All in the Family Barack Obama’s Sister 
Jordan Murph January 20, 2008 Questions for Maya Soetoro-Ng All in the Family Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON Q: Let's talk about the Democratic presidential caucuses taking place on Feb. 19, in Hawaii , where Barack Obama was born. Will you be campaigning for your brother? Yes, of course. I have taken time off from my various teaching jobs in Honolulu and just got back from two months of campaigning. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says: "1-20-09. End of an Error." What kind of bumper sticker is that? It doesn't even mention a candidate by name. That's just one bumper sticker. I have three others on my car, including one that says, "Women for Obama." What is the age difference between you and Barack? I'm nine years younger. Our mother, after divorcing Barack's father, met my father at the same place, the East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus. Barack's father was Kenyan, and yours was Indonesian. Your mom was what used to be called a freethinker, a white anthropologist from Wichita, Kan., who moved to Jakarta after her second marriage. My mother was a courageous woman. And she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep. She died at only 52, from ovarian cancer ? Today, more than anything, I wish all the women in Barack's life — our mother, his wife and daughters, my daughter, our grandmother, his Kenyan half-sister — I wish we could all sit together and gaze at the moon. Your mom has been described as an atheist. I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute. You didn't mention the Koran in that list, although Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. I should have mentioned the Koran. Mom didn't really emphasize the Koran, but we read little parts of it. We did listen to morning prayers in Indonesia. Are you worried about mentioning Islam because it has already been evoked by negative campaigners trying to tarnish your brother? I'm not worried. I don't want to deny Islam. I think it's obviously very important that we have an understanding of Islam, a better understanding. At the same time, it has been erroneously attached to my brother. The man has been a Christian for 20 years. What religion are you? Philosophically, I would say that I am Buddhist. What effect do you think your mother's wanderlust had on Barack? Maybe part of the reason he was so attracted to Chicago and his wife, Michelle, was that sense of rootedness. He elected to make a choice, whereas Mom sort of wandered through the world collecting treasures. Do you think of your brother as black? Yes, because that is how he has named himself. Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will. Do you think of yourself as white? No. I'm half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I'm Latina when they meet me. That's what made me learn Spanish. That sort of culturally mixed identity was seen as an anomaly when you were growing up. Of course, there was a time when that felt like unsteady terrain, and it made me feel vulnerable. You were ahead of the multicultural curve. That's one of the things our mother taught us. It can all belong to you. If you have sufficient love and respect for a part of the world, it can be a meaningful part of who you are, even if it wasn't delivered at birth. INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY DEBORAH SOLOMON |
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 | Fischer vs. the World: A Chess Giant’s Endgame 
La Nación, Buenos Aires Bobby Fischer in Buenos Aires to play Tigran Petrosian in 1971 January 19, 2008 An Appraisal Fischer vs. the World: A Chess Giant's Endgame There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess. These are abstract, almost invented realms, closed systems bounded by rules of custom or principle. Here, the child learns, is how elements combine and transform; here are the laws that govern their interactions; and here are the possibilities that emerge as you play with signs, symbols, sounds or pieces. Nothing else need be known or understood — at least at first. A child's gifts in such realms can seem otherworldly, the achievements effortlessly magical. But as Bobby Fischer's death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price. In 1956 Mr. Fischer, at 13, displayed powers that were not only prodigious but also uncanny. A game he played against Donald Byrne, one of the top 10 players in the United States, became known as "the Game of the Century," so packed was it with brilliance and daring (and Mr. Fischer's sacrifice of a queen). "I just got good," he explained — as indeed he did, winning 8 of the 10 United States Championship tournaments held after 1958 and then, of course, in 1972, breaking the long hold that Soviet chess had on the international championship. "All I want to do, ever," he said, "is play chess." And many thought him the best player — ever. Garry Kasparov once said that he imagined Mr. Fischer as a kind of centaur, a human player mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself. But of course accompanying Mr. Fischer's triumphs were signs of something else. His aggressive declarations and grandiose pronouncements were once restricted to his chosen playing field. ("Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind.") Eventually, they grew in scope, evolving into ever more sweeping convictions about the wider world. After his triumph against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, he all but abandoned chess, and seemed to replace the idea of a seated challenger pushing pieces on a 64-square board, with that of a demonic Jewish world conspiracy that was (as he said in radio broadcasts from the Philippines) perpetrated by a "filthy, lying bastard people" who kill Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies") while exploiting that "money-making invention," the Holocaust. In this vision the circumscribed rules of chess were overturned, and in their place were imagined esoteric plottings of evil grandmasters. In a 2002 essay in The Atlantic Monthly Rene Chun chronicled Mr. Fischer's "pathetic endgame." He was reported to keep a locked suitcase with him, containing pills and home remedies: "If the Commies come to poison me, I don't want to make it easy for them," he said. He had his dental fillings removed, worrying about the secret signals and controlling forces that might be channeled through his jaw. The 9/11 attacks, he said, were "wonderful news." What was all this? "I don't believe in psychology," Mr. Fischer once said about chess competition. "I believe in good moves." And yes, without the good moves, he would never have struck the fear in his opponents that he once did. But how did faith in good moves mutate into such perverse psychology? Was there any connection between his gifts in chess and his later delusions? You might of course speculate that his perceptions were affected by never having seen his father, a physicist named Mr. Fischer, after he was 2. A revealing profile in Harper's magazine in 1962 indicated that Mr. Fischer's mother, Regina Wender, also had other preoccupations. Bobby's sister described her as a "professional crusader." Bobby had dropped out of high school and was a chess wunderkind with a world reputation, while, at the time of the profile, his mother was spending eight months walking to Moscow in a "pacifist" protest. A few years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer, obtaining F.B.I. records under the Freedom of Information Act, also found compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer's father was not the man named on his birth certificate, but a brilliant Hungarian scientist, Paul F. Nemenyi, with whom his mother had an affair. Mr. Nemenyi apparently paid to help support Bobby, and there is even the record of a complaint he made to a social worker about Bobby's upbringing. If that identification is accurate, the paradoxes of Mr. Fischer's virulent anti-Semitism become still more profound, since Mr. Nemenyi, like Ms. Wender, was Jewish. Chess too can seem to encourage a streak of craziness. ( "I like to see 'em squirm," Mr. Fischer proclaimed.) But for paranoia and posturing, nothing could come close to the 1972 championship match in Reykjavik. In recent years the argument has been made that the attention given to the confrontation between Mr. Fischer and Mr. Spassky had little to do with the cold war. Mr. Spassky himself was no party-line comrade, and Mr. Fischer, with all his idiosyncrasies, was far from a comfort to the United States State Department; moreover, by 1972, such confrontations no longer had the symbolic power they had during the era of Sputnik. But there is still no question that the contest drew its worldwide audience partly because it presented two conflicting national idols. Mr. Fischer, with his demands about money, his finickiness about cameras and chairs and schedule, could seem an extreme example of the American individualist, while Mr. Spassky, with his back to the audience, his stone-faced demeanor and the state support for this national game behind him, seemed an incarnation of Soviet ideology. The Soviets also answered Mr. Fischer's egomaniacal posturing with their own versions of conspiracy mongering, suggesting that Mr. Spassky's performance was being deliberately sabotaged by American tampering with the players' environments; the air had to be tested and the chairs X-rayed. But there is still something about Mr. Fischer's craziness that is closely connected with the essential nature of chess. The gift of early insight into chess or math or music is often also accompanied by a growing obsession with those activities, simply because of the wonders of connection and invention that unfold in the young mind. The world itself, with its more messy human interactions, its complicated histories, its emotional conflicts, can be put aside, and attention focused on an intricate bounded cosmos. Perhaps we should be grateful that such gifts are so rare, for if they were not, how many of us would prefer to remain cocooned in these glass-bead games? At least in mathematics and music, we may be grateful too that ultimately, with the coming of maturity, the world starts to put constraints on abstract play. Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone. But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world. So when it comes time to look at the wider world, it might seem a vast extension of the game, only ever so much more frightening because its conspiratorial strategies cannot be discovered in rule books, and its confrontations cannot be controlled by formal tournaments. That was the world that Bobby Fischer saw around him as he morphed from world champion chess player into world-class crank, never realizing that he had unwittingly blundered into checkmate.
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| Don’t Cry for Me, America 
Paul Krugman. January 18, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Don't Cry for Me, America Mexico. Brazil. Argentina. Mexico, again. Thailand. Indonesia. Argentina, again. And now, the United States. The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, disappointed with the returns they're getting, search for alternatives. They think they've found what they're looking for in some country or other, and money rushes in. But eventually it becomes clear that the investment opportunity wasn't all it seemed to be, and the money rushes out again, with nasty consequences for the former financial favorite. That's the story of multiple financial crises in Latin America and Asia. And it's also the story of the U.S. combined housing and credit bubble. These days, we're playing the role usually assigned to third-world economies. For reasons I'll explain later, it's unlikely that America will experience a recession as severe as that in, say, Argentina. But the origins of our problem are pretty much the same. And understanding those origins also helps us understand where U.S. economic policy went wrong. The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: "Why is the United States, with the world's largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?" His answer was that the main explanation lay not here in America, but abroad. In particular, third world economies, which had been investor favorites for much of the 1990s, were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997. As a result, they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets. The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a "global saving glut": lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go. In the end, most of that money went to the United States. Why? Because, said Mr. Bernanke, of the "depth and sophistication of the country's financial markets." All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as "a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone." E.g., "Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad." In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world's surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences. As I said, these consequences probably won't be as bad as the devastating recessions that racked third-world victims of the same syndrome. The saving grace of America's situation is that our foreign debts are in our own currency. This means that we won't have the kind of financial death spiral Argentina experienced, in which a falling peso caused the country's debts, which were in dollars, to balloon in value relative to domestic assets. But even without those currency effects, the next year or two could be quite unpleasant. What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation. The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild. It wasn't just Alan Greenspan's unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of "froth" in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America's financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets. Right now, Mr. Bernanke is in crisis-management mode, trying to deal with the mess his predecessor left behind. I don't have any problems with his testimony yesterday, although I suspect that it's already too late to prevent a recession. But let's hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.
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| The Bus to Houston 
Illustration by Bob Hambly January 20, 2008 Lives The Bus to Houston By MARTHA WOODROOF My leaving home actually began by going back there, to Greensboro, N.C., from Mount Holyoke College for the summer of 1966. That was when my mother pretty much went off her rocker. It wasn't really a surprise. Mother had been intermittently mentally ill for years, but since being crazy was considered unacceptable in our house, her problems hadn't been dealt with at all. Mother had "issues" with control, with sex, with emotional intimacy, with a brain that produced too much of some chemicals and not enough of others. Her problems ran rampant and unacknowledged through my childhood, as my father was too worn down — or didn't know how — to intervene. I was 19 that summer, working as a teacher's aid in Head Start, trying to finish growing up. For this, it seemed, my lovely, erudite mother raged at me almost nonstop. When she physically attacked my boyfriend, I'd had enough. I took my earnings — 30 bucks in cash, 200 more in my checkbook — and got on the bus to Houston. I wanted a different life, and Houston seemed as different as I could afford. A Greyhound bus is a honky-tonk on wheels; a rolling principality where the driver may be king, but if you're quiet the king doesn't care what you're up to. Riding one for 36 hours in the mid-'60s was like living the lyrics of a Woody Guthrie song. There I was, Miss Prissy Prep School, with her 30 bucks and her paperback Trollope novel, awash in the smell of fried chicken and dirty diapers and increasingly unwashed people. I stared out the window and watched the South's underbelly roll by with its shacks and cotton fields, live oaks and bayous. This, finally, was my life. The 15-year-old boy beside me was on his way to Mississippi for reasons he didn't want to talk about. Because he hadn't had the ritualized social dance drilled into him that I'd had drilled in to me, he assumed people sitting next to each other on a bus were friends. And so we were, talking about our short lives as the dingy bus stations came and went. That boy was the first person I told about my mother. He seemed to think no less of me for either having such a parent or for leaving her behind, but he did insist I phone home from Spartanburg so that my folks — imperfect as they were — wouldn't worry more than was unavoidable. When I ran short of cash just before he got off the bus, he lent me $10. I wrote down his address and promised to send him the money. With no seatmate to distract me, I crossed the Mississippi with my nose stuck to the window. It stayed there through Louisiana and beyond, while Trollope lay neglected in my lap. Why read when I could watch East Texas roll by? Freedom's just another word for no pretensions left to lose. I got off the bus in Houston at midnight and checked into the cheap hotel across the street. My first job was as a lunch-counter waitress. No one there cared that I spoke French or could discuss "Paradise Lost"; they just wanted their eggs. But before long I was working as a researcher and had my own studio apartment. It was the '60s; I considered myself a person of principle and art. I occupied buildings, marched for miles, lost friends to Canada and acquaintances to war, got involved in theater. I fell in love with Texas weather's lack of civility, with Houston's swagger, with tall men who wore big hats. My daughter, Lizzie, was born in Houston. We moved with her father to Charlottesville, Va., when she was 5, and she and I stayed there. While she was growing up I liked to remind her that before she ever saw Mr. Jefferson's manicured city, she'd been in a hurricane, stared down giant water roaches, slept backstage and protested injustice. I'm happy and proud to say she has grown up unafraid. Leaving home the way I did didn't fix either me or my life, but it did teach me I didn't have to stay somewhere just because the future somewhere else looked murky — something that was good to know when my first two marriages didn't work. God knows I've had plenty of rough patches since then — bouts with addiction and alcoholism, my own rounds with the family disease of depression — but nothing ever made me regret getting on the Houston bus. I did my best to keep in touch with my parents, and I visited them occasionally. At the end of my mother's life I was able to take care of her without rancor. By then I suppose I understood we'd both done the best we could. But I put off sending the 10 bucks back to that boy on the Houston bus until I finally lost his address. And that I do regret. Martha Woodroof reports for public radio and is the author of "How to Stop Screwing Up: Twelve Steps to a Real Life and a Pretty Good Time."
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| New Wave on the Black Sea 
RCINY/Tartan USA Corneliu Porumboiu January 20, 2008 New Wave on the Black Sea "HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?" This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin ("the Gus Van Sant"; "the Chinese documentary"; "that Russian thing"). It's a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be? More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out. But for the moment we were happy to have "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," the second feature by Cristi Puiu, though given the movie's methods and subject matter there was perhaps something a little perverse in our joy. Its exotic provenance was not the only thing that made Puiu's movie sound like something only a stereotypical film snob could love. More than two and a half hours long, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" chronicles the last night in the life of its title character, a flabby 63-year-old Bucharest pensioner with a stomachache and a drinking problem. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style in drab urban locations — a shabby apartment, the inside of an ambulance, a series of fluorescent-bulbed hospital waiting and examination rooms — it follows a narrative arc from morbidity to mortality punctuated by casual, appalling instances of medical malpractice. And yet viewers who witnessed poor Dante Lazarescu's unheroic passing on the grand screen of the Salle Debussy emerged from the experience feeling more exhilarated than depressed. "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is raw, melancholy and unflinching, but it is also lyrical, funny and, perhaps paradoxically, full of life. And though the wobbling camera and the use of unflattering available light create an atmosphere of tough, unadorned naturalism, the film is also, on closer inspection, a remarkably artful piece of work, with a strong, unpredictable story, rigorous camera work and powerfully understated performances. The excitement that greeted it came from the feeling that one of the oldest and strongest capacities of cinema — to capture and illuminate reality, one face, one room, one life at a time — had been renewed. When the festival was over, Cristi Puiu returned to Bucharest with an award, called Un Certain Regard, given to the best film in a side program that frequently upstages the main competition. The rest of us went home with the glow of discovery that is one reason we go to film festivals in the first place. This is not an especially unusual occurrence on the festival circuit. Every so often, a modest picture from an obscure place makes a big splash in the relatively small international art-film pond. But the triumph of "Mr. Lazarescu" in Cannes turned out to be a sign of things to come. In 2006, the year after "Mr. Lazarescu," attentive Cannes adventurers would find room in their screening schedules for two new Romanian movies, Catalin Mitulescu's "Way I Spent the End of the World" and Corneliu Porumboiu's "12:08 East of Bucharest," both of which dealt, albeit in very different ways, with the revolution of 1989. When the time came to hand out awards, Porumboiu won the Caméra d'Or, given to the best debut feature. A year later, the first film in the Cannes competition to be shown to the press was Cristian Mungiu's second feature, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a harrowing, suspenseful story of illegal abortion and an unsparing portrait of daily life in the last years of Communist rule. By the end of the festival, "the Romanian abortion movie" (its inevitable and somewhat unfortunate shorthand designation) had overpowered a competitive field. There was much delight but no great surprise when Mungiu, a soft-spoken, round-faced 39-year-old, walked onto the stage of the Salle Lumière on the last night of the festival to accept the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize and a token of membership in the world fraternity of cinematic masters (or at least in a diverse club whose other recent inductees include Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier and Michael Moore). Earlier in the day, the Certain Regard jury (one of whose members was Cristi Puiu) gave its award to "California Dreamin'," yet another Romanian movie whose director, the prodigiously talented Cristian Nemescu, died in a car accident the year before at the age of 27. In three years, then, four major prizes at the world's pre-eminent film festival went to movies from a country whose place in the history of 20th-century cinema might charitably be called marginal. The post-Cannes triumphal march of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (it opens in New York on Friday) to the tops of English-language critics' polls and year-end lists, as well as to a Golden Globe nomination, offers belated confirmation of last spring's news flash from the Côte d'Azur. But perhaps you are hearing it here first: the Romanian new wave has arrived. IS THERE OR IS THERE NOT? Such is the consensus, or at least the hype, within the worldwide critical community. In Romania itself, where Mungiu's Palme d'Or was front-page news and occasioned a burst of national pride (including a medal bestowed on the director by the country's president), there is a bit more skepticism. The Romanian title of "12:08 East of Bucharest," the 2006 Caméra d'Or winner, is "Fost sau n-a fost," which translates as "was there or was there not?" The question is posed by the pompous host of a provincial television talk show to an undistinguished panel (consisting of an alcoholic schoolteacher, a semiretired Santa Claus and a desultory handful of callers) on the 16th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu. The moderator wants his guests to address whether or not, in their sad little city in Moldavia (Porumboiu's hometown of Vaslui), the revolution really happened. A long and inconclusive debate follows, punctuated by verbal digressions and technical difficulties: a production assistant's hand reaches into the frame; the camera abruptly zooms in on the host's nose. ("At last, a close-up," he says). A discussion of contemporary Romanian cinema with Romanian filmmakers and critics can sometimes resemble that scene: "Is there or is there not a Romanian new wave?" Or, as it was put recently, with some irreverence, before a very distinguished panel at a contentious public debate held at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, "Romanian Cinema: The Golden Age?" Compared with what? Romanian cinema, it will be pointed out, was not born with "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." As it happened, Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or arrived punctually on the 50th anniversary of the first Romanian Palme, awarded in 1957 to Ion Popescu-Gopo's "Short History," a charming, wordless animated short in which human evolution and industrial development culminate in the planting of large daisylike flowers on distant planets. More to the point, there was a Romanian movie industry in the 1970s and '80s, and many of the filmmakers whose movies traveled the festival rounds in those days — directors like Stere Gulea, Dan Pita and Mircea Daneliuc — are still active. The younger generation, furthermore, does not necessarily represent a unified or coherent movement. In an article published last summer in the English-language journal European Alternatives, Alex Leo Serban, one of Romania's leading film critics, instructed readers to keep in mind that "there are no 'waves,' . . . just individuals." When I met him in Bucharest in November, Puiu, the director of "Mr. Lazarescu," was more emphatic. "There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian new wave," he insisted, hammering the point home against the arm of his living-room couch. Puiu, who studied painting in Switzerland before turning to film, is given to grand, counterintuitive statements. ("I am not a filmmaker!" he practically shouted at me when I asked him, in all innocence, what inspired him to become one.) To spend time with him — as I discovered in the course of a long evening at his apartment, during which several bottles of Romanian wine and countless American cigarettes joined Mr. Lazarescu in the great beyond — is to be drawn into frequent and fascinating argument. Over hors d'oeuvres, we stumbled into a friendly quarrel over the idea that anyone's life has ever really been changed by a book or a film, and as we ate roast lamb at Puiu's high, narrow kitchen table we debated whether or not a camera's zoom could be said to correspond to any activity of the human eye. When it comes to new waves, the critics who announce (or invent) them have more of an investment than artists, who understandably resist the notion that their individuality might be assimilated into some larger tendency. Ever since the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early '60s, cinephiles have scanned the horizon looking for movement. In Czechoslovakia before 1968, in West Germany and Hollywood in the 1970s and more recently in Taiwan, Iran and Uzbekistan, the metaphor signaled newness, iconoclasm, a casting off of tradition and a rediscovery of latent possibilities. It also contains an implicit threat of obsolescence, since what crests and crashes ashore is also sure to ebb. Which may be one reason for partisans of Romanian cinema to resist the idea of a wave. If no one wins a prize next year in Cannes, will this golden age be over? But it's hard, all the same, for an outsider to give full credence to the notion that the current flowering of Romanian film is entirely a matter of happenstance, the serendipitous convergence of a bunch of idiosyncratic talents. For one thing, to watch recent Romanian movies — the features and the shorts, the festival prizewinners and those that might or should have been — is to discover a good deal of continuity and overlap in addition to obvious differences. Though they might be reluctant to admit it, the new Romanian filmmakers have a lot in common beyond their reliance on a small pool of acting and technical talent. Because of the stylistic elements they share — a penchant for long takes and fixed camera positions; a taste for plain lighting and everyday décor; a preference for stories set amid ordinary life — Puiu, Porumboiu and Mungiu are sometimes described as minimalists or neo-neorealists. But while their work does show some affinity with that of other contemporary European auteurs, like the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who make art out of the grim facts of quotidian existence, the realism of the Romanians has some distinct characteristics of its own. It seems like something more than coincidence, for example, that the five features that might constitute a mini-canon of 21st-century Romanian cinema — "Stuff and Dough," Puiu's first feature; "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"; "12:08 East of Bucharest"; "The Paper Will Be Blue," by Radu Muntean; and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" — all confine their action to a single day and focus on a single action. This is less a matter of Aristotelian discipline than of respect for the contingency and loose-endedness of real experience. In each case, the action is completed — Lazarescu dies; the abortion in "4 Months" is performed; the broadcast in "12:08" comes to an end — but a lingering, haunting sense of inconclusiveness remains. The narratives have a shape, but they seem less like plots abstracted from life than like segments carved out of its rough rhythms. The characters are often in a state of restless, agitated motion, confused about where they are going and what they will find when they arrive. The camera follows them into ambulances, streetcars, armored vehicles and minivans, communicating with unsettling immediacy their anxiety and disorientation. The viewer is denied the luxury of distance. After a while, you feel you are living inside these movies as much as watching them. When Otilia, the heroine of "4 Months," joins a dinner party at her boyfriend's house, the camera stays across the table from her, putting the audience in the position of a silent, watchful guest. We know she has just been through an unspeakably strange and awful experience, but the others, friends of the boyfriend's parents, are oblivious, and their banal, posturing wisdom becomes excruciating. The emptiness of authority — whether generational, political or conferred by elevated social status — is an unmistakable theme in the work of nearly all the younger Romanian filmmakers. The doctors who neglect Mr. Lazarescu; the grandiose, small-time television host in "12:08"; the swaggering army commanders and rebel leaders in "The Paper Will Be Blue" and their successors, the officious bureaucrats in "California Dreamin' " — all of these men (and they are all men) display a self-importance that is both absurd and malignant. Their hold on power is mitigated sometimes by their own clumsiness but more often by unheralded, stubborn acts of ordinary decency. An ambulance technician decides to help out a suffering old man who is neither kin nor especially kind; a student stands stoically by her irresponsible friend; a militia officer, in the middle of a revolution, goes out of his way to find and protect an errant, idealistic young man under his command. There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good guys and bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission. This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty. There is an unmistakable political dimension to this kind of storytelling, even when the stories themselves seem to have no overt political content. During the Ceausescu era, which ended abruptly, violently and somewhat ambiguously in December 1989 — in the last and least velvety of the revolutions of that year — Romanian public life was dominated by fantasies, delusions and lies. And the filmmakers who were able to work in such conditions resorted, like artists in other communist countries, to various forms of allegory and indirection. Both Puiu and Mungiu describe this earlier mode of Romanian cinema as "metaphorical," and both utter the word with a heavy inflection of disgust. "I wanted to become a filmmaker as a reaction to that kind of cinema," Mungiu told me. "Nothing like this ever happened in real life. And you got this desire to say: 'People, you don't know what you're talking about. This is all fake. This is not what you should be telling in films. I could do way better than you.' I felt this way, but I think this whole generation had that feeling. Those movies were badly acted, completely unbelievable, with stupid situations, lots of metaphors. It was a time when, you know, saying something about the system was more important than telling a story." The new generation finds itself with no shortage of stories to tell, whether about the traumas of the Stalinist past or the confusions of the Euro-consumerist present — and also, for the moment, with an audience eager to hear them. TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE Or perhaps with several different audiences. "Make sure you pay attention to the words on the screen at the beginning," Mungiu advised a packed house of moviegoers who had come, six months after Cannes, to see "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." This was in Silver Spring, Md., at a program of new European movies presented by the American Film Institute. I saw Mungiu in Cannes in May and met him briefly at the New York Film Festival, but as it happened I would be unable to catch him in Bucharest. After his triumphant homecoming and a kind of roadshow Romanian release of "4 Months" over the summer, he had been in a state of frequent-flier exile familiar to successful filmmakers, crisscrossing the globe — with stops in Korea, Berlin, Los Angeles and now the suburbs of Washington — to show his movie. His opening remarks were meant to direct the audience's attention to the only part of "4 Months" that provides its story with explicit context, a note in the lower right-hand corner that says, "Romania, 1987." But for this crowd, it turned out, the explanation was redundant. They knew exactly where they were. Two-thirds of the way through the screening — at a point when the viewer is fully immersed in the helplessness and dread that are the film's governing emotions — I bumped into Mungiu just outside the theater doors. He appeared to be listening intently to what was going on inside. "I think there are a lot of Romanians here tonight," he said, looking up. I asked what gave him that impression. "They're laughing," he said. "They always do." Now, it should be noted that "4 Months" is about as far from a comedy as a movie can be. If you were looking for a generic label, you could do worse than to call it a kind of horror movie, in which the two main characters, young women in jeopardy, are subjected to the sadism of an unscrupulous abortionist and, almost worse, the indifference, hostility and incomprehension of just about everyone else. It is not an easy film to watch, but it feels, to a non-Romanian, like an absolutely convincing anatomy of what ordinary people endured under communism. And it clearly felt that way to the members of the Romanian diaspora as well, except that they found humor in addition to horror in revisiting a familiar bygone world. What followed the screening was less the anticipated Q-and-A session than a trip down memory lane, which spilled out into the theater lobby and continued well into the night. "That was exactly like my dorm room at university," one woman announced. Another wanted to know how Mungiu found the brands of soap, gum and other items that had been staples of the Ceausescu era. ("You can find anything on the Internet," he replied.) Mungiu originally conceived "4 Months," which is based on something that happened to a woman he knows, as part of a series of "Tales From the Golden Age," an ironic reference to the way Ceausescu characterized his reign, which began in 1965. Born in 1968, Mungiu calls himself a "child of the decree," meaning Ceausescu's 1966 edict restricting abortion and birth control for the purpose of spurring economic development by increasing the Romanian population. Though the law fell short of its demographic goals, it did in its way spawn a handful of new Romanian filmmakers, who reached adolescence and early adulthood just as Ceausescu's monstrous utopian experiment was collapsing. Puiu was born in 1967. Muntean, whose experience in the military during the 1989 revolution is the basis of "The Paper Will Be Blue," is four years younger. Corneliu Porumboiu was 14 (and playing table tennis with a friend) when the old regime fell. Its demise was an anomaly, much as the regime itself was. One especially painful aspect of Romanian communism was that it was, well, Romanian — an indigenous outgrowth at least as much as a foreign imposition. For much of his reign, Ceausescu was admired in the West for his relative independence from Moscow, but internally he fostered a nationalist cult of personality that in some ways had more in common with Kim Il Sung's North Korea (which Ceausescu came to admire after visiting in the early 1970s) than with desultory bureaucratic police states like Czechoslovakia and East Germany. And perhaps for this reason — because Romanians were not simply throwing off an imperial yoke, but at the same time exorcising a leader who claimed to be the highest incarnation of their identity as a people — the Romanian revolution was by far the most violent in Eastern Europe in 1989. Elsewhere, the imagery of that year consists of hammers chipping at the Berlin Wall and a playwright installed in Prague Castle, but in Romania there are soldiers firing into crowds, torn flags and the summary execution, on Christmas Day, of the dictator and his wife. And the nature of the event is shadowed, to this day, by doubt and irresolution. Was it a popular uprising or a coup d'etat sponsored by an opportunistic faction within the military and the ruling party? Its aftermath — in particular the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1990 — was nearly as bloody as the revolution itself, and the transition out of communism in the 1990s was marked by economic crisis, political stalemate and social malaise. It would be an unwarranted generalization for me to claim that Romanians are still preoccupied with this history. I can say, though, that every conversation I had in Bucharest, even the most casual, circled back to the old days, so that I sometimes felt that they ended much more recently than 18 years ago. And the physical aspect of Bucharest confirms this impression. The busy shopping streets have the usual storefronts — Sephora, Hugo Boss, various cellphone carriers and European grocery chains — and the main north-south road out of town is jammed with Land Rovers and lined with big-box discount stores. Turn a corner, though, or glance behind one of the billboards mounted on the walls of old buildings, and you are thrown backward, from the shiny new age of the European Union (which Romania joined only last year) into the rustiest days of the Iron Curtain. The architecture is a jumble of late-19th-century Hapsburg-style villas and gray socialist apartment blocks, some showing signs of renovation, others looking as if they had fallen under the protection of some mad Warsaw Pact preservation society. This layering of the old and the new was perhaps most apparent when I visited Bucharest's National University of Drama and Film (U.N.A.T.C.), a venerable institution housed in a building rumored to have been previously used as a training facility for the Securitate, Ceausescu's notorious secret police. Mungiu, Porumboiu and Nemescu are all U.N.A.T.C. graduates, and Puiu currently teaches courses there in screen acting. Like much else in the city, the complex was under renovation, with freshly painted walls and tools banging and buzzing in the corridors and courtyards. In a drafty classroom downstairs, I was introduced to members of the faculty, who sat silently and warily, arms folded, as, with the help of an interpreter, I fumbled through an explanation of my interest in new Romanian film. It was not an interest any of them gave much indication of sharing, apart from one voluble professor. "We are all dinosaurs, but at least I will admit that I am one," he announced, before going on to praise the achievements of his former students. Afterward, feeling as if I had just failed an oral exam, I went upstairs to meet with some current students — about 40 of them, crowded into a small screening room. The difference between them and their professors seemed to be more than just a matter of age and status. They belonged to a different world, one in which I felt perfectly at home. I wanted to talk about Romanian cinema, and while they had a lot to say about the subject, they also wanted to talk about Borat and David Lynch, about Sundance and the Oscars, about Japanese anime and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." Fost sau n-a fost? You tell me. CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' "There is no Romanian film industry." This is not another one of Cristi Puiu's counterintuitive provocations but rather a statement I was to hear again and again in Bucharest as I visited the offices of film schools and production companies, a studio back lot and the headquarters of the National Center for Cinematography (C.N.C.). There was no shortage of industriousness, but Romania lacks the basic infrastructure that makes the cycle of production, distribution and exhibition viable in other countries. What is missing, above all, is movie theaters: there are around 80 cinemas serving a country of 22 million people, and 7 of the 42 largest municipalities have no movie screens at all. (In the United States there are almost 40,000 screens and millions of movie fans who still complain that there is nothing to see). What Romania does have, in addition to a backlog of stories crying out to be told on screen, are traditions and institutions that give filmmakers at least some of the tools required to tell them. The "dinosaurs" at U.N.A.T.C. take their pupils through a rigorous program of instruction that includes courses in aesthetics and art history and requires them to make two 35-millimeter short films before graduating, one of them in black and white. This kind of old-school technical training, which extends to acting as well, surely accounts for some of the sophistication and self-assurance that Mungiu, Porumboiu and their colleagues display. Not that anything comes easily. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either from within Romania or from outside the country. And the scarcity of theaters makes exhibition quotas — which other countries use to protect their film industries from being overwhelmed by Hollywood — untenable. But if there is no film industry, there is at least a Law of Cinematography (modeled on a French statute) that establishes a mechanism by which the state helps finance movie production. Taxes collected on television advertising revenue, DVD sales and other media-related transactions go into a fund, money from which is distributed in a twice-yearly competition. Winning projects are ranked, with the top selections receiving as much as 50 percent of their production costs from the fund. Film costs tend to be modest — the budget of "4 Months" was around 700,000 euros — and the filmmakers have 10 years to pay back the state's investment, at which point they own the film outright. Many of the filmmakers I spoke to complained about the system. Porumboiu, impatient with its slow pace and bureaucratic obstacles, financed "12:08" himself. Shortly before Cannes last year, Mungiu was involved in a public spat with the C.N.C. that made headlines in the local press. After a dispute with the center, Puiu circulated a letter pledging never to participate in the system again. But a collection of the movies that arose from harmonious relations between filmmakers and their financiers would consist largely of home videos and vanity projects. Even frustrated artists, in other words, can flourish. And their success abroad, moreover, feeds the system with prestige and helps bring in money from the European Union and adventurous foreign investors. Though Romania's homegrown film industry will most likely remain small, it exists in close proximity to Hollywood itself. American audiences may not be familiar with "The Paper Will Be Blue" or "Stuff and Dough," but those who have seen "Cold Mountain," "Borat" or "Seed of Chucky" can claim some acquaintance with Romanian cinema, or at least with movies made in Romania. About 20 miles outside of Bucharest, where newly built suburban developments give way to farmland, is the Castel Film Studio, a vast complex that houses the largest soundstage in Europe, a 200,000-gallon tank for underwater filming and standing sets like city streets, a full-size wingless jet and the mountain hamlet from "Cold Mountain." Castel promises skilled labor at a lower cost than producers are likely to find in the United States or Western Europe (though the weakness of the dollar has made its prices a bit less attractive to Americans). Its crews are trained at the rigorous Romanian film schools, and in turn receive hands-on experience with equipment that is hard to come by in modest Romanian productions. Oleg Mutu, the director of photography who brought Bucharest to gloomy life in "Mr. Lazarescu" and "4 Months," spent a few weeks operating a camera on "Cold Mountain." Cristi Puiu recently shot an insurance commercial at Castel. The U.N.A.T.C. students, even as they dream of Golden Palms and envision making tough, realistic movies about immigrants, Gypsies and alienated youth, acknowledge that they are more likely to find paying work in advertising or television. Meanwhile, the stars of the current wave — who are part of what is to my mind the most exciting development in a European national cinema since Spain in the 1980s — contemplate their next projects and prepare their proposals for the next round of C.N.C. competitions. One afternoon in Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu and I sat in the cafe at the Bucharest Cinematheque, drinking coffee and talking about movies: Woody Allen; "The Lives of Others"; the Italian neorealists. The Cinematheque is a kind of mothership for Bucharest cineastes. It's where they went to discover exotic films when they were younger, and where their films are now shown and celebrated in a country without many other public places for movie going. After a while, we got up, and Porumboiu offered to show me around the screening rooms. At the box-office entrance, decorated with a "4 Months, 3 Weeks and Two Days" flier, a guard confronted us and shooed us away. The facilities were closed. Porumboiu tried to explain that he wanted to show them to a guest from New York, but he was rebuffed. We could buy a ticket or rent out a theater, but we couldn't just walk in and look around. And so we wandered away, to find another place to hang out in this bustling, bedraggled city. It occurred to me that maybe there was no Romanian translation of the sentence "Do you know who I am?" — which would have been the first thing out of an American director's mouth in a similar situation. Or perhaps this was a double-edged metaphor: maybe in Bucharest, nowadays, a filmmaker with a prize from Cannes is nothing special. A.O. Scott, a film critic at The Times, last wrote for the magazine about the history of the Hollywood Western.
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| Clinton Defeats Obama in Nevada Vote 
Todd Heisler/The New York Times Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrated in Las Vegas after winning Saturday's Democratic caucuses in Nevada January 19, 2008 Clinton Defeats Obama in Nevada Vote LAS VEGAS – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, capturing strong support from women voters and adding a fresh boost of momentum to her campaign as the Democratic presidential race heads to South Carolina, where she is engaged in a fierce battle with her rival, Senator Barack Obama. Mrs. Clinton's victory in Nevada – her second straight win over Mr. Obama – underscored her strength among Hispanic voters, who comprise a large share of the electorate in several upcoming states, as the campaign expands into a coast-to-coast series of 22 contests on Feb. 5. The New York senator had 51 percent of the vote to Mr. Obama's 45 percent, with just over 90 percent of the state's caucuses reporting. John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, faded to a distant third place with 4 percent of the vote. "I guess this is how the West was won," Mrs. Clinton told her supporters during a victory rally at the Planet Hollywood hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Speaking over loud cheers, she added: "We will all be united in November. I don't think politics is a game. I don't think elections are just another day in the calendar." Mr. Obama, in a terse statement, barely acknowledged his defeat. "We ran an honest, uplifting campaign in Nevada that focused on the real problems Americans are facing, a campaign that appealed to people's hopes instead of their fears," he said. "That's the campaign we'll take to South Carolina and across America in the weeks to come, and that's how we will truly bring about the change this country is hungry for." Mr. Obama said that he received more national delegates in Nevada than Mrs. Clinton because of his strong performance across the state, "including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled." But some election officials said they were confused about Mr. Obama's claim that he more delegates than Mrs. Clinton. "I don't know why they're saying that," said Jill Derby, president of the Nevada State Democratic Party, referring to the Obama campaign. "We don't select our national delegates the way they're saying. We won't select national delegates for a few more months." In terms of the popular vote, Mrs. Clinton won most of her support in Nevada's southern counties, while Mr. Obama was more popular in the north. Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its influential union blocs, was supporting Mrs. Clinton by an 11-point margin with 93 percent of its caucuses reporting. Mr. Edwards's campaign issued a statement that described the senator as an underdog "facing two $100 million candidates" and emphasized his platform against lobbyists and special interests. "The nomination won't be decided by win-loss records, but by delegates, and we're ready to fight for every delegate," the statement said. State party officials said more than 107,000 Nevada voters attended the caucuses. It is the third state in the row to achieve record-setting turnout in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, which party strategists believe is a referendum on the Bush administration and a strong call for a new direction in Washington. Before leaving town, the candidates made separate stops to visit hotel and casino workers, making a final appeal for support. Voters across Nevada poured into hundreds of neighborhood precincts across the state, as well as a handful of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, to voice their preference in the Democratic presidential campaign. In a brief morning stop by the Mirage casino and hotel, Mr. Obama was asked whether the outcome would influence voters in South Carolina, where Democrats will vote next Saturday. "All these things add up," Mr. Obama said. Nevada, the third stop in the Democratic presidential nominating fight, was perhaps the most mysterious among the early-voting states. There was no clear front runner, no reliable polling data, and no institutional history. All candidates worked feverishly to manage – usually lowering – their expectations. The Democratic caucus, never even a minor factor in past primary seasons, has historically attracted only the party faithful; only about 9,000 people participated in the 2004 caucuses at a handful of sites. Party officials were uncertain about turnout on Saturday, but preliminary reports suggested that participation was significantly higher. At the Flamingo hotel, one of the at-large caucus sites on the Las Vegas Strip, it was a chaotic scene. Inside the Sunset Ballroom, 245 voters registered their attendance before breaking off into their preference groups. Maids and cooks, bellmen and bartenders – nearly all of whom wore their uniforms and matching nametags – were standing more than 20 deep. To attend the caucus, they took an hour lunch break, but as the proceedings stretched beyond the allotted time, some of the voters asked if they could leave. A boxed lunch was served and the proceedings were translated into Spanish. "No matter what happens at the end of this, we will leave as friends and Democrats will be working together," the temporary chairwoman of the caucus said, standing at the front of the ballroom. "We want everyone to feel they can choose their own candidate without intimidation." Brenda Santiago, a housekeeper at nearby Harrah's hotel and casino, arrived shortly before Noon. Although she is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which supported Mr. Obama, she said she had been determined to choose her favorite candidate on her own. And that, she said, was Senator Clinton. "I have my own opinions," said Ms. Santiago, 46. "Hillary has more experience – and she has Bill!" The strength of Mr. Obama's endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union remained an open question. The Clinton campaign had denounced the at-large precincts in casinos as unfair, but inside the Sunset Ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel, Mrs. Clinton received support from 121 people and 25 delegates, compared to 120 for Mr. Obama and 24 delegates. The Clinton corner, dominated largely by women, cheered when the results were announced. Nevada was chosen by the Democratic Party to hold an early contest, along with South Carolina, to increase both geographic and racial diversity. Still, as other states decided to move their primaries to Feb. 5, and the nation has focused on the traditional early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, Nevada had remained in the shadows, with fewer candidate visits and national attention. That shifted after Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton split their earlier contests, and the culinary union here, which has about 60,000 members and is extremely influential in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, and hopes to play a major role in the race, threw its endorsement to Mr. Obama in a suddenly-relevant rubber match. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton both had offices around the state, including the Republican strong hold of Elko county, and campaign staff workers have fought for Hispanic, working class and suburban voters. Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting from New York.
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| Winter Day Out in Boston 
Robert Spencer for The New York Times Harvard Book Store, just off Harvard Square. January 18, 2008 Winter Day Out in Boston BOSTON is a city of ghosts, but on the coldest of days, don't expect them to come to you. Instead, visit Forest Hills Cemetery, a rambling Victorian-era burial ground about four miles from downtown and a splendidly quiet place to roam. Winding paths crisscross its 275 acres, and if you pick up a map by the entrance, you can find the graves of Anne Sexton, E. E. Cummings and Eugene O'Neill. Drive slowly along the narrow roads until you find a good place to park and wander. On a recent morning, snow crunched underfoot and fell in soft chunks from the treetops. Bliss. After an hour or two of tromping, you will be thoroughly chilled and getting hungry. Drive a few miles north to Brookline, where you can thaw out by a stone hearth at the Fireplace, known for coziness and New England comfort food. The sweet-spiced squash bisque with Great Hill blue cheese and pumpkin seeds was a standout on my visit, but the tuna melt with Vermont Cheddar and the turkey club rolled in a Rhode Island johnnycake also caught my eye. This being Boston, you must also feed your brain. In tweedy Cambridge, there is no better place to get lost than the aisles of Harvard Book Store, just off Harvard Square. It's 75 years old and packed with titles familiar and unknown. There are separate sections for philosophy, cultural and critical theory and politics, as well as a vast fiction collection. Most customers are quietly engrossed, but you may encounter a conversation or two worth eavesdropping on. Bundle up again and stroll a few blocks, window-shopping all the way, for your next bit of sustenance: an astoundingly rich hot cocoa at L. A. Burdick, a cafe and chocolate shop on the other side of Harvard Square. Choose from dark, milk or white chocolate, and if you dare risk overdosing, try one of Burdick's famous chocolate mice on the side. On the other side of the Charles River, nocturnal adventures await. Boston's South End, brimming with homegrown shops and restaurants, historic brownstones and creative energy, is a fine place to end a wintry day. In the middle of it all is Sibling Rivalry, an upscale restaurant run by two brothers who create "dueling" menus with one set of main ingredients each season. The fall menu featured scallops, mushrooms, artichokes, bacon and beets — one brother concocted a salad of roasted beets with goat cheese fondue, walnuts and bibb lettuce, for example, while the other offered boneless short ribs of beef with roasted beets, ragout of salsify, pearl onions and carrots. Just down the street, one of the city's newest nightspots pulses with live music, mostly jazz, seven nights a week. Most performers are local, with the nearby Berklee College of Music providing a steady supply. You might catch a jazz organ trio, a bluesy jam band or a bossa nova chanteuse in the cavernous space, a former boiler room with exposed brick walls, red velvet curtains and funky chandeliers. Drinks like the Beehive Julep and the Moscow Mule (vodka, ginger beer and lime) will help you stay toasty. If snow is falling, walk less than two blocks south to Union Park Street to glimpse a scene from 19th-century Boston before calling it a night. The narrow park, surrounded by cast-iron fences and gas lamps, will be lovely and still, a perfect precursor to sleep. Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Avenue, Jamaica Plain. The Fireplace, 1634 Beacon Street, Brookline; (617) 975-1900. Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge; (617) 661-1515. L. A. Burdick, 52-D Brattle Street, Cambridge; (617) 491-4340. Sibling Rivalry, 525 Tremont Street; (617) 338-5338. The Beehive, 541 Tremont Street; (617) 423-0069.
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| On Africa’s Roof, Still Crowned With Snow 
Tom Norring Trekkers at Uhuru on Mount Kilimanjaro's Kibo peak. At 19,340 feet, it's the highest point in Africa January 20, 2008 Explorer | Mount Kilimanjaro On Africa's Roof, Still Crowned With Snow By NEIL MODIE A THICK veil of snow had settled on Kilimanjaro the morning after my group arrived in Tanzania. Over breakfast, we gazed at the peak filling the sky above the palm trees of our hotel courtyard in Moshi, the town closest to the mountain. It was as Hemingway described it: "as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." I had wanted to climb to the roof of Africa before climate change erased its ice fields and the romance of its iconic "Snows of Kilimanjaro" image. But as we trudged across the 12,000-foot Shira plateau on Day 2 of our weeklong climb and gazed at the whiteness of the vast, humpbacked summit, I thought maybe I needn't have worried. An up-and-down-and-up traverse of the south face of Kibo, the tallest of the mountain's three volcanic peaks, showed us a panorama of the summit ice cap and fractured tentacles of glacial ice that dangled down gullies dividing the vertical rock faces. And four days later, when we reached 19,340-foot Uhuru, the highest point on Kibo, we beheld snow and ice fields so enormous as to resemble the Arctic. It looked nothing like the photographs of Kibo nearly denuded of ice and snow in the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Nor did it seem to jibe with the film's narrative: "Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro." As it turned out, we had simply been lucky. This was the last week of January — nearly a year ago — and the middle of the dry season. But several weeks of heavy rain and snow preceded the arrival of our group, 10 mountaineering clients and a professional guide from International Mountain Guides, based near Seattle. That made for a freakishly well-fed snow pack and the classic snowy image portrayed on travel posters, the label of the local Kilimanjaro Premium Lager and the T-shirts hawked in Moshi's tourist bazaars. But to many climate scientists and glaciologists who have probed and measured, the disappearance of the summit's ice fields is inevitable and imminent. Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University who has studied Kilimanjaro's ice fields for years, photographed the summit a year to the week, coincidentally, before we were there. He found only a few, isolated snow patches in shaded areas, a drastic difference from what we encountered. Even on the world's highest free-standing volcano, seasonal snow doesn't remain on a peak so close to the Equator. One of our Tanzanian guides, John Mtui, a tall, bespectacled and soft-spoken Chagga — the people who inhabit Kilimanjaro's southern foothills — began climbing the mountain as a porter 25 years earlier, when he was 18. "When I first started climbing, we had big snow, big glaciers," Mr. Mtui said. "The glaciers were bigger and taller than now. And also, the weather changed. We had heavier rain than we have now." Like other exotic destinations widely believed to be threatened by degradation from climate change, the mountain's precariousness has become a marketing opportunity. The adventure travel industry sends about 30,000 climbers a year toward Kilimanjaro's summit. Scientific and outdoor magazines mention the imminent loss of the ice fields. So do guide services and outfitters on their Web sites. Our climb leader, Justin Merle, a mellow 6-foot-4 man in his late 20s who has a world-class mountaineering résumé, said of the typical adventure-travel article: "It's like, 'See Kili Before the Snow Is Gone.' That's almost a catchphrase." Given Kilimanjaro's snow, glaciers and volcanic upbringing, it didn't look all that different from peaks I've climbed in my native Northwest. From my living room in Seattle, I can gaze at Mount Rainier, which I've climbed a dozen times. Even in the dead of summer, it retains a mantle of ice that makes it seem like a hulking life form. Kilimanjaro is almost unimaginably bigger: nearly a mile higher, it covers 1,250 square miles abutting Kenya. And yet, unlike Rainier, climbing Kilimanjaro required no real mountaineering skills, no ice axes, ropes or crampons, merely strong legs, hearts and lungs for trudging more than three and a half vertical miles above sea level. That, and a supply of Diamox, to fend off altitude sickness. Our approach was on the Machame, the most scenic and second-most heavily traveled — a distant second — of the six designated routes to the summit. Even so, our six camps along the way, five on the ascent and one on the descent, were 200-tent metropolises. The most heavily congested approach is the Marangu, called the "tourist" or "Coca-Cola" route, a reflection of its overcrowded, touristy ambience and the ubiquitous soft drink, which is sold at camps along the way. Our longer, more macho Machame is known as the "whiskey route." The trip to the summit and back down again covered 39 miles. Most of my companions were seasoned hikers and backpackers but had scant mountaineering experience. Two exceptions were Todd Ziegler, an orthopedic surgeon from an Atlanta suburb, and his friend, Julie Nellis, a physical therapist from Atlanta, a diminutive but tireless, multisport athlete and the only woman on the trip. Both had climbed Rainier and major summits in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, Mexico and elsewhere. Mr. Merle had already guided expeditions to four of the Seven Summits — Aconcagua, Everest, McKinley and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Kilimanjaro was his easiest. We 11 Americans were the pampered tip of a human iceberg that included three Tanzanian guides and 38 porters and cooks, all Chaggas. They cooked and served our meals, boiled our water and carried much of our individual gear along with cook pots, food, our sleeping tents and a walk-in dining tent. As we'd trudge with our day packs up the mountain, the porters — some in their midteens — would overtake us while hauling on their backs our duffels containing our sleeping bags and extra clothing, tents and plastic armchairs. "Jambo," they'd murmur, Swahili for "hello"; it was a polite way of saying, "Coming through. Step aside." We passed through ecological zones of spectacular diversity: equatorial rain forest, followed by misty heath and moors dotted with outsize, otherworldly flora, then alpine high desert and finally the frigid, dry summit zone. It was all on trail, but several steep stretches required grabbing handholds on near-vertical rock. At 5,718 feet at the trailhead Machame Gate, we set out on a muddy track in the rain forest, thick with vines, old-man's-beard and trees perched atop giant above-ground roots. The cloudy sky abruptly gave way to heavy rain, which ceased once we made our way up a misty hogback ridge onto the Shira plateau, covered with giant heathers and sprinkled with glossy volcanic obsidian. As we traversed the plateau, gaining, losing and regaining elevation between 12,300 feet and 15,200 feet, four of us took Mr. Merle's offer to make a side trip to the Lava Tower, a black volcanic plug rising some 300 vertical feet above the plateau, while the others hiked on to the next camp. I get spooked scrambling up even nontechnical vertical rock. But when Mr. Merle asked if any of us wanted to ascend the tower, and Ms. Nellis instantly chirped, "I want to go," the rest of us followed, assisted by Mr. Merle and Mr. Mtui in finding each handhold and foothold. In the moors were the region's most distinctively weird plants: colonnade-like, eight-foot lobelias and clusters of tree-size senecio kilimanjari, or giant groundsels, with clumps of cabbage-shaped leaf clusters atop withered-looking trunks. Kilimanjaro's abundant wildlife was rarely visible. Small snakes and monkeys scurried away from us in the rain forest. Jet-black, white-necked ravens — sturdy, hatchet-beaked, mean-looking — uttered guttural croaks as they fought over food scraps at the higher camps. At our highest camp, austere Barafu (ice in Swahili) on a cliff top at 15,200 feet, the only permanent residents were primitive lichens and mosses. From there, starting at midnight with headlamps, we clambered, gulping thin air, up frozen scree the final 4,100 vertical feet to the summit. "Pole-pole," the porters counseled, Swahili for slowly. As if we could do otherwise. On several steep, single-file stretches, we waged elbow and expletive duels with Italian, American and Russian parties trying to crowd past us and other teams who were slowed by traffic jams of climbers above us. Patchy snow covered the upper slopes above approximately 18,500 feet. At dawn, as we reached Stella Point at the lower lip of Kibo's summit crater, the fluted walls of the flat-topped Rebmann Glacier stretched out to our left. Snow blanketed the summit area, a mile and a half wide and hemmed by glaciers. Uhuru, the highest point in all Africa, was a 45-minute slog ahead. From there, we gazed toward Kenya, obscured by clouds, on the mountain's northern flank. In the distance to the southwest rose the volcanic cone of Mount Meru, 15,000 feet. Seven miles to the east, yet still part of the Kilimanjaro massif, was its fanged, eroded, second-highest peak and Africa's third highest, 16,893-foot Mawenzi. (Mount Kenya, about 90 miles north of Nairobi, is No. 2 at 17,058 feet.) All 10 of us reached the summit, even two stragglers fighting altitude sickness. That let International Mountain Guides continue to boast of a 100 percent success rate in getting its Kilimanjaro clients to the top. That flies in the face of the mountain's overall record, thought to be roughly 50 percent failures, mainly on the less acclimatization-friendly Marangu route. After the ascent, we dropped 4,100 feet back down loose scree to Barafu for a brief rest. Then we descended another 5,000 vertical feet, the last hours in a downpour, to muddy Mweka Camp, our final overnight, in the rain forest. There, we beheld a most welcome namesake of the mountain: Kilimanjaro Premium Lager, sold by the Mweka park ranger out of his tiny hut. Descending the final 4,800 feet of elevation to Mweka Gate, we found a clamorous gaggle of local entrepreneurs hustling T-shirts, souvenirs and services. Two dollars bought me an incomparable bargain: a thorough scrubbing, rinsing and wiping of my mud-caked boots, gaiters and trekking poles. Back at the Keys Hotel in Moshi that night, the local lager was the official beverage of our victory celebration. On its label, at least, Kilimanjaro's snows would never disappear. IF YOU GO Kilimanjaro has two main climbing seasons: January through February and mid-June through mid-October, typically the most stable weather periods. The mountain has six established routes to the summit, some of them demanding mountaineering routes. The most heavily used trekking route is the Marangu, but other routes take longer to reach the summit and allow for more gradual acclimatization. Numerous adventure travel companies in the United States and abroad offer guided climbs of Kilimanjaro. International Mountain Guides (360-569-2609; www.mountainguides.com), which has led treks to the summit since 1989, takes the Machame route. There are a 7-day climb for $3,600 and a 15-day trip for $4,975 that includes a wildlife safari to the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti Plain. Prices include park fees and in-country travel. Alpine Ascents International (206-378-1927; www.alpineascents.com) has scheduled 2008 winter climbs at about $5,600, via Machame and including a safari in a 15-day trip. There are climb-only ($4,700) and safari-only ($2,500) options. Rainier Mountaineering (888-892-5462 or 360-569-2227; www.rmiguides.com) offers a 13-day climb via the Machame route and a safari for $4,895 or a 9-day climb-only trip for $3,495. Mountain Travel Sobek (888-687-6235 or 510-594-6000; www.mtsobek.com) takes trekkers on a less traveled route, the Rongai, to Kilimanjaro's summit in a 14-day trip that includes a wildlife safari and a stay on Kenya's coast. Prices start at $5,995 plus $1,050 for park fees and $300 for in-country airfare, or a 10-day climb-only option for $3,995 plus $975 for park fees and $200 for in-country airfare.
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| Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular 
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times Japan's younger generation came of age with the cellphone, and created its own popular culture by tapping thumbs on keypads. January 20, 2008 Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, "The Tale of Genji," a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it. Of last year's 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere. "Will cellphone novels kill 'the author'?" a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature. Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of. One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote "If You" over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors. After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor. "My mother didn't even know that I was writing a novel," said Ms. Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. "So at first when I told her, well, I'm coming out with a novel, she was like, what? "She didn't believe it until it came out and appeared in book stores." The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando. The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by mobile-phone companies' decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004. "Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called 'packet death,' and you wouldn't hear from them for a while," said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels. The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25. "It's not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there," said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. "Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write." Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers. Cellphone writers are not paid for their work, no matter how many millions of times their novels might be read online. The payoff, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the Web sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the sites make most of their money from advertising. Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to remain undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist mostly of dialogue. "Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like 'The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,' " Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country." "In cellphone novels, you don't need that," said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. "If you limit it to a certain place, readers won't be able to feel a sense of familiarity." Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote "The Tale of Genji." "Love Sky," a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre's sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation's attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone's omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie. Given the cellphone novels' domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music. Ms. Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold. "They don't read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them," she said. "On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don't want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I'd like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre." As the genre's popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand? "When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone," said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. "Some hard-core fans wouldn't consider that a cellphone novel." Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool. Ms. Naito, the novelist, said she writes on a computer and sends the text to her cellphone, with which she rearranges the content. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, Ms. Naito said she felt more comfortable writing on a computer. But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing's young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb. "Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied," said Mr. Matsushita of Starts. "Since she's switched to a computer," he added, "her vocabulary's gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer."
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| Today’s Papers Kick in the PantsBy Lydia DePillis
Posted Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008, at 6:36 A.M. E.T. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all lead with the roughly $145 billion economic stimulus package outlined Friday by President Bush. The White House arrived at the number by taking 1 percent of GDP, exceeding the expected $100 billion for onetime individual tax rebates for consumers, with half as much again for businesses in the form of an expansion of the deductions for investment in equipment. The administration sidestepped a few of the plan's worst potential hurdles by leaving details up for negotiation with Congressional Democrats (a strategy Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called "constructive ambiguity") and refraining from linking the proposal to making Bush's earlier tax cuts permanent. The proposal met with largely affable reactions on Capitol Hill, but the WP emphasizes that it failed to calm jittery markets, which continued their fall as the week closed. Today's Nevada Democratic caucus and South Carolina Republican primary dominate election news. The WP fronts a look at the frenzied final day of campaigning in the GOP race, where Mike Huckabee is battling John McCain's veteran supporters with his own Christian evangelicals, both of whom are large constituencies in the pivotal state. South Carolina's political establishment is as divided as its electorate, with its Republican senators split between McCain, who's vowing to follow Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell if necessary," and Mitt Romney, who's in a race for third with Fred Thompson. The NYT fronts below the fold an almost admiring study of Huckabee's ability to turn hard Christian right positions (such as an endorsement of a Southern Baptist statement declaring that a wife must "submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband") into moderate-seeming soundbites, but the paper buries a folksy profile of Fred Thompson on the trail. On the Democratic side, the LAT reefers an overview of the scene in Nevada, finding that while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are making a few concessions to the Nevadan audience with talk of issues like Yucca Mountain, the Western setting is still mostly a backdrop for their recurring themes of change and experience. But in the heightened atmosphere of a tie-breaking state, the WP says that Obama has learned to rigorously counter all the attacks levied against him by Senator Clinton, while weaving offensive barbs into his speeches. The Democratic presidential contenders, breaking from their Congressional colleagues, blasted the White House's stimulus package for passing over those most in need: Although the Bush plan would grant an estimated $800 rebate to each individual taxpayer, 50 million people who make too little to pay income taxes in the first place would get nothing. Administration officials, however, tell the WP that these points are open for debate, and the compromise package—to be hammered out in a meeting Tuesday—could include an increase in the earned income tax credit as well as unemployment benefits. The LAT plays it as a sign that President Bush is taking the lead on the economy, while the NYT notes that both the White House and Congress have an interest in taking swift action, considering recent ominous economic indicators and both of their abysmal approval ratings. Yesterday marked the beginning of Ashura, Shiite Islam's most important holiday, in which hundreds of thousands gather to worship in Basra and Nasiriya. This year, as the LAT fronts and the WP stuffs, adherents of a messianic cult called Supporters of the Mahdi are spreading chaos, hoping to hasten the return of the 12th imam. Eighty have died in clashes with Iraqi security forces, in the government's first major test in the region since the Americans and the British turned it over last month. The NYT has a surprisingly upbeat take, pointing out that government troops have protected the vast majority of worshipers. Meanwhile, the LAT fronts a big picture of people still dying in Kenya, where supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga have begun to tear up railway lines to protest the contested presidential election, meeting with canisters of tear gas from police. According to the NYT, Friday marked the beginning of a period of relative calm after a tactical switch from mass rallies to boycotts of businesses allied with President Mwai Kibaki. The NYT catches up to the WP's scoop yesterday on the CIA's conclusion that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had been taken out by a Pakistani militant leader with ties to al Qaida. The WP, in turn, fronts the case of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a terrorist who took advantage of relatively cushy conditions at Fort Dix, N.J., to start a weapons stash and begin laying plans to attack his captors, while divulging some of the most valuable information gleaned yet on top al Qaida operatives. The NYT features a look at how some high oil prices—those of "edible oils" like palm and canola—are affecting how much people eat, not just how much they drive. Factors like the rise of biofuels in vehicles and even bans on trans fats in United States cities leave poor people in South Asia especially without affordable cooking oil. Covering the race that matters most in Los Angeles, the LAT puts no fewer than six reporters on the story developing around the film industry's biggest party: the Oscars, nominations for which are due out on Tuesday. Everybody's hoping and praying for a resolution to the Writers Guild of America strike—dressmakers! Studios! Millions of people around the world! The NYT gets into the act with an illuminating above-the-fold profile of the two leaders behind the picket lines. The WP reefers and NYT and LAT front long obituaries of the international chess champion, anti-Communist hero, and madman Bobby Fischer, who died late Thursday. Check out the NYT piece for the best stories of his life, including a refusal of psychiatric help on the grounds that a psychiatrist should pay him for the privilege of working on his brain. Lydia DePillis is a writer living in New York.
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| Ferrari’s 2008 car is better than its title-winning predecessor 
 Zoom
Shorter wheelbase on the F2008 helping Raikkonen
Ferrari's 2008 car is better than its title-winning predecessor, Kimi Raikkonen said earlier this week at Jerez.
The Spanish sports newspaper Marca quotes Raikkonen as discussing the early performance of his new mount, the F2008.
"The car has improved in quite a few areas, especially its behaviour in the slow curves," the Finn revealed.
Raikkonen added that at the car's next outing, in Valencia for the group test beginning next Tuesday, the car will be tried with modified bodywork pieces.
"So far the car is behaving well and I think we are in a very good starting position," he said.
Source GMM
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Thursday, January 17, 2008 | Shelby Lynne’s Dusty Trail 
Mel Karch January 13, 2008 Shelby Lynne's Dusty Trail By ROB HOERBURGER I. The Grammarian Everything started as expected. Shelby Lynne, the torchy pop singer, and her band, about a half-dozen slightly shaggy regular Joes, ambled into the Viceroy, a retro lounge in downtown Seattle, in early November, looking to get a head start on Saturday night. They were in town to perform songs from her new CD, "Just a Little Lovin'," a tribute to Dusty Springfield, due out Jan. 29, but because their concert wasn't for a couple of days, Lynne announced, with a knee slap in her voice: "I am off work! I want to get drunk and hear some music." Here was the fabled good ol' girl, who, even though she junked Nashville and country music more than a decade earlier, still had plenty of country spirit. A few rounds were served; jocularity ensued. That is, until the end of her second Chopin martini (three olives), when the air started to get a little thin. "Do you know the difference between the words 'bringing' and 'taking'?" she practically whispered into my sleeve, as if not to embarrass me. "Because you just used one of them incorrectly." I do know the difference, and though I couldn't remember what I said, I agreed with her anyway, dizzied by the sudden altitude of the conversation. Lynne then proceeded to conduct a sobering mini-symposium on grammar: subjective and objective cases; "begging" versus "raising" the question; parts of speech. "It's all about using the proper pronouns," she asserted with the calm authority of a linguistics maven promoting her latest book on NPR. I'd heard some choice nouns applied to Lynne. "Aren't 'hellcat' and 'spitfire' the words most used to describe you?" her road manager, Tim Aller, said a little later that night. I'd also heard some prime adjectives: "misunderstood" and, sliding down the politeness scale, "gnarly" and "volatile." ("Please go easy on Shelby if she gets a little tipsy," one of her staff members had entreated.) But there she sat on the leather banquette, bolt upright, a model of prim-and-trim rectitude, in her smart blazer, jeans and boots, her peroxided hair parted, layered and quietly falling onto her shoulders. Well, why not? Her songs, often about recalcitrant, neglectful or hesitant lovers, are highly literate, and her background is not quite as off-road as it has often been portrayed. And while it's true that she has been hardened by a single, horrific event — the murder-suicide of her parents when she was a teenager — she has refused to let that frame the conversation about her. Maybe this pedagogic interlude was just an extension of the contemplative artist, whose work has won critical acclaim and seemed to position her, early in this decade, as the next important grown-up pop singer for greater America. Suddenly one corner of her mouth slid up. "Hay-ull, what do I know?" she said, her Alabama drawl, usually a slow drip when she sings, now in full stream. "I didn't go to college." Lesson over. Lynne was back to the good ol' girl: she inquired after the score of the L.S.U.-Alabama game and reeled off some college-football rankings. Another list was lingering in the air, too — that week's music charts. "Did you see that Alison Krauss debuted at No. 2 this week with her album with Robert Plant?" one of her band members said. The unlikely pairing of Krauss, the bluegrass singer and fiddler, and Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, was looking as if it might become the biggest hit in her career, which was already studded with millions in sales and a wall of Grammys (20 at last count). "That li'l bitch, doesn't she have enough already?" Lynne said. Lynne clearly didn't begrudge Krauss the success, but she had to be wondering why she hasn't had at least a sliver of the platinum pie. That particular week in early November was a good one for country pop; landing ahead of Krauss on the charts, at No. 1, was Carrie Underwood, the "American Idol" ingénue whose second album, "Carnival Ride," sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week. And Reba McEntire, the country doyenne, also reached No. 1 a few weeks before that with an album of duets. Meanwhile, Lynne, though she's not a country singer anymore, looked with some melancholy on the success of her estranged musical cousins. She has yet to go platinum — with all eight of her albums combined. "The only way to get ahead in the music business these days is to call up all your friends," she said. "To pool your resources." In a sense that is what Lynne is doing with "Just a Little Lovin'," calling back Springfield, the sultry British chanteuse and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who died in 1999 and with whom Lynne is sometimes compared, to help her finally break her commercial curse. She came close with her first post-Nashville album, "I Am Shelby Lynne," which garnered enthusiastic reviews and led to a surprise Best New Artist Grammy in 2001 — surprise considering how long she'd been in the business. But the usual post-Grammy anointing by a broader public never happened. She always seemed to release the right album at the wrong time, or the wrong album at the right time, or release the wrong single, or be on the wrong label, or even wear the wrong outfit (she collected that Grammy, in front of millions of viewers getting their first good look at her, in a skimpy two-piece that, as my mother used to say about Carly Simon's risqué get-ups in the '70s, almost missed). Now the hope is, with an album of songs that people already know, Lynne's commercial stars might finally align. If she were 10 or 15 years younger — Lynne is 39 — she might be Carrie Underwood or Kellie Pickler, blowing away the "American Idol" panel with her earthy, passionate voice and booking a ride to the top of the charts. While 39 doesn't necessarily mean senescence in pop music the way it once might have — Bruce Springsteen picked up his most recent No. 1 album at age 58; that's eight years older than Frank Sinatra was when he recorded "Strangers in the Night" — it is a little long in the tooth to be looking for your first big hit. But the album's release was still more than two months away, and the concert was still two nights away, and it was time for Saturday night to resume. Lynne put a temporary ban on shoptalk and instructed everyone to head for dinner. At the restaurant she admired the young maître'd's black onyx earrings, practically yanking them from his ears and fingering the piercings, which were the size of pennies. ("How'd you get 'em so big?" she asked. "Practice," he replied.) When we were seated, she painted, or rather drew, herself into a corner of the rectangular table; for a restaurant with such a pricey wine list, it seemed surprising that there were crayons available, but there they were, and Lynne bowed her head and started sketching furiously on the paper tablecloth, finishing with something resembling a fat brown spruce. She checked everyone else's drawings, topped off everyone's wineglass and went back to her tree. Here was the nurturing den mother. Then came the Britney moment. "I just wanna make my [adjective] music, man," she said, bobbing up, crayon rattling in hand, seemingly unconcerned with who was in earshot. Her entourage raised half a collective eyebrow — they seemed used to this kind of outburst — but then resumed eating as Lynne, her blue-steel eyes narrowed and fixed on me, issued what seemed to be both an apology and a warning. "I've just been burned so many [adjective] times." So now, in addition to good ol' girl, contemplative artist and nurturing den mother, there was bratty star. In three hours, Lynne had revealed the ingredients of the potent cocktail that has created some exquisite music but also a constant, almost entitled sense of embattlement, which might have helped keep her at arm's length from a large audience. "Mañana," she cooed a few minutes later, referring to a meeting we'd scheduled and adding another persona, sexy vamp, to the list. It was as if to say, now that she'd gotten all that out of her system, she was ready to begin. II. The Look of Lunch Seattle: crunchy and aerobic, city of steep hills, high literacy, designer caffeine bars. Shelby Lynne, though, declined my offer to meet at one of its main attractions — I'd suggested the Rem Koolhaas-designed library — and instead took the elevator down from her hotel room and walked a few steps across the street to Cyclops, a bar (her kind of bar, the old-fashioned kind). There was a portly bartender, football on the TV and a felt poster of mid-'70s Elvis (shades and spangles but not yet busting out of his jumpsuit) on the wall behind the table in the front window, where I found Lynne installed at 12:30 in the afternoon, halfway through a Guinness. She flicked a "Hey" off her lips, and from behind her ice blue sunglasses — there was actually sun in Seattle that day, and it was pouring through the window — she motioned to the seat across from her. I was struck again by how petite she is, almost tomboyish, though it always seems to be the case with these divas when they show up in person: they never take up as much space as their big voices and outsize reputations might suggest. And Lynne, in a variation of yesterday's blazer-and-jeans ensemble, looked ready for business, peace-sign necklace around her neck, her blond hair now pulled back and up and making her resemble a pert alumna of a Beach Boys song. We started to talk about the new album and Springfield. Then another legendary diva interrupted us. "Badass!" Lynne exclaimed. "Midnight Train to Georgia" was piping through the sound system. "A bass, drums, piano and guitar. That's all you need. And a badass singer like Gladys Knight." She took a long sip of her Guinness. "Oh, yeah, and the Pips. They were O.K." Knight and Elvis, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, Nancy Wilson and Brook Benton, all singers from different backgrounds, all staking claims to different eras and different styles, but all with a certain similar elemental approach to singing that appeals to Lynne and places them among her favorites. It's that same vocal immersion that drew her to Springfield, although she admits she was late to get hip: she was introduced to Springfield only about 15 years ago, during Lynne's musical hash-slinging days in Nashville. "Somebody gave me a copy of 'Dusty in Memphis,' " she said, referring to Springfield's sea-parting 1969 LP. "And I thought, Damn, that's the kind of record I want to make." On her new CD — nine songs from Springfield's catalog, plus one original — Lynne in fact bites off a big chaw of "Dusty in Memphis" (though she wisely avoids the untouchable "Son of a Preacher Man") and also tackles a handful of Springfield's steamy hit singles like "The Look of Love" and "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me." "I started listening to Dusty, Al Green and the Plastic Ono Band all at the same time," she said, "and I knew I had to get the hell out of Nashville." Lynne, who came from a musical family ("I was singing before I could talk," she said), moved to Nashville from Alabama in 1989 a few years after her parents' death, when she was 20, shopped a few songs around and before long had a deal with CBS Records. But it also wasn't long before she rankled under the tight musical and image control that the country-music capital is wont to impose on its young artists. Lynne, who'd lived her life till then basically bucking and throwing riders, was not one to conform. "When I was growing up," she said, "we always had quality music in the house. It was the Mills Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Elvis, the Beatles, Waylon and Willie. We never listened to crap. And then I got to Nashville and was told what to record, what to wear. I thought: You're gonna tell me what to sing? What to wear?" She lasted for four albums and notched a few minor country hits. She even won the Academy of Country Music's Top New Female Vocalist award in 1991. But after about a decade and increasingly diminishing record sales, she'd had enough, and the feeling was mutual. "I think she was recognized as one of the greatest singers in a city full of good singers," says Luke Lewis, president of Lost Highway Records, Lynne's current label, and a veteran of the Nashville scene. "But she's tempestuous, and Nashville is known to be intolerant of tempestuousness. It got her into trouble with the gatekeepers, the ones who decide what gets on the radio, on TV, what gets printed." Lynne's voice, eyes, carriage, soften when she talks about the music fans in Nashville, explaining that they weren't the problem. When she recently performed a brief concert there to introduce her new album, she told me: "They were still with me, they didn't let me down. They never have." But she's less generous about the state of country music today. "I don't like modern country music," she said. "It's not what I'm into, is all. I'm old-school. I tend to like Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers. . . . The new stuff all sounds the same. I'm not ragging on anybody, but it doesn't require emotional involvement. What Carrie Underwood is singing about has already been heard. It's in a beautiful package. But my duty is to take the hard route." That route led her West, with everything she owned in two suitcases, toward Los Angeles. It was one occasion when Lynne's fearlessness paid off, as she sought out Bill Bottrell, producer of Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club," another album she admired. She was armed with demo recordings of her new style: quieter, suffused with heartbreak to be sure, but more elliptical than her lyrically and musically too-on-the-nose country recordings. Bottrell signed on, and in 1999, "I Am Shelby Lynne" emerged. It was a smoldering statement of desire and betrayal, all simmering under jabbing horns, jittery strings, Lynne's yearning acoustic guitar, even the occasional electronic blip and honk. It was a long way from Nashville and finally, it seemed, just where Lynne wanted to be. "That album came from the most vulnerable, desperate place," she said. "I think about it every day." Critics thought about it a lot, too, at least then. It ended up on many best-of-year lists, and Lynne was talked about not just as a first-class songwriter like Crow but also as the next major interpretive singer in the line of Annie Lennox and k.d. lang, a line that extends back to Springfield herself. The yearlong steady drumbeat for the album seemed to reach its loudest point when Lynne won her Grammy. But by then the record was more than a year old and had not sold well, and her label had decided that it wanted a new album from her, that it would no longer promote "I Am Shelby Lynne." On the night of the awards ceremony, according to a friend, Lynne stormed around, mowing down and cursing out even friends and people who worked on the album, because it hadn't sold more. (At last count it was up to 246,000 copies, respectable but hardly the breakthrough that Lynne was expecting.) Bucking and throwing riders. She did calm down long enough to land a song in the movie "Bridget Jones's Diary." It was catchy and sharp and seemed to have "hit single" and maybe even "Oscar nomination" written all over it. Except it was called "Killin' Kind," and, released around 9/11, was doomed. "There's no way that radio was going to play anything with 'kill' in the title," says her manager, Elizabeth Jordan. For the album that followed shortly thereafter, "Love, Shelby," her label, Def Jam, teamed her with Glen Ballard, who produced Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill," and Lynne's frank, no-frills songwriting seemed at odds with the splashy soundscape. It was a slightly dumbed-down "I Am Shelby Lynne." The Britney Spears-like cover, which pictured Lynne kneeling in cutoffs and lettering done in lipstick, didn't help. Critics brayed. Even many of her longtime fans, sensing she was grasping a little too hard for the pop prize, rejected it. "I got nailed," she said. "It was such a catastrophe." Lynne's decade of musical soul searching, just on the verge of paying off, seemed to bleed out in a matter of a few months. She went back to basics. After taking a few years off, to help a friend through breast-cancer treatment and to recover herself from the career tremor, she recorded a couple of spare albums for Capitol, "Identity Crisis" and "Suit Yourself," even though she was loath to enter the music-business fray again. "I thought, Oh, you major-label [noun, pl.], you break my heart every time." Those albums, which melded the best of Lynne's country and pop instincts, got her back on solid footing with her core audience and with critics, but she still couldn't reach the larger public. "With every one of my albums," she said, "I always say, 'This is going to be the one, this is going to be the one,' and then we go through the whole process, and in the end maybe 5,000 more people know my name." Lynne dipped into acting, landing the part of Carrie Cash, Johnny's Cash's mother, in "Walk the Line." And then while she was casting about for her next musical direction, she remembered an e-mail message from Barry Manilow, who was a fan, suggesting she record an album of Dusty Springfield songs. "It's usually career suicide to do an album of covers," she said. "But I thought, Why the hell not? I didn't have enough new songs of my own anyway." Lynne might have had an easier time coming up with 10 songs from scratch. Springfield's body of work is known for its musical and emotional depth and seems only to grow in stature: a critics' poll in Rolling Stone a few years ago ranked "Dusty in Memphis" as the third-most-important album by a woman in the rock era, behind only Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" and Joni Mitchell's "Blue." When she heard about the concept of Lynne's new album, Rita Houston, the music director of WFUV, the influential public radio station in New York, and long a supporter of Lynne's, said, "My first thought was, These aren't the easiest songs in the world to sing." And while Springfield's and Lynne's styles overlap in the softer, breathier moments, there are significant differences. For all her husky, romantic realism, Springfield had essentially a glam, cosmopolitan sound: she was about chandeliers and candlelight, good Champagne (bubbly with a kick) and crushed velvet. Hers was an inside voice. Lynne's rootsy voice comes from the outside: blinding summer suns, dark, deserted blacktops, a quick slug of Jack. Even when she ends up in the bedroom, she takes a rougher road. So it was important to have the right producer, one who could be true to the integrity of the material while allowing Lynne the flexibility to put it in her own voice. And here her luck was good: she landed Phil Ramone, the veteran producer of classic albums by Paul Simon and Billy Joel and the engineer for Springfield's original recording of "The Look of Love." Ramone kept the tracks lean, no strings or horns, just Lynne and her band, recording on analog equipment, and they did the whole album in five days. "When Shelby sings, she owns the song," Ramone says. "But she was so intent on being correct. She was a nervous wreck. We listened to hundreds of Dusty's songs. But we knew in the end she had to be herself. Otherwise you start to sound like a mid-'70s record." Forty years or so on, these songs are served both by Lynne's respect for them and by her wariness of them. You can feel her tunneling a little harder to the deep emotional warrens that Springfield had express access to, but she gets there just the same. It's not just a matter of her winning over the songs; it's also a matter of them winning over her. The album's highlight may be her conversion of Springfield's first big hit, "I Only Want to Be With You." For Springfield it was a mid-'60s carnival joyride. For Lynne, it's a country-lane saunter that celebrates the satisfaction of adult romance. "Look, I don't want to be Dusty," Lynne said. "I just want to remind people about her and about these great songs. I wanted to make the kind of album that she might have made today." There are some solid parallels, though, musical and non-, between the two women. "Dusty in Memphis," for all its acclaim, wasn't much of a hit when it was released, just as "I Am Shelby Lynne" wasn't. Springfield, like Lynne, could be temperamental; she was a perfectionist who frequently delivered the goods in the 59th minute of the 11th hour, and watch out if you got in her way before then. And then there were the gay rumors that dogged Springfield most of her career, which in her case turned out to be true, though she never used the word "lesbian" officially. That same speculation has followed around Lynne, who was married briefly when she was 18, and neither will she confirm nor deny, saying only that she goes where the love is. "I've done everything on every corner of the universe," Lynne said, "but I'm not going to make an announcement about it." And there's one more, eerie similarity. Toward the end of an interview I did with Springfield for this magazine outside London in 1995, she asked if I would be exploring the city alone that night, and when I said yes, she cautioned me. "Be careful," she said. "You think London is safe. But it's not." Lynne asked practically the same question about Seattle. "Ah, private music," she said. "Well, don't let it hurt you." III. Fences It's perhaps not a surprise that "hurt" is Lynne's most familiar gear. In Seattle we spoke briefly about her childhood, and she said, "There's nothing that happened to me in Alabama that wasn't sad." But when we met in New York the next week, she seemed eager to talk about her parents and to suggest that her upbringing, despite its sudden, violent end, wasn't always so tragic. "I feel very lucky to have had the parents I did," she told me between sips of wine in a Chelsea trattoria on a blustery late afternoon in November, the day after she performed at the nearby Hiro Ballroom. Lynne seemed aware of the potential controversy of that statement, and the words sounded well aged, as if Lynne had let them breathe for a while before she said them to anyone but herself. But she was quick to defend them. Yes, it's true she grew up in a town so small it was basically just a ZIP code, and yes, she and her sister, Allison, who is three and a half years younger, had a great appreciation of the country, of creeks and fishing poles and cows and horses and homemade bows and arrows. But they also had a lot of books and music. Her father, Franklin Moorer, was an Auburn University graduate who taught English sometimes and other times was a juvenile-corrections officer, while her mother, Lynn, was a legal secretary. "We were a unit, and we liked it like that," she said. Music was the stitching. "Mama could sing her butt off," Lynne said. "Daddy was an O.K. singer, but he was more of a guitar player. Sometimes we'd be on the road and Daddy would just stop the car, get out and play for a while, then we'd keep going." Despite his academic credentials, Lynne said, her father was a renegade "who always hated the Man," and he would disappear on sudden, infrequent jaunts to Mobile. He returned from one of them with Willie Nelson's landmark outlaw-country LP, "Willie and Family Live." "I still remember the day Daddy came home with that record," she said. "I heard it and knew I wanted to be an outlaw, too." It didn't take her long. She was frequently in trouble at school, she told me, always mouthing off. And as she grew older she started butting heads with her father, who always drank heavily but was now becoming abusive. "Mama was a wreck," Lynne told me. "She was a gentle soul, sharing, the life of the party . . . but she wasn't a fighter. I am. I could have been a boxer. I'm still not above it." In the summer of 1986, Lynne, then 17, was clashing with her father so much that he had her thrown in jail for reasons she won't disclose. And when she got out, she tried to think of a way to take her mother and sister out of harm's way. "Daddy drank a little," she said, "and I couldn't have him being mean." But before she could act, at 5 a.m. on Aug. 12, her father shot her mother and then turned the gun on himself outside the house. Shelby and Allison, who was 14, were inside when it happened. By the time they got outside, she said, "it was done." Lynne stops short of analyzing her father's demons, of trying to explain what made him suddenly turn homicidal. More than 20 years later, she told me, she has wasted too much of her life on the whys and what-ifs, "and it ain't worth a damn, because in the end things are the way they're supposed to be." She has come to forgive her father, and she and her sister, who is now the country singer Allison Moorer, wish that people would let the matter rest. (Moorer declined to be interviewed, citing the ironclad rule that the sisters, who are kind of like the Venus and Serena of pop and country music, have about never doing "crossover" interviews.) "People think we're in tremendous pain," Lynne said, "but we want everyone to know that we're O.K." Lynne and Moorer went back to Alabama together in 2002, during Lynne's timeout, to take care of some property they owned. "It was time for me to build some fences," she said. She wrote poetry and thought about quitting the music business altogether, but even when she started making records again, she took the best of Alabama with her back to California, where she lives just outside Palm Springs. She gardens, mows her own grass, fixes everything herself, a talent she says she got from her father. "I don't exercise," she said, "but I'll do any kind of manual labor." When she's not on the road, a typical Friday night for Lynne means having some friends over for a bottle of wine and playing records, just as the family used to do in Alabama. "I don't have an iPod," she said. "I have a computer that I turn on occasionally. I still have all my vinyl. Sissy" — her nickname for Moorer, who lives in New York with her husband, the alt-country singer Steve Earle — "says she has no room in her apartment for records, but I'd keep mine even if I had to sleep on them. You can't roll a joint on an iPod." IV. Wishin' and Hopin' and Bringin' and Takin' For the first 16 years or so of her life, Dusty Springfield, whose real name was Mary O'Brien, attended convent schools, and when I interviewed her, I asked when she'd last gone to church. "Sometime in the late 60's," she said. "I won't go again until they bring back the Latin Mass. I want the candles, the incense, the whole bloody show." Springfield's records certainly always provided just that, whether they were flooded with klieg-light arrangements or glowed in the more recessed lighting of her "Memphis" era; her voice had all the candles and incense she needed. And that's what Lynne brought to her concerts in Seattle and New York. Sure, she had the same threadbare combo that plays on the new album, but that just made Lynne sing out more, to get in the face of the melodies and lyrics, to expose every raw nerve. This is probably what she meant by making the kind of album Springfield would have made today. "I think this is my best record," she said in Seattle. "Just in the quality of the songs and the singing." Ramone, who has heard and produced a few good singers in his day, said, "I think this gives Shelby the platform that she's needed" to finally put across all the facets of her voice. For all her enthusiasm, though, Lynne is measured about the album's prospects. "I've been in this business 20 years and haven't had a big hit record. And I'm still doing it. In another 20 years, I'll still be doing it. I wouldn't trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I'll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I'll still be cute." The audiences in both cities reacted warmly to Lynne's tribute to Springfield. (Seattle turned out the biggest sea of bald heads I'd seen in a concert hall, perhaps a sign that they knew the music's provenance.) Even my waiter at the supper-club-like venue, a 33-year-old named Jared, seemed impressed. "I know all these songs," he said. "My parents listened to them all the time." And in the end both evenings became as much about Lynne as about the material. For most of the shows she bowed her head in reverence and kept her patter to a minimum (" 'Preciate it," was about all she said after each number, as if any attempt to "entertain" would distract her from the more serious business at hand). Onstage she sang with both a dreamy, faraway lilt and a right-this-second-ness, as she does on the record. But something unexpected happened during the encore, "Wishin' and Hopin'." When Springfield recorded the song in 1964, she turned the prefeminist lyric of slavish devotion ("Wear your hair/Just for him") into a sly, swinging decree of sexual empowerment. Lynne's version had a similar yoke-loosening. When she got to the line about the hair, she broke from the song and announced, "I don't wear my hair for anyone." Then she picked up her head, threw back that hair and unbridled a smile. She was not Dusty Springfield. She was not Carrie Underwood. She was Shelby Lynne. Her new album may or may not break down the fences that have stood between her and the general public, but in that moment, it was clear that Lynne had broken down a few of her own. Rob Hoerburger, an editor of the magazine, writes frequently about pop music. His profile of Dusty Springfield appeared in the magazine in 1995.
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| Papal Inquisition Papal Inquisition
January 17, 2008; Page A16American universities aren't the only places where politically incorrect speakers are silenced nowadays. This week in Rome, of all places, Pope Benedict XVI found himself censored by scholars, of all people, at one of Europe's most prestigious universities. ![[Pope Benedict XVI]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GG015_Benedi_20051013170235.gif) On Tuesday the pontiff canceled a speech scheduled for today at Sapienza University of Rome in the wake of a threat by students and 67 faculty members to disrupt his appearance. The scholars argued that it was inappropriate for a religious figure to speak at their university. This pope's specific sin was a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago in which, they claimed, he indicated support for the 17th-century heresy trial against Galileo. The censoring scholars apparently failed to appreciate the irony that, in preventing the pope from speaking, they were doing to him what the Church once did to Galileo, stifling free speech and intellectual inquiry. One of Benedict's favorite themes is that European civilization derives from the rapprochement between Greek philosophy and religious belief, between Athens and Jerusalem. In the speech he wasn't allowed to give, the pope planned to talk about the role of popes and universities. It is a pope's task, he wrote, to "maintain high the sensibility for the truth, to always invite reason to put itself anew at the service of the search for the true, the good, for God." La Sapienza -- which means "wisdom" -- was founded by one of the pope's predecessors in 1303. Another unappreciated irony. |
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| The Afterlife of Cellphones 
Richard Barnes Bring us your old, your broken, your out-of-style: Cellphones at a recycling warehouse in Hilliard, Ohio.  Richard Barnes for The New York Times Flipped Phones Top: Reclaimed keypads. Bottom: Parts of reclaimed phones; the metal will be recycled. January 13, 2008 The Afterlife of Cellphones By JON MOOALLEM 1. Cellphones in Hell Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006. This so-called e-waste is the fastest-growing part of the municipal waste stream and, depending on your outlook, either an enormous problem or a bonanza. E-waste generally contains substances that, though safely sequestered during each product's use, can become hazardous if not handled properly when disposed. Those products also hold bits of precious metals like silver, copper, platinum and gold. The Belgian company Umicore is in the business of reclaiming those materials. It extracts 17 metals from our unwanted televisions, computers and cellphones and from more ominous-sounding industrial byproducts like drosses and anode slimes. Umicore harvests silver from spent photo-developing solutions collected at American big-box stores and sells it to Italian jewelers. The company describes its work as "aboveground mining." Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It's a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back. That resource is our garbage. Umicore's smelter was burning furiously at 2,116 degrees Fahrenheit one afternoon last fall. Two heavy-set men in blue overalls sat in the control room, staring expressionlessly through heat-shielded windows. They were eye-level with the mouth of the smelter — a pit 13 feet wide by 46 feet deep. A conveyor belt fed shredded circuit boards and scrap into the fire in a dim, fast blur. I imagined the black-and-white television in my mother's basement, or my first blue Nokia cellphone — all the devices I'd gotten close to and outgrown — spilling out and squealing like lobsters in a pot. The metals exit the smelter's base as a glowing sludge. It streams into another caldron the height of a house. From there, it moves into tanks of acid. The acid is electrocuted. As electricity flows through the mixture, copper accumulates on the tank's end plate. I watched a giant claw move across the ceiling, rip out the plate and, with a violent whack, cleave off a gleaming layer of 99.9 percent pure copper, with the unmistakable sheen of a new penny. It was thrilling to see something so clean and recognizable emerge from such an alien process. After explaining the final stages, Thierry Van Kerckhoven, Umicore's e-scrap manager, handed me another of the end products from this process: a one-kilogram bar of gold. It felt the way I thought it would, based on what you see in the movies: substantial, mesmerizing. It was worth about $24,000. "This gold is recycled gold," Kerckhoven said. "This gold is green gold." Recycling feels good because we imagine it as just this kind of alchemy — which Umicore achieves with impressive environmental controls. The centerpiece is a monstrous gas-cleaning-and-filtration system that captures and neutralizes enough of the carcinogenic and endocrine-altering chemicals produced from melting e-waste, according to Umicore, that the faint yellow emission finally released from its smokestack easily surpasses the European Union's air-quality standards. (Martin Hojsik, who campaigns against toxics for Greenpeace International, notes that the process followed by Umicore and its few, similarly equipped competitors around the world is "not entirely clean" but still "the preferable solution" for recovering metals from e-waste.) Ultimately, by weight, only 1/2 of 1 percent of the e-waste Umicore takes in cannot be safely sent back into the world in a usable form. "There is often a discussion of separating what is valuable from what is toxic," Christian Hagelüken, Umicore's senior manager of business development, told me. "But sometimes they are the same thing." This may never be more true than for cellphones. They are the most valuable form of e-waste. Each one contains about a dollar's worth of precious metals, mostly gold. And while single phones house far less hazardous material than a computer — an old, clunky monitor can incorporate seven pounds of lead — their cumulative presence is staggering. Last year, according to ABI Research, 1.2 billion phones were sold worldwide. Sixty percent of them probably replaced existing ones. In the United States, phones are cast aside after, on average, 12 months. And according to the industry trade group CTIA, four out of every five people in the country own cellphones. Umicore estimates that, together with its competitors, it received only 1 percent of all phones that were discarded globally in 2006. "This of course is a lousy percentage," Hagelüken said. "Computers are also bad, but phones are the worst." Our obliviousness has mostly kept them from being recycled at all. When we do bother, we may not know, or be able to control, where the "recycled" phones go. Many enter a secondhand market in the developing world through a receding series of middlemen. Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world's e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there's little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become — how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them — we rarely wonder where they go when they die. 2. Cellphones in Purgatory If we think at all about what to do with old phones, we may realize we can return them to the wireless industry. With the idea of extended producer responsibility gaining traction — the notion that businesses should manage the disposal or recycling of their products — most major carriers and manufacturers in the United States now run voluntary take-back programs. But because we stop wanting phones long before they're unusable, they also represent a kind of neglected value, there to be capitalized on. Seth Heine, who founded the company Collective Good in 2000, recognized this early. Collective Good is a profitable business that, as the name suggests, Heine also sees as a vehicle for philanthropy. People send in their phones, and Collective Good sells the ones that still work into a global secondhand market. A portion of each phone's resale or scrap value goes to one of more than 500 causes — ranging from the Red Cross to the Humane Society to the Obama campaign — selected by the phone's donor. Used phones are sold to people overseas who can't afford new ones, and hazardous waste is kept out of landfills. "It's a self-cleaning oven," Heine says. When I visited his office outside Atlanta a few months ago, Heine was introducing a new venture, GreenPhone.com, which pays donors directly for their phones. Mail a BlackBerry Pearl, for example, to GreenPhone, and Heine will cut you a check for $65. And because Heine still isn't entirely comfortable with all the paper consumption this entails, GreenPhone also plants a tree for every check it writes. Heine is 40, a whip-smart and mildly self-righteous environmentalist with an M.B.A. and a boyish love of sports cars. There's a lava lamp on his desk, but also, hanging behind it, a motivational poster that says VISION. Recently, he moved most of his operation to a larger facility in Colorado. But phones were still arriving at the small Georgia warehouse when I was there; they come in prepaid envelopes printed off the company's Web site or from collection boxes at every Staples and FedEx Kinko's in the United States. Each month, Heine receives 20,000 phones of at least 800 different makes and models. They were scattered around the room: silver ones, a battered flip-phone with a sticker of a wolf on it. A store in Beverly Hills had been sending boxes of gold-plated, limited-edition Dolce & Gabbana Motorola Razr phones, turned in when customers traded up for something even newer. "That phone can't be more than six months old," Heine said at one point. Later, he handed an employee a Nokia with a note rubber-banded around it. It was something a friend gave him at dinner; that happens all the time, he said, "when you're the Fred Sanford of phones." Heine's business succeeds or fails based on how well it can assess and then realize the value of each phone. "I refer to that as the pachinko machine," he told me. "You dump in a phone and it rattles around. It's got to come out somewhere at the bottom." The question is, where? Phones beyond repair, or with little value, are dispatched to Umicore for their gold. But because acquiring the phones costs so much — all those individual, prepaid envelopes add up — recycling them must be subsidized by reselling the reusable ones. The most valuable handsets find their way to a room across the hall from the storeroom, where two employees sell them on eBay. Most, however, are sold via private auction to a stable of about 20 different resellers. Some, once refurbished, will be sent to American consumers to replace broken phones under warranty or covered by insurance. But it's through the resellers, and the unfathomable network of resellers they sell to, that many also end up overseas, where the price of new phones can be prohibitively expensive. American wireless carriers like AT&T and Sprint offer new phones below cost, or free, as incentives to get customers to sign lucrative two-year service contracts. Users in much of the world don't purchase contracts, though. They buy chunks of prepaid minutes instead and can transfer their phone from one carrier to another more easily. Foreign carriers have no incentive to offer great deals. Phones we get free can cost upward of $200 in Latin America or Africa — where customers have less to spend. "A lot of people in the developing world will never own a new phone," Heine says. They depend on our castoffs. Ever-changing technology means that specific phones work only in specific networks, but relatively few are obsolete everywhere in the world. As one reseller says, "There's always a place to put the phone." Small-time entrepreneurs known as aggregators prowl the Internet cobbling together orders of thousands of a single make and model. "There are many, many thousands of us," Joseph Khan told me. Khan, who lives outside Los Angeles, works as a limousine driver but has a side business in phones. Recently, he claims, he purchased several thousand Qualcomm QCT-1000's for $11 each and resold them in Ukraine for $121 each. The QCT-1000 was introduced in 1996. "The battery is the size of a printer!" Khan says. The need to refurbish or even significantly repair most phones is another reason vast quantities of them end up overseas — particularly in Asia, where cheap labor and replacement parts make the cost of fixing all sorts of phones with cameras and color screens and other features so low that many buyers do not even care if the phones turn on. America's largest phone-recycling company, ReCellular, based in Michigan, sells millions of phones annually to 375 refurbishers in 40 different countries. Some of these refurbishers, Mike Newman, a vice president of ReCellular, told me, "are going to be highly sophisticated companies with really sparkling, huge plants," while others might consist of an entrepreneur with "10 small stores in the Dominican Republic who has, in the back of one of them, a place where 10 people are doing some refurbishing — just sitting on some benches and old tables, taking off the housings and fixing them." ReCellular handles the phones from most of the major recycling programs in America sponsored by wireless carriers, including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. It expects to receive seven million phones this year. Financially, according to Newman, the "backbone of these programs is the resale of usable phones." It's hard to track ReCellular's or Collective Good's phones. But Jack Qiu, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who has studied the movement of used computers and phones in China, describes one route phones take. In Kowloon, in Hong Kong, Pakistanis and other immigrants (often asylum seekers) import phones from Europe by the shipping container. These are fixed or cannibalized for parts in stalls at a local market. In the past, Nigerians and other African exporters swept in to buy tens of thousands of phones at a time, particularly so-called "14-day phones" — those that have been returned under warranty and used little. But recently, Qiu says, the markets for these phones have become saturated in African cities. So the Nigerians, needing to take their business to poorer African villages, have been leaving Hong Kong for Chinese cities like Guangzhou, where they can purchase cheaper, more heavily used phones from the larger refurbishing companies there. Many Nigerians have learned Mandarin in order to do business in Guangzhou, Qiu says, and the city now has an African-style coffee shop. Africa is one of the biggest markets for used phones. Seventy-five percent of all phones in the least-developed African nations are cellphones — and usage in many places is increasing by 30 or 40 percent per year. Their impact can not be overstated, particularly where roads are poor and settlements separated by great distances, places that land lines never reached and now have no reason to do so. Consequently, cellphones are not easily abandoned — and, when they are, someone somewhere is still likely to see some value in them. Jim Puckett, the coordinator of the Basel Action Network, a nongovernmental watchdog group that focuses on e-waste, visited Nigeria in 2005. He describes, at one Lagos electronics bazaar, repairmen sitting on dirt floors under shelves of scavenged parts, jury-rigging phones back together, over and over again, until the things are absolutely dead. "I've never seen the real end," Qiu says. "I've seen landfills in China full of used computer parts, but I've never seen a single landfill of used mobile phones or phone parts." The Chinese themselves "retire" between 200 million and 300 million phones every year, he says. These phones are sold in places like India, Mongolia, Vietnam and Thailand. And from Thailand, they are sold to buyers in Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Myanmar. In other words, the pachinko machine is global, and there are millions, or even billions, of phones still clattering down its channels. In 2001, Basel Action Network filmed a documentary in Guiyu, China, a town overrun by shipments of old computers from recyclers in the United States and elsewhere. Guiyu's residents, including children, make their living sorting, dismantling and burning computer parts or bathing them in nitric and hydrochloric acids to recover precious metals. This not only mobilizes a device's hazardous constituents; it also creates new ones. The health consequences are immense; respiratory problems and elevated blood-lead levels in children are reportedly rampant in Guiyu and, around the time of BAN's visit, the nearby river contained up to 2,400 times the World Health Organization's acceptable threshold for lead. In 2005, BAN found 500 shipping containers of electronics arriving in Lagos each month. Useless computers were being tossed into burning piles behind a marketplace. And the phones — no matter how many ramshackle resurrections they experience — will at some point presumably meet the same fate, Puckett says. "It sounds like a cellphone's just a little thing — if you burn it it's not such a big deal," he explains. "But we're talking about mass volumes going to countries that have no infrastructure or ability to deal with it." Moreover, manufacturers now sell "ultra-low-cost handsets" — new, no-frills phones specifically for consumers in the developing world. Some cost less than $20. These phones, says Badii Kechiche, a market analyst with Pyramid Research, are what really fuels the spread of phone usage across Africa — not the comparatively skimpy supply of our used ones. As a consequence, used cellphones — just rare enough to stay out of the planet's globalized digital trash heaps so far — may come to be more like regular junk. "If ultra-low-cost handsets are coming in," Kechiche says, "and they're much cheaper or cheaper than refurbished handsets, what's the point of getting a refurbished handset?" The people we rely on to take our garbage are not only losing their need for it. They're becoming firsthand generators of that same garbage. In a study published last year, 34 recent-model cellphones were put through a standard E.P.A. test, simulating conditions inside a landfill. All of them leached hazardous amounts of lead — on average, more than 17 times the federal threshold for what constitutes hazardous waste. Under a stricter state of California test, they also leached four other metals above hazardous levels. The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don't contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year's study. More important, he notes, such landfills don't exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics. The electronics industry is greening significantly, though. E-waste take-back programs are starting to spread around the developing world. A landmark law, the RoHS directive, enacted by the European Union, requires all electronics manufacturers to drastically lower concentrations of hazardous substances, including lead, in their products. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are among those voluntarily phasing out other dangerous substances not covered by RoHS. Still, according to Ogunseitan, there will always be risks, or at least unknowns, accompanying the improper disposal of such products. The compositions of consumer electronics evolve through long sequences of trial and error. "In a phone that you can hold in the palm of your hand, you now have more than 200 chemical compounds," he says, citing the results of an analysis of one new cellphone. "To try to separate them out and study what health effects may be associated with burning it or sinking it in water — that's a lifetime of work for a toxicologist." The laws governing the export of e-waste present their own difficulties. An international treaty restricting the movement of hazardous waste to the developing world, a 170-nation agreement called the Basel Convention, is ambiguous when it comes to electronics. Namely, when is an item repairable — and thus freely exportable as a reusable product — and when is it just hazardous waste? Nothing requires exporters to even test the products they ship. Consequently, exporting products for "reuse" is often used as a loophole to dump them. In any case, the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention. Electronics recycling "has always been the used-car lot of the recycling world," Seth Heine laments. With no clear standards to follow, he enforces his own. He claims to thoroughly assess the condition of all his phones. He's also quick to send working phones with limited potential for reuse straight to Umicore rather than sell them for far more money to less scrupulous buyers in the secondhand market. Heine figures this means he is leaving $150,000 on the table each year, easily. (Several environmental groups I contacted, including BAN, singled out Heine for his integrity and seriousness about the environment.) Mike Newman told me that ReCellular supports establishing standards for exporting phones. But he also questions their effectiveness. A company could say it doesn't sell irreparable or untested devices to the developing world, but, "How does any company really know where their phones end up?" he asks. "Once you sell them, they're not your phones anymore." Newman claims that ReCellular tests all of its recycled phones anyway. But on the day we spoke, there were lots made up of hundreds and thousands of phones (even up to 15,000) listed for sale on ReCellular's Web site and labeled Bulk Beyond Economical Repair and Bulk Used/Untested. Newman would later clarify: these phones were not from recycling programs. They were returned under carrier warranty programs; ReCellular acquires and resells tens of thousands of these devices too every month and doesn't bother testing them. Given this state of affairs, you can't help wondering if throwing your old phone in the trash, and into the high-tech sarcophagus of an American landfill, could end up doing less damage to the environment than recycling it. But that ignores yet another crucial part of the equation. As Heine explains, even though what he sells will probably be thrown out eventually, if a phone gets three or four more lives, "it's absolutely better for the environment than having to make three or four more phones — phones that wouldn't be recycled, either." Reusing phones conserves natural resources, which reduces the environmental damage that comes with mining them. That damage isn't necessarily obvious. When I called Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who specializes in solid-waste issues, he was less interested in discussing the toxicity of old electronics than the costs of mining a particular metal, tantalum, to build the capacitors for new products. Tantalum comes from an ore called coltan. Control of coltan deposits was a factor in perpetuating Congo's civil war in the late 1990s, and the people mining it there now, Hershkowitz says, rely on "critically endangered" gorillas for food. Tantalum is one of the metals Umicore can't recover from e-waste. Much of the world's gold and copper, meanwhile, is mined in open pits, which means it is leached out with cyanide or sulfuric acid. Using data from the United States Geological Survey and mining companies' own reports, Earthworks estimates that mining the gold needed for the circuit board of a single mobile phone generates 220 pounds of waste. The environmental nonprofit calls this "an extremely conservative" estimate. What's more, the world's supply of these metals is finite. So even as the E.P.A. plays down the risks of throwing e-waste into landfills, it also urges us not to. Tim Townsend, an environmental engineer at the University of Florida who has studied the toxicity of mobile phones for the E.P.A., sums up the absurdity of just tossing this stuff away: "If we know these metals are, overall, bad for us, it doesn't make sense to keep digging them up from the earth's crust and bringing them into the biosphere while — at the same time — we're taking the ones we've already got and burying them." As with most environmental issues, then, no option for getting rid of a phone is free of trade-offs, and nothing is as simple as we'd wish. But the truth is, few of America's phones are turned in for "recycling" in the first place. (It's unclear how few. The figure of less than 1 percent, put forward in a groundbreaking report on phone recycling by the nonprofit Inform five years ago, is still repeated. ReCellular estimates that it's more like 10 percent now.) While a phone's small size may give even normally conscientious consumers a dispensation to slip it into the trash, there seems to be a more typical solution, what ABI Research estimates nearly half of Americans do: stick the thing in a desk drawer and leave it there. Every recycler I spoke with talked about "the drawer." It turns out to be the real purgatory for phones. Using predictions from Inform, the United States Geological Survey estimates that in 2005 there were already more than half a billion old phones sitting in American drawers. That added up to more than $300 million worth of gold, palladium, silver, copper and platinum. Heine says he still receives phones in prepaid envelopes addressed to the Kentucky tobacco barn where he started Collective Good in 2000. It tells him that people get motivated, take the envelope, then stick that in a drawer for a long time. "As soon as [a phone] makes its way into the drawer, it's hard to get people to dig it back out," ReCellular's Newman told me. I asked him how hard. "I have employees," he said, "who have them in their desk drawers." 3. Cellphones in Heaven Given the intimate place of cellphones in our lives, why do we get rid of them so quickly? Sometimes we don't have a choice. We switch to a new carrier and must buy a phone adapted to its particular network. (Late last year, Verizon announced it would eliminate this requirement.) Or we trade up for new features: first a camera, then an MP3 player, then a Web browser. Apple's iPhone promised to put an end to this chase by combining everything in a single, graceful device. But the industry knows the iPhone is just a momentary milestone in its race to replace laptop computers entirely — and that we will follow, one revolutionary but not-quite-perfect device at a time. Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it's obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. "There's some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal," says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry. Phones were initially an afterthought, given out free so that customers had something to talk into after buying the real product, the service contract. But carriers learned, as Donovan puts it, that "if you deliver something cool, and if it's a bit of a status symbol, people will pony up and pay cash for it." He adds: "People want them to become more than an awkward gadget. People want it to be an expression of their personalities." Right now, there are roughly 470 models of phone for sale in the United States. About 16 new ones come out every month. Many are only slightly altered versions of existing phones, suggesting how easily we get bored — how we'll crave something that slides, say, instead of flips open. (There are currently 46 styles of Motorola Razr; Motorola has, in fact, projected which colors and finishes we'll find most attractive through the year 2009.) And we have the perfect incentive to get whatever we want every two years when our contracts are up and the discounts for new phones roll around. When I asked Iain Gillott, an analyst with iGR, what makes a person get a new phone, he told me, "They're cruising through the Sunday paper, and they see a fabulous phone for 50 bucks and they say, 'Well, I haven't had a new one in 18 months.' " Gillott estimates 50 to 60 percent of phones are replaced "because people get tired of the design." Otherwise, consumers want a new feature — even, it seems, if there's no real need for it; according to M:Metrics, 82 percent of those with Internet-enabled phones do not go online. Steven Herbst, a psychology researcher at Motorola, told me: "All that pressure to have the latest — something that people will be impressed by — is compounded by the fact that all of a sudden somebody is doing something with their mobile phone that you can't do." In other words, it's because we've made phones such deep and indispensable extensions of ourselves that we dump them so quickly. Who can bear seeing himself as even slightly outdated or incapable? "Somewhere during the last 100 years, we learned to find refuge outside the species, in the silent embrace of manufactured objects," Jonathan Chapman, a young product designer and theorist at the University of Brighton, writes in his book "Emotionally Durable Design." But designers and consumers have snared themselves in an unsustainable trap, Chapman told me, since our affection for many high-tech objects is tied exclusively to their newness. "The mobile phone occupies a kind of glossy, scratch-free world," he says. Whereas a pair of jeans gains character over time, a phone does no such thing. "As soon you purchase it, you can only watch it migrating further away from what it is you want — a glossy, scratch-free object." You might leave the plastic film over the display for a few days, just so you can take it off later and "give yourself a second honeymoon with the phone," he says. But ultimately everything that first attracted you to it only deteriorates. You start looking at it differently. "It's made of some kind of sparkle-finished polymer and it's got some decent curves on it, but so what? The intimacy comes more from the fact that, within that hand-held piece of plastic, exists your whole world" — your friends' phone numbers, your digital pictures, your music — and that stuff can be easily transferred to a new one. So you "fall out of love" with the phone, Chapman says. Even the most idealistic visions of how e-waste should be recycled and reused take for granted that consumers and businesses will never reconsider why we are buying and discarding so many of those products, so quickly, in the first place. If the rush of castoffs isn't likely to stop, we need to clear a proper path for it, considering all the inevitable compromises and costs along the way and delivering those products to as consequenceless a place as possible. There is no heaven for cellphones. Wherever they go, it seems that something, somewhere, to some extent always ends up being damaged or depleted. The only heaven I came across was what Chapman described. It is an image in our heads — not of a place where we can send a used phone but one where we imagine each device when it's brand-new, right before we first get our hands on it. That illusion of perfection, no matter how many times we see it spoiled, will always lure us into buying the next new phone and sending the last one careering on its way. Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about the science and commerce of sleep. |
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| The Moral Instinct 
Illustration by Adrian Tomine January 13, 2008 The Moral Instinct Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in "I Hate Gates" Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug? Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care. It's not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd's nerd and the world's richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle's eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all. I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them," wrote Immanuel Kant, "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations. These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history's worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us. So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions. The Moralization Switch The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral ("killing is wrong"), rather than merely disagreeable ("I hate brussels sprouts"), unfashionable ("bell-bottoms are out") or imprudent ("don't scratch mosquito bites"). The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, "I don't like brussels sprouts, but I don't care if you eat them," but no one would say, "I don't like killing, but I don't care if you murder someone." The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to "let them get away with it." People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, "The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell." We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial. Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn't enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering "punitive damages." At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called "bums" and "tramps"; today they are "homeless." Drug addiction is a "disease"; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a "sexually transmitted disease" and more recently a "sexually transmitted infection." This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate. Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the "moral" setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles. Reasoning and Rationalizing It's not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love? A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom. A family's dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cook it and eat it for dinner. Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It's not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren't. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, "I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong." People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification. The gap between people's convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says "yes." Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don't see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can't come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven't had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either. When psychologists say "most people" they usually mean "most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money." But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.'s. Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat. By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people's brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved). When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another. But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene's theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis. A Universal Morality? The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a "universal grammar" that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos. The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be. Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called "conscientiousness" and "agreeableness" are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes). People given diagnoses of "antisocial personality disorder" or "psychopathy" show signs of morality blindness from the time they are children. They bully younger children, torture animals, habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery. Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger their own children and can't think through even the simplest moral dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save his dying wife. The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever? This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman's life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people's moral judgments can't be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples. Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky's theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize? The Varieties of Moral Experience When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it's bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality. The exact number of themes depends on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following: Stick a pin into your palm. Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.) Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error. Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.) Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation. Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.) Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.) Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage. Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.) In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism. The Genealogy of Morals The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest. The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene." Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken's definition of conscience as "the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking"). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions. Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn't pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals. Juggling the Spheres All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother? The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It's not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled. Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn't easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question. The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It's not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive. Is Nothing Sacred? And "morally corrosive" is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because "we have our kind of morality and they have theirs." And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry. In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it's important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves. Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn't follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. "Selfish" genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene's metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were "selfish" in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish. Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear. In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it's good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can't literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset. Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that's the kind of people they are. Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone always sacrificed themselves for another's good would be as preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did. Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don't make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process. Is Morality a Figment? So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself? Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us? Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly? This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren't in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others. Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers' blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself. One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other's children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other's child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we'd both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things. The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can't act as if my interests are special just because I'm me and you're not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it. Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history's best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza's Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant's Categorical Imperative; and Rawls's Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer's theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings. Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound. At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries' agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other's concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives' concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern. The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels. Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay "The Wisdom of Repugnance," Leon Kass, former chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: "We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder." There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors' repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new. There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient's intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it's physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line? And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.'s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don't add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing. Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like." Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of "The Language Instinct" and "The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature."
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!["It is not a treaty...[In the future, it] may well become the international Magna Carta." Eleanor Roosevelt with the Spanish text of the Universal Declaration in 1949](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EleanorRooseveltHumanRights.gif)
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