October 16, 2011

 

ROLAND EMMERICH’S film “Anonymous,” which opens next week, “presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.” That’s according to the lesson plans that Sony Pictures has been distributing to literature and history teachers in the hope of convincing students that Shakespeare was a fraud. A documentary by First Folio Pictures (of which Mr. Emmerich is president) will also be part of this campaign. 

So much for “Hey, it’s just a movie!”

The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J. Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed democracy and modernity, argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius; Shakespeare, a glover’s son and money-lender, could never have done so. Looney also showed that episodes in de Vere’s life closely matched events in the plays. His theory has since attracted impressive supporters, including Sigmund Freud, the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and his former colleague John Paul Stevens, and now Mr. Emmerich.

But promoters of de Vere’s cause have a lot of evidence to explain away, including testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else that confirms that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Meanwhile, not a shred of documentary evidence has ever been found that connects de Vere to any of the plays or poems. As for the argument that the plays rehearse the story of de Vere’s life: since the 1850s, when Shakespeare’s authorship was first questioned, the lives of 70 or so other candidates have also confidently been identified in them. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.

“Anonymous” offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatizing this conspiracy, Mr. Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence. Indeed, Mr. Emmerich has treated fact-based arguments and the authorities who make them with suspicion. As he told an MTV interviewer last month when asked about the authorship question: “I think it’s not good to tell kids lies in school.” 

The most troubling thing about “Anonymous” is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth is turned into a wantonly promiscuous woman who is revealed to be both the lover and mother of de Vere. Rather, it’s that in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda.

In the film de Vere is presented as a child prodigy, writing and starring in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1559 at the age of 9. He only truly finds his calling nearly 40 years later after visiting a public theater for the first time and seeing how easily thousands of spectators might be swayed. He applauds his art’s propagandistic impact at a performance of “Henry V” that so riles the patriotic mob that actors playing the French are physically assaulted. He vilifies a political foe in “Hamlet,” and stages “Richard III” to win the crowd’s support for rebellious aristocrats.

De Vere is clear in the film about his objectives: “all art is political … otherwise it is just decoration.” Sony Pictures’ study guide is keen to reinforce this reductive view of what the plays are about, encouraging students to search Shakespeare’s works for “messages that may have been included as propaganda and considered seditious.” A more fitting title for the film might have been “Triumph of the Earl.”

In offering this portrait of the artist, “Anonymous” weds Looney’s class-obsessed arguments to the political motives supplied by later de Vere advocates, who claimed that de Vere was Elizabeth’s illegitimate son and therefore the rightful heir to the English throne. By bringing this unsubstantiated version of history to the screen, a lot of facts — theatrical and political — are trampled.

Supporters of de Vere’s candidacy who have awaited this film with excitement may come to regret it, for “Anonymous” shows, quite devastatingly, how high a price they must pay to unseat Shakespeare. Why anyone is drawn to de Vere’s cause is the real mystery, one not so easily solved as who was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

Kazuhiro Yokozeki for The New York Times

October 14, 2011

 

TOKYO — Takeo Hayashida signed on with a citizens’ group to test for radiation near his son’s baseball field in Tokyo after government officials told him they had no plans to check for fallout from the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Like Japan’s central government, local officials said there was nothing to fear in the capital, 160 miles from the disaster zone.       

Then came the test result: the level of radioactive cesium in a patch of dirt just yards from where his 11-year-old son, Koshiro, played baseball was equal to those in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl.       

The patch of ground was one of more than 20 spots in and around the nation’s capital that the citizens’ group, and the respected nuclear research center they worked with, found were contaminated with potentially harmful levels of radioactive cesium.       

It has been clear since the early days of the nuclear accident, the world’s second worst after Chernobyl, that that the vagaries of wind and rain had scattered worrisome amounts of radioactive materials in unexpected patterns far outside the evacuation zone 12 miles around the stricken plant. But reports that substantial amounts of cesium had accumulated as far away as Tokyo have raised new concerns about how far the contamination had spread, possibly settling in areas where the government has not even considered looking.       

The government’s failure to act quickly, a growing chorus of scientists say, may be exposing many more people than originally believed to potentially harmful radiation. It is also part of a pattern: Japan’s leaders have continually insisted that the fallout from Fukushima will not spread far, or pose a health threat to residents, or contaminate the food chain. And officials have repeatedly been proved wrong by independent experts and citizens’ groups that conduct testing on their own.       

“Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air, from the food. It’s everywhere,” said Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert at Nagasaki University’s faculty of environmental studies and a medical doctor. “But the government doesn’t even try to inform the public how much radiation they’re exposed to.”       

The reports of hot spots do not indicate how widespread contamination is in the capital; more sampling would be needed to determine that. But they raise the prospect that people living near concentrated amounts of cesium are being exposed to levels of radiation above accepted international standards meant to protect people from cancer and other illnesses.       

Japanese nuclear experts and activists have begun agitating for more comprehensive testing in Tokyo and elsewhere, and a cleanup if necessary. Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’ measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”       

The government has not ignored citizens’ pleas entirely; it recently completed aerial testing in eastern Japan, including Tokyo. But several experts and activists say the tests are unlikely to be sensitive enough to be useful in finding micro hot spots such as those found by the citizens’ group.       

Kaoru Noguchi, head of Tokyo’s health and safety section, however, argues that the testing already done is sufficient. Because Tokyo is so developed, she says, radioactive material was much more likely to have fallen on concrete, then washed away. She also said exposure was likely to be limited.       

“Nobody stands in one spot all day,” she said. “And nobody eats dirt.”       

Tokyo residents knew soon after the March 11 accident, when a tsunami knocked out the crucial cooling systems at the Fukushima plant, that they were being exposed to radioactive materials. Researchers detected a spike in radiation levels on March 15. Then as rain drizzled down on the evening of March 21, radioactive material again fell on the city.       

In the following week, however, radioactivity in the air and water dropped rapidly. Most in the city put aside their jitters, some openly scornful of those — mostly foreigners — who had fled Tokyo in the early days of the disaster.       

But not everyone was convinced. Some Tokyo residents bought dosimeters. The Tokyo citizens’ group, the Radiation Defense Project, which grew out of a Facebook discussion page, decided to be more proactive. In consultation with the Yokohama-based Isotope Research Institute, members collected soil samples from near their own homes and submitted them for testing.       

Some of the results were shocking: the sample that Mr. Hayashida collected under shrubs near his neighborhood baseball field in the Edogawa ward measured nearly 138,000 becquerels per square meter of radioactive cesium 137, which can damage cells and lead to an increased risk of cancer.       

Of the 132 areas tested, 22 were above 37,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which zones were considered contaminated at Chernobyl.       

Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said most residents near Chernobyl were undoubtedly much worse off, surrounded by widespread contamination rather than isolated hot spots. But he said the 37,000 figure remained a good reference point for mandatory cleanup because regular exposure to such contamination could result in a dosage of more than one millisievert per year, the maximum recommended for the public by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.       

The most contaminated spot in the Radiation Defense survey, near a church, was well above the level of the 1.5 million becquerels per square meter that required mandatory resettlement at Chernobyl. The level is so much higher than other results in the study that it raises the possibility of testing error, but micro hot spots are not unheard of after nuclear disasters.       

Japan’s relatively tame mainstream media, which is more likely to report on government pronouncements than grass-roots movements, mainly ignored the citizens’ group’s findings.       

“Everybody just wants to believe that this is Fukushima’s problem,” said Kota Kinoshita, one of the group’s leaders and a former television journalist. “But if the government is not serious about finding out, how can we trust them?”       

Hideo Yamazaki, an expert in environmental analysis at Kinki University in western Japan, did his own survey of the city and said he, too, discovered high levels in the area where the baseball field is located.       

“These results are highly localized, so there is no cause for panic,” he said. “Still, there are steps the government could be taking, like decontaminating the highest spots.”       

Since then, there have been other suggestions that hot spots were more widespread than originally imagined.       

Last month, a local government in a Tokyo ward found a pile of composted leaves at a school that measured 849 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, over two times Japan’s legally permissible level for compost.       

And on Wednesday, civilians who tested the roof of an apartment building in the nearby city of Yokohama — farther from Fukushima than Tokyo — found high quantities of radioactive strontium. (There was also one false alarm this week when sky-high readings were reported in the Setagaya ward in Tokyo; the government later said they were probably caused by bottles of radium, once widely used to make paint.)       

The government’s own aerial testing showed that although almost all of Tokyo had relatively little contamination, two areas showed elevated readings. One was in a mountainous area at the western edge of the Tokyo metropolitan region, and the other was over three wards of the city — including the one where the baseball field is situated.       

The metropolitan government said it had started preparations to begin monitoring food products from the nearby mountains, but acknowledged that food had been shipped from that area for months.       

Mr. Hayashida, who discovered the high level at the baseball field, said that he was not waiting any longer for government assurances. He moved his family to Okayama, about 370 miles to the southwest.       

“Perhaps we could have stayed in Tokyo with no problems,” he said. “But I choose a future with no radiation fears.”       

Maja Htij/dapd, via Associated Press

October 15, 2011

 

ROME — In dozens of cities around the world on Saturday, people took to the streets, clutching placards and chanting slogans as part of a planned day of protests against the financial system.       

In Rome, a protest thick with tension spread over several miles.  Protesters set fire to at least one building and clashed violently with the police, who responded with water cannons and tear gas.        

In other European cities, including Berlin and London, the demonstrations were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and many gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Elsewhere, the turnout was more modest, but rallies of a few hundred people were held in several cities, including Sydney, Australia, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Protests were also held in New York and several other cities in the United States and Canada.       

But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages — signs have been held in opposition to President Obama yards away from signs in support — so Saturday’s protests contained a grab bag of messages, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water.       

Despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor.       

“I have no problem with capitalism. I have no problem with a market economy. But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin. “We shouldn’t bail out the banks. We should bail out the people.”       

Another protester in Berlin, Katja Simke, 31, said that it was clear “that something has to be done.”       

“This isn’t a single movement but a network of different groups,” said Ms. Simke, who was opposed to income inequality but also cared about climate change and atomic energy. “I’m really positively surprised by how well this came together.”       

Saturday’s protests sprang from demonstrations in Spain in May and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began last month in New York. This weekend, the global show of force came as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations meet in Paris to discuss global economic issues, including ways to tackle Europe’s sovereign debt crisis

In London, where crowds assembled in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the ubiquitous emblems of the movement were in evidence. “Bankers Are the Real Looters” and “We Are the 99 Percent,” read several placards and flags. One demonstrator, dressed as Jesus Christ, held a sign that said “I Threw the Money Lenders Out for a Reason,” a reference to an episode from the Bible.       

Brief clashes were reported in London, where police were out in force with dozens of riot vans, canine units and hundreds of officers. But the gathering was largely peaceful, with a picnic atmosphere and people streaming in and out of a nearby Starbucks.       

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an appearance at the cathedral and was met by hundreds of cheering fans, and was virtually borne aloft to the church steps, where he called the movement “the culmination of a dream.”       

In Rome, Saturday’s protests were as much about the growing dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — who narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday — as they were was about global financial inequities.       

“We’re upset because we don’t have prospects for the future,” Alessia Tridici, 18, said in Rome. “We’ll never see a pension. We’ll have to work until we die.”       

In contrast, protests in Berlin remained peaceful and upbeat, with music and even a little dancing on a warm, sunny day.       

“I like the carnival atmosphere,” said Juhani Seppovaara, 64, a photographer and writer originally from Finland now living in Berlin. “But for me there’s a little too much populism, very complicated matters reduced to one or two sentences.”       

In Sydney, several hundred protesters carried signs with slogans including “We Are the 99%” and “Capitalism Is Killing our Economy.” The atmosphere was lively, with a brass band providing music in packed Art Deco-style public thoroughfares outside the headquarters of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the city’s financial district.       

In central Tokyo, where periodic rallies against nuclear power have been held since the March accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, about 300 protesters marched with signs through busy streets and heavy traffic, chanting “We’re With Occupy Wall Street!” “Down With the Rich!” and “No More Nukes!”       

Two young men held a banner that expressed a somewhat apologetic solidarity: “Radioactivity Has No Borders. To the World From Japan: Sorry!” Another held a sign that read simply, “Let’s Complain More.”       

“Even timid Japanese are finally starting to push for change,” said Miku Ohkura, 24, a college student in Tokyo, who said she had already been to about a half dozen protests for various causes in the last few months. She said that apart from being opposed to nuclear power, younger people were angry at being made to bear the brunt of Japan’s economic woes, with many unemployed or too poor to start families. “We all have different messages, but we’re all alike in that we want society to become more equal,” she said.       

In Hong Kong, about 200 people rallied at Exchange Square, an open area near the International Finance Center, in the heart of the city’s banking and commerce district. Various groups staged sit-ins, protesting issues including growing income disparity and a political system that some demonstrators said was undemocratic.       

Thousands of people protested in Hong Kong in March, criticizing the government then for not doing enough to help the poor. A far larger crowd marched through downtown Hong Kong on July 1, the anniversary of the territory’s return to China, over the widening income gap.       

A 2009 report by the United Nations Development Report found Hong Kong had the greatest income disparity of the 38 developed economies it studied.       

“It’s just embarrassing,” said Nury Vittachi, a Hong Kong resident who attended Saturday’s rally. The Hong Kong government likes to stress stability and prosperity, Mr. Vittachi said, but a widening wealth gap threatens those ideals.       

“We’ve had decades of increasing inequality, culminating in the financial crisis,” said Jack Copley, 20, a student at the University of Birmingham who was protesting in London. “The best we can hope for,” he said, gesturing to the gathered crowd, “is that we can change the political climate to make it harder for politicians to rule in the interests of the few.”       

October 11, 2011

 

WASHINGTON

Abdulfattah “John” Jandali is a casino manager outside Reno, so he knows about odds.

And he must wonder sometimes: What are the odds of a Sunni Muslim immigrant from Syria producing two dazzling American talents, a son who transformed the world of technology and a daughter who lit up the world of literature, and ending up estranged from both?

Of the many memorable photos that have been published since Steve Jobs died, the most poignant was in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.

The picture itself wasn’t anything special, not like the intimate portraits of Jobs by Diana Walker that appeared in Time magazine. This was just a head shot of Jobs staring out, with rimless glasses, aquiline nose, receding hairline and intense brown eyes.

It mesmerized because of its juxtaposition to a head shot of Jandali, Jobs’s 80-year-old biological father, who stared out with the same rimless glasses, aquiline nose, receding hairline and intense brown eyes.

Jandali told The Journal that, over the last year, he periodically sent some e-mails to the son he never met, wishing him happy birthday or better health. He said he got a couple of short replies, including a “Thank you.” But a Jobs family friend disputes that.

Jandali, a widower, reads books on an iPad and uses an iPhone 4. But the father of Jobs never met the father of Apple. The closest he got was downloading videos of Jobs introducing Apple products. He didn’t even learn Jobs was his son until around 2005.

When Jandali was pursuing his doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin in the early ’50s, he fell in love with a fellow graduate student named Joanne Schieble. She became pregnant, but her family did not approve of her relationship with a Syrian, so she put up her son for adoption. The boy was raised by Paul Jobs, a high-school dropout and machinist for a laser company in Los Altos, Calif., and Clara Jobs, an accountant.

Once Joanne’s disapproving father died a couple of years later, she married Jandali. They had a daughter, who grew up to be Mona Simpson, the novelist.

The couple divorced after a few years and Joanne and Mona lived in Green Bay, Wis., feeling as though Jandali had abdicated his role in their lives. Jandali told The Journal that he had tried to reach Mona after he heard of Jobs’s death, but she did not respond. He keeps a publicity shot of his daughter that he downloaded from the Internet, framed, on his desk.

“If I talked to him,” he said of his son, “I don’t know what I would have said to him.”

Like Shakespearean drama, where fathers haunt and where siblings are swept apart by a shipwreck only to learn later that the other is still alive, Steve and Mona met only in their mid-20s. Jobs began the hunt for his biological mother in his teens and was ready to give up, he told The Times’s Steve Lohr, when he finally discovered at age 27 that he had a younger sister.

He was thrilled that she was an artist because he liked to think of himself as one. The computer whiz kid and the literary whiz kid grew close.

Simpson mined the theme of missing fathers for her critically acclaimed novels “Anywhere But Here” and “The Lost Father.” She also wrote a novel inspired by her famous brother, “A Regular Guy,” which casts a gimlet eye on Jobs, who specialized in hot-cold emotional roller-coaster rides.

It’s about an emotionally disconnected, fruit-loving Silicon Valley biotech entrepreneur named Tom Owens, “a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom.” He lives in a barely furnished mansion once owned by a copper baron, as Jobs did; he loses control of his company to suits, as Jobs did; he tried to decide whom to marry by asking friends which of his two girlfriends was more beautiful, as Jobs did; he belatedly forms a relationship with his out-of-wedlock daughter, as Jobs did.

Simpson begins with the simple devastating sentence: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.”

She focuses on the painful central question about Jobs: How does the abandoned become the abandoner? When he cast off his own infant daughter he was the same age his parents were when they cast off him.

Three years after the novel came out in 1996, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Jobs had with an old girlfriend, wrote a searing piece for The Harvard Advocate about how it took her two years to get up the courage to read her aunt’s book, which contains details like Jane (Lisa’s doppelganger) forging her father’s signature on her Harvard application.

“He was away on business, and it had to be done,” Lisa writes, adding about Mona: “It is a rare experience to find that someone unexpected has been holding captive moments of my past. She watched me when I was younger, sneaking contraband miniskirts and makeup into my locker, and later, during middle and high school, she was one of my primary confidants. I didn’t know that as I sought her consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking. It was apparently a trade.”

The roman à clef jangled nerves in the family, but Mona and Steve were close again when he was dying.

Beyond the gushing encomiums for the Prospero of Palo Alto, there roiled a family tempest that might have even shocked Shakespeare.

 

 

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

October 11, 2011

 

What’s in a name?

A lot, apparently. Apple’s new iPhone is called the iPhone 4S. But what people really wanted was the iPhone 5.

The rumors online had predicted the second coming — or, rather, the fifth coming. It would be wedge-shaped! It would be completely transparent! It would clean your basement, pick you up at the airport and eliminate unsightly blemishes!

Instead, what showed up was a new iPhone that looks just like the last one: black or white, glass front and back, silver metal band around the sides. And on paper, at least, the new phone does only four new things.

THING 1: There’s a faster chip, the same one that’s in the iPad 2. More speed is always better, of course. But it’s not like people were complaining about the previous iPhone’s speed.

THING 2: A much better, faster camera — among the best on a phone. It has a resolution of eight megapixels, which doesn’t matter much, and a new, more light-sensitive sensor, which does. Its photos are crisp and clear, with beautiful color. The low-light photos and 1080p high-definition video are especially impressive for a phone. There’s still no zoom and only a tiny LED flash — but otherwise, this phone comes dangerously close to displacing a $200 point-and-shoot digital camera.

THING 3: The iPhone 4S is a world phone. As of Friday, you will be able to buy it from AT&T, Verizon and, for the first time, Sprint ($200, $300 or $400 for the 16-, 32- or 64-gigabyte models). But even if you get your iPhone 4S from Verizon, whose CDMA network is incompatible with the GSM networks used in most other countries, you’ll still be able to make calls overseas, either through Verizon or by inserting another carrier’s SIM card. Call ahead for details.

Each carrier has its selling points. Sprint is the only one with an unlimited iPhone data plan (example: $110 a month for unlimited calling, texting and Internet). AT&T says it has the fastest download speeds. But if you care about calling coverage, Verizon is the way to go.

THING 4: Speech recognition. Crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition.

Exactly as on Android phones, a tiny microphone button appears on the on-screen keyboard; whenever you have an Internet connection, you can tap it when you want to dictate instead of typing. After a moment, the transcription appears. The sometimes frustrating on-screen keyboard is now a glorified Plan B.

Apple won’t admit that it’s using a version of Dragon Dictation, the free iPhone app, but there doesn’t seem to be much doubt; it works and behaves identically. (For example, it occasionally seems to process your utterance but then types nothing at all, just as the Dragon app does.) This version is infinitely better, though, because it’s a built-in keyboard button, not a separate app.

But dictation is only half the story — no, one-tenth of the story. Because in 2010, Apple bought a start-up called Siri, whose technology it has baked into the iPhone 4S.

Siri is billed as a virtual assistant: a crisply accurate, astonishingly understanding, uncomplaining, voice-commanded minion. No voice training or special syntax is required; you don’t even have to hold the phone up to your head. You just hold down the phone’s Home button until you hear a double beep, and then speak casually.

You can say, “Wake me up at 7:35,” or “Change my 7:35 alarm to 8.” You can say, “What’s Gary’s work number?” Or, “How do I get to the airport?” Or, “Any good Thai restaurants around here?” Or, “Make a note to rent ‘Ishtar’ this weekend.” Or, “How many days until Valentine’s Day?” Or, “Play some Beatles.” Or, “When was Abraham Lincoln born?”

In each case, Siri thinks for a few seconds, displays a beautifully formatted response and speaks in a calm female voice.

It’s mind-blowing how inexact your utterances can be. Siri understands everything from, “What’s the weather going to be like in Tucson this weekend?” to “Will I need an umbrella tonight?” (She has various amusing responses for “What is the meaning of life?”)

It’s even more amazing how Siri’s responses can actually form a conversation. Once, I tried saying, “Make an appointment with Patrick for Thursday at 3.” Siri responded, “Note that you already have an all-day appointment about ‘Boston Trip’ for this Thursday. Shall I schedule this anyway?” Unbelievable.

Siri can perform an incredible range of tasks. She can get stock prices, weather, currency and price conversions, dictionary definitions, measurement conversions, math totals. She lets you use your voice to edit or check the Clock, Calendar, Notes and Address Book apps, the new Reminders app and the renamed Music (formerly iPod) app. She can read your new e-mail and text messages to you — and let you respond, all by voice (big news for drivers). She uses GPS to know where you are, so you can say things like, “Remind me to pick up the dry cleaning when I leave work” — and she’ll do it.

She is not, however, as smart as “Star Trek’s” computers. She draws an apologetic blank if you say things like, “How many AT&T minutes do I have left this month?” or “How do you get ketchup stains out?” And it’s surprising that she doesn’t interact with more of the built-in apps. It would be great if you could open an app by voice (“Open Angry Birds”) instead of hunting through 11 screens, or turn on Airplane Mode by voice, or display a certain set of photos.

Apple says Siri will improve with time — both because she adapts to you, and because Apple itself will periodically upgrade her brain.

But already, Siri saves time, fumbling and distraction, and profoundly changes the definition of “phone.” I find myself using certain commands constantly, especially “Wake me at,” “Call,” “Send a message to,” “Give me directions to,” and “Remind me.”

It’s a shame that Siri isn’t available for older iPhones. Apple says that she requires the 4S’s faster processor, although before Apple bought the company, there was a Siri app that ran just fine on other models.

Most of the new software features in the 4S, however, are indeed available to older iPhones, thanks to the free iOS 5 software update.

Some of its 200 new features play Android catch-up. For example, a tidy, attractive Notification Center appears when you swipe a finger down the screen. In one place, it lists all of your missed calls, text messages received, coming appointments and other updates — a tremendous convenience.

You can now fire up the camera right from the Lock screen, saving you a detour to the Home screen. You can now press the Volume Up button to snap a picture; it falls exactly where a real camera’s shutter button would be. Basic photo-fixing tools (auto-color adjust, cropping and red-eye removal) are now built in.

If you’re sending a text, photo or video to another iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, iOS automatically uses a new, proprietary service called iMessages instead of sending a traditional text message. (It’s not a separate app; it’s built into the existing Messages app. These iMessages appear in blue text bubbles; regular text messages appear in green.) This new service lets you see if the recipient has read your message yet, and it can save you money; instead of counting as a cellular text message, each i-to-i message goes over the Internet and costs you nothing.

Starting Wednesday, iOS 5 will be available as a free download for the iPhone 3GS and 4, all iPads and the last two generations of the iPod Touch.

(Speaking of older models: The iPhone 4 is still for sale, for $100, and so is the iPhone 3GS — free with a two-year contract. That ought to be catnip to people who think that a phone’s price is significant next to the $2,000 two-year cost of the contract.)

The iCloud service goes live on Wednesday, too. Like its predecessor, the $100-a-year MobileMe, iCloud wirelessly, automatically synchronizes your calendar, address book and mail among your phone, tablet, Macs and PC’s. But iCloud also synchronizes your photos, music, e-books, apps and TV shows among all of those gadgets — far more reliably. And it’s free. (My full review of iCloud appears Thursday at nytimes.com/pogue. And — full disclosure — I’m writing a book about the iPhone and iOS 5.)

Android phones seem to come out every Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. Apple updates iOS and the iPhone only once a year. So Apple had a lot of catching up to do, even some leapfrogging. There are some rough spots here and there; for example, every now and then the 4S’s camera app gets stuck on its startup screen. And while the battery still gets you through one full day, standby time is shorter than before (200 hours versus 300). But over all, Apple has done an excellent job.

The question isn’t what’s in a name — it’s what’s in a phone. And the answer is: “A lot of amazing technology. And some of it feels like magic.”

 

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

Occupy Las Vegas Hits Strip

By DOUG MCMURDO
Published: Today

 

 

A diverse group of more than 1,000 people marched on the Strip to the chant of “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” Thursday, as the weeks-old Occupy Wall Street protest went nationwide.

Calling themselves the 99 percenters –– those who aren’t part of the richest 1 percent of Americans –– the protesters marched in a loop between Tropicana Avenue and Flamingo Road from 4 to just after 7 p.m. Word of the event spread largely through social media, with many participants hearing about the protest on Facebook.

Reaction from tourists was a mix of support, bewilderment and anger, with some shouting encouragement to the marchers and others yelling obscenities.

Las Vegas police on motorcycles, in patrol cars, on horseback and on foot stopped traffic on the Strip when protesters neared an intersection.

In contrast to incidents of police using pepper spray and arresting protesters who have occupied Wall Street since Sept. 17, this group at one point chanted, “Thank you, Metro.”

Las Vegas police said that no arrests were made during the protest.

The Strip event drew teachers, union workers, college students, children and their parents, the unemployed and retirees. People of all races and backgrounds joined the march.

They were unified by a common frustration amid a profound and prolonged economic downturn.

Protesters carried signs that included slogans such as “They only call it class warfare when we fight back,” “Wall Street is responsible for the identity theft of America,” “Tax the rich or we’ll have to eat them” and “Where the Heller are the jobs?”

And while the national protest has taken on organization and a sense of purpose that was lacking at its inception, Thursday night’s message was unified: Take back a Congress protesters think has been bought and paid for by millionaires and billionaires.

But if there was one common thread that made this protest about Las Vegas, it was the foreclosure crisis.

“We’re in a city where more people have lost their home than anywhere else,” protester Sannette Gutierrez said. “Tourists come here and think Vegas is fantasy land; they don’t think of us as a working-class city, but we are. They just think we’re here to clean up their vomit after they leave.”

Jackie Pletscher, 36, hasn’t lost her home, but her three neighbors have, and the Las Vegas street she lives on has become a ghost town.

Her home has lost more than half its value since the housing collapse, and the bank, she said, sold her mortgage to Wall Street.

Enrique Ruano, 39, said he has lost his home and was forced to file bankruptcy. He works one week out of every four these days and is grateful for that. Still, he wonders whether life will ever get back to normal.

“I’m doing this (marching) for my kids,” he said. “I have to keep a positive attitude for them. I want them to have a future.”

Wayne Lee, 47, a Strip casino dealer, said he tried to negotiate a loan modification with his lender. He said he was making his payments when he asked for help, and the bank said it could do nothing for him until he defaulted on his loan.

“They couldn’t even prove they owned the mortgage,” he said. “They never did one thing the (Nevada) Supreme Court said they have to do, and the judge let them take it anyway.”

Their message wasn’t well-received by all those who heard it. Don, a farmer from Missouri who declined to give his last name, said protesters “just want something for nothing.”

Not everyone who participated in the protest came because of home foreclosures.

Viviana DeArmis, a Green Valley High School teacher, and Coronado High School teacher Kym Morris marched in support of education reform. Yolanda Diyess protested corporate discrimination against black subcontractors. Angelo Branacair wants his children, who are in college, to have job prospects when they graduate.

All of them believe corporate greed has created the worst economy in more than 70 years.

“We’re here to fight the millionaires that control our politicians,” said Jim Walsh, one of the protest organizers. “This is nonpartisan. The corporate takeover of our government is across the board, whether GOP or Democrat.”

Contact Doug McMurdo at dmcmurdo@ reviewjournal.com or 702-224-5512.

© 2011 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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   A new edition of the letters is now in progress. See The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922 , edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge University Press, 2011). ↩

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   Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

   Ernest Hemingway and his three sons, Bimini, the Bahamas, July 1935

   He enjoyed taking people out on the Pilar to fish or to show them the excitement of it, Dos Passos and MacLeish before he broke with them, and Arnold Gingrich, who was the editor of Esquire and who married a sporty blond woman, Jane Mason, who’d been Hemingway’s mistress and was the model for Mrs. Macomber. The boat was used as well for cruising along the Cuban coast—the island is eight hundred miles long—to secluded bays where they would have lunch, swim, siesta, and sometimes stay for a few days.

   Paul Hendrickson, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sons of Mississippi—a book about the white sheriffs who, in 1962, tried to stop James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi—is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. He interviewed all three of Hemingway’s sons in 1987 for a piece about them in The Washington Post. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. The book not only traces the history of the boat with all its associations but also the longer arc of Hemingway’s life—his childhood, youth, companions, manhood, and achievement—in its full rise, fall, and finally rise again. Not a bell, as Hendrickson writes, but a sine curve.

   There exists a general feeling that Hemingway was better earlier; his books were better, he was better as a man. By the time he was fifty, his son Gregory—with whom he had a difficult relationship—said he was “a snob and a phony.” The hotels, the Ambos Mundos and the Compleat Angler, seemed to become the Gritti Palace, Ritz, and Sherry-Netherland, and there was much association with rich or fashionable people. He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” And in a famous letter to his former wife, now Hadley Mowrer, he wrote:

    

   Now I’ve written good enough books so that I don’t have to worry about that I would be happy to fish and shoot and let somebody else lug the ball for a while. We carried it plenty and if you don’t know how to enjoy life, if it should be the only one life we have, you are a disgrace and don’t deserve to have it. I happen to have worked hard all my life and made a fortune at a time when whatever you make is confiscated by the govt. That’s bad luck. But the good luck is to have had all the wonderful things and times we had. Imagine if we had been born at a time when we could never have had Paris when we were young. Do you remember the races out at Enghien and the first time we went to Pamplona by ourselves and that wonderful boat the Leopoldina and Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Black Forest?… Good bye Miss Katherine Kat. I love you very much.

   It is Hemingway at his most gentle, elegiac, and self-pitying. Eight years after writing it he published Across the River and Into the Trees, an autobiographic novel about an aging colonel wildly in love with a young Italian woman in Venice that took his egotism to new heights and was ridiculed mercilessly, made worse by the notorious interview he gave to Lillian Ross that provided an equally devastating portrait. But he followed this with one of his most popular and enduring works, The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic marlin and an aged fisherman’s courage, written in Hemingway’s heroic style, uplifting, open to being mocked.

   In 1954 he was given the Nobel Prize. Gabriel García Márquez, still a journalist, caught sight of Hemingway and his wife in Paris one day in 1957 walking along the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Hemingway was wearing old jeans and a lumberjack’s shirt. He had long been one of García Márquez’s great heroes, for his myth as well as his writing. The Old Man and the Sea had hit García Márquez “like a stick of dynamite”; he was too timid to approach Hemingway but also too excited not to do something. From the opposite side of the street he called out, “Maestro!” Hemingway raised a hand as he called back “in a slightly puerile voice,” “Adios, amigo!”

   His health was deteriorating. There was recurring depression as well as the effects of serious injuries from two successive airplane crashes in Africa in 1954 that resulted in concussion, a fractured skull, a ruptured liver, and a dislocated arm and shoulder. Over the years he’d had many diseases, broken bones, and a number of wounds. There were also diabetes, hypertension, migraine headaches, and the cumulative cost of decades of hard drinking. He had night terrors and thoughts of suicide. His father had committed suicide—shot himself—in 1928. Writing was becoming increasingly difficult, and he had always put into it everything he had. His style became in some respects a kind of imitation of itself, a close imitation although, as Walter Benjamin noted, only the original of anything has authentic power.

   Still, toward the end, in 1958, he finished the beautiful remembrance of his youth in Paris, A Moveable Feast, written with a simplicity and modesty that seemed long past. As with much of Hemingway, it fills one with envy and an enlarged sense of life. His Paris is a city you long to have known. Two of his novels never put in final form by him have been published posthumously, The Garden of Eden and Islands in the Stream. Like all his books, they sold well. In 2010 Scribner’s sold more than 350,000 copies of Hemingway’s works in North America alone. By far the most popular is The Old Man and the Sea.

   There are lengthy though discerning portraits of minor characters in Hendrickson’s book. They are of interest mainly because they are neglected witnesses. The longer one, affectionately done, is of Walter Houk, who served in the US embassy in Havana at the end of the 1940s and whose girlfriend Nita worked for Hemingway as his secretary. She introduced Houk to Hemingway and they became friends. The Houks were married at Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s house; he gave the bride away. Houk’s memories are firsthand, meals with the Hemingways, swims in their pool, voyages on the Pilar. A kind of rosy nostalgia seems to be taking over when suddenly, in the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerizing, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.

   He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He’s in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women’s Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.

   The last, very moving section of Hemingway’s Boat is devoted to Gregory, Gigi as he was always called, rhyming with “biggy,” the wayward son who as a boy was caught trying on his stepmother’s white stockings. “He was a boy born to be quite wicked who was being very good…,” Hemingway wrote in his fictional version,Islands in the Stream. “But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it.” Hendrickson says, “I’ll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt….” And these were possibly the transsexual fantasies in The Garden of Eden along with all the women in Hemingway with hair cut short like a boy’s.

   When Gigi’s oldest child, Lorian, saw him for the first time in years, he took her out in a chartered boat to show her big-game fishing, but then embarrassingly lost the big marlin he’d hooked. He hadn’t slacked, and the line had snapped. He’d made a botch of it. He seemed broken. She reached out and touched his forhead in sympathy. “Sorry, Greg,” she said. “You’re a pretty girl,” he said. “A very pretty girl. Call me ‘Father,’ would you?” She noticed the nail polish on two of his cracked and dirty nails.

   Hemingway’s declining health and psychological problems were more serious at the end of the 1950s. He had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed theFBI was following him. (In fact FBI agents had compiled a large file on him.) He was delusional and slurring his speech. It was kept from the public. He was unable to write as much as a single sentence. In chilling detail Hendrickson gives the almost step-by-step account of his final hour when he rose early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, put on his slippers, and went quietly past the master bedroom where his wife was sleeping. The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.

   Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them—the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.

   “Forgive him anything,” as George Seldes’s wife said in the early days, “he writes like an angel.”

    

   Copyright. 2011. The New York Review of Books

October 1, 2011

 

James Atlas is the president of Atlas & Co., a publishing company. He is at work on a book about biography.

A BROCHURE arrives in the mail announcing this year’s winners of a prestigious fellowship to study abroad. The recipients are allotted a full page each, with a photo and a thick paragraph chronicling their achievements. It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking.

Let’s call this species Super Person.

Do we have some anomalous cohort here? Achievement freaks on a scale we haven’t seen before? Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts? And if so, what convergence of historical, social and economic forces has been responsible for the emergence of this new type? Why does Super Person appear among us now?

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary cause, and these robust intellects reflect the leap in the physical development of humans that we ascribe to better diets, exercise and other forms of health-consciousness. (Stephen Jay Gould called this mechanism “extended scope.”) All you have to do is watch a long rally between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to recognize — if you’re old enough — how much faster the sport has become over the last half century.

The Super Person training for the college application wars is the academic version of the Super Person slugging it out on the tennis court. For wonks, Harvard Yard is Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Or maybe it’s a function of economics. Writing in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, John Quiggin, a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, argues that the Great Academic Leap Forward “is both a consequence of, and a contributor to, the growing inequality and polarization of American society.” Nearly 25 percent of the annual income in America goes to 1 percent of the population, creating an ever-wealthier upper class. Yet there’s no extra space being made in our best colleges for high-achieving students. “Taken together,” Professor Quiggin points out, “the Ivy League and other elite institutions educate something less than 1 percent of the U.S. college-age population” — a percentage that’s going to shrink further as the population of college-bound students continues to grow.

Preparing for Super Personhood begins early. “We see kids who’ve been training from an early age,” says Charles Bardes, chairman of admissions at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The bar has been set higher. You have to be at the top of the pile.”

And to clamber up there you need a head start. Thus the well-documented phenomenon of helicopter parents. In her influential book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” Judith Warner quotes a mom who gave up her career to be a full-time parent: “The children are the center of the household and everything goes around them. You want to do everything and be everything for them because this is your job now.” Bursting with pent-up energy, the mothers transfer their shelved career ambitions to their children. Since that book was published in 2005, the situation has only intensified. “One of my daughter’s classmates has a pilot’s license; 12-year-olds are taking calculus,” Ms. Warner said last week.

REMEMBER the Dumb Kid in your math class who couldn’t understand what a square root was? Gone. Vanished from the earth like the stegosaurus. If your child is at an elite school, there are no dumb kids in his or her math class — only smart and smarter.

Even the most brilliant students have to work harder now to make their nut. The competition for places in the upper tier of higher education is a lot tougher than it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when having good grades and SAT scores in the high 1200s was generally sufficient to get you into a respectable college. My contemporaries love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today. This is no illusion: 19 percent of applicants were admitted to my Ivy League school for the class of ’71; 6 percent were admitted for the class of ’15.

Graduate and professional school statistics are just as daunting. Dr. Bardes told me that he routinely interviewed students with perfect or near perfect grade point averages and SATs — enough to fill the class several times over. Last year 5,722 applicants competed for 101 places at Weill Cornell; the odds of getting in there are even worse than those of getting your 3-year-old into a New York City private school.

“Applicant pools are stronger and deeper,” concurs Stephen Singer, the former director of college counseling at Horace Mann, the New York City private school renowned for its driven students. “It used to be that if you were editor of the paper or president of your class you could get in almost anywhere,” Mr. Singer says. “Now it’s ‘What did you do as president? How did you make the paper special?’ Kids file stories from Bosnia or El Salvador on their summer vacations.” Such students are known in college admissions circles as “pointy” — being well-rounded doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to have a spike in your achievement chart.

AND it doesn’t hurt to be from an exotic foreign land. “Colleges are reaching out to a broader range of people around the world today,” says William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “They go to Africa and China. If you want first-class mathematicians, try looking in Bulgaria.” In case they miss someone, many colleges now have recruiting agents in other countries who are paid commissions — by both the parents and the college — to help “place” those students. Globalization comes to the college admissions world.

Just as the concentration of wealth at the very top reduces wealth at the bottom, the aggressive hoarding of intellectual capital in the most sought-after colleges and universities has curtailed our investment in less prestigious institutions. There’s no curricular trickle-down effect. The educator E. D. Hirsch Jr. has pointed to a trend he labels the Matthew Effect, citing the Biblical injunction: “ ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ We’ve lifted up rich kids beyond their competence,” he says, “while the verbal skills of the black underclass continue to decline.”

Affluent families can literally buy a better résumé. “In a bad economy, the demographic shift has the potential to reinforce a socio-economic gap,” says Todd Breyfogle, who oversaw the honors program at the University of Denver and is now director of seminars at the Aspen Institute. “Only those families who can help their students be more competitive will have students who can get into elite institutions.”

Schools are now giving out less scholarship money in the tight economy, favoring students who can pay full freight. Meanwhile, Super People jet off on Mom and Dad’s dime to archaeological digs in the Negev desert, when they might once have opted to be counselors in training at Camp Shewahmegon for the summer. And the privilege of laboring as a volunteer in a day care center in Guatemala — “service learning,” as it’s sometimes called — doesn’t come cheap once you tote up the air fare, room and board.

Colleges collude in the push to upgrade talent. “It’s a huge industry,” Mr. Breyfogle says. “Harvard has a whole office devoted to preparing applicants for the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.” At its worst, this kind of coaching results in candidates who are treated as what he calls “management projects.”

“They’ve been put in the hands of makeover experts who have a stake in making them look better than they are, leveraging their achievement,” Mr. Breyfogle says.

“We are concerned about that,” confirmed Jeff Rickey, head of admissions at St. Lawrence University, whom I tracked down at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference in New Orleans. “If they joined a club, when did they join it? Maybe they play 15 instruments, but when they list them out, the amount of time they spent on each isn’t that much.” Mr. Breyfogle is also on the alert for résumé stuffing. “They’ve worked at an orphanage in Katmandu, but it turns out it was over Christmas break,” he gave as an example. “It’s easier to be amazing now.” All you need is money.

O.K., so maybe some Super People aren’t so Super. But the fact is, they do a lot of good. When I read about a student who has worked at a mental health clinic in Bolivia or founded a farmers’ market in a low-income neighborhood in Washington, I’m impressed. (All we did in college, I seem to recall, is smoke dope and play pool.)

And it’s not as if the Super People get to slack off when they graduate. There’s too much competition.

In the end, the whole idea of Super Person is kind of exhausting to contemplate. All that striving, working, doing. A line of Whitman’s quoted by Dr. Bardes in our conversation has stayed with me: “I loaf and invite my soul.”

Isn’t that where the real work gets done?

 

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