business as they could, risks be damned, quickly radiated across global markets and will have huge consequences for millions of people who have never heard of M.B.I.A. or Ambac. The situation illustrates a fundamental paradox of today’s financial system: it’s bigger than ever, but terrible decisions by just a few companies—not even very big companies, at that—can make the entire edifice totter.
In that sense, the potential collapse of monoline insurers looks like a classic example of what the sociologist Charles Perrow called a “normal accident.” In examining disasters like the Challenger explosion and the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, Perrow argued that while the events were unforeseeable they were also, in some sense, inevitable, because of the complexity and the interconnectedness of the systems involved. When you have systems with lots of moving parts, he said, some of them are bound to fail. And if they are tightly linked to one another—as in our current financial system—then the failure of just a few parts cascades through the system. In essence, the more complicated and intertwined the system is, the smaller the margin of safety.
Today, as financial markets become ever more complex, these kinds of unanticipated ripple effects are more common—think of the havoc wrought a couple of weeks ago when the activities of one rogue French trader came to light. In the past thirty years, thanks to the combination of globalization, deregulation, and the increase in computing power, we have seen an explosion in financial innovation. This innovation has had all kinds of benefits—making cheap capital available to companies and individuals who previously couldn’t get it, allowing risk to be more efficiently allocated, and widening the range of potential investments. On a day-to-day level, it may even have lowered volatility in the markets and helped make the real economy more stable. The problem is that these improvements have been accompanied by more frequent systemic breakdowns. It may be that investors accept periodic disasters as a price worth paying for the innovations of modern finance, but now is probably not the best time to ask them about it. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

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Month: February 2008

Where You Going With That Monet?

White Men Jumped

How Obama won over key Clinton supporters in Wisconsin, and why it matters.

Totally Spent

Susan Sontag’s final wish

I Love You, but You Love Meat

Put Another File in the Jukebox, Baby

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location

The Big Steal

Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well

To Catch a Thief

Needing a Hail Mary, Fans Find a Monastery

Sex in the City

Mom: Britney Spears resting at L.A. hospital

Playing It Safe in Las Vegas

Google Works to Torpedo Microsoft Bid for Yahoo

In the Name of the Father

More Fun Than Root Canals? It’s the Dental Vacation

His City, Lost and Found

Now, About Your BMW

An Open and Shut Marriage

The Long and Winding Road

Putting Trend Spotters on the Spot

Romney Exits, Saying He Has to ‘Stand Aside for Our Party’

Coping With the Caveman in the Crib

The Vanishing Point

Darkness and Light

A Giant Bid That Shows How Tired the Giant Is

Six Dead in Georgia Refinery Blast

Characters Adrift on the Fast Track to Nowhere

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN

Making Lipstick Jungle

Chatting with Brooke Shields about growing up famous.

O Wise Bank, What Do We Do? (No Fibbing Now)

Leaving Las Vegas

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN

Annals of National Security

A Strike in the Dark

What did Israel bomb in Syria?

by Seymour M. Hersh February 11, 2008

ILLUSTRATION: GUY BILLOUT

Cultural happenings in New York and elsewhere, both online and off.

February 8, 2008

Who’s on First

By JAD MOUAWAD

The Financial Page

by James Surowiecki February 11, 2008

ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

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