Month: April 2011

  • Why a Magazine is Like a Wristwatch

     

     
     

    I spend a lot of time worrying about how magazines—and one magazine in particular—will fare in a world of ubiquitous WiFi and e-readers, and recently I got the chance to put some of those thoughts into words as a panelist at the Association of Writers and Writer’s Programs big annual convention here in Washington:

    Like most of you, I got tons of catalogues and sales brochures in the mail during the last Christmas season. There’s something odd about the ones I’m showing you. These are wristwatches. Pages and pages of lavish ads for wristwatches. That’s very curious. After all, nowadays we all have cell phones that show us the time. We don’t need watches. Yet apparently, they’re still a big business.
     
    So let me introduce myself. I am a wristwatch. Or, more accurately, a wristwatch maker. Okay, so I’m really the editor of a print magazine—the media world’s equivalent of a wristwatch.
     
    Now, if you’re a wristwatch-maker and cell phones come along, you have some choices to make. You could go into the cell phone business. But that doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Or you could drastically reduce the quality and price of your watches—dumb them down—in order to sell more of them. Also not a good idea. Actually, it looks like it’s really not such a bad thing to be a Rolex in a cell phone world. A fancy watch isn’t just a device for telling time. But I don’t think I’d want to be a mass-market watch, like Timex.
     
    So it appears that the only logical thing to do is to go on making Rolexes or Patek-Philippes or whatever while trying to adapt to the new era. Maybe you even make your watches more luxurious and expensive to distinguish them from cell phones, even as you do other things to cope with the cell phone challenge.
     
    Since the WQ has been pretty successful in the past, my first reaction to the digital age is to keep doing what we’ve been doing at least as well as we’ve done it in the past, and maybe even better—making the magazine more intellectually and aesthetically luxurious. If we could afford it, I would make the magazine more physically luxurious, with nicer paper and color illustrations. Because I think print magazines like mine are already akin to luxury products, and in the future they will become even more so. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than being the print equivalent of a Timex—a newspaper, for example, or a weekly magazine.
     
    What about those cell phones? What about the Web? We’re out there. We just redesigned our Web site for what seems like the umpteenth time. We have a blog, a Facebook page, an e-newsletter, we’re rolling out a digital edition, we’re on the Nook, we have a Twitter account—I Twitter too (@stevelagerfeld), and I really like it. We have video and a few podcasts.
     
    So that’s my second reaction. This is great stuff. I don’t know where it’s leading, and I may not like everything about it, but, frankly, I’m still a little agog over it. I still remember the first day I ventured out on the Internet with a colleague—staring at that little blinking green cursor. It was memorable. I think when print magazines venture out on the Web, they have to do it with the same excitement and intensity and joy that they bring to print.
     
    There are only five of us on the editorial staff of the WQ, and we’re all very involved in the Web site, but often it comes down to three of us—me, another middle-aged editor, and an assistant editor who’s in her twenties. In a lot of places, the editor would just hand it over to the twenty-something and say, “You handle it.” I really value what she and the others have to say, but in the end the site speaks for the magazine and the institution that publishes the magazine, and I feel I need to be very involved.
     
    Finally, remember that the Web is a continuing experiment. We recently overhauled our Web site, but there were some things about the new design we didn’t like. So we changed them. Just like that. You can’t do that in print. I wish we could afford more experimentation. Writing is different on the Web too. In the magazine, we maintain a pretty formal tone. On the Web, we have a lot more latitude to play around—to be more chatty or funny or maybe even snarky.
     
    When we launched the new Web site, and also the e-newsletter, we decided that we would think of it as a way to build an even stronger sense of community with our readers. That’s one of the great things about being able to speak in a different voice and to offer a little bit more. But from what we can tell so far, a lot of our readers aren’t coming to the Web site. People are coming from elsewhere. So guess what? That means we’ll think again about what we’re doing on the site.
     
    So those are all the good things. But there are a few caveats. First, you can’t do so much on the Web that you forget what you are and how you became what you are. You can’t sacrifice the quality of what you do in print—which means you can’t put lower quality content out on the Web either. This is a tradeoff we face almost on a daily basis. Because almost anything we do on the Web takes away from what we do in print.
     
    Second, the Web is quite literally a different medium, almost as different as TV or radio. It has its own forms, conventions, and needs. We put a lot of our print material out on the Web, but I’m under no illusion that it’s going to make us a big success. It might help us to a degree—our traffic now spikes when we get a link from an aggregator or a columnist—but ultimately to go anywhere on the Web you have to live there, and that’s why we do some of the things we do.
     
    For writers, the Web has been a great thing in many ways—at least for young writers. There’s just a lot more ways to get your writing out, and I would say that the discipline of writing for the Web is itself a good thing, another way to learn about writing.
     
    But that brings us to another problem. Hardly anybody is getting paid for what they do on the Web. I know the WQ isn’t, or at least not much. Until that changes, it’s a big limit on how much we’ll do. Subscribers pay us a lot of money. More than most people in the nonprofit world, I abide by the age-old principle: Show me the money.
     
    Finally, the Web is an incredibly faddish place. I remember back in the 1990s, somebody who was involved with the business side of the magazine came back from a conference and said, “Oh my God! There’s this thing called the Web and we have to have a Web site and start giving away everything we do for free!” In fact, we already had a Web site, and we couldn’t see then any more than we can today any sense in giving away everything for free.
     
    I recently fell victim to this sort of mania myself. When the iPad came out, I thought, “Oh my God, we have to have an app!” Well, I cooled down and it turns out it really didn’t make sense to go to the expense of creating apps right away. You’ve just got to keep your head.
     
    Will the iPad and other tablets be the salvation of magazines and books? I don’t know. What I do know is that print-based people like me need to be prudent, but not gloomy or defensive. It’s a scary time but it’s exciting too. We need to throw ourselves into it with the same dedication and passion we bring to print.
     
    In sum, you could say my position is that we need to embrace the web but wear a condom. Thank you.
     
    Photo credit: flickr
     
     
    —Steven Lagerfeld
    Copyright 2010, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. All rights reserve

  • Details on Grand Prix of India.

    Indian track to be named the Buddh International circuit

    By Tom Cary Formula One Last updated: April 25th, 2011

    Comment on this Comment on this article

    Indian GP organisers have announced that the new track being built 25 miles outside New Delhi, which will make its F1 debut on Oct 30, is to be called the Buddh International Circuit after the district in which it is located.

    In the above video Team Lotus reserve driver Karun Chandhok describes a lap of the undulating Hermann Tilke-designed 5.14km track, which will have “one of the highest average speeds in F1″ as well as “the best facilities in the world”.

    By chance the announcement came on the same day the chief organiser of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi was arrested following an investigation into allegations of corruption. The GP organisers – Jaypee Sports International – were clearly at pains to distance themselves from that event.

    “Be assured my friends,” the executive chairman of Jaiprakash Associcates, Manoj Gaur, said. “Our and [our] country’s reputation is there. We are responsible people. The track is ready and the homologation of the facility will be done in July as per the time-table of the FIA.”

    The privately-owned Jaypee Group is one of India’s largest industrial conglomerates.

    Gaur said the project was costing $400 million. “Somebody had to come up with that size of investment. And it’s a privilege to do something for India,” he said. “Before the champions are born, we have to give them the infrastructure. We are not owners of a team but we have passion. Maybe in five years we will see an Indian team winning and that will be the biggest satisfaction.”

    It will be interesting to see what pricing structure they come up with and whether the locals will be able to afford to go to the 150,000-capacity venue.

    Samir Gaur, managing director of the JPSI, said tickets would most likely start at a “moderate” Rs 2500 (£35) with grandstand tickets more in the order of Rs 35,00 (£475).

     

    © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011 All Rights Reserved

  • A Royal Wedding, a Tarnished Crown

     

    Keystone/Hulton Archive — Getty Images

    CELEBRATION The wedding day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981.

     

    April 23, 2011
     

    A Royal Wedding, a Tarnished Crown

    By JOHN F. BURNS

    LONDON — Outwardly, at least, this week’s royal pageant will bear a strong resemblance to the last of the great royal weddings, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Now, as then, a tall, slim young man in a crisply tailored military uniform will wed a bride so striking she has launched 10,000 magazine covers, offering to Britain and the world the promise of a monarchy alluringly renewed.

    This time, as last, the congregation will be led by an assembly of the world’s crowned heads, with a worldwide television audience of tens of millions. Once again, cheering crowds in central London will greet the newlyweds as a gilded carriage conveys them from their vows to a reception at Buckingham Palace.

    Like that other happy dawn 30 years ago, too, Friday’s marriage will offer a respite, albeit fleeting, from a public mood weighed down by recession fears, unemployment and a government austerity program that has labor unions edging toward a season of paralyzing strikes.

    But in other ways, the Britain of William and Kate is startlingly different from the country that celebrated so extravagantly, and so guilelessly, in 1981. For one thing, the monarchy’s survival is being questioned in a way it was not when Charles wed Diana. Among many in Britain, Friday’s ceremony, more than a rite of renewal, is viewed as a step toward saving the monarchy — and a far from certain one, at that — after a quarter of a century in which its foundations have been shaken as never before in modern times, by the soap opera that Charles and Diana’s marriage became as well as the dissolute behavior of many other royals.

    Not that crowds are likely to storm the barricades. Still, there have been signs, among them a tepid take-up of Prime Minister David Cameron’s challenge to communities across the country to organize street parties, to suggest that the jubilation may be more muted than in 1981 — and for that matter, than amid the postwar gloom of 1947, when William’s grandmother Queen Elizabeth married Prince Philip.

    For years, polls have been showing support for the monarchy running at levels that have made republicanism more than the marginal phenomenon it has been for most of modern times. While many Britons retain a bulletproof affection for the 85-year-old Elizabeth, their support beyond her seems conditional. This is especially so in the case of Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall; they stand first in line to the throne on Elizabeth’s death, but far behind Prince William and Miss Middleton in public preference. A clear majority in the polls favors the younger couple’s jumping past Charles and Camilla and acceding directly to the throne.

    Often enough in English history, there has been more than a whiff of republicanism in the air — from Cromwell and the civil war in the 1640s to the decades of turmoil that followed Charles II’s restoration in 1660, and, in modern times, the public distemper that greeted Edward VIII’s abdication to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson in 1936. But in recent years, the royals have learned the hard way what the 19th-century constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot meant when he wrote of the imperative of mystery in the workings of the monarchy: “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it,” he wrote. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

    But daylight — a blinding searchlight, more like — has been thrown on the royals in recent times, and there has been much for the British public to dislike. There have been the serial divorces, with three of Elizabeth’s four children having abandoned their first marriages, exceeding the par set by surveys that show more than 40 percent of all British marriages failing. In the 1990s, there were sundry indiscretions, including the publication of the “Camilla-gate” tape recording of an intercepted cellphone call, in which Charles offered excruciating expressions of sexual yearning for Camilla. Most recently, there have been the tabloid revelations about dubious financial deals involving Prince Andrew, Charles’s younger brother, and some of the foreign potentates he has courted as Britain’s highest-ranking trade envoy.

    But even without the embarrassing miscues, the reverence Bagehot deemed critical to the monarchy’s well-being would have been hard to sustain in a society that has become markedly less deferential. The culture of 1981, in Britain, bore many hallmarks of the class-based nation Britain had been in an earlier age. The age of the cellphone and cable television, and the new horizons they opened, was yet to dawn. The vastly expanded choices in television, and fleets of jumbo jets, carrying millions of Britons across the Atlantic, were to lead to a significant Americanization of British culture, in idioms, dress and attitudes. But those, too, still lay ahead.

    Along with all this, the ’80s, ’90s and the last 10 years have seen in Britain, as elsewhere in the Western world, a rapid rise in wealth and household incomes that has bred a new mood of self-confidence, dented but not reversed by the current economic woes, and brought with it an abandonment of many of the attitudes that sustained the old order. Other factors, too, have worked against things as they were: a relaxation — some would say collapse — of the old standards of discipline in the state schooling system, and in the influence of the Church of England, the nominal faith of more than 70 percent of the population, but so weakened now that less than 5 percent of all nominal Anglicans are regular churchgoers.

    Along with this, the population itself has been changing. The current count of 60 million includes more than 3 million new immigrants who have arrived in the past 20 years, mostly from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa; many have settled in the London area, where nearly a third of the population is now foreign-born. Among these have been many Muslims, members now of a community estimated at 2.5 million, with community groups that have called for an end to the monarchy, or at least for an end to the primacy of the Church of England, the “established church” since the days of Henry VIII, with the monarch at its head.

    It is a new, more cosmopolitan Britain, and one the principal royals have worked hard to nurture. Prince Charles, in particular, has been a tireless supporter of inner-city causes and interfaith initiatives. Some years ago, he braved the mockery of traditionalists when he said that as king, he would like to be seen as “defender of the faiths” — all faiths — and not alone as “defender of the faith.” That title was bestowed on Henry VIII by the pope before Henry’s break with Rome over Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and has been inscribed ever since on British coins. Cranky as he sometimes seems, with his acknowledged habit of talking to plants and having his valet squeeze his toothpaste onto his brush, as one of his former aides has claimed, Charles’s openness to the new, multiracial Britain is a major string to his bow.

    But only time will tell whether the anachronism of the monarchy in a democratic age can be rescued by the modernizing changes that seem certain to follow when Prince Charles or Prince William ascends the throne. One of the things that generated passionate support for Princess Diana, when she was alive and after her death in a Paris car crash in 1997, was the sense that she, above all the royals, empathized with the afflicted and downtrodden, perhaps because of the emotional deprivations she had suffered as a child, and later as a royal bride.

    Two years before her death, but after her break with Prince Charles, Diana told a television interviewer that she aspired to become the “queen of people’s hearts.” Today, that stands as a challenge to Miss Middleton, in her role as consort to the future king. So far, the palace has seen to it that she remains pretty much a blank page, at least as far as any ideas she may have about how the monarchy might change. But on her success and Prince William’s, first of all in making a happier marriage than Prince Charles and Princess Diana, may rest, in good measure, Britain’s chances of retaining a monarchy that has withstood all other vicissitudes for more than a thousand years, and with it the institution that inspired Shakespeare to call his native land “this royal throne of Kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty … this blessed plot, this earth, this Realm, this England.”

    For all the disappointment of recent years, those words, written at the height of the first Elizabethan age, capture the deep affinity and affection many in this country still feel for the monarchy. For them, this week will bring new hope that the wedding will lead on, while Prince William and his princess are still young enough to make a difference, to a new chapter for the crown that will yield the contentment — for the nation, and for the couple themselves — that was so cruelly promised on the halcyon day that saw Prince William’s parents wed.

     

    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

     

     

     

  • Faster in town than going by car, bus, tube or on foot

    Bicycling
    A way of life

    Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition

    The Bicycle Book. By Bella Bathurst. Harper Press; 306 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

    Will of the wheelwright
    FROM mountain bikers to BMXers to racers, couriers to commuters, the bike epitomises a way of life for millions of people. There are more than a billion bicycles in the world — more than twice the number of cars — and the bike has regularly proven to be the fastest form of urban transport, reaching its destination more quickly than cars, buses, tubes or pedestrians.

    Bella Bathurst made her name writing about the lighthouses built by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. Her joyful freewheel through the world of bicycles and the people who ride them not only affirms her as an elegant chronicler of quirky subjects, but fills a gap in a pantheon of cycling literature that brims with route guides, sports science manuals, biographies and instruction books.

    While Rob Penn’s glorious “It’s All About the Bike” went some way to redressing the balance last summer, “The Bicycle Book” is unique in appealing to both cycling nuts and those of us who mean to dust off the flat-tyred two-wheeler propped against a wall in the hall, spare room or garage, but never quite get round to it.

    Ms Bathurst admits to picking and choosing “quite shamelessly” from all the information available to her about cycling and leaving out quite a lot. The political and environmental debate, or how to stop your bike being nicked, are blogging favourites, but how many people know that the Evans Cycle franchise sold four times as many bikes as usual on the day of the London tube bombings in 2005; that bicycle couriers first came into being in Paris in 1874 taking messages from banks to telegraph offices; or that, until 2004, the Swiss army had three infantry regiments of cyclists working in security, border control and dispatch?

    Ms Bathurst also introduces the reader to some remarkable characters. In the early 1920s Zetta Hills, a determined young woman with a taste for showmanship, cycled across the English Channel on a bicycle mounted on two buoyant planks. In 2007 Vinod Punmiya, an Indian businessman, made his name by racing against a train known as the “Deccan Queen” over the 140km between Pune and Mumbai. Then there is Graeme Obree, a former cycling legend known as the Flying Scotsman who fought his depressive demons by breaking the hour record — the ultimate time trial — twice, once making two attempts within 24 hours. For him the pursuit, when boiled down to its fundamentals, is about “you and a bike”, a philosophy that will resonate with anyone who loves the sunny simplicity of cycling.

    Copyright. 2011. The Economist Magazine. All Rights Reserved.

  • Ex-Blackwater Guards Face Renewed Charges

    Johan Spanner for The New York Times

    A view of Nisour Square, site of shooting in September 2007 involving former Blackwater contractors that killed 17 Iraqis.           

     

    April 22, 2011

    Ex-Blackwater Guards Face Renewed Charges

    By JAMES RISEN

    WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday reopened the criminal case against four former American military contractors accused of manslaughter in connection with a shooting that killed at least 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.       

    Criminal charges against the former employees of Blackwater Worldwide had been dismissed in December 2009 by a federal judge in Washington, who criticized the Justice Department for its handling of the case and ruled that prosecutors had relied on tainted evidence.       

    The three-judge appeals panel disagreed with that decision, and sent the case back on Friday, ordering Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court to review the evidence against each defendant individually.       

    “We find that the district court’s findings depend on an erroneous view of the law,” the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled. The appeals judges called on the lower court to determine “as to each defendant, what evidence — if any — the government presented against him that was tainted as to him,” and whether that was enough to justify throwing out the charges.       

    The former guards affected by the ruling are Evan S. Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; Donald W. Ball of West Valley City, Utah; and Dustin L. Heard of Knoxville, Tenn., all of whom had served with the Marines before joining Blackwater; and Paul A. Slough from Keller, Tex., who had been in the Army.       

    A fifth guard had also been indicted, but the charges against him were dropped by the Justice Department before Judge Urbina dismissed the case.       

    The appeals court ruling was a victory for the Justice Department, which had been bruised by Judge Urbina’s ruling taking it to task for an overzealous prosecution.       

    “We’re pleased with the ruling and assessing the next steps,” the department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said Friday. Defense lawyers involved in the case did not respond to requests for comment.       

    The shootings, in the middle of traffic in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, left at least 17 Iraqi civilians dead and set off an anti-American political firestorm in Iraq and an international debate over the role of private security contractors in modern war zones. The Blackwater guards were accused of firing wildly and indiscriminately from their convoy into other cars and at Iraqi civilians. The guards defended their actions, saying they were responding to fire from insurgents.       

    The Nisour Square shootings became a watershed event in the Iraq war, and led the Iraqi government to demand greater sovereignty and control over foreign contractors operating in the country. The Baghdad government later demanded and won the right to subject foreign contractors to Iraqi law, while the United States government grudgingly began to impose greater curbs on the freewheeling activities of the personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan.       

    The earlier dismissal of the charges against the guards, who were indicted in 2008, was met with angry protests in Iraq, while Friday’s action pleased some in Baghdad.       

    “This new decision has brought optimism and happiness back to me,” said Talib Mutlak, who was injured in the Nisour Square shooting. “This is a victory for the blood of martyrs and injured people who were affected by Blackwater.”       

    Blackwater itself never truly recovered from the shooting. It quickly became the subject of numerous Congressional and federal investigations and lawsuits for a broad range of activities in Iraq and elsewhere.       

    Among other troubles, five former Blackwater executives, including the company’s onetime president, were indicted on federal weapons and obstruction charges, two other former guards were charged with murder in connection with a shooting in Afghanistan, and the Justice Department opened an inquiry into whether Blackwater sought to bribe Iraqi officials in order to keep doing business in Iraq after the Nisour Square shooting.       

    After the shooting, Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services, and then late last year the company’s founder, Erik Prince, sold the business. He has left the United States and moved his family to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.       

    Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad.
    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.                

  • Fixating on a Future Royal as Elusive as Cinderella

    Andrew Yates/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    Kate Middleton arrived for a visit with her fiancee Britain’s Prince William, to Witton Country Park in Darwen, northwest England, on April 11, 2011

     

    Matt Dunham/Associated Press

    A life-size image of Prince William and Kate Middleton made its way near Trafalgar Square in London on Wednesday.

     

    April 21, 2011

    Fixating on a Future Royal as Elusive as Cinderella

    By SARAH LYALL

    LONDON — The theme of the walking tour was the forthcoming royal wedding, but the object of the group’s obsession was Kate Middleton, the royal bride. In Mayfair, the guide paused at the next important landmark: the Jigsaw store on Dover Street.       

    “Kate’s struggle to hold down a job since graduating has reportedly earned the displeasure of the queen,” declared the guide, Hana Umezawa, as earnestly as if she were explaining the Spanish Armada. “The closest Kate has come to having a regular job was when she worked at Jigsaw as a part-time assistant accessories buyer from 2006 to 2007.”       

    What do you say about a young woman who went to college, fell in love and became engaged? With Kate and Prince William’s wedding a little more than a week away, the chances of the public — that is, us — learning anything new about Miss Middleton before she turns into a princess (or a duchess, depending on which title she takes) are zero.       

    Now 29, she has formally spoken to the press only on the day she and William announced their engagement and submitted to a gentle sprinkling of softball questions. She appears to have spent a lifetime avoiding unseemly episodes.       

    “It’s absolutely extraordinary — people do comment and talk about what she’s like, but we know almost nothing about her,” said Valentine Low, who writes about the royal family for The Times of London. “She’s a blank cipher. She’s existed in this funny little bubble for the past nine years, and they’ve done a brilliant job of controlling the flow of information, just letting out enough for us to feel that we’re getting something.”       

    Miss Middleton is a rarity in this era of lives played out in public: a megacelebrity who has never been on a reality show, has no Facebook page, does not tweet and is not preparing to reveal all in a memoir. She is like an old-time Hollywood star, full of mystery, a canvas onto which the world can project its fantasies.       

    If Diana, Princess of Wales, was an aristocrat with a common touch, Kate Middleton is a commoner who has triumphed among aristocrats. But just as it did with Diana, a public voracious for new juicy details will have to make do with recycled scraps from a banquet that has long since been served and cleared away.       

    How she grew up in Bucklebury, Berkshire, with two loving and good-looking parents who met while working at British Airways, he as a flight dispatcher and she as a flight attendant.       

    How she has a brother, James, who has largely stayed out of the limelight, and a sister, Pippa, who largely hasn’t.       

    How her mother, Carole, has ancestors who were miners, and how Carole left behind her working-class roots when she and Kate’s father, Michael, founded a successful Internet business that sells party accessories. How their newfound wealth allowed them to move into a grand country house and to send Kate to Marlborough College, an elite boarding school, where she excelled at sports but not, unfortunately, at misbehaving.       

    There is some debate over how early Miss Middleton became aware of Prince William as a potential husband. In his book “William and Kate: A Royal Love Story,” Christopher Andersen describes her as having spent her teen years fantasizing about William, poring over news articles about him, even putting images of him up on her wall.       

    Asked in their engagement interview whether she in fact did display a poster of William in her dorm room, Kate grinned and said, “He wishes.” (She added: “I had the Levi’s guy on my wall — not a picture of William. Sorry.”)       

    Their courtship at the University of St. Andrews, where both were students, has been told in endless articles, books and television specials. But only a few insiders know if the episode that is supposed to have ignited the royal passion — when Kate appeared at a fashion show in a see-through dress and William uttered the prosaic but fateful words, “Wow! Kate’s hot!” — really happened that way.       

    The two, who by all accounts have an easy and joking relationship, lived together in a group house, first as friends and then as a couple. He introduced her to his family and hung out with hers. When he wavered about whether college was right for him, she persuaded him to stay.       

    They graduated. He joined the military. She worked part time for Jigsaw, and part time for her parents. She stopped working. They went to a lot of nightclubs.       

    Another key spot on the royal wedding tour was Mahiki, a Polynesian-themed club that is a known drinking location for William, a (possibly reformed) known drinker.       

    Here, Ms. Umezawa related, William’s friends were believed “to treat Kate unkindly by making derogatory references to her middle-class background,” including muttering the flight-attendant phrase “doors to manual” when they saw her. It was also here, she said, that William came to celebrate after he and Kate (briefly) broke up in 2007, leaping onto a table, yelling “I’m free,” and amassing an $18,000 bar bill in less than a week.       

    Since they’ve reconciled — “Kate, by her aloof behavior, gained the upper hand,” Ms. Umezawa explained — they have lived together in Anglesey, Wales, where William works as a search-and-rescue pilot for the Royal Air Force. They reportedly do their own shopping and possibly even their own cleaning.       

    “Kate has played it beautifully,” said Kate Reardon, the editor of Tatler magazine. “She appears to be modest and conservative and un-showoffy and everything that we would love her to be.”       

    In her last days being single, Miss Middleton appeared to have gone into lockdown. However, she was spotted shopping in London this week. But the more she stays out of the limelight, the more fevered and, in a way, paltry, the speculation becomes. She designed her own wedding dress! No, she had three competing dresses made by three competing designers! No, she has one dress, and it is locked in a vault in Clarence House (home of Prince Charles)! She is worryingly thin; how will the dress fit?       

    None of this will be cleared up until the big day. Even Hello!, a magazine that can turn the rustling of a breeze near a royal palace into a news story, has had to make do with less than usual.       

    “Kate’s big wedding secret revealed,” it promised on the cover of last week’s issue. Inside it disclosed, citing unnamed sources, that Miss Middleton would not hire a professional makeup artist for her wedding but would apply her own.       

    That seems highly unlikely, given that a television and Internet audience of approximately 2.5 billion people will be on hand next Friday to critique her makeup job, along with everything else about her. And think of the wedding photos.       

    But who knows? The palace had no comment.   

     

    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved    


     

  • Japan’s Disaster and the Manufacturing Meltdown

    April 17, 2011
    POSTSCRIPT

    What the Earthquake and Tsunami Revealed About Globalization

    Marc Levinson

    MARC LEVINSON is a former Senior Fellow for International Business at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.

    The effects of Japan’s March earthquake and tsunami are being felt far beyond the shattered region around Sendai and Fukushima. As U.S. auto assembly lines grind to a halt for want of components that usually come from now-disabled factories in northeastern Japan, business strategists may be forced to rethink the way globalized companies do business. The result could well be a retreat from current manufacturing methods — sourcing key components from a single supplier and running “lean” factories without stocks of supplies on hand — whose main goal is to minimize costs. Now, management may also pay close attention to risks.

    Such a change would represent a reversal of course for major international companies, potentially transforming the way that many of the world’s industrial giants have functioned for the past two decades. Whereas companies used to run separate operations in many countries, each serving a given national market, in the 1980s multinational corporations started to run their affairs with diminishing attention to national borders. Today, a single plant or research center will often take worldwide responsibility for a particular product or business area. And whereas factories once manufactured their own components or purchased them nearby, now even some small plants have supply lines that stretch across the globe. Almost every manufacturer, from your local maker of wedding dresses to Boeing and Caterpillar, is a global company, because its production relies critically on parts or other inputs made or designed outside its home country.

    The globalization of manufacturing is responsible for much of the boom in international trade over the past two decades. Around half of the maritime shipping containers that arrive in the Los Angeles and New Jersey ports, for example, contain not products for retail sale but “intermediate goods,” products partially manufactured in one location and destined for further processing somewhere else. Similarly, a large proportion of airfreight consists of high-value components, such as semiconductors and optical lasers, rather than finished consumer goods.
    The shift to dispersed, highly specialized operations has significant economic advantages. One is that each producer focuses on the particular things it does best, instead of devoting capital and management attention to a wide variety of activities or to activities that offer poor returns, such as manufacturing components that are already widely available at low prices. A second advantage of this type of production is that it permits economies of scale. A specialized factory may produce only a few types of goods, but it is able to make and sell a lot of each one, since its market is global. This usually means lower costs to produce each unit.

    Financially, specialized production and global supply chains make sense. But firms — and the investors who own them — have paid too little attention to the risks that such a strategy entails.

    As I wrote in “Freight Pain” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2008), the development of long supply chains was made possible by the decline in the cost of moving goods. But even in 2008, those costs were already rising: “Congested shipping lanes and highways make transit times uncertain,” I wrote, “and this uncertainty hurts profits.” Moreover, the push for ever-greater port security will further slow transit; physical inspection of shipping containers could delay delivery by two to three days or more. As I wrote then, “Even if the proportion of containers pulled out of the flow of traffic is small, importers will be forced to reckon with the possibility that their goods might be delayed in transit. In some instances, importers will adjust by keeping more stocks in their U.S. warehouses at any one time.”

    Even more costly, an unforeseen event at one end of the chain may disrupt the flow of components to the next firm thousands of miles away. The problem is compounded if a sole-source supplier stops production. A manufacturer may be left high and dry if its producer of fuel pumps, friction bearings, or graphics processors goes offline. The recent disaster in Japan is an extreme example, but supply- chain problems are far from unusual. A shortage of freight cars, a dock strike, a factory closure due to lack of water, a riot that keeps a supplier’s employees from getting to work — these and many other events can wreak havoc with production schedules.

    It is hard to quantify how much supply-chain interruptions have cost business in recent years, because they generally go undisclosed. After all, no company wants to alert its competitors to weaknesses in its business model. And even in the case of the Japanese disaster, many companies with lower profiles than the automakers have yet to announce how they will be affected by shortages of or higher prices for essential components. Public attention has focused on outages at Japanese plants that turn out silicon wafers and memory chips, but there are surely many more obscure products that are in short supply.

    The total cost of lost U.S. production due to shortfalls of Japanese components will easily run into the billions of dollars; slowing or closing down auto assembly lines, as several manufacturers have already done, does not come cheap. Other products that are “made in America,” particularly factory equipment, also rely heavily on Japanese electronics, and even if those producers are not forced to close plants temporarily, the risk of delays in filling orders may cause impatient customers to defect to competitors who do not depend on inputs from Japan.

    The supply-chain problems that followed the Japanese disaster were not inevitable. Companies can avoid them by building supply chains with redundancy and resilience. Redundancy means manufacturing key components in separate locations and transporting them along different paths so that a single problem at a supplier, port, or warehouse does not cripple production. Resilience means backing away from just-in-time production strategies and maintaining larger inventories so that delayed shipments do not shut down an entire factory.

    Redundancy and resilience are not cheap. Sourcing from multiple locations will result in higher input costs. Keeping larger stocks on hand is costly, too, since it forces manufacturers to finance goods sitting uselessly on their warehouse shelves. All of this represents a drag on the larger economy insofar as it reduces economic efficiency.
    But while reducing supply-chain risks has its costs, idle auto plants and electronics factories around the world demonstrate that there is also a cost to doing nothing. When the global supply chain fails to deliver a key component on time, the expense may be much higher than corporate strategists imagine.

     

    Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved

  • War in Libya Could Drag On, Military Analysts Say

    April 20, 2011
    By STEVEN ERLANGER

    PARIS — France and Italy said Wednesday that they would join Britain in sending liaison officers to support the rebel army in Libya, in what military analysts said was a sign that there would be no quick and easy end to the war in Libya.       

    The dispatching of the liaison officers — probably fewer than 40 of them, and carefully not designated as military trainers — is a sign also, they said, that only a combination of military pressure from the sky, economic pressure on the government and a better-organized and coordinated rebel force will finally convince Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that he has no option but to quit.       

    “Some countries thought the Libya operation could be over quickly,” said a senior NATO ambassador. “But no military commander thinks so.”       

    Sending advisers to Libya is the latest in a series of signs of trouble for the NATO campaign, which began in earnest with a stinging, American-led attack but has seemed to fizzle since operational command was transferred to NATO on March 31. After that, a rebel offensive was smashed by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, which sent the rebels reeling toward the eastern city of Ajdabiya.       

    New tactics used by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces — mixing with civilian populations, camouflaging weapons and driving pickup trucks instead of military vehicles — have made it hard for NATO pilots to find targets. At the same time, loyalist artillery and tanks have hammered the rebel-held city of Misurata with cluster bombs, which have been banned by much of the world, making a mockery of NATO’s central mission of protecting civilians.       

    Divisions within NATO seem to be harming the strategy as much as Colonel Qaddafi’s new tactics, said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Only six of the 28 member countries are participating in the airstrikes, with France and Britain doing half of them and Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Canada the rest.       

    Prominent nations like Italy and Spain are hanging back, and others have sent planes only to support the no-fly zone, or are helping to enforce the arms embargo. The Obama administration, which has ruled out deploying American troops in Libya, announced Wednesday that it would authorize as much as $25 million in military surplus supplies, though not weapons, to the Libyan opposition forces.       

    “You want to send Qaddafi a message of collective will, that there’s no way out, that he’s facing a determined and unified opposition,” Mr. Niblett said. “And he’s seeing a European-led NATO that is not sufficiently cohesive.”       

    “If I were him, I would look at European disagreements and take heart from them, especially when the opposition appears so weak,” Mr. Niblett said.       

    Colonel Qaddafi “senses there is a gap between means and ends,” he added. “He can look at divisions among members of NATO and feel he can be part of a political solution, because in the end he may feel there is not sufficient cohesion to follow the strategy through to its end,” which is his ouster.       

    To persuade Colonel Qaddafi and his sons to leave, he said, “we need both the political and military track, and we have bits of the military and a fractured political situation, and we’re not giving the strategy the best shot.”       

    To some extent, the problems in NATO can be traced to changes since the end of the cold war. With the end of the Soviet threat and its expansion to global missions outside Europe, NATO has become less an alliance than a coalition of like-minded nations, analysts say.       

    “As soon as NATO went out of area it stopped being an alliance,” said François Heisbourg, a defense expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “In area, it is an unlimited liability partnership. But now with a global scope, everything must be negotiated, and it’s all à la carte. That’s the post-cold-war world.”       

    Tomas Valasek, a defense expert at the London-based Center for European Reform, compared NATO to an American political party, “a coalition of countries with broadly the same interests, but with different views.”       

    It was inevitable after the cold war, he said, that NATO countries would focus on different threats: terrorism and Afghanistan for some, like the United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands; Russia, for the Central Europeans.       

    “As for the rest,” he said, “I don’t even know why they stay in NATO.”       

    NATO will never be what it was, Mr. Valasek said. “NATO will become more of a transactional place in the future, so, as in Libya, more often than not there will be coalitions of the willing, with NATO support.”       

    NATO officials reject the criticism, saying the alliance has done a good job in a short time and that the air campaign is working well.       

    “There is no question about the collective will in NATO” to carry out the United Nations’ resolution on Libya, said Oana Lungescu, the alliance spokeswoman. She said that in the three weeks since NATO took over command of the operation, “we are steadily degrading Qaddafi’s ability to carry out and sustain attacks on his own people and gradually squeezing the regime’s forces.”       

    But just about everyone agrees “that there can’t be a military solution to the crisis as such,” Ms. Lungescu said.       

    “This mission keeps up the pressure for a credible political solution,” she said.       

    A senior NATO ambassador asked for patience. “In the end the balance will shift; it has to,” he said. “Qaddafi gets no more arms, no more tanks, no more ammo, and he gets weaker and over time the others get stronger. And at some point someone around Qaddafi decides to have a political way out.”       

    While Colonel Qaddafi’s foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, defected to Britain three weeks ago — where he was treated leniently, as an encouragement to others around the Libyan leader to change sides — there have been no prominent defections since.       

    The current political debate, the senior NATO ambassador said, is not about whether the Libya war will end in negotiations, but the nature and context of the talks. Some countries would like to begin negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi before he leaves power, with the clear aim that he must leave. But others, particularly the rebels, say that negotiations can begin only after the colonel and his sons are safely out of the country.       

    For now, Mr. Valasek said, the problem is that both Colonel Qaddafi and the NATO-supported opposition think that time is on their side. “It may take everyone longer to realize that this is as far as military force takes us. But unless we want a divided Libya, we need to sit down and negotiate.”       

    Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington.

     

    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • Royal wedding

     

    Royal wedding: What next for William after the
    wedding?


    Comments (12)

    Prince William in RAF uniform Prince William will be focusing on his career in the RAF



    Royal wedding



    “William to be the next king”, is a seductively attractive
    headline.


    It offers freshness, youth and the prospect of a soon-to-be-married prince as
    a head of state in waiting.


    Several opinion polls have suggested the son should replace the father at the
    front of the queue.


    But royal succession isn’t a beauty contest, or an episode of The X Factor.
    British citizens and subjects are observers of the process, not voters.


    Constantine of Greece knows all about royal destiny. His time came, briefly,
    in the 1960s, before he was deposed in a military coup and his birthplace voted
    to become a republic.


    Living in exile in London for decades, he has watched Prince William, his
    godson, grow up.


    When the prince, who’s an RAF search and rescue pilot, became engaged, the
    former king of Greece told the BBC he’d warned William in a letter that, “it was
    dangerous to fly a helicopter when you’re in love.


    “I said, ‘Be careful, concentrate on that helicopter now and think of
    Catherine later on!’”


    The ex-monarch is a stickler for the status quo. He doesn’t believe William,
    who he describes as “a hell of a nice guy”, should leapfrog Prince Charles.


    Constantine said: “It works from father to son or mother to son and that’s
    how it goes. They have to wait their turn… that’s how it should be, because we
    are not politicians. We don’t strive for that chair. The chair is there if it’s
    needed.”

    ‘Madness to be king’

    There are voices of dissent. One of the more surprising supporters of an
    abandonment of royal business-as-usual is former newspaper editor Sir Max
    Hastings.


    An article he wrote about the Prince of Wales in the Daily Mail last year was
    headlined “Why I believe it would be madness for him to be king”.


    In an interview with the BBC, Sir Max suggested that the longer the Queen
    reigned, the more attractive a king William might become.



    “Start Quote



    After his marriage… Prince William won’t be skulking
    around waiting for a vacant throne to occupy”

    End Quote

    “If time passes and Prince William is more and more at the centre of the
    stage, one question I think is bound to be asked,” he said.


    “Would it be in everybody’s interests – including those of the Prince of
    Wales – for a new, young, next-generation Prince William to succeed to the
    throne? I think an enormous amount will depend on what seems to be the will of
    the British people.”


    The will of William is clear. He doesn’t want to rock the Windsor boat.


    He has a healthy grandmother, his father shows no sign of giving up on his
    long wait for what his ex-wife called “the top job”, and he was born into an
    institution which is still scarred by the trauma of Edward’s
    abdication.

    Homeless

    After his marriage to Kate Middleton, Prince William won’t be skulking around
    waiting for a vacant throne to occupy.





     */ bbc.fmtj.av.emp.load( function() { var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(); if (bbc.fmtj.av.emp.loadProxyPlayer !== undefined && bbc.fmtj.page !== undefined && (bbc.fmtj.page.siteToServe === “news” || bbc.fmtj.page.siteToServe === “sport”) && !(userAgent.search(“safari”) >




    Click to play



     
     

      

    Ex-King Constantine of Greece said his godson was
    straightforward, hardworking and a “hell of a nice guy”


    His focus will be on married life and his job on Anglesey with the RAF. He’ll
    make more trips overseas representing an octogenarian monarch and he’ll continue
    to work for his chosen charities.


    These include Centrepoint, which helps young homeless people. At first glance
    it’s an unlikely pairing – a prince in a palace aiding people who have no roof
    over their head.


    Those who have seen William in action insist it’s a mutually beneficial
    relationship.


    Anthony Lawton was Centrepoint’s chief executive when the son of Diana,
    Princess of Wales became its patron.


    Diana introduced William and Harry to the plight of the homeless. Mr Lawton
    says getting the prince involved was his “biggest achievement” when he ran the
    charity.


    Prince William with Centrepoint worker William slept rough in London
    as part of his involvement with homeless charity Centrepoint

    He says William got stuck in from the outset – learning to cook his first
    lasagne – and he could relate to the young people he met because of their shared
    knowledge of popular culture.


    The former chief executive insists the future king’s interest is more than
    skin-deep, adding: “He does it because he really cares about it”.


    Another thing he cares about passionately is how his wife-to-be will cope as
    a senior member of a family like no other.


    In the build-up to his wedding, there’s one statistic which may just have
    given the prince pause for thought.


    The government estimates the global television audience for the celebration
    will be two billion.


    That’s two billion people with possibly more than a passing interest in his
    peculiar existence.


    Two billion people who may not be satisfied with a “now you see them, now you
    don’t” approach to royal life in the coming months and years.


    But that’s precisely how Prince William wants to play it. He’s sidling, not
    striding to embrace his destiny.


    Caution – borne out of Diana’s troubled life as a princess – is embedded in
    his DNA.


    After the wedding there will be demands, possibly vocal ones, for William and
    Kate to be more and more on display.


    These will be demands which William will be determined not to
    satisfy.

     

    Copyright.2011.BBC.com  All Rights Reserved

  • The New York Times launches its first Tumblr blog

     

    By Joe Pompeojoe Pompeo–    Mon Apr 4, 2:15 pm ET

    More than eight months after media reporters first stumbled upon a URL that the New York Times had quietly registered with Tumblr, the paper of record has finally launched its inaugural editorial product on the influential blogging platform.

    T on Tumblr, which went live Monday morning, will function as a visual repository for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, as well as a supplement to the magazine’s online home.

    “It’s a great way of bringing to the surface a lot of these great visuals that for any reason may have been overlooked,” Horacio Silva, T’s online director, told The Cutline. “We take a very curatorial approach to the editorial decisions we make. I think that aspect lends itself perfectly to Tumblr.”

    Silva noted that T goes to press only 15 times a year, in concentrated seasonal bursts, which tends to have a burying effect on the mass of photographic content it spits out. His hope is that Tumblr’s premium on community-building and re-blogging will help those images travel farther and live longer than they do from T’s daily website. “Because of the sheer number” of images in the magazine, “it is possible to overlook some,” he said. “This is a way to allow users to engage with and share that content.”

    T on Tumblr debuts just one week after the Times implemented a metered pay system that charges readers for online content (after 20 articles per month), but which also guarantees that all referrals from social media and blogging sites, such as Tumblr, will remain free. The new platform also puts the Grey Lady on more even footing with the plethora of news outlets that have already adopted Tumblr in the past year, even if the Times is a bit late to the party.

    There are now more than 160 such media organizations–ranging from magazines and newspapers, to digital operations, to TV and radio shows–engaging their readers through Tumblr, an intuitive self-publishing platform that launched in 2007. These dozens of publishers make up a healthy portion of the site’s 67 million unique monthly visitors and 5.3 billion monthly page views, said Mark Coatney, Tumblr’s resident media liaison.

    The use cases vary: Some publications’ Tumblrs tend to replicate their respective RSS and Twitter feeds, keeping readers up to date on content as it hits the web. Others are more idiosyncratic, pointing readers to third-party pieces their editors find interesting or fun. Others feature original content that cannot be found elsewhere online or in print, sometimes divided by subject matter across multiple Tumblrs.

    The Times, in any case, is a welcome addition to the growing roster.

    “We’re really excited about having them,” said Coatney, whose job is to help media outlets devise Tumblr strategies. “The Times is a global brand, the paper of record.” It’s also one of the top five sources that Tumblr users link to on any given week, he added. “It’s something everyone on Tumblr already reads and is paying attention to. So it’s great for us if they’re really going to start to integrating with that community.”

    But why did it take the Times so much longer to integrate than most of its peers?

    “It’s been a long period of thinking and brainstorming,” said Lexi Mainland, one of two social media editors at the Times. “We’ve just been sort of listening and watching and waiting for the best idea. Being first is great with breaking news, but it’s not always best to be first until you know exactly what you wanna do.”

    The idea to do a Tumblr for T “just bubbled to the surface” more quickly than other propositions that were floating around the newsroom, said Mainland. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Tumblr has a highly-active fashion community. When Vogue’s Tumblr launched earlier this year, said Coatney, it racked up more than 1,000 followers in its first day.

    A number of other Times Tumblrs are also in the works, including one that would aggregate all of the paper’s New York-centric feature reporting across various desks–culture, metro, real estate, dining and style. “That would be a really great opportunity for us,” said Mainland. “We’re still playing around with it in terms of design.”

    On the other hand, “One of the things we’re paying the most attention to is, ‘How can we do really well in the Tumblr space and make it an organic part of our work flow?’, ” said Mainland.

    To that effect, maintaining T on Tumblr will be “something I add to my morning responsibilities,” said Silva. “One thing I don’t want it to be is a glorified RSS feed. I don’t ever want the process to be automated.”

    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

    YAHOO = window.YAHOO || {}; YAHOO.Media = YAHOO.Media || {}; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons = YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons || {}; (function(){ var o_facebook_iframe_url=”http://l.yimg.com/b/social_buttons/facebook-share-iframe.php?u={url}&t={title}”; YAHOO.Media.SocialButtons.conf = { tracking: { _S: 2143733613, pkg: “http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110404/bs_yblog_thecutline/the-new-york-times-launches-its-first-tumblr-blog”, intl: ‘us’, lang: ‘en-US’, ct:’a’ }, content: { url: “http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110404/bs_yblog_thecutline/the-new-york-times-launches-its-first-tumblr-blog”, title: “The+New+York+Times+launches+its+first+Tumblr+blog+-+Yahoo%21+News”, mail_locale: “us”, mail_property: “news”, mail_meta: “&h1=yblog_thecutline/20110404/bs_yblog_thecutline/the-new-york-times-launches-its-first-tumblr-blog&h2=T&h3=3879″, print_url: “http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110404/bs_yblog_thecutline/the-new-york-times-launches-its-first-tumblr-blog/print” }, config: { facebook_iframe_url: o_facebook_iframe_url } }; })();