January 30, 2006















  • Bloggers Beware.




    The document says information is "critical to military success



    The wide-reaching document was signed off by Donald Rumsfeld

    US plans to 'fight the net' revealed


    US plans to 'fight the net' revealed








    		By Adam Brookes
    BBC Pentagon correspondent



    A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.



    Bloggers beware.

    As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

    From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

    The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

    Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.







    Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.


    The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

    The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

    Propaganda

    The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

    All these are engaged in information operations.



    Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

    "Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

    "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

    The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

    "In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.

    Credibility problem

    Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.







    When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system


    Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

    And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.

    But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.

    The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.

    It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support.

    It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from "third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials".

    It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.

    'Fight the net'

    When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

    It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

    "Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

    The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

    The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence.

    "Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."

    US digital ambition

    And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

    US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

    Consider that for a moment.

    The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

    Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

    The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

    And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.


    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

    Published: 2006/01/27 18:05:49 GMT

    BBC MMVI
    To my way of thinking we must be ever mindful of the fact that this current White House Administration will be leaving office in three short years. Who will be the voice to come forth and return the 'GENIE' to the bottle, so to speak.?

     

    What is and not considered 'subversive' or detrimental to the public welfare.?

     

    There have been suggestions muttered in some quaters that to be simply in philosophical opposition to the current regime relegates one to being described at best as 'sympathizer' and at worst as an outright purveyor of terror in some solipsistic formulation.

     

    Carefully consider which direction this may take us, and jealously guard the freedoms that this Administration has claimed are so vitally important that we send our own soldiers to their death half a world away so that people in other lands may have what we are questioning here at home.

     

     

    Michael P. Whelan 

     

     


     







    John Cassavetes




    Film Forum John Cassavetes with Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).


    January 29, 2006

    'Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American Independent Film,' by Marshall Fine

    Under His Influence


    Review by PHILLIP LOPATE


    SEVENTEEN years after his death in 1989, John Cassavetes's stock continues to rise. Revered worldwide as one of the dominant models for personal filmmaking, his pictures are reissued in fancy DVD boxed sets, shown in retrospectives and taught in universities. Yet during his lifetime his work was often dismissed as confused and self-indulgent. Of all major American directors, it has probably taken him longest to gain his critical due.


    Marshall Fine, film and TV critic for Star magazine, has written the first genuine biography of this increasingly influential figure. An avowed devotee, Fine set out "to kindle the same kind of excitement and curiosity about Cassavetes' work in readers" that he felt, and he has accomplished his goal with "Accidental Genius," an absorbing, well-researched book. "My approach has always been journalistic, piecing together a story," writes Fine, whose prose style, in truth, rarely rises above the journalistically serviceable. But the material is riveting, the story moves briskly, and the real triumph lies in its central portrait. Cassavetes comes alive on the page, his restless spirit captured in all its contradictoriness.


    Fortunately, Fine is no hagiographer. We see many instances of Cassavetes acting like a jerk, or at cross-purposes: an egalitarian who led others by manic charisma; a provocateur who disliked violence and nudity on screen; a proponent of the uneasy who recut his films when preview audiences responded enthusiastically, yet whose favorite director was the crowd-pleasing Frank Capra; a generous helper to beginners, who often hurt himself by insulting studio higher-ups; a wise soul and an immature prankster.


    Cassavetes was himself an actor of fine, if narrow, intensities, so it figures he would evolve an actor-centered cinema. He began acting, he admitted, to capture girls' attention and to compensate for his small stature. He idolized James Cagney "because he was short - and tough." Starting out with juvenile delinquent roles, Cassavetes graduated, during the heyday of live television in the 50's, to brooding male leads in the Brando-Dean mold. He also won the heart of the gorgeous, talented actress Gena Rowlands, who married him and formed with him a lifelong artistic partnership.


    Stymied by conventional film and theater practices, he began improvising scenes with young actors; the result was his first directed film, "Shadows" (1959), a work of raw, lyrical charm. From that start, he created the template that would produce "Faces," "Husbands," "Opening Night" and the five other movies that carried his personal vision. What Fine says about his masterpiece, "A Woman Under the Influence," could apply equally to the others: "It is an uncompromising film that refuses to go where the audience would like. It has the untidiness and illogic of real life, with people acting against their own best interests, hurting the ones they love and immediately regretting it." Such films were hard to finance, and Cassavetes broke the first Hollywood rule - never use your own money - by mortgaging his house, funneling his acting fees into his productions and even distributing them himself.


    The book is particularly strong on Cassavetes's work methods. He was, it turns out, "a human script factory," always writing or dictating another screenplay. Cassavetes resented being saddled with the "improvisation" label when so much of his work was scripted; but it was partly his fault. He muddied the waters by confessing how he loved to make use of accidents and surprises. Still, he maintained that the only improvised parts were the impromptu movements, like crossing a room, in the midst of line deliveries.


    To keep the acting free and open, Cassavetes insisted on not blocking or lighting elaborately beforehand. The camera had to adjust to the actors, necessitating a hand-held, semi-documentary style. Film critics' initial resistance to him may have reflected their formalist preference for the carefully composed shot, as in Ford and Antonioni. Cassavetes had hit upon a new kind of destabilized, fluid image, and if his films do have ravishing visual passages, they come from the camera serendipitously following actors' natural rhythms. This darting camerawork supported his vision of life as a shifting, bewildering affair; it also meant that the actors had to stay in the moment, never knowing when the camera was on them.


    People had to be moved out of their comfort zones to elicit moments of true feeling. Peter Falk, who took awhile getting used to Cassavetes's methods, reported, "On 'Husbands,' he'd run in front of the camera, put a banana up your behind - he'd do anything." All this rests on the questionable assumption that what is most off-balance or unfamiliar is most authentic. There are revelations in Cassavetes's films that show with startling clarity the map of human confusion, but there are also scenes where actors fumble and bluster through embarrassing shtick.


    Being a booster, the author can't seriously engage any arguments against Cassavetes's artistry. Each film is recounted scene by scene - space that might have been better spent in balanced criticism. Then again, he has not meant to do a critical biography. If the personal treatment of the formative years tends to devolve later into a march through directorial projects, it may be because Cassavetes came to pour everything of substance into his work. A man of enormous stamina, he could go for days on nothing but cigarettes, coffee and booze; in the end, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was an inadvertent suicide on the part of a man who once said, "I'm a great believer in spontaneity because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world."


    Fine justly credits Cassavetes with creating a cinema of emotion; breaking new ground in his focus on middle-class suburban lives; altering the spatial frame; and changing the way films were financed and distributed, by going outside the studio system. I wish he hadn't harped on the idea that Cassavetes "invented American independent film," which may be true, but is a mixed compliment, given the mediocrity of most indies. I prefer to think this director's chief legacy was an astonishing set of films that invite a different relationship to being in the moment, and in which the mystery of human behavior dictates that anything can happen at any time to anyone.


    Phillip Lopate's film criticism was collected in "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically," and his anthology "American Movie Critics" will be published in March.











    Reagan Presidency



    I will honestly confess to a brain freeze when it comes to understanding the Reagan Presidency.


    When I read about the details of Mrs. Reagan, referred to as "mommy" by "Ronnie", it boggles my mind to imagine that there were overtures to psychics in order to map out the Presidential travel plans.


    More than one former staffer in the Reagan White House has related the bizarre world of decision making influenced by Mrs. Reagan, who held more power than any other elected official in America at that time.


    There are also credible accounts of the President resting comfortably with uninterrupted afternoon naps, and his complete dependence on teleprompters to distinguish the topic and the point of reference for whatever speech was being delivered at the moment.


    Maybe I miss something in the translation, but where does the Reagan Presidency not benefit from  the inexorable course of history, as opposed to taking credit for things that would have happened in spite of his tenure.


    Finally, how did this so called "Evil Empire", that supposedly threatened the free world with world domination, collapse under its own weight with rusting missiles in inoperable silos, literally overnight.


    By the time Reagan demanded Gorbachev to "Take down that wall", the evil empire had nothing but economic disaster.


    They did not only take the wall down, they dissolved the entire USSR.


    Did our Intelligence community completely misread the reality of the Soviet condition?


    Or was this "Paper Tiger" created to boslter the Defense Industry in their efforts to deploy an 800 ship Navy for which there was acknowledgedly insufficient personnel to get them out of dry dock.


    There is also the "Star Wars" proposal which was also to defend against the indomitable Soviet threat.


    Somebody must have known this "Evil Empire " was gasping its last breath.


    With due respect to Dennis Miller, 'I could be wrong, but that is the way I see it'.


    Michael P. Whelan


     



     







    'President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination,' by Richard Reeves




    Gary Hershorn/Reuters; Larry Rubenstein/U.P.I.; Gary Hershorn/Reuters; Gary Hershorn/ReutersRonald Reagan, with (from left) former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; Mikhail Gorbachev; former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada


    January 29, 2006

    'President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination,' by Richard Reeves

    The Great Delegator


    Review by ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE


    ON the afternoon before the opening of the Group of 7 summit meeting in 1983, James Baker, the White House chief of staff, dropped in on Ronald Reagan to deliver a briefing book. The United States was the host of the conference, the only one held on American soil during the Reagan presidency; the administration had pre-emptively billed the meeting as a triumph; and Baker, worried about his boss's lack of preparation and aware that "Reaganomics" wasn't universally popular, had taken a lot of trouble compiling the briefings, which were both concise and comprehensive. On returning the next morning, Baker was furious to discover that the book lay exactly where he had left it - and confronted his boss with his failure to do his prep. Reagan's unflustered reply: "Well, Jim, 'The Sound of Music' was on last night."


    Ronald Reagan is a gold mine of presidential anecdotes (this one is from Lou Cannon). But try to understand the man behind the yarns and the gold turns to dross. His official biographer, Edmund Morris, found him such an elusive figure that he resorted to the Reaganesque technique of mixing fact with fiction, producing a dog's dinner of a book. There are wonderful books about the world that created Reaganism, most notably Steven Hayward's "Age of Reagan." There are impressive studies of this problem or that policy. But anybody who wants to understand the man must still return to Cannon, who was Reagan's "journalistic shadow," in Richard Reeves's words, in both Sacramento and Washington, and who produced monumental studies of his time as governor and president.


    One reason Reagan is so difficult to understand is the contrast between achievement and effort. Reagan was undoubtedly a "transformative" president - arguably the most important since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He restored confidence in America after the malaise of the Carter years; re-energized the presidency after the trauma of Watergate; and revolutionized assumptions about what government could and couldn't do. His economic policies supercharged incentives for entrepreneurs, who were taking over from big companies as the engines of the economy; and his huge arms buildup put timely pressure on the crumbling Soviet system.


    Yet the man who presided over such dramatic changes was frequently out to lunch. He was never exactly a Stakhanovite: he started his day with the comics and took frequent time for naps, sometimes in cabinet meetings. But as his presidency wore on, his mind began to fail, the victim, as it turned out, of incipient dementia.


    The other reason he is so elusive is the contrast between his geniality and his remoteness. Reagan had the gift of likability, always ready with a smile and a joke. Yet he didn't really need people. He was perfectly content with his own company - reading conservative publications or watching old movies - and he tended to treat people as either hired help or an audience. Martin Anderson, an adviser, described him as "the most warmly ruthless man I've ever seen." "You can get just so far to Ronnie, and then something happens," said Nancy, who was probably the only person who really got close to him.


    Now Reeves brings a biographical technique that he has honed in two previous books - on Kennedy and Nixon - to the Reagan enigma. The essence of this technique is to focus on the goals that his subjects set for themselves and then immerse the reader in a river of narrative. "I have tried to show what it was like for each of these men to be president," he explains. This makes for refreshingly nonjudgmental books (though Reeves is clearly no fan of Reagan's economic policies); it also makes for highly readable ones, with the president's goals providing a spine but never getting in the way of the unfolding story.


    Reeves is unlikely to displace Lou Cannon as the Virgil of Reaganland. He spends too much time reciting the daily headlines; he sometimes loses sight of his central characters in the rush of events; the whole effect is of a story written from a distance rather than with insider's knowledge. Still, for all these faults, "President Reagan" is a compelling read, fast-paced and scrupulously fair. The account of the Iran-contra affair is particularly gripping. Anybody who is interested in Reagan's extraordinary presidency needs to reckon with Reeves.


    Reeves argues that Reagan was a master of both imagination and delegation. He stuck firmly to a small number of clear goals - reducing the size of government, restoring America's power and pride, and facing down Communism - and then delegated implementation to the "fellas." He did not so much do things as persuade others to do them for him. But his preference for delegation should not be confused with passivity. He insisted on using the phrase "tear down this wall" against the advice of his underlings, for example. The arms control deals that crowned his administration would have been impossible without his mixture of sci-fi fantasy and idealism. A Russian note taker who watched him carefully at two summit meetings likened him to an aged lion. If the prey was 10 feet away, he couldn't be bothered to move; but when it wandered to within 8 feet, he suddenly came to life - and Reagan the negotiator dominated the room.


    Reagan's imagination was fired by ideology but tempered by pragmatism. He was a product of the conservative revival of the 1950's and 60's, a revival that was driven by a combination of free-market enthusiasm and antitax fervor, superpatriotism and anti-Communism, religious revivalism and, to be frank, wild-eyed lunacy, and he possessed a rare gift for rendering conservative ideas into emotion-laden rhetoric. Even as a senior citizen in the White House, Reagan was a sucker for far-out conservative ideas: from the "space lasers" that were being championed in Human Events (which his aides tried to prevent him from reading) to Arthur Laffer's supply-side economics.


    Yet this ideological zeal coexisted with a canny pragmatism. The man who slashed the top rate of tax in 1981 later raised taxes and fees by more than $80 billion a year; the man who championed "creative destruction" introduced "voluntary" export restraints on Japanese cars; and the man who denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" ended up traveling to Moscow to visit his "friend" Mikhail Gorbachev. This provoked a growing rumble of criticism from the right during his presidency. As Reeves writes about the Moscow summit meeting: "The president threw an arm around Gorbachev's shoulder as they walked along like a couple of guys coming off the field after the big game. That was just too much for America's anti-Communist establishment." But most of these former critics have long ago forgotten their complaints - and Reagan memorials are now springing up as fast as Wal-Marts. Among the many arts that conservatives have mastered is the art of fabricating heroes.


    Everybody will have his or her complaints about Reeves's sins of omission. He could have said more about Reagan's ideas ("good ones, bad ones and odd ones," as he puts it). He could have said more about the influence of the American West in shaping a man who was given the Secret Service nickname Rawhide. But in one area Reeves scores a bull's-eye: exposing the sheer strangeness of the Reagan years. Top billing goes to Iran-contra - that remarkable story of semi-privatized foreign policy and Reaganauts gone wild. But there are plenty of other gems: Reagan going to sleep during Gorbachev's address to the Moscow conference; astrologers helping to decide everything from Reagan's choice of George Bush as his running mate to the president's schedule; the director of central intelligence, William Casey, mumbling so badly that Reagan couldn't hear a word he said ("the mumbling leading the deaf," according to one of the president's men); and Reagan trying to persuade a Southern Democrat to support the sale of Awacs to Saudi Arabia by reminding him the Bible tells us that Armageddon will begin in the Middle East and involve the Russians. If Reeves were in the thriller business, he would be accused of stretching the bounds of credibility; as things are, readers will simply have to keep pinching themselves, checking Reeves's footnotes and realizing that, yes, all this actually happened.


    Adrian Wooldridge is the Washington bureau chief of The Economist and the author, with John Micklethwait, of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America."




















  • Yahoo




    Jim Wilson/The New York Times
    When Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo, invited Terry Semel, above, to take charge of the company in 2001, skeptics scoffed. But Yahoo has thrived under Mr. Semel's control.

    Copyright. n.y. times. 2006

     

    January 29, 2006


    When Terry Met Jerry, Yahoo!


    By RICHARD SIKLOS


    WHEN Yahoo Inc. announced nearly five years ago that Terry S. Semel, then a former leader of the Warner Brothers motion picture studio, would become its chairman and chief executive, the reaction both outside and within Yahoo was not exactly one of wild encouragement.


    Despite a hugely successful career running companies that make movies, television shows and music, Mr. Semel was immediately labeled an "old media" guy. Worse, he was a Hollywood guy, and had barely touched a computer during the nearly two decades he oversaw Warner Brothers with Robert A. Daly.


    Even though he had been making private Internet investments since resigning from the studio two years earlier, when people associated "Semel" and "Yahoo," they were more likely to think of an Australian comic named Yahoo Serious who starred in the 1988 Warner Brothers flop "Young Einstein." Mr. Semel's former boss at Time Warner, Gerald M. Levin, who had just completed his merger with America Online, laughed incredulously when he heard the news of Mr. Semel's new gig in April 2001, according to an executive who was with Mr. Levin at the time.


    At Yahoo, where the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the evaporation of online advertising had just helped sink the company's market value from a peak of $127 billion to just $12.6 billion when he joined, the reception wasn't much warmer. Mr. Semel, then 58, had neither geek cred like that of Yahoo's co-founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, nor Silicon Valley venture-capitalist swagger. Mr. Semel looked like a self-assured but unassuming guy who originally hailed from Queens, which he was. Word spread quickly in Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., that — horrors! — he even wore a gold chain on his wrist. (This, too, was true, but the chain is not a fashion statement; it's a medical bracelet for a shellfish allergy.)


    The story line at Yahoo is much different today. Having lost $98 million on revenue of $717 million in the year when Mr. Semel joined it, Yahoo earned $1.2 billion last year on sales of $5.3 billion. With a market capitalization nudging $50 billion, it is worth roughly the same as the newly Pixar-ized Walt Disney Company or the combined value of the recently split Viacom and CBS.


    Dollars aside, Yahoo has the widest global reach of any Internet site. It counts more than 420 million registered users around the world, and it owns the most-used e-mail, instant-messaging and music Web sites on the planet. In the United States alone, Yahoo attracted 103 million unique visitors in December, making it the country's most-visited Web destination, according to Nielsen NetRatings.


    "It's a 21st-century media company," Mr. Semel said in a recent interview. "The difference between the more traditional media companies and companies like Yahoo is all about technology, and the two — technology and media — totally marry each other."


    Not all marriages go as planned, of course. It is highly symbolic that Mr. Semel was recently in the office of Time Warner's chief executive, Richard D. Parsons, proposing that Yahoo effectively take AOL off of Time Warner's hands, although Mr. Parsons was not interested. Depending on how it handles the rapid and daunting rise of Google's search-based juggernaut — not to mention Microsoft's new determination to rule the Web — Yahoo has a shot at being the digital media company to beat.


    IN the past two years, Mr. Semel has netted $403 million by exercising Yahoo options and selling shares. He still owns shares and options worth more than $230 million. The stock fell back last month amid concerns about whether Yahoo's revenue can continue to grow by 30 percent or more a year. The old-media guys, most of whom light up cigars if they can hit double-digit earnings growth, wish they had his problems.


    As he looks back over his five years running Yahoo, Mr. Semel makes no pretense of being a techno-guru, and he is often asked whether he really understands technology. "I'm never going to be a technologist, but I have to be conversant," he said, adding: "I was never an actor or a director or a singer — I had to understand the process well enough to help make decisions."


    Although he has apartments in San Francisco and New York, home is still in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He commutes to Sunnyvale three or four days a week on the Gulfstream IV corporate jet that he and Mr. Daly bought from Warner Brothers when they resigned in 1999.


    "Terry's a thoughtful, intelligent man and he did not take his media imperialist roots to Sunnyvale," said Barry Diller, the former Hollywood mogul who is now chairman and chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp. "And that's what got him on the road to fluency, which he's mastered. That's some feat for an old-media dog, speaking as one who could be similarly described."


    To hear Mr. Semel describe it, the revival at Yahoo is attributable to the same methodical style and emphasis on team-building and consumer desires that allowed him and Mr. Daly to increase Warner Brothers' revenue to more than $11 billion from less than $1 billion over nearly two decades.


    But he concedes that there were unexpected contrasts between the old and the new that were not immediately apparent to him — just as they seem to keep confounding many of his old-media colleagues.


    While all media rely on good content and distribution as underpinnings of their success, he said that the interactive world emphasizes qualities that the offline world doesn't, including truly global reach, personalization and community. All media companies recite these concepts, but are heavily invested in and dependent on preserving existing relationships based on controlling both their content and the way it moves to people. What is more, they have not grown up in a world where technology can be as much of a competitive edge as hiring Steven Spielberg to direct a picture.


    Perhaps the most glaring difference between Yahoo's vision of a media company and the visions of more conventional media groups is in the definition of content. In a world of high-speed connections to a growing web of material that audiences can consume or manipulate in endless ways, Yahoo strives to be a 24/7 global blockbuster of self-expression. "Terry has said he's been very clear about the fact that the habits and the desires of the consumer are the common theme between his last career and his current career," Mr. Yang said.


    By the time he was hired, Yahoo already had the foundation for success — most notably its number of worldwide users, more than 200 million, who did everything from checking business news and sports scores to sending e-mail and instant messages, listening to music and shopping.


    But beyond the powerful brand and a company full of whizzes, there was no clear business strategy. The first thing Mr. Semel did was to streamline 44 business units into 4. That helped to set corporate priorities. "Terry's relentless focus on focus is probably the most important thing we as a team or as a company are doing," Mr. Yang said.


    Mr. Semel's first big decision — and probably his shrewdest — was to make advertising its mainstay business. At some of his earliest meetings at Yahoo, Mr. Semel recalled, some executives were advocating that the business instead pour its efforts into trying to extract monthly fees from its registered users.


    "He was very early on in thinking, 'if we can keep the users growing and we can keep growing usage, we will be able to monetize this and we will be able to create value,' " said Mary Meeker, the Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. "It sounds like mom and apple pie, but that was something a lot of people did not get in 2001."


    Mr. Semel was also keen to develop other revenue streams, including music services, games and premium e-mail accounts. Its absence in the dial-up Internet access business, where AOL and Microsoft had pole positions, seemed, in those days, a glaring disadvantage. Mr. Semel addressed this with his second smart move: establishing a partnership with SBC, now AT&T, to sell Yahoo-brand high-speed connections over souped-up phone lines. Yahoo later added Verizon, British Telecom and Rogers Communications in Canada, and now has 9.6 million subscribers, according to Morgan Stanley estimates. Each subscription generates an average of $3 a month for Yahoo.


    Vital to its focus on advertising was Yahoo's decision, in 2003, to develop its own search business — built on the rapid-fire acquisitions of Inktomi and Overture, which itself had just bought AltaVista — to compete with Google. That freed Yahoo from having to license Google's search technology. "We hardly went to sleep after we started to understand their business," Mr. Semel said of Overture's service of placing sponsored links alongside relevant search results. (Overture has been rechristened as Yahoo Search Marketing.)


    Two years after introducing its own search engine, Yahoo trails only Google in that field. But it has also had to acknowledge that it is less effective than its rival at instantly matching relevant ads to search results. And Yahoo's share of the search market slipped to 30 percent in December from 32 percent in the same month a year earlier, while Google's share rose to 40 percent from 35 percent, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Improving the financial return on search advertising, Mr. Semel says, is in the works.


    Although search represents only 5 percent of activity on the Web, this is no small matter: the higher profit margins generated by Google's AdWords business are a big reason that Google's $128 billion market capitalization now dwarfs Yahoo's. (History will decide whether Google or, for that matter, Yahoo warrant their starry valuations in a market where the stocks of media companies with much higher revenues are being shunned by investors.)


    Still, Mr. Semel contends that Yahoo's ability to blend brand and search advertising will set it apart as the Web continues its swift evolution. Susan L. Decker, Yahoo's finance chief, notes that most search advertisers are already online one way or another and tend to be small or midsized companies. But, she said, many major corporations are still spending only a small percentage of their marketing budgets online.


    Without content that people want, of course, advertising is moot. Yahoo has gained attention in the past year for developing original programming, based out of a new Yahoo Media complex in Santa Monica, Calif.


    Columnists have been hired for its news sites, reporters are hatching multimedia presentations and the inevitable online reality show is in the works. Yahoo wants to be the largest online video hub, streaming everything from news clips and movie trailers to Howard Stern stunts and NASA missions. Last year, it streamed four billion music videos, enough to fill the schedules of a lot of MTV channels.


    Mr. Semel says he sees the company's original content efforts as small steps toward figuring out what works on the Internet. But he and his colleagues are clearly more enamored of the prospects for distributing so-called old-media content. "Yahoo wants to create an environment where people can find all the content they want," said Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's chief operating officer. "That's why we're going to be a great partner to the media companies."


    PARTNER, sure, but rival, too. Consider the News Corporation's online moves, particularly its purchase of MySpace.com, a fast-growing social-networking Web site. The News Corporation intends for it to be the online equivalent of the early Fox network: an alternative that will draw young audiences from Yahoo and elsewhere.


    More directly, America Online repositioned itself as a free portal last year, thus becoming a direct rival of Yahoo. "I think they're going to be tough competitors going forward," said Mr. Parsons, Time Warner's chief executive. He added that he considered AOL's portal competitive to Yahoo's, but he acknowledged that Yahoo had a lead in several areas, including its reach overseas.


    Mr. Semel and his Yahoo colleagues are most eager to encourage their registered users, who represent roughly 40 percent of the one billion people now online globally, to create their own content. Yahoo executives say that social networks, blogs, message boards and sites where users from around the world share material — like the recent Yahoo acquisitions Flickr, a photo-sharing business, and Del.icio.us, where people swap information on favorite Web sites and other things — are the keys to a fast-emerging media market.


    Across Yahoo's overflowing campus of purple cubicles in Sunnyvale, Calif., teams are working on a range of products — with names like Yahoo360, Y!Q, Yahoo Mindset, MyWeb 2.0 and Yahoo Answers — that use Web-searching as a ribbon for tying together virtual communities. MyWeb 2.0, for example, bills itself as a "social search engine" that lets users tag search results they may want to come back to and to share those results with cyberfriends.


    At a media company like Warner Brothers, central factors for success include managing talent, financial acumen, guiding a "Batman" or a "Friends" to a debut and understanding how to market it. While many online efforts by media companies have focused on building direct and deeper connections with audiences, these have largely amounted to virtual fan clubs and stores for media brands and products.


    Lately, Yahoo and other Internet companies have been enamored of the notion of connecting communities of people who, say, are fans of Batman but also share an affinity for mountain biking or Indian food. Thanks to new services intended to extend Yahoo's network beyond computer screens to phones, TV's and other gadgets, these communities can stay in constant contact.


    Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search and marketplace, came up with the acronym FUSE to sum up Yahoo's social networking ambitions: to "find, use, share and expand all human knowledge." This sounds awfully high-minded for a company whose logo ends in an exclamation point, but it underscores another difference between old and new in a cynical age: "People come to work trying to change things," Mr. Weiner said.


    They also come to work knowing that the Internet is a field of dreams without barriers to entry. If you don't build it, someone else will — most likely Google. Technology is what allows Yahoo to start these services and to tie them together on a global scale. "Almost from the first day I came to Yahoo," Mr. Semel said, "I realized that every strategy we were considering had to be related to the quality of our technology."


    Farzad Nazem, a Yahoo veteran who is its chief technology officer, stressed that point. "Most of the old-media companies treat technology as an afterthought. It's part of the execution, but it's never part of the planning," he said. "In the new world, it's almost the reverse."


    AND it's probably no surprise that, faced with the rapid rise of Google and growing competition from AOL and Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo has been hiring engineers and opening research centers. Last year it added 220 people a month and now employs about 10,000.


    "We try to present a consumer-friendly and, as much as possible, a humanized version of the Internet," said Mr. Yang. "It's fair to say we don't go out and talk about ourselves as a tech company like Google or Microsoft. That is a very deliberate message we want to send out."


    It is a message that played to Mr. Semel's strengths. Mr. Daly, the former Warner Brothers executive, remembers telling nay-sayers that they were wrong to underestimate his old friend:


    "I told them, 'You don't understand Terry Semel. He knows what they need, and that is to bring a sense of not only leadership but marketing and how to put things together.' At Yahoo, he is the father."






    .. language=JavaScript> .. language=JavaScript src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/s_code_sampling.js">


     



     


    Thursday, January 26, 2006







    Google




    January 25, 2006
    Version of Google in China Won't Offer E-Mail or Blogs
    By DAVID BARBOZA

    SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 - Google is bringing a special version of its powerful search engine to China, leaving behind two of its most popular features in the United States.

    In an effort to cope with China's increasingly pervasive Internet controls, Google said Tuesday that it would introduce a search engine here this week that excludes e-mail messaging and the ability to create blogs.

    Google officials said the new search engine, Google.cn, was created partly as a way to avoid potential legal conflicts with the Chinese government, which has become much more sophisticated at policing and monitoring material appearing on the Internet.

    Web sites have exploded in popularity in a country eager for freer flow of information. But Web portals and search engines trying to win Chinese users face a significant balancing act: they do not want to flout government rules and guidelines that restrict the spread of sensitive content, but they want to attract users with interesting content.

    One result has been that search engines and Web portals have censored their sites and cooperated with Chinese authorities. Indeed, the move to create a new site comes after Google itself, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, have come under scrutiny over the last few years for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor or block online content.

    Currently, people in China use Google by accessing its global engine, Google.com. But industry experts say that the site is often not accessible from inside China, possibly because it is blocked by Chinese authorities culling what is deemed to be sensitive or illegal information.

    Google's new Chinese platform, which will not allow users to create personal links with Google e-mail or blog sites, will comply with Chinese law and censor information deemed inappropriate or illegal by the Chinese authorities. This approach might help the company navigate the legal thickets that competitors have encountered in China.

    Foreign companies say they must abide by Chinese laws and pass personal information about users on to the Chinese government. In one case two years ago, Yahoo provided information that helped the government convict a Chinese journalist, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, on charges of leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site.

    Another challenge, though, is trying to attract Chinese users to a censored engine. Google officials conceded that the company was struggling to balance the need to bolster its presence in the China market with the increasingly stringent regulations that govern Internet use here.

    "Google is mindful that governments around the world impose restriction on access to information," a senior executive wrote, responding to questions. "In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

    The Chinese government has been particularly strict in recent years about filtering antigovernment news and opinion pieces from the Web and blocking Web sites or blogs that question governmental authority.

    The government also has employed a variety of techniques to control what appears on the Web - temporarily blocking sites, redirecting viewers to government-controlled sites and even shutting sites altogether. Government officials have even been able to block references to specific words, like Tibet, Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square.

    A year ago, when Google first started a Chinese-language version of its global service, the company filtered out and omitted some news sources that were already being blocked in China. The company said at the time: "There is nothing Google can do about it."

    Now, Google officials say they hope they have struck the right compromise. The new site will improve access and speed up regular search engine service in a country where Internet traffic is skyrocketing, even if that service is limited in scope, the company said.

    China has more than 100 million Internet users, making it second only to the United States in Web surfers; and blogging, podcasting, playing online games and surfing the Web are wildly popular.

    Google says it plans to disclose when information has been blocked or censored from its new site, just as it does in the United States, Germany and other countries.

    The regular Google.com site, based outside China, will continue to be available for access from China.

    Difficulties using the site have put Google at a disadvantage in China, where the Google.com site had lost ground to a Chinese rival, Baidu.com, which went public last year.

    Baidu is called the Chinese Google, and Google even has a stake in the company. But officials at Google say that recently they have been losing share in China, partly because of difficulty people had using Google.com.

    The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks the activities of Western technology companies seeking to do business with repressive regimes, condemned the Google-China deal as "hypocrisy" and called it "a black day for freedom of expression in China" in a statement published on its Web site.

    "The firm defends the rights of U.S. Internet users" the statement added, "but fails to defend its Chinese users against theirs."

    Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



     







    Google in China



    While taking a break from the activities at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Google co-founder Sergey Brin talked about Google.cn and the growing kerfuffle over Google's acquiescence to China's censorship demands.





    Editor's Note: Have Google and its American-based search competitors paid too high a price for entry into the Chinese market? Can their presence truly effect change by virtue of being available in China? Tell us more at WebProWorld.





    Fortune Magazine's David Kirkpatrick managed to grab a few minutes of Brin's time in Davos, Switzerland, site of the World Economic Forum Summit. The conversation quickly turned to Google China, where Google's acceptance of Chinese government controls on what citizens can and cannot search has drawn comments and complaints from a range of people spanning from bloggers to Congressional representatives.

    Brin said he believed Google is "doing the right thing" with their work in     China:


    "We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it."


     



    He also noted how Google blocks content in the     US when it receives a DMCA request; the search engine also blocks queries for Nazi-related topics in Germany and France. That led to this exchange between Brin and Kirkpatrick:


    Brin: ...we also by the way have to do similar things in the U.S. and Germany. We also have to block certain material based on law. The U.S., child pornography, for example, and also DMCA

    Fortune: You actually actively block child pornography?

    Brin: No, but if we got a specific government request. If a third party makes a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) claim that another party is violating copyright, and that party is not able to counter, then we are obligated to block that.

    In     France and Germany there are Nazi material laws. One thing we do, and which we are implementing in China as well, is that if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine. "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results." And we're doing that in China also, and that makes us transparent.



    Falun Gong practitioners and human rights activists will likely be surprised to find their work lumped in with kiddie porn and Nazism. Topics like "Falun Gong" and "human rights" get blocked routinely in     China.

    Kirkpatrick then obtained an opposing viewpoint to Brin's position from Human Rights Watch leader Ken Ross, and noted his opinion on the subject:


    I'm sure Google justifies this by saying it's just a couple of search words that people can't get to, but it's very difficult for Google to do what they just did and avoid the slippery slope. The next thing they'll do is ask them to tell them who is searching for "Taiwan" or "independence" or "human rights." And then it's going to find itself in the position of turning over the names of dissidents or simply of inquisitive individuals, for imprisonment.



    Ross suggested that the search engines could face down     China over censorship if they band together. That isn't going to happen, as none of the big search engines want to yield the promise of multi-billion dollar profits from the fast-growing Internet user base in China to homegrown efforts like Baidu, who do not have a problem following government dictates on content and search.






    About the Author:
    David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

January 26, 2006

  • Do No Evil…

    January 25th, 2006

    This post was written by Chris Silvey



    For the most part I think of Google as a indisputably first-class company. I have trouble thinking of criticisms of the company …that is until this week. Google has every right to enter any agreements that it sees fit. I love the free market systems and would not be in favor of preventing a private business from entering into agreements with foreign countries. But this week’s announcement by Google that they will help the Chinese dictatorship censor web searches just seems wrong to me.


    This isn’t the first time Google has censored for the government. Anyone who has used Google maps to search for a satellite photo of the White House has noticed the obvious photoshopping.


    The White House


    I assume the US government asked Google to do this…why else would the top of the White House be covered? Why Google would choose to participate in this, literal cover-up, is beyond me (unless forced by law to do so). Any terrorist or foreign country that wants this information can easily get the uncensored picture. If the government doesn’t want photos of the security on top of the White House, then they should camouflage the top of the building with netting or false walls, or some other visual illusion. It isn’t Google’s responsibility to hide easily obtainable information about the White House, the same should go with China.


    The announcement of cooperation between Google and the Chinese communist government comes as even more of a surprise when contrasted with Google’s recent dispute over releasing search statistics to the US government. Let me get this straight…China wants to censor searches of words such as Democracy, Freedom, and Christianity…No Problem! The US government wants a random sample of a million searches (no personal information on the searchers would be given)…and Google wants to fight for the rights of its users.


    Juxtaposing these two controversies within a week confuses the hell out of me. Why cooperate with China to censor but not cooperate with the US government in a court case about internet pornography? Please explain.


    All of this leads me to a question I don’t often ask. How rich do you need to be? Google desires to enter a market with 1.5 billion people in order to make money. Is the bottom line always the sole determinant of a business decision? The answer to that question is obviously no, at least in Google’s case. They provide their employees with …free meals…laundry…company time for private projects. The founders of Google, and just about every employee at the company, are in the top 10% of income earners.


    Participating in actions, such as censorship, is condoning it. Google should take the high road and let its competitors participate in the proactive elimination of information. Leave the censorship to communist dictators!


    Update: Google changes its motto from



    Do No Evil!


    to



    Don’t Be More Evil Than Necessary!


  • January 26, 2006

    David Pogue

    Razr vs. Blade: Cloning Is Only Skin Deep


    By DAVID POGUE


    THEY say that looks aren't everything, but don't tell Motorola. Its breathtakingly beautiful Razr is the world's best-selling cellphone.


    In just one year, this ultrathin metal slab has attained almost iPod-like popularity; 12 million people are now slipping Razr phones in and out of their pockets. You can buy the Razr in black, silver, pink or blue (for about $150), and there's more to come.


    "The year of 2005 was the Razr," says Edward J. Zander, Motorola's chief executive, "and the year of 2006 is more Razrs."


    All right, we get the idea. Thin is in.


    Other cellphone companies get the idea, too. In fact, Samsung has already come up with a Razr clone, nicknamed the Blade. (Its official name is the A900. It's offered only by Sprint, for $200, although a Verizon edition is reported to be in the works.)


    Whereas the Razr is a flat, rectangular, high-fashion flip phone, the Blade is a flat, rectangular, high-fashion flip phone. The dimensions are identical, too: 3.9 by 2 inches, and about a half-inch thick when closed. Both feel satisfying and James Bondian in your palm, and both snap shut with the cushioned click of a Lexus car door.


    Each has a camera, a speakerphone, Bluetooth wireless capability, a totally flat keypad, crystal-clear and extremely loud ringers, a big color screen inside and a postage-stamp-size screen on the outside.


    The phones are similar in their limitations, too. Neither has a Silence All keystroke for use in boardrooms, theaters or churches; you have to work the Volume Down key all the way to zero through the volume settings. The vibrate mode is so feeble, one layer of pocket fabric blocks it from your nerve endings.


    FINALLY, skinny little phones have skinny little batteries. The Blade dies after three hours of talking, or less. The Razr's life is longer, but still not nearly what its Web site says ("seven hours"). Truth is, you'll probably have to charge either phone at least once a day.


    But there are differences between the Razr and the Blade. Man, are there differences.


    The Razr, you see, may be the pinnacle of physical beauty. (The Blade is a hair less spectacular looking. Its designers, or perhaps its lawyers, stopped short of copying one particular bit of Motorola's design: the Razr's top is shorter than the bottom, so it nestles against a raised bottom lip when closed.)


    But the Razr's software quickly becomes the bane of its owner's existence. If you're used to the logical layout of, say, a Samsung or LG Electronics phone, this Razr will nick you badly.


    The stratospherically stupid address book, for example, can handle only one phone number for each person. You must create separate entries for "Mom home," "Mom work," "Mom cell" and so on. (Hello, Moto? We're not in 1970 anymore.)


    And if several friends' names begin with the same letter, you can't type SY to highlight Sylvia; that would be too obvious. Instead, pressing S takes you to the beginning of the S's. Then you have to walk through them all with the arrow key until you reach Sylvia. (Moto added a Search dialog box in some versions of the software, but it's still clunky.)


    Worse, the Razr actually has two address books: one in the phone and another on the internal account-information card. Good luck trying to figure out why you can't associate ringer sounds, photos or one-digit speed-dial keys with certain contacts. (It's because they're on the card list but not the phone list.)


    On most phones, tapping the Talk button summons your All Calls list — every incoming, outgoing or missed call. The Razr, though, keeps separate logs for incoming and outgoing calls. So if you want to call Carl back, you have to remember whether he called you or you called him.


    The Samsung phone's software avoids these pitfalls and many more. Its menu items are numbered, so you can just press 7 (or whatever) instead of walking down long lists with the arrow keys. Similarly, once you've opened a secondary menu, you can press the arrow keys to view other secondary menus, without first having to backtrack "up the tree" to the main menu.


    You can reprogram the buttons on both phones, including the two "soft keys" (unlabeled buttons whose functions are identified on the screen) on the Home screen. But if you decide to dedicate a soft key to the address book — a natural choice — guess what you'll see on the Razr? "Address Bo." That's all that fits.


    Instant messagers should note, too, that the Razr's iTap predictive-text input method is much slower than the T9 method of most phones. Actually, just about every function requires more button taps on the Razr than on the Samsung.


    One crucial reason is that the Samsung has a physical Back button. The Razr, on the other hand, must devote one of its two soft-key functions to a Back function at every step, wasting a spot that could have listed a more valuable option.


    Then there are the hardware differences. Samsung, the follower, had many months to study the Razr and improve on it. The camera lens, for example, rotates on the phone's hinge barrel for ease in capturing angled shots, and there's even an L.E.D. "flash" with a four-foot range.


    The Blade also records videos up to an hour long. The Razr, meanwhile, records 15-second videos, 7-second videos or none at all, depending on which version of its software you have.


    (Reviewing the Razr is tricky, because each of its three carriers — Verizon, Cingular and T-Mobile — has a slightly different version, and even then the specs change periodically. For example, the Samsung and Verizon's enhanced Razr take 1.3-megapixel photos; the Cingular and T-Mobile Razrs take measly 0.3-megapixel shots. Verizon also says that its Razr has a one-touch All Calls list, multiple phone numbers for each contact, and type-selection of names in the address book. This review is based on the latest Cingular Razr.)


    The Samsung is also highly voice-commandable, which is commendable. If you say, "Call Bill Gates mobile," for example, the phone dials for you. This feature is not only for safety (because you can keep your eyes on the road), but also for convenience.


    You can also check battery life, check signal strength or open programs by voice. You can even dictate text messages rather than tapping them out — yes, actual speech-transcription software is built in, although its accuracy leaves much to be desired.


    For additional monthly fees, the Samsung is also capable of astonishing multimedia feats. Its tiny stereo speakers can blast out music from Sirius satellite radio, Rhapsody Radio, or songs downloaded directly from Sprint's music store (ludicrously overpriced at $2.50 a song). Thanks to Sprint's high-speed Internet service, you can even watch cable TV channels with a smooth, uninterrupted picture.


    When connected by Bluetooth or a cable, both the Razr and the Blade let your laptop get onto the Internet from just about anywhere. But Sprint's high-speed network makes this setup far more enjoyable.


    So is the Blade's superiority over the Razr a slam-dunk? Not quite. Along with all of its features, Samsung's attempt at geek chic is accompanied by a few big bummers.


    One is the carrier: it's Sprint. If there's no Sprint coverage where you live, that's the end of the story.


    The second glitch is the external screen: it can't show photos. It doesn't show you the picture of incoming callers the way the Razr does, and it doesn't let your model see the photo you're about to snap.


    The third problem is storage. Neither phone has a removable memory card. The Blade has only 47 megabytes for all your pictures, movies and music; you'll be lucky to fit one CD's worth of music in that. True, the Razr's 5 megs is even worse, but then, that phone isn't marketed as a multimedia machine.


    The Blade, on the other hand, has physical buttons on the outside of the shell for Play/Pause, Next Song and Previous Song.


    Despite these frustrations, the Samsung A900 offers 90 percent of the Razr's design wow factor, but with software that's infinitely more thoughtful and efficient. (And a manual to match. The Razr's manual is a horror show, filled with baffling terminology like "incoming call alert" when it means "ringer.")


    In phones, as in people, looks are important — in getting your attention. But for a happy long-term relationship, it's the software design that counts.


    E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com













  • Robert Caplin for The New York Times

    James Frey, author of the book "A Million Little Pieces."
    January 26, 2006
    Oprah Calls Defense of Author 'a Mistake'
    By EDWARD WYATT

    In an extraordinary reversal of her strident defense of the author whose book she catapulted to the top of the best-seller list, Oprah Winfrey said today she believed that the author James Frey "betrayed millions of readers" by making up elements of his life in his best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

    She added that she believed "I made a mistake" when she said that the truth of the book mattered less than its story of redemption.

    In a live broadcast of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" from her studios in Chicago in which she interviewed Mr. Frey, Ms. Winfrey apologized to her audience for her call to "Larry King Live" earlier this month defending the author. Today, Ms. Winfrey, alternately fighting back tears and displaying vivid anger, berated Mr. Frey for duping her and her audience.

    "I gave the impression that the truth does not matter," Ms. Winfrey said. "I made a mistake." To all of the viewers who called and wrote to her telling her she was wrong to allow Mr. Frey to maintain that his book reflected the "essential truth" of his life even though substantial details were falsified, Ms. Winfrey said, "You are absolutely right."

    "I feel duped," she said. "I don't know what is true and I don't know what isn't," she said, before addressing Mr. Frey with the question, "Why did you lie?"

    Ms. Winfrey chose "A Million Little Pieces" in September for her popular television book club, and it sold more than two million copies within the next three months, making it the fastest-selling pick ever for her book club.

    But questions about the truth of Mr. Frey's memoir began to arise almost immediately, as they had since its publication in 2003. The memoir tells the harrowing story of Mr. Frey's arrival at a Minnesota rehabilitation center, which has since been identified as Hazelden, after years of alcohol and drug addiction.

    In early January, The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, reported that Mr. Frey's claim to have spent nearly three months in jail was false. Actually, he spent only a few hours in jail.

    On Thursday, Mr. Frey said of the Smoking Gun report, "Most of what they wrote is pretty accurate."

    Mr. Frey said he had made up many of the details of his life and had created a bad-guy portrayal of himself as a "coping mechanism."

    "I thought of myself as tougher than I was and badder than I was," Mr. Frey said.

    Ms. Winfrey asked if he made up the material because it helped him cope or because he thought it would help sell books. Mr. Frey responded, "Probably both."

    Ms. Winfrey was about 20 minutes into her show when ABC News interrupted the broadcast to televise President Bush's news conference. "The Oprah Winfrey Show" is televised in Chicago in the morning but in the afternoon in most major television markets.

    Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map








  • Shawn Baldwin for the New York Times

    A Hamas newspaper hawker sells a copy of the organizations latest edition in Gaza City today.

    January 26, 2006
    Victory Ends 40 Years of Political Domination by Arafat's Party
    By STEVEN ERLANGER

    RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jan. 26 — With discipline and a well-financed campaign to turn out its faithful in constituencies, the radical Islamic party Hamas scored an overwhelming victory in Wednesday's Palestinian legislative elections, taking 76 out of 132 seats, deposing the former ruling party, Fatah, which won only 43.

    The preliminary results, announced tonight by the Central Election Committee, were likened by Palestinians to an earthquake or a tsunami, ending more than 40 years of political domination by Fatah, the main political faction built by the late Yasir Arafat. Fatah, along with the Palestinian Authority, is widely viewed by Palestinians as corrupt and ineffective.

    The surprising results put Hamas — considered to be a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union — in charge of the Palestinian political future and brought a to efforts to restart peace talks. They made a mockery of the voter surveys released Wednesday night that indicated that Fatah would have the most seats and could retain control of the Palestinian legislature and the cabinet.

    In a televised speech tonight, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose position is unaffected by the vote, said he remained committed to negotiations with Israel. He suggested that future talks would be conducted through the Palestine Liberation Organization, which could bypass a Hamas-led government.

    "I am committed to implementing the program on which you elected me a year ago," he said. "It is a program based on negotiations and peaceful settlement with Israel."

    But Israel's acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said talks were not possible now. "The state of Israel will not negotiate with a Palestinian administration if even part of it is an armed terrorist organization calling for the destruction of the state of Israel," he said in a statement tonight after a cabinet discussion of the election results.

    Even before the results were announced, the Fatah prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, resigned; Mr. Qurei had warned Mr. Abbas against holding these elections. And in a series of clashes here, Hamas supporters raised their green flag over the parliament building. They celebrated throughout Gaza and the West Bank, holding victory marches in major cities. In Nablus, Hamas hung enormous green banners on public buildings and its military arm, the Qassam brigades, marched in uniforms with weapons, but unusually, did not wear masks.

    In Ramallah, Ali Abu Shusha, 31, with a bright green Hamas banner on his taxi, exulted in the victory. "Hamas was created by the people and belongs to the people," he said. "I want Hamas to run the government. It has clean hands, puts the poor before the rich and will resist the occupier."

    In Gaza City, however, Kamilia Barghouti, 26, a waitress, said she was in shock. "I'm worried about the way this victory will affect how I can dress in public, and even if it will affect where I can work," she said."

    The victory of Hamas represents an enormous test for the Palestinians, for the Western nations that pressed for this election and that provide millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians, and for the Arab world, which is likely to be shaken by the victory of a militant Islamic party in the symbolic heart of the Muslim world, Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories.

    But the results will also be a test for Hamas, which had seemed to want a more gradual entry into politics. The leader of Hamas, Mahmoud Zahar, said proudly in Gaza: "We are going to change every aspect, as regards the economy, industry, agriculture, as regards social aid, health, administration, education." But it will not be an easy transformation, and it will provoke political resistance from a largely secular society.

    While Hamas politicians said that they would invite other parties, including Fatah, to join them in a government of national unity, key Fatah members like Jibril Rajoub and Mahmoud Dahlan made it clear that Fatah should not be involved with any part of a government dominated by Hamas and help provide cover for Hamas as it deals with the real problems of governance.

    Fatah, they suggested, should go into opposition and let Hamas make its own mistakes and deal as best it could with the facts of Palestinian life and the Israeli occupation. The Fatah Central Committee voted tonight not to join a Hamas-led government.

    But it is also possible that some Fatah members with good relations with Hamas, like the Gazan legislator Ziad Abu Amr, who ran as an independent with Hamas support, and a former minister of national economy, Mazen Sinokrot, will agree to join Hamas in a cabinet that probably will be led by a non-Hamas prime minister.

    "My advice to Abu Mazen and to Hamas is to think of serious power-sharing," Mr. Amr said, referring to Mr. Abbas. "A partnership between Fatah and Hamas is necessary," he said. "Hamas is going to be put to the test of being a practitioner and not simply an opposition. Politics will have to be taken into account at the expense of ideology."

    While Mr. Abbas won praise for pressing ahead with these elections, the result is not what he wanted and is bound to weaken his position. He gambled, but with a smashing Hamas victory, he is perceived to have lost and to bear some responsibility for failing to reform Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas has said that if he cannot carry out his policies, which include negotiations with Israel, he will quit.

    Israelis warned the world not to give in to wishful thinking and presume that Hamas will suddenly alter its goals. Israel and the world did not negotiate with Mr. Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization until it agreed to recognize the state of Israel in the late 1980's and disavow terrorism. Israeli politicians suggested that the process would have to begin all over again with Hamas.

    "For Israelis, this is the definitive end of the illusion of a comprehensive peace," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a policy research organization in Jerusalem. "There is no more credible hope of Palestinian moderation. For Israelis, it will only confirm what the last five years of terror have taught them: that the war is not about settlements, but about Israel's right to exist."

    The Palestinian Authority as a serious negotiating partner no longer exists for Israel, Mr. Halevi said. "Now the era of the pretend peace process is also over," he said, and Israel will continue to act unilaterally to set its own borders, build the separation barrier between itself and the Palestinians and in time, continue the process of unilateral withdrawal from more West Bank settlements — so long as it can ensure that a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority will not use that territory to launch rockets or other attacks on Israel.

    "There is now a broad consensus, that Israel will go ahead and build our borders to preserve Israel as a democratic Jewish state," said Ami Ayalon, a former director of Shin Bet now running for a seat with the Labor Party.

    The Palestinian Authority constructed by Fatah "no longer exists," he said. "Palestinian society is very confused. When they chose Hamas, it is more because of the corruption and failure of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah than because of religion or terrorism. But they will have to pay the price for their decision."

    The Hamas victory also brings the group's support for armed attacks on Israel to the fore. Hamas said it entered politics "to protect the resistance" to Israeli occupation of Muslim land, so it is unlikely to heed Western appeals to disarm and recognize Israel, which Hamas in its charter promised to destroy.

    The most that successful Hamas candidates like Ahmad Mubarak would say today is that if Israel pulled back to its 1967 boundaries, Hamas would consider "a long-term truce."

    Mr. Mubarak, a former Islamic jurist, and other Hamas winners were greeted with Arabic sweets and kisses at Hamas headquarters in an office building here, as bearded men in green sashes and hats bustled about talking urgently on their cellphones.

    A Hamas politician from Ramallah, Fadel Saleh, said the group would concentrate "on restoring our Palestinian home and rebuilding Palestinian society," leaving international relations to Mr. Abbas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which does not include Hamas. But, "we want to remake the P.L.O. too, based on this vote," he said. "Hamas wants cooperation with all Palestinian parties and a national agreement on policy."

    Hamas was not surprised by the vote, he insisted. " But it is an earthquake for Israel and for the foreign world, because they don't know what Palestinians want," he said. "We want honest government and an end to the occupation, and we will work so that every weapon in the hand of a Palestinian is a national weapon, directed against the occupation, not used for security chaos."

    The death of Mr. Arafat took the lid off seething resentments of Fatah and the men he brought back to the Palestinian territories from exile after the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel. Those accords set up the Palestinian Authority, and in the 10 years since the last legislative elections, in which Hamas refused to participate, one-party rule proved to be as corrupting among Palestinians as anywhere else.

    "Corrupt authorities who have been in power for a long time are usually thrown out in free elections," said Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian analyst who teaches at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. "After 40 years, it's almost natural. I hoped Fatah would get away with it, but didn't. That the opposition came from a radical Islamic group is unfortunate, but there was no other serious opposition."

    Mr. Kuttab said that those who have preached democracy, from the Bush Administration to the Israeli right, will have to decide if their values trump their interests. "If Hamas respects the rules of the democratic game, we have to let the winners win," he said. "But now Hamas will be in power and find out what it will be like to live in the real world. Hamas will have to face reality, and part of reality means dealing with Israel."

    But even this process could take many months or years, he said.

    Hamas now will have the power to move against corruption, as it promised, and could begin to open investigations into top Fatah officials. How Fatah will respond to the reality of its loss of power will come clear only in the coming days and weeks.

    Hamas is also likely to leave the security forces alone, at least for now. They are almost entirely made up of Fatah loyalists, and they voted by more than 90 percent for Fatah in the early voting. Any Hamas effort to try to take over the security forces would almost certainly lead to clashes.

    Hisham Ahmed, a political scientist at Birzeit University who has written books about Hamas, called the vote "an historic moment in every sense." He said there were scores of reasons to explain the vote, "but the most important factor was not Fatah's split but the causes behind the split, the domination of Fatah by self-serving people who did not keep in touch with the people and ostracized the talented."

    But he emphasized that because many Palestinians were angry with Fatah, the domination of internal issues and the complications of the voting system, "these results don't reflect the real size of Fatah and Hamas in the society."

    If Mr. Abbas and the world handle the situation intelligently, Mr. Ahmed said, "it could mark the beginning of the end of Hamas as an ideologically pure force and a beginning of a reformed Fatah." But if it is handled badly, he said, "the radicalization of Palestinian society will continue."

    In Gaza City, Raif Diab, 60, said that the vote marked "a new day, an historic day for the Palestinian people." Hamas will turn its attention to domestic issues and give Fatah outward responsibility for foreign relations, he suggested, but added: "I do have my fears, however. I worry that although Hamas came to power through the democratic process, they are not entirely democratic in their hearts."

    According to the results, the Hamas list won 30 of 66 seats at the national level and 46 of 66 seats in constituencies. It did especially well in Gaza, but polled well throughout the West Bank, too. Fatah won 27 seats on the national level and only 16 in the constituencies. The leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine won three seats while another leftist list, Badil, won two seats. The Independent Palestine list, led by presidential election runner-up Mustafa Barghuti, won two seats, as did the Third Way list of the outgoing finance minister, Salam Fayyad, and Hanan Ashrawi. Four other independents won in constituencies, including Mr. Amr. Among the Fatah casualties was Mr. Rajoub.

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January 25, 2006

















  • Men's Fashion




    Luca Bruno/Associated Press, left and right; Alberto Pellaschiar/ Associated Press

    From left to right:

    MIU MIU A new take on the 1980’s new wave.

    BURBERRY Few signs of tartan but plenty of quilted fabrics.

    ARMANI Still the look of comfort.

    January 22, 2006
    Fashion Review
    Milan Evokes Boardroom James Bonds
    By GUY TREBAY
    MILAN

    WHEN the fashion cops start pulling designers over and asking them to walk a straight line, it is clear that sobriety is in style. This is Safety Season in Milan, and, as it happens, that was the name of a band whose music underscored Wednesday's Calvin Klein show, perhaps the most coherent presentation yet from that label's designer, Italo Zucchelli, and one that signified Milan's prevalent mood.

    The fashion business is infrequently inclined to consensus building. Yet something like collective agreement took hold last week, as designers fell in line with an unspoken effort to restore credibility to this city as a producer of men's wear and to bring back the status lost to Paris when Hedi Slimane was hired to design Dior Homme.

    Very little in the last five years has had as much impact on how men dress as Mr. Slimane's taut suits and "blood spattered" Richard Hell-style shirts. And by men, one is not just referring to scrawny 20-year-olds mysteriously able to fork over $2,000 for a Dior suit. It is clear a label is succeeding when it can rate editorial coverage in 032c, the hipster magazine from Berlin, and also outfit Richard D. Parsons, the chief executive of Time Warner, and the senior partners at Deutsche Bank in New York, as Dior Homme does.

    Milan hasn't come close to registering that kind of effect for a while. Yet if the restraint and smart styling on display lately is a gauge, the city seems close to reclaiming its cool.

    The models cast for Mr. Zucchelli's fall 2006 collection for Calvin Klein looked vaguely like operatives for one of those cold war syndicates from which James Bond was always saving humankind. This is intended as praise. As mystifying as the failure by designers here to make reference to the Winter Olympics in Turin was the obliviousness to the style bonanza presented by Daniel Craig's casting as the new Bond.

    Inadvertently perhaps, Mr. Zucchelli's faintly boxy jackets, often double breasted and just grazing the top of the buttocks, and his lean trousers lopped at ankle height seemed precisely the sort of things to outfit MI6 operatives in the remake of "Casino Royale" and also to lend them a semblance of the suaveness no actor since Sean Connery has put across on screen.

    Even the label's signature palette of shale grays, jades and hibiscus blues - holdovers from the days when Mr. Klein himself was designing - had a tonal sophistication geared for cinema.

    Mr. Zucchelli was one of a group who wisely chose to forgo the nonsensical narratives designers haul out to justify their imaginative shortcomings. Season after season one is treated to rock 'n' roll "stories" and narrative "moods" brought on by contemplation of the broody mists of the Scottish highlands. There is always at least one collection whose point of departure is that failed monarch and compulsive clothes dummy, the Duke of Windsor.

    All of these references were again in play, most notably in a fussy array of what looked like cassocks and surplices at Gucci. Unless Gucci has changed direction and is reorienting the label's cocksure image to accommodate people who vote in papal conclaves, the designer John Ray's offerings were a surprising misstep.

    Similarly, Alexander McQueen, another Gucci Group designer, brought out Korean-inspired kimonos, Jack the Ripper costumes, Fair Isle sweaters with skull motifs, suits reminiscent of Mick Jagger in "Performance" and trousers apparently inspired by Romany wanderers. It was a collection that was as catholic as the Gucci show, but in an altogether different way.

    As always with this designer, who cut his teeth on Savile Row, the suits were sophisticated, well detailed and ingenious, even when they had waistbands that landed at nipple latitude. But when a British journalist remarked that Gary Oldman could have worn anything in the show, a reference to the actor's turn as Dracula, it was a reminder that vampires are thought not to cast a reflection in mirrors. In the case of Mr. McQueen's more theatrical efforts this might be considered a plus.

    Set starkly against the week's more arrant silliness was the assured restraint of Raf Simons in his design debut for Jil Sander. Ringing changes on the narrow silhouette now in favor, Mr. Simons presented clothing that was linear and boxy, indisputably sexy and at the same time as utilitarian and strict as uniforms for a modern day spook.

    Real spooks probably do their surveillance from behind a computer bank wearing fuzzy slippers and coffee-stained sweats. But any spy worth his iris scan would be proud to sport one of Mr. Simons's stiff leather jackets with a bonded wool two-button suit the color of a cement overcoat. And the art dealers who form a firm client base for the label will undoubtedly find delight in the sweaters with necklines that when worn over a white shirt evoke the shape of a Robert Gober urinal.

    In similar style designers who are as unalike as Christopher Bailey at Burberry, Alessandro Dell'Acqua and Jasper Conran presented shows that showcased almost ostentatious restraint.

    Mr. Bailey has traded in his familiar Crayola palette for hues that bring to mind the lees from a cask of aged port. There were blessedly few signs of the label's oppressive bland tartan and a fair amount of the high-low styling games so nimbly played by Mr. Bailey's competitor Miuccia Prada. In Mr. Bailey's hands the game took the form of complicated quilted fabrics rendered as a double-belted trench and paired with his version of a tuxedo worn with a geeky knit cap and winkle-picker brogues.

    Mr. Dell'Acqua and Mr. Conran also offered slick, well-detailed shows close to monochromatic (unless ink on gray on smoke counts as a color combination) and suits cut so appealingly narrow that the models looked like strokes from a Sufi manuscript.

    One of the not-so-subtle messages of the week was that being fashionable requires pushing back from the table when the dessert trolley rolls around. Bellows pleats and expandable waistlines may have made Dockers a $1 billion brand in under 20 years, but those styles were invented for a baby boomer generation whose next destination on the sartorial train may involve the Depends aisle at Duane Reade.

    Younger men have adapted to the lessons that have been a fashionable woman's burden since Eve. Whether it takes Pilates, 1,000 daily situps or a surgeon's cannula, a narrow waist is the fashionable sine qua non. Giorgio Armani is so keen on the point that he posed for an Italian news magazine wearing only gym shorts and sneakers. The preternaturally lean Mr. Armani is 70 plus.

    Mr. Armani continues to assert his belief that men are sexier when slightly languorous and have an identifiable waist. This is the message he has put across since Richard Gere was photographed doing inverted situps in "American Gigolo." That cinematic clunker was made a quarter century ago and marked the first public awareness of Mr. Armani and, not coincidentally, an overall shift in perceptions about the utility of men.

    Gigolos were not new to the screen of course. Rudolph Valentino made them an oily specialty. Yet as irresistible as women allegedly found that silent screen star, he was a menace and an anathema to men. By the time Mr. Gere turned up, guys had become a lot more comfortable in passive roles. It is a curiosity of Mr. Armani's success that his clothes, though priced for and marketed to men in the professions, remain insistently feminine and soft.

    His show on Thursday, titled "Velvet Man," featured voluminous trousers, frock coats and plush fabrics in gem tones, uniformly paired with velvet pumps. If the designs look less likely to suit the boardroom than the boudoir, one cannot dispute, based on the volume of his business, that he must have insights into men's sartorial comfort zones.

    The opposite may be true of Miuccia Prada, who toys not just with sexual norms but also with anatomy. Few designers outside of Japan have so consistently warped the masculine silhouette as Ms. Prada did at both Prada and Miu Miu.

    For her Prada show she dropped crotches, tightened and belted pants legs, made jackets tubular, added gauntlets and topped her models' heads with fur motorcycle helmets, which gave them the cranial volume of giant bugs. She asserted that her ambition was to invoke the heroic dreams of men and boys, which was credible in a Fantastic Four kind of way.

    At Miu Miu, Ms. Prada, guided by the stylist Olivier Rizzo, summoned another pop cultural fantasy, the new wave 1980's, as imagined by some melancholy Japanese kid hanging out on Harajuku bridge. All the referents one typically finds at this poseurs' crossroads were on full display: studded boots, layered sweaters and jackets, checked blazers buttoned crazily high and worn straitjacket tight, even trousers with stirrup straps. It was Yohji Yamamoto for people too junior to recall that designer before he became the Sneaker King.

    If the vision was not to every taste, at least it was consistent and complete. In an odd way the same could be said of both Roberto Cavalli and Valentino, two designers whose names are rarely mentioned in the same breath.

    For exuberant vulgarity nobody tops Roberto Cavalli, and that is his charm. Retailers and editors love to slag Mr. Cavalli's clothes as flashy, underdesigned and overornamented, and of course they are. What makes them appealing is their lack of pretense at class.

    As the rich become more segregated from hoi polloi and gradually less visible, they deprive the rest of us of the amusing spectacle of how they live. Mr. Cavalli conjures wealth in the soap operatic manner of a fashion Aaron Spelling. Bosomy zillionaires (Victoria Beckham in this case) mince about in dresses with feathered bodices and gilt leather sandals. Their crotch-stuffed lovers wear laced ruffle shirts and butter-leather jeans. An element of veracity in these concoctions is clearly what kept viewers glued to "Dynasty." It is also what buys fuel for the helicopters Mr. Cavalli flies while communing with nature, the thing he says he most enjoys.

    When Valentino Garavani quits the planet, his destination is jet-set heaven. The aviation equipment is private, and the carrier is Valentino Airlines. Inside an old Milanese palace Mr. Garavani installed a pretend airport lounge as imagined by someone who never whiled away the hours clocking delays on the departures board while snacking on sad pretzel mix.

    The lighting was soothing. There were comfy leather banquettes. The ambient music made a preflight Ambien unnecessary. As a celestial voice intoned news of arrivals, travel archetypes (the old, the young, the straight, the gay, the rock 'n' roll and the canine) disembarked and sashayed off Valentino's ark of the air.

    As we all must, Valentino Airlines passengers pushed luggage carts, but they did so in suits of crisp elegance or coats of crocodile. Who can say, really, what the show's commercial value was? Who, in a certain sense, cares? For a few delirious moments on a chill Milanese afternoon it was a delight to be a passenger on Mr. Garavani's flight of fantasy, wherever it was bound.

    Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



     







    Waiting Tables




    Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

    January 25, 2006
    Critic's Notebook
    My Week as a Waiter
    By FRANK BRUNI

    IT'S 7:45 p.m., the East Coast Grill is going full tilt and I'm ready to throttle one of the six diners at Table M-8.

    He wants me to describe the monkfish special. For the fourth time. I hoarsely oblige, but when I return yet again to my riff on the apricot lager mustard, which comes right before my oratorical ode to the maple pecan mashed sweet potatoes, his attention flags and he starts to talk to a friend.

    Does he mistake me for a recorded message, paused and played with the push of a button? Doesn't he know I have other tables to serve?

    I need to go over and massage the mood at R-5, where one of the two diners has a suspiciously shallow pool of broth in her bouillabaisse, perhaps because I spilled some of it near M-2.

    And I need to redeem myself with the two diners at X-9, who quizzed me about what the restaurant had on tap and received a blank stare in response. I'm supposed to remember the beers? Along with everything about the monkfish, these oddly coded table references, more than 10 wines by the glass and the provenance of the house oysters?

    I had no idea.

    I usually spend my nights on the other side of the table, not only asking the questions and making the demands but also judging and, I concede, taking caustic little mental notes. And it's been 20 years since I walked in a waiter's shoes, something I did for only six months.

    But last week I traded places and swapped perspectives, a critic joining the criticized, to get a taste of what servers go through and what we put them through, of how they see and survive us. My ally was Chris Schlesinger, a well-known cook and author who owns the East Coast Grill, in Cambridge, Mass., and has no business interests in New York. So that my presence in the restaurant wouldn't become public knowledge, he introduced me to his staff as a freelance writer named Gavin doing a behind-the-scenes article to be placed in a major publication.

    In some ways this restaurant, which opened in 1985 and specializes in fresh seafood and barbecue, was an easy assignment. Its service ethic is casual, so I didn't have to sweat many niceties. Its food is terrific, so diners don't complain all that much.

    But its pace can be frenetic, and servers have little room to maneuver among 100 or so tightly spaced seats.

    From Monday through Saturday, I worked the dinner shift, showing up by 3:30 and usually staying past 11. I took care of just a few diners at first and many more as the week progressed.

    And I learned that for servers in a restaurant as busy as the East Coast Grill, waiting tables isn't a job. It's a back-straining, brain-addling, sanity-rattling siege.

    Monday
    Pop Quiz and Chop Chop

    Every day at 4 p.m., the servers take a pop quiz. This afternoon's questions include ones on how the restaurant acquires its oysters and the color, texture and taste of mahi-mahi.

    Before and after the quiz they tackle chores: moving furniture, hauling tubs of ice from the basement, folding napkins. I pitch in by chopping limes into quarters and lemons into eighths. I chop and chop. My fingers go slightly numb.

    The servers range in age from their early 20's to their late 40's. Some go to school or hold other jobs on the side. Many would like to do less physically demanding work. All would like to earn more money.

    If they put in a full schedule of four prime shifts a week, they might make $45,000 a year before taxes. Almost all of it is from tips. They wonder if diners realize that.

    Bryan, a young server with whom I'm training, brings me up to speed on the crazy things diners do. They let their children run rampant, a peril to the children as well as the servers. They assume that the first table they are shown to is undesirable and insist on a different one, even if it's demonstrably less appealing. They decline to read what's in front of them and want to hear all their options. Servers disparagingly call this a "menu tour."

    I acquire a new vocabulary. To "verbalize the funny" is to tell the kitchen about a special request. "Campers" are people who linger forever at tables. "Verbal tippers" are people who offer extravagant praise in lieu of 20 percent.

    The doors open at 5:30 and soon two women are seated at L-3. They interrogate Bryan at great length about the monkfish, which, in changing preparations, will be a special all week long. He delivers a monkfish exegesis; they seem rapt.

    They order the mahi-mahi and the swordfish.

    "It's amazing," Bryan tells me, "how unadventurous people are."

    How unpredictable, too. During a later stretch, Bryan has a man and a woman at L-3 and two men at L-4. The tables are adjacent and the diners receive the same degree of attention. The men at L-4 leave $85 for a check of $72 - a tip of about 18 percent.

    L-3's check is $58, and Bryan sees the man put down a stack of bills. Then, as the man gets up from the table, the woman shakes her head and removes $5. The remaining tip is $4, or about 7 percent.

    Tuesday
    Ice, Ice Baby

    I'm shadowing Tina, who has worked at the East Coast Grill for decades and seen it all. She is handling the same section Bryan did. She offers a psychological profile of a woman sitting alone at L-3, who declared the chocolate torte too rich and announced, only after draining her margarita, that it had too much ice.

    "Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.

    Some people are worse. Arthur, a young server who is fairly new to the restaurant, recalls a man who walked in and announced that he had a reservation, a statement Arthur distrusted. The East Coast Grill doesn't take reservations.

    Arthur tried to finesse the situation by saying he was unaware of the reservation but hadn't worked over the previous three days.

    "You haven't worked in three days?" the man said, according to Arthur's recollection. "You're going to go far in life!"

    At about 9:30, a half-hour before the kitchen stops accepting orders, I take my first table, two women and a man. I ask them if they want to know about the half-dozen specials.

    "We want to know everything," the man says.

    The statement is like a death knell. I mention the monkfish, but forget to say that it comes with a sweet shrimp and mango salsa. I mention the fried scallops, and I'm supposed to say they're from New Bedford, Mass. But that detail eludes me, so I stammer, "Um, they're not heavily breaded or anything." They seem puzzled by my vagueness and poised to hear more. I've got nothing left.

    What unnerves me most is trying to gauge their mood. Sometimes they smile when I circle back to check on them. Sometimes they glare.

    In addition to dexterity, poise and a good memory, a server apparently needs to be able to read minds.

    Wednesday
    Who Really Needs a Drink?

    I'm under Jess's wing. She's young, funny and generous with her encouragement. That final quality turns out to be crucial, because after I greet four diners at M-7, I'm informed that one of them has an affiliation with the Culinary Institute of America.

    As I walk toward them with a bowl of house pickles, which is the East Coast Grill's equivalent of a bread basket, my hand shakes and several pickles roll under their table. I can't tell if they notice.

    But I can tell they don't trust me. I'm tentative as I recite the specials, and I ask one of them if he wants another Diet Coke. He's drinking beer. They all look at me as if I'm a moron.

    Jess tells me that enthusiasm is more important than definitive knowledge, that many diners simply want a server to help them get excited about something.

    "You've got to fake it until you make it," she says.

    I take her pep talk to heart, perhaps too much so. I handle three men at M-6, one of whom asks, "Between the pulled pork platter and the pork spareribs, which would you do?"

    I tell him I'd change course and head toward the pork chop.

    "It's that good?" he says.

    "It's amazing," I say. I've never had it, but I've seen it. It's big, and so is he.

    He later tells me, "Dude, you so steered me right on that pork chop."

    I serve four young women at M-9. They order, among other dishes, the "wings of mass destruction." Per the restaurant's script, I warn them away from it, pronouncing it too hot to handle. They press on and survive.

    One of them later wonders aloud whether to have the superhot "martini from hell," made with peppered Absolut. I didn't even know it was on the menu before she mentioned it.

    "Why worry?" I say. "With those wings, you climbed Everest. The martini's like a bunny slope."

    She orders it and drinks it and she and her friends leave a 22 percent tip (which, like all the tips I receive, will be given to the other servers). The three men at M-6 leave 20 percent.

    Have I become a service God?

    Thursday
    I'm Really Allergic to Tips ...

    Divinity must wait.

    It's on this night that I spill bouillabaisse, confront my limited beer knowledge and silently curse Mr. Monkfish at M-8. I move up to an evening-long total of eight tables comprising 20 diners; on Wednesday I served five tables and 17 diners.

    I encounter firsthand an annoyance that other servers have told me about: the diner who claims an allergy that doesn't really exist. A woman at X-10, which is a table for two, or a "two top," repeatedly sends me to the kitchen for information on the sugar content of various rubs, relishes and sauces.

    But when I ask her whether her allergy is to refined sugar only or to natural sugars as well, she hems, haws and downgrades her condition to a blood sugar concern, which apparently doesn't extend to the sparkling wine she is drinking.

    She orders the sirloin skewers, requesting that their marginally sweet accouterments be put on a separate plate, away from her beef but available to her boyfriend. He rolls his eyes.

    Pinging from table to table, I repeatedly forget to ask diners whether they want their tuna rare or medium and whether they want their margaritas up or on the rocks. I occasionally forget to put all the relevant information - prices, special requests, time of submission - on my ordering tickets.

    At least everyone at M-8, including Mr. Monkfish, seems content. As I talk to one of the women in the group, another server noisily drops a plate bound for a nearby table. A rib-eye steak special skids to a halt at the woman's feet.

    "Is that the cowboy?" she says, using the special's advertised name. "That looks really good!"

    About an hour later M-8's spirits aren't so high. They're motioning for me, and it's a scary kind of motioning. The two credit cards I've returned to them aren't the ones they gave me.

    One of my last tables is a couple at X-1. They take a bossy tone with me, so when the woman asks if it's possible to get the coconut shrimp in the pu pu platter á la carte, I automatically apologize and say that it's not.

    It turns out that I'm right. (I guiltily check a few minutes later.) It also turns out that servers make such independent decisions and proclamations, based on the way diners have treated them, all the time.

    Friday
    Do Not Jump the Shark

    Apparently everything up to now has been child's play. Business will double tonight. People will stand three deep at the bar, closing lanes of traffic between the kitchen and some of the tables.

    "Like a shark," Chris Schlesinger tells us, "you've got to keep moving or you die."

    My chaperone is Christa, who's as down to earth and supportive as Jess. She's supposed to watch and inevitably rescue me as I try to tackle an entire section of five tables, each of which will have at least two seatings, or "turns."

    By 7:30, all of these tables are occupied, and all have different needs at the same time. One man wants to know his tequila choices. I just learned the beers that afternoon.

    Another man wants directions to a jazz club. Someone else wants me to instruct the kitchen to take the tuna in one dish and prepare it like the mahi-mahi in another. That's a funny I'll have to verbalize, a few extra seconds I can't spare.

    I've developed a cough. It threatens to erupt as I talk to three diners at M-6. Big problem. I obviously can't cough into my hand, which touches their plates, but I can't cough into the air either. I press my lips together as my chest heaves. I feel as if I'm suffocating.

    The kitchen accepts orders at least until 10:30 on Fridays and Saturdays. I'm dealing with diners until 11. By then I've been on my feet for more than six hours.

    Over the course of the night I have surrendered only two tables and six diners to Christa. I have taken care of 11 tables and 32 diners myself. Except I haven't, not really. When my tables needed more water, Christa often got it. When they needed new silverware, she fetched it, because I never noticed.

    Truth be told, I wasn't so good about napkin replacement either.

    Saturday
    Feeding the Hordes

    My last chance. My last test. The restaurant ended up serving 267 diners on Friday night. It will serve 346 tonight.

    Between 5:30 and 5:50, I get five tables, each of which needs to be given water, pickles, a recitation of the specials and whatever coddling I can muster.

    The couple at one table want a prolonged menu tour. I'm toast.

    Once again I try to tackle an entire section, seven tables in all. Dave is my minder. He tells me to make clear to diners that they need to be patient.

    "If you don't control the dynamic, they will," he says.

    I don't control the dynamic. Around 6:30 I ask him to take over a table I've started. As some diners leave and new ones take their places, I ask him to take over a few more tables.

    I deliver a second vodka on the rocks with a splash of Kahlúa to a woman at L-9. Before I can even put it down, she barks, "There's too much Kahlúa in that!" Nice to know you, too, ma'am.

    I do some things right. I point a couple at L-6 toward the tuna taco, because by now I've tasted it and I know it's fantastic. They love it and tell me they love me, a verbal tip supplemented by 17 percent. The next couple at L-6 barely talk to me, seek and receive much less care and leave a tip of over 50 percent. Go figure.

    I do many things wrong. I fail to wipe away crumbs. I don't write the time on one ticket. I write M-12 instead of L-12 on another, creating a table that doesn't exist.

    Around 8:45, my shirt damp with perspiration, I hide for five minutes in a service corridor, where I dip into the staff's stash of chocolate bars. Then I suck on a wedge of lemon, a little trick I learned from Bryan, to freshen my breath.

    By the end of the night I've served a total of 15 tables comprising 38 people. Some of these people were delightful, and most tipped well, keeping my weeklong average - for a comparatively light load of tables - at about 18 percent.

    Some weren't so great. They supported an observation that Dave made about restaurants being an unflattering prism for human behavior.

    "People are hungry, and then they're drinking," he noted. "Two of the worst states that people can be in."

    I recall a young woman at a six-top who bounced in her seat as she said, in a loud singsong voice: "Where's our sangria? Where's our sangria?" Her sangria was on the way, although she didn't seem to need it, and the bouncing wasn't going to make it come any faster.

    Around 11:30 all the servers are treated to a shot of tequila. I drink mine instantly. I'm exhausted. I'll still feel worn out two days later, when I chat briefly on the telephone with Jess, Christa and Dave, who by that point know the full truth about me.

    "I think you got a good sense," Dave says.

    I think so, too, if he's talking about trying to be fluent in the menu and the food, calm in the face of chaos, patient in the presence of rudeness, available when diners want that, invisible when they don't.

    It's a lot, and I should remember that. But I'd still like frequent water refills. And a martini from hell. Straight up.

    Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



     







    Recomendations on the Web




    A search for the band Coldplay produced these results on liveplasma.com, a site that helps people find movies and music they may like. The circle sizes reflect the relative popularity of the artists. Copyright N.Y. Times. 2006.


    January 23, 2006


    Like This? You'll Hate That. (Not All Web Recommendations Are Welcome.)


    By LAURIE J. FLYNN


    SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22 - On Amazon.com, a customer interested in buying the novel "The Life of Pi" is also shown "The Kite Runner" because other Amazon customers - presumably with similar tastes - also purchased that book. That's just one approach among many in the science of recommendation software.


    Web technology capable of compiling vast amounts of customer data now makes it possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific shopper's interests. Companies are finding that getting those personalized recommendations right - or even close - can mean significantly higher sales.


    For consumers, a recommendation system can either represent a vaguely annoying invasion of privacy or a big help in bringing order to a sea of choices.


    "It's like if your music is in Tower Records and no one knows it, you're nowhere," said Tim Westergren, a founder of Pandora, an online music site, and of the Music Genome Project. "On the Internet, it's that times 100."


    But spewing out recommendations is not entirely without risk. Earlier this month, Walmart.com issued a public apology and took down its entire cross-selling recommendation system when customers who looked at a boxed set of movies that included "Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" were told they might also appreciate a "Planet of the Apes" DVD collection, as well as "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and other irrelevant titles.


    The company said that the problem was created last year when the Web site set out to promote African-American films for Martin Luther King's Birthday. It linked a set of four African-American films to a group of 263 popular movies also boxed into sets, hoping that the links would give the four films more exposure.


    "Unfortunately," said Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, in a statement, "some of the inadvertent combinations were very offensive."


    Wal-Mart's trouble stemmed not from the aggressive use of advanced cross-selling technology, but from the near lack of it. Companies with more nuanced strategies have avoided embarrassing linkages.


    At NetFlix, the online DVD rental company, for example, roughly two-thirds of the films rented were recommended to subscribers by the site - movies the customers might never have thought to consider otherwise, the company says. As a result, between 70 and 80 percent of NetFlix rentals come from the company's back catalog of 38,000 films rather than recent releases.


    "The movies we recommend generate more satisfaction than the ones they choose from the new releases page," said Neil Hunt, NetFlix's chief product officer. "It increases customer loyalty to the site."


    Mr. Hunt said NetFlix's recommendation system collected more than two million ratings forms from subscribers daily to add to its huge database of users' likes and dislikes. The system assigns different ratings to a movie depending on a particular subscriber's tastes. For example, "Pretty Woman" might get a four- or five-star rating if other people who share a customer's taste in movies rated it highly, while the same film might not appear on another customer's screen at all, presumably because other viewers with that customer's tastes did not rate it highly.


    "The most reliable prediction for how much a customer will like a movie is what they thought of other movies," Mr. Hunt said. The company credits the system's ability to make automated yet accurate recommendations as a major factor in its growth from 600,000 subscribers in 2002 to nearly 4 million today.


    Similarly, Apple's iTunes online music store features a system of recommending new music as a way of increasing customers' attachment to the site and, presumably, their purchases. Recommendation engines, which grew out of the technology used to serve up personalized ads on Web sites, now typically involve some level of "collaborative filtering" to tailor data automatically to individuals or groups of users.


    Some engines use information provided directly by the shopper, while others rely more on assumptions, like offering a matching shirt to a shopper interested in purchasing a tie. And some sites are now taking personalization to another level by improving not only the collection of data but the presentation of it.


    Liveplasma.com, an online site for music and, more recently, movies, graphically "maps" shoppers' potential interests. A search for music by Coldplay, for example, brings up a graphical representation of what previous customers of Coldplay music have purchased, presented in clusters of circles of various sizes.


    The bigger the circle, the greater the popularity of that band. The circles are clustered into orbits representing groups of customers with similar preferences.


    "This is a way of showing recommendations that are vastly more useful than textual links," said Whit Andrews, a research vice president at Gartner Inc., a market research company in Stamford, Conn.


    Another development under way is matching customer tastes across Web businesses, using knowledge of a customer's tastes in music to try to sell them books, for example. "To date, that's been largely uncharted territory," Mr. Andrews said, though not for lack of trying. Web sites have long tried to develop systems for cross-selling among companies that protect customer privacy but also allow sharing of data.


    While large online stores are having success through recommendations, smaller Web sites are having a more difficult time using the technology to their advantage. Developing a system for cross-selling is expensive, and perhaps most important, requires amassing a huge amount of customer data to be effective, said Patty Freeman Evans, a Jupiter Research analyst.


    As a result, according to Ms. Evans, fewer than one-quarter of online shoppers make unplanned purchases when they are online, a far smaller percentage than customers at actual stores.


    Walmart.com's DVD sales site now has no automated recommendation system at all. The music section of Walmart.com, however, uses a system closer to that of Amazon, where customers are given recommendations based on music they've purchased in the past. The company is also looking at using that technology for the DVD section, along with movie reviews and guides that are automatically linked to customer searches.


    Carter Cast, president of Walmart.com, says personalized recommendations are one of the company's "important priorities" for its Web store. "It's convenient and helpful for customers, and it does help generate sales," Mr. Cast said, referring to the personalization feature on Walmart.com's music section.


    Certainly, Apple's iTunes store has benefited from its ability to recommend songs and artists. In fact, its newest feature, called MiniStore, is able to make recommendations based on songs in users' playlists, no matter where they came from.


    When someone is using the MiniStore and selects a song on the playlist, Apple will automatically collect that information. The feature, however, has been criticized by privacy advocates who say it allows Apple to snoop on customers. Under pressure, Apple decided last week to make the feature an option that customers get only on request.







     







    Blogs by Lawyers




    October 7, 2005


    Opening Arguments, Endlessly


    By JONATHAN D. GLATER


    Inside every lawyer, it is said, there is a brilliant writer, held back by professional ambition or by fear of failure. Nowhere is that truism more evident than in the explosion of online blogs by, for and about lawyers.


    There is Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a lawyer who opines on politics in an online journal at www.dailykos.com, which recently held a poll on possible presidential candidates in 2008. T. Evan Schaeffer shares thoughts on law cases in Ohio and elsewhere through www.legalunderground.com. Neil Wehneman, who just started law school, plans to share everything he learns there at www.lifeofalawstudent.com. And John H. Hinderaker is one of the lawyers behind www.powerlineblog.com, which contributed to the downfall of Dan Rather.


    "It's all words, that's all the law is," Scott Turow, a lawyer and the author of "Presumed Innocent" and other novels, said when asked to speculate on reasons for the proliferation of law-related blogs, sometimes called blawgs. When people think of law, he continued, "You think of jails and marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is, that's what it is - it's all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the written stuff and the spoken stuff."


    There is no reliable data on how much of the blog universe consists of lawyers, or of any other profession, for that matter. But several influential blogs do seem to be run by lawyers, who constitute considerably less than 1 percent of the population.


    A survey conducted by Blogads.com, which administers online advertising on blog sites, and completed voluntarily by 30,000 blog visitors last spring, found that 5.1 percent of the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting that group fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. The survey also found that of the 6,232 people who said they also kept their own blogs, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession, putting lawyers fourth again, behind the 17.5 percent who said they were in the field of education, 15.1 percent in computer software and 6.4 percent in media, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. He conceded that the survey was hardly scientific, but argued that at least it undermined the popular image of the blogosphere as dominated by antsy teenagers and programmers in their pajamas, tapping away at keyboards all night.


    If lawyers are talking a lot online, perhaps that is not surprising - lawyers talk a lot offline. But lawyers were quick to offer less cynical justifications for the trend, if indeed there is one.


    Good lawyers write well, quickly and clearly and do not fear arguments, said Mr. Hinderaker of powerlineblog.com. "Most people's personalities are such that they don't really like conflict and are shy about putting arguments and opinions out in public where they're going to be attacked," he said. "Obviously lawyers do that all the time."


    Lawyers may also find some of their day-to-day tasks unrewarding, he continued, and blogging offers a way to wield more influence in discussions of topics that they care about - especially politics. The law "is a business that attracts a lot of people who have quite a bit of ability and ambition," he said. "For many of them, their law practice doesn't fully satisfy that desire to play a part in the world."


    Mr. Turow, the author, noted that people who might once have kept a journal now keep a blog. " 'One L' today would be a blog," he said, referring to his memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School. "I kept a journal. These days I probably would post it."


    Mr. Wehneman, who is just starting law school, has not yet built the audience he hopes for his blog chronicling the experience. But after he moves onto his advanced classes on intellectual property, he said, "I really expect that there would be huge interest."


    The law has always fascinated lawyers and nonlawyers alike, which may explain some of the sites' popularity.


    "Lawyers tend to have something credible to say about an important subject," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who nevertheless expressed skepticism about Blogads' survey results. "Lawyers have been educated about the legal system, which people are interested in."


    That helps to explain the number of blogs by law professors, ruminating on developments in politics, fashion, culture and, of course, the law. Mr. Volokh maintains www.volokh.com; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford writes at www.lessig.org; Jack Balkin of Yale posts at balkin.blogspot.com; and Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee maintains www.instapundit.com. (Needless to say, lawyers and law firms too numerous to count have hung out virtual shingles, too.)


    "It's our natural environment, to read things on the Web, to read news stories, and to have something to say," said Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who posts her views at althouse.blogspot.com. Compared with spending a year writing a law review article, she said, blogging is fun.


    The proliferation of law blogs is helpful, according to Denise M. Howell, who works at Reed Smith in Los Angeles and who claims credit for coining the term "blawg." She said the blogs demystified the law without costing outrageous sums; led to more open, frequent and occasionally informed discussions of politics, law and occasionally morality; and helped forge links between practicing lawyers, law professors, law students and the real world.


    "Blogs break down the barriers," she added.







    4:55 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove







    Personal Note



    Earlier this week I posted an entry relating to my intention to share my some experiences that have consumed my life during these last weeks.


    My problem is that I am uncertain as to where I can begin, as much of this story relates to a tragic loss of life in the family of someone that I have known personally and professionally over the last ten years.


    At this point in time I am not completely certain how much of this story I can divulge without compromising the confidence of my friend in some very real way.


    Perhaps I should not mention any of this at all until I am able to know which direction this will take.


    However, I see that more than a few people have seen fit to visit this site for one reason or another, and out of respect for you I would like you to know that I have as many questions as I have words to describe what I have experienced.


    In more ways than one I am hoping that by sharing this I may have the benefit of some of the insights of people who may happen by here and read these pages.


    In short, it involves the very unimaginable horror of a young son, the son of my friend, who took his own life on Christmas Day. He was nineteen years old.


    As a father I can not imagine even what this can be as a magnitude of pain and grief.


    I have spent many hours with my friend, and I am so lost in what makes life so hard and unexplainable.


    More than anything I am simply frightened by life itself. It makes me feel like what if this ever happened to me, if God forbid my own son ever died in such a way. When I am with my friend I think of this constantly. 


    And how is this man even standing up. and I wonder all the time that he must be thinking that he will wake up and it will all just be a dream


    Even myself, I feel like sometimes I am dreaming in this nightmare.


    Meanwhile, this is a good man, a deeply spiritual man. His son was apparently left completely overwhelmed and despondent over the breakup of a love relationship.


    Please anyone who ever reads this promise me that you will say at least one prayer for my friend and his grieving wife and daughter.


    Sincerely and With Deepest Gratitude,


    Michael

January 21, 2006

  • Claire Danes Gets Her So-Called Shot




    Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

    Claire Danes, who plays the wallflower heroine of "Shopgirl," her most mature role to date, in Manhattan last month.


    January 15, 2006


    Claire Danes Gets Her So-Called Shot


    By DANA STEVENS


    THERE'S something about Claire Danes's face I've been trying to figure out. She is not, in the strictest sense, beautiful. She's very pretty, of course, in the way that 26-year-old blond movie stars with long, lean frames and gray-green eyes can't help but be. But there's something about her face that bursts that frame of reference wide open. Between the wide-angled planes of her cheekbones, her features are large and mobile - more chunky than delicate - and expressive in a way that at times seems out of her conscious control.


    On the day we meet in a crepe place in SoHo, around the corner from the loft she shares with the actor Billy Crudup, Ms. Danes's face looks, by moments - and I mean this in the nicest way - almost like that of an eager, curious animal.


    In the role of Mirabelle Buttersfield, the wallflower heroine of "Shopgirl," Ms. Danes's mysterious face gets a full workout, registering shifts of emotion so subtle that she seems, at times, to understand more about the story's moral and emotional complexities than the script itself does.


    An example: Late in the film, Mirabelle learns in a meeting with her financial adviser that her wealthy sometime boyfriend, Ray Porter (Steve Martin), has paid off her student loans in full, without consulting her. Relief, shock and outrage ripple across Ms. Danes's features in rapid succession, suggesting that the unspoken sugar-daddy undercurrent to Mirabelle and Ray's affair may finally have run its course. Yet the following scene has Mirabelle throwing herself at Ray's neck with an unambiguous benediction: "You are the sweetest man!"


    Even critics uncomfortable with the film's damsel-in-distress gender dynamics (one called it " 'Oliver Twist' for dirty old men") concede that Ms. Danes's performance holds the film together. It's her most mature role to date, and her first chance to function as a film's sole emotional center, the axis of sanity between the mania of Jason Schwartzman's would-be boyfriend and the arctic chill of Mr. Martin's calculating businessman.


    The Claire Danes effect has been most frequently invoked by critics using words like "raw," "honest" and "unaffected": paradoxical words, given that this poised, polished young woman has spent more than half her life professionally pretending to be someone else.


    The daughter of two artists (her father is a photographer and her mother a painter) who met at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ms. Danes grew up in downtown Manhattan, in a bohemian milieu where creative expression was encouraged - it's her older brother, a corporate lawyer, whom she describes as the family's "black sheep." She began taking modern dance at 4 and, by 10, was studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute and winning parts in avant-garde stage productions and student films. Ms. Danes recalls an "epiphanous" moment while watching Madonna on television as a small child: "I understood that performing could be one's vocation, and I thought, yeah! It's only later that I began to separate acting from dancing and singing."


    Once the concept of becoming a professional arose, Ms. Danes never looked back: "I never thought of myself as a child actor. I knew I was a kid, but they weren't related. There was nothing I could do about being a kid, and meanwhile I was an actress, and I had something to say in my acting."


    After attending junior high at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, she won the career-making role of Angela Chase, the insecure high-school heroine of "My So-Called Life," at 14. The show lasted only a season, to the chagrin of fans who still consider it the best teenage drama ever on television, but it got Ms. Danes to Los Angeles, where she spent her high-school years being tutored in on-set trailers while wearing "all kinds of funny costumes" (from white angel wings for Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" in 1996, to trailer-trash hot pants for Oliver Stone's "U Turn" in 1997). As she remembers that time: "I was lonely a lot. I was only around adults mostly. So I went to college for two years" - namely, Yale, where she took a general liberal arts program with courses in English, psychology and graphic design ("I was pretty cheeky and managed to evade a lot of the requirements," she says).


    This fall, Ms. Danes was able to revisit her early love of dance when she appeared at Performance Space 122 in a solo piece choreographed by Tamar Rogoff. The performance, titled "Christina Olson: American Model," was inspired by Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," in which a young disabled girl, lying on her side in a desolate field, turns toward a house in the distance. Ms. Danes laughingly described filming a video segment used in the piece, in which she dragged herself across East 10th Street on one hip, in the famous posture captured in that painting: "Nobody looked. It's kind of an incredible piece of footage, because everybody was entirely unfazed at some scrawny white girl, you know, dragging herself across the street. And I thought, O.K., I'm playing it way too safe. So I'm getting a lot less squeamish."


    Ms. Danes was back in New York on a holiday break from filming "The Flock" in New Mexico. In this thriller, directed by Andrew Lau, the Hong Kong director of the "Infernal Affairs" series, she plays an F.B.I. agent-in-training who prevents her mentor (played by Richard Gere) from destroying his career and himself with his obsessive, unorthodox investigative methods. She can speak at length about her character and Mr. Gere's, but trying to describe the film as a whole, she falters a bit: "Andrew is not wildly communicative. I really love Andrew and I feel very supported by him, but he doesn't really tell me what it is I'm doing, and I don't have a sense of the world that's coming together."


    But Ms. Danes lights up at the chance to discuss "Stage Beauty" (2004). During filming, she fell in love with her co-star, Mr. Crudup (who, much to the delight of the tabloids, subsequently separated from his pregnant girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to move in with Ms. Danes). Though she remains resolutely private on the subject of her personal life, it's clear that Ms. Danes has a stake in "Stage Beauty," which she names as one of her favorites among her roles. The film, which was tepidly received at the box office, traces the rise of the earliest female actors on the English stage. Its story is like a 17th-century version of "A Star Is Born," in which Ms. Danes's character, a fledgling actress, enjoys a rapid ascent to fame even as Mr. Crudup's, a renowned female impersonator, slides into obscurity.


    "Stage Beauty" is a film full of provocative ideas about acting (even if it does ultimately muffle many of those ideas in the service of a conventional happy ending). It's a story not only of a battle between genders but also of the contrast between two radically different conceptions of performance. On the one end is technique - the extreme stylization represented by Mr. Crudup's deliciously artificial Desdemona - and on the other, the more "natural," expressive, almost Methodesque style that emerges at the end, when Ms. Danes takes over the same role.


    When asked where on that spectrum she places her own work, Ms. Danes falls into the longest and most thoughtful silence of the afternoon. "I think," she says finally, "that everybody wants to create, to do something that feels genuine and kinetic and spontaneous. I think actors want to surprise themselves. When it's really good, you kind of transcend yourself, and that happens infrequently. Very, very rarely. You might get one or two of those moments on a film, say, and sometimes they don't even use the takes where that happens. And I'm not really that moralistic about how you get there."


    Ms. Danes readily admits that she tends toward perfectionism in assessing her own performances: "My dad used to yell at me when I would draw, and I'd erase my previous drawings that I didn't like. He'd say: 'Don't do that. Leave them, because it's good to know what the path is.' I'm a big eraser still, but that's a good lesson to turn to."


    She professes to find her recent work more watchable than projects from a few years ago, which still have the capacity to make her cringe. But with the passage of a little more time, she says, her older performances become watchable again: "I see something I did when I was 15 now, and I go, awww."


    At least one piece of work from that year is worthy of more than an affectionate coo. As the sickly sister Beth in "Little Women" (1994), Ms. Danes, then 15, was given one of the toughest assignments an actor can have: she had to play someone purely and entirely good, without drowning in a pool of treacle. Watch the scene in which her character is led downstairs, still shaky from a bout of scarlet fever, and shown the piano that a wealthy neighbor has donated for her Christmas present. As the shy, humble Beth slowly realizes that this extravagant gift is hers to keep, Ms. Danes's face crumples and rearranges itself in a series of overlapping expressions: disbelief, gratitude, embarrassment at being the center of attention, and finally, full-on, silent weeping.


    It's a moment that entirely transcends the prim correctness of this period costume drama: a dying girl's joy at being given more than she ever expected. If Ms. Danes does find herself nominated for an Oscar on Jan. 31, it will be because of her ability to pull off a moment like this: the triumph of face over script.















  • Snowmobiles




    Scott A. Schneider for The New York Times

    A rider on a practice run for the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby in Eagle River, Wis.

    January 15, 2006
    Snowmobiles Keep Coming Though the Ice Is Melting
    By JOE DRAPE

    EAGLE RIVER, Wis., Jan. 14 - It has been a tough winter here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin for reasons less-hardy souls may have trouble fathoming. White gold, the local name for snowfall, has been meager, and the sunny skies and the 39-degree weather make it downright balmy for a place accustomed to temperatures of zero and below.

    So far it has claimed this town of 1,443's proudest winter attraction: the Ice Castle, which for more than 70 years has been sculptured from more than 2,000 blocks of lake ice and stood sentinel on Railroad Street. Then the Eagle River Area Fire Department lost a borrowed pickup truck when it plunged into Silver Lake as the ice harvest began 17 days ago.

    But the wintertime blues disappeared Friday night, Day 2 of the 43rd annual World Championship Snowmobile Derby, which residents herald as the Indianapolis 500 of snowmobile racing.

    Jimmy Blaze  followed a fireworks display, which opened Friday Night Thunder, by defying physics and doing a back flip on a snowmobile to the whoops and mitten-muffled applause of the 10,000 people who crammed on a snow-covered hill at Eagle River Derby Track. The temperature had dropped to 25; the wind chill made it feel like 11 and a steady snow fell.

    Hundreds of the young men and women in parkas bearing the logos of their favorite sled manufacturers, like Polaris and Arctic Cat, arrived by snowmobile. Families, too, planted camping chairs in the white bowl, but while mothers and fathers watched the racers hit 100 miles an hour on the track's icy oval, their snowsuit-bundled children found a steeper hill for body-sledding.

    "The Derby made this town," said Chuck Decker, who owns the track and the event that celebrates all things snowmobile. "This community was one of the first to get hold of snowmobiles to race them, to make them a family activity and to really love them."

    The high-pitch whir of motorized sleds screamed from the 600 miles of trails that crisscross the woods and towns of Vilas County and drew more than 30,000 people here for the weekend. At the Ico Station, snowmobiles idled behind cars at the gas pumps. Dim headlights darted across Highway 70 to the sound of scraping asphalt as sledders sniffed out another trail. At Smuggler's Lounge, a dark, shotgun tavern, they emitted steam in the parking lot.

    "The helmet rack is halfway down to the right," the bartender at Smuggler's Lounge said, greeting one snowmobiler after another who walked through the door.

    The more than 200 competitors who came here for four days of racing in junior, amateur, semipro and professional divisions were a serious bunch. They stalked the Best Western near the track in racing boots and leathers tattooed with patches from myriad sponsors.

    But the motels along Wall Street, Eagle River's stoplight-free main artery, and the resorts along its jumble of lakes offered easy access to the trails for the thousands who had come to drive their neon-colored machines up to 100 miles a day.

    There is a reason this town proclaims itself the Snowmobile Capital of the World. The vehicle is rooted in the county's history. Carl Eliason of nearby Sayner, Wis., put a motor on a toboggan to fashion the first snowmobile in the 1920's. Snowmobiles have become part of the region's culture, used for transportation as well as recreation. Students ride them to Northland Pines High School and anglers park them alongside ice-fishing shacks on many of the 1,300 frozen freshwater lakes here.

    "They are practical," said Bill Demlow, a hunting and fishing guide. "Everyone is up here for the outdoors, and if you can't get to work or go out to the woods or on the lakes, you'll go goofy."

    Vilas County issues tourist-handy trail maps that list 63 businesses as official "pit stops" to break up a sledder's day. They range from diners to beer joints, from resorts to beer joints and from fine restaurants to, yes, more beer joints.

    Wisconsin has averaged 25 snowmobile fatalities over the past 10 years, with alcohol contributing to more than half of them, according to a 2003-4 report by the state Department of Natural Resources.

    Still, the state government embraces the pastime, promoting more than 20,000 miles of snowmobile trails. Last November the Wisconsin State Lottery teamed with the World Championship Snowmobile Derby for a $2 scratch-off game called Cool Winnings.

    There are perhaps two kinds of snowmobile enthusiasts: speed demons and nature lovers.

    "It's my rush, my release," said Stacey Schwartz, 24, a paralegal from Burlington, Wis., who won the women's division race last year, an achievement that returned $85, or $4 more than her entry fee.

    Unlike Nascar, snowmobile racing is mostly a break-even proposition. The top professional teams spend $200,000 a year on equipment, testing and travel, but the season is short. Most racers hold other jobs.

    "It doesn't matter what level you're racing at, it's like one big family," said Schwartz, whose father and brother are professionals.

    Dick Burbey, on the other hand, is clearly in the outdoors camp.

    Before attending opening day of the snowmobile derby, he put on his leathers, pulled his sled out of the garage at his home in Goodman, Wis., and glided over wooded trails for 100 miles. Burbey, a 57-year-old truck driver, said that his arms were sore but that it was a small price to pay.

    "I saw a dozen deer and at one point had to stop because there was a wolf on the trail," he said. "I sat there and waited for him. Where else can you see that?"

    In 1964, an innkeeper named John Alward, along with his wife, Betty, and a friend, Walter Goldsworthy, were the founders of the snowmobile derby. The Alwards, whose Chanticleer Inn is situated within one million acres of national and state forests with chains of pristine lakes filled with fish, and other business people had long attracted Midwesterners seeking good fishing and cool temperatures in the summer. But John Alward was concerned by what happened when this summer haven froze over.

    "We had a couple of snowmobiles in the garage, and Dad figured more than a few other people did, too," said Jake Alward, who still owns the Chanticleer Inn, which his father bought in 1951. "He decided to have a rally and caught all kinds of stuff for it. People around here thought he was crazy."

    When more than 100 racers entered and 2,000 people showed up for what was billed as the World's First Snowmobile Derby, resort and restaurant owners hurried to winterize their facilities. The inaugural race was run on and around Dollar Lake, next to the Chanticleer Inn, and many of the snowmobiles could not make it up a small hill. Eventually, an eighth grader named Stan Hayes took first place in the marquee race for 9-horsepower sleds.

    The Alwards held the championships on their property one more year before passing it on to the local Lions Club.

    "The Lions Club trademarked the name World Championship Snowmobile Derby, so anyone who wanted to call themselves a world champion had to race in Eagle River," said Decker, whose family bought the event in 1985.

    Decker, who was the 1986 world champion in the marquee 25-lap Pro 440 class, has built the derby into an extravaganza. He enticed sponsors whose brightly colored signs overwhelm the snowy backdrop; by contrast, minor league baseball stadiums look aesthetically restrained.

    Decker added "hot seats," or heated suites, for those willing to pay $80 to $225. Last year, that looked like a bargain as temperatures lingered around 20 below zero. Decker also groomed bumps and jumps inside the oval for sno-cross racing and put lights above the track.

    About $130,000 in cash, prizes and trophies were on the line over the weekend, Decker said, nearly a third of it earmarked for the 12 professionals from Minnesota, Michigan, Canada and, of course, Wisconsin, who qualified for the Pro 440 class finals on Sunday. But for competitors and spectators alike, Derby Week, as it is called, is more about the experience than about the money.

    "We came mainly to ride," said Jim Anderson of Junction, Ill., who was unwinding with a beer outside Sweetwater Spirits and Resort(Pit Stop No. 56) after coming off the trails.

    Schwartz, the paralegal, made the five-hour drive to Eagle River with her daughters, 8-year-old Alexis and 5-year-old Hannah, to try to defend her title. Hannah just joined the junior circuit.

    "This is the most prestigious race of them all," Schwartz said. "You win this and you got bragging rights. I'm the only one in my family that can say I'm a world champion."

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    Campus Politics and University Employees




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    This article can be found on the web at
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050509/washburn


    Columbia Unbecoming


    by JENNIFER WASHBURN


    [posted online on April 25, 2005]


    In recent months, a growing chorus of conservative critics has decried the existence of a liberal orthodoxy on college campuses and called for new measures to safeguard students' free speech. Curiously, however, these critics are silent regarding the free speech rights of graduate student employees, including teaching assistants (TAs) and research assistants (RAs) who have been trying to hold union elections and have been censored by their university employers. In recent years, in fact, Columbia, Tufts, Penn, Brown and other prestigious private colleges have responded to student organizing drives with tactics that can only be described as profoundly illiberal and undemocratic.


    At Columbia, where the students just concluded a weeklong strike in tandem with their brethren at Yale, a previously undisclosed internal memo (just obtained by The Nation--download here) reveals that the administration has been flirting with union-busting tactics that go well beyond anything an academic institution should contemplate. The memo, dated February 16, 2005, is signed by none other than Alan Brinkley, a well-known liberal historian who is now serving as Columbia's provost. Brinkley has gone out of his way to assure outside observers, including New York State Senator David Paterson, that "students are free to join or advocate a union, and even to strike, without retribution." Yet his February 16 memo, addressed to seventeen deans, professors and university leaders, lists retaliatory actions that might be taken against students "to discourage" them from striking. Several of these measures would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act.


    Such measures include telling graduate student teachers and researchers who contemplate striking that they could "lose their eligibility for summer stipends" (i.e., future work opportunities) and also "lose their eligibility for special awards, such as the Whitings" (a prestigious scholarship and award program). Yet another proposal cited in the memo would require students who participated in the strike "to teach an extra semester or a year" as a condition for receiving their scholarly degree.


    It's unclear whether Columbia's deans and department chairs ever deployed any of these punitive measures--or threatened to deploy them--during the most recent strike, where hundreds of students, joined by other union sympathizers, participated in rowdy demonstrations along Broadway. But the fact that Brinkley proposed such illiberal tactics is itself highly revealing. It suggests that, when it comes to the universities' current administrations, the conservatives have it wrong.


    True, college professors in the United States overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But it is hard to make the case that the governance of these institutions--most of whose trustees and regents have backgrounds in business, not education--can be classified as "liberal." In fact, in recent years, most major universities have adopted a corporate cost-cutting model--predicated on the elimination of full-time professorships and the downsizing of teaching--that is anathema to the academic culture.


    Nowhere has this new, corporate style of management been more evident than at Columbia. Just over three years ago, Columbia's graduate students held a union election, which was sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Board. (In 2000, the NLRB issued a landmark ruling granting graduate student employees at private universities the right to unionize. Students at public universities have enjoyed those rights since 1969.) Columbia, which hired one of the nation's foremost union-busting law firms to represent it, filed a federal appeal which caused the students' ballots to be impounded. Then, in 2004, a new Republican-dominated NLRB reversed its earlier pro-union ruling and rescinded graduate students' right to unionize. This left the students with few options except to strike.


    Columbia has consistently argued that graduate students are apprentices, not employees, making collective bargaining inappropriate. This position is shared by nearly every private university, including Brown, Tufts and Penn (student election ballots were impounded prior to being counted on these campuses, as well). Yet the private universities' argument flies in the face of reality. Graduate students no longer feel like apprentices who are being mentored to join a scholarly guild. A generation ago, when these students could look forward to full-time careers in academia, their years of training, heavy teaching loads and low pay were tolerable. Now they increasingly feel exploited: Most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim. Worse, they know that by allowing universities to exploit their cheap labor, they are helping to eliminate the very full-time positions for which they are purportedly being trained. Today, roughly 50 percent of the faculty in higher education teach on a part-time, contingent basis. A remarkable 60 percent of all new faculty appointments are "off the tenure track," meaning that professors are ineligible for tenure and have only short-term contracts. So it should not come as a surprise that informal lists of signatures--verified by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz--indicate strong majorities of graduate students at both Columbia and Yale do support a union.


    Ironically, although conservatives continue to see liberalism as the bogeyman, the rise of a corporate labor model in higher education may pose a far greater risk to academic freedom and free speech. Historically, let's not forget, the leaders of the academic freedom movement recognized that the only way to prevent corporate trustees and other outside interest groups from violating the free speech rights of their professors was to establish a system of faculty self-governance, peer review and long-term job security. Otherwise, any professor who voiced unconventional or unpopular views was extremely vulnerable to getting fired.


    Viewed through this lens, the unionization campaigns at Columbia, Yale, Brown, Harvard, Penn and other institutions may be the last, best hope for stopping administrators from imposing a corporate labor model on universities that erodes faculty power--and with it academic freedom.

  • Bahrain




    James Hill for The New York Times

    Members of the opposition have accused the royal family of monopolizing all available land. They say an expatriate community of 250,000 blocks Shiites from most decent jobs.


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    Protesters shouted slogans against the ruling Khalifa family during a march against alleged torture by Bahraini security forces.



    James Hill for The New York Times


    Thousands participated in National Day festivities, which included musical performances and fireworks.


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights advocate, criticized the Shiite clergy for opposing a proposed law that would give more defined divorce rights


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    Ali Abdulemam, founder of the Web site BahrainOnline.org, in his father's home


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    Sheik Adel al-Mawada, second from left, an elected member of the lower house of Parliament, with colleagues in his home.


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    Deputies taking a break from a session of the Bahraini Parliament, the lower house of the legislative body that is elected


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    In preparation for National Day, workers put up a portrait of Prime Minister Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa. During a protest, demonstrators yelled slogans against the prime minister, who has remained in his post since Bahrain's independence in 1971


     



    James Hill for The New York Times

    In Manama, the capital of Bahrain, from left to right, portraits of the prime minister, king and crown prince, all members of the Khalifa family

    January 15, 2006
    Stirrings in the Desert
    In Tiny Arab State, Web Takes On Ruling Elite
    By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

    MANAMA, Bahrain - Ali Abdulemam, this country's most notorious blogger, sat in the boxlike reception room of his father's house in a cramped Shiite village dotted with raw cinder-block houses, trying to log onto the widely popular Web site that he founded.

    The government on this flyspeck of an island nation, home to an American Navy base, recently renewed its effort to block dozens of opposition Web sites. So Mr. Abdulemam, 28, a computer engineer, had to spend about 10 minutes whipping through various computer servers around the world before finally pulling up his Web site, BahrainOnline.org.

    It was National Day, Dec. 16, and some five miles away, the beautifully landscaped boulevards of Manama, the capital, were packed with revelers enjoying bands and fireworks. Pictures of the ruling princes blanketed the city, which was also awash in the national colors, red and white. Red and white lights were even wrapped around the palm trees lining the main thoroughfares.

    But most of the couple of hundred people posting messages in the "National Forum" section of BahrainOnline mocked the idea of celebrating the day in 1971 when a Sunni Muslim king ascended the throne to rule over a Shiite Muslim majority.

    "In Bahrain, glorifying the king means glorifying the nation, and opposing the king means betraying the homeland and working for foreign countries," wrote one online participant, noting that the formula is the mark of a dictatorship. "Should we be loyal to the king or to Bahrain?"

    Bahrain, long a regional financial hub and a prime example of the power of the Internet to foment discontent, bills itself as a leader of political change in the Arab world. It is a claim echoed in praise from the United States, which considers Bahrain crucial for its many regional military ventures because the American Navy's Fifth Fleet is based here.

    But in Bahrain, as across the Arab world, those pushing for democratic change want to end minority rule by a family, sect or a military clique.

    The royal family here dominates, holding half the cabinet positions and the major posts in the security services and the University of Bahrain.

    Sheik Muhammad al-Khalifa, the prince who runs the Economic Development Board, argues that Bahrain should not become a democracy in the Western sense. "As traditional Arabs, I don't think democracy is part of our nature," he said.

    "I think all people want is accountability," he added, noting that some form of democracy was needed to achieve that.

    So political change in the Middle East rests partly on whether and how the many minority governments will yield power and allow others to participate. So far, the results are anemic.

    The al-Saud tribe slapped its name on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where local elections a year ago have not produced active municipal councils, and crucial issues like how much oil wealth the ruling family absorbs are not discussed.

    In Syria, the ruling Assad family and its confederates from the Alawite minority  sect are in crisis, accused of assassinating Rafik Hariri, a former Sunni prime minister of Lebanon and an important figure who might have been able to rally majority support against the Alawites' monopoly on power.

    Of course, Iraq remains the biggest experiment of all in changing the practice of minority rule. The American occupation has yet to answer whether it is possible to forge a democratic government in the Arab world, or if the attempt will drown in a cauldron of sectarian bloodshed. But the results are being closely watched, perhaps nowhere more than in Bahrain, where up to 70 percent of its native population of 450,000 are Shiites, similar to Iraq's Shiite-Sunni split. Shiites here also increasingly look to moderate religious leaders in Iraq for guidance.

    Some political change has occurred. Debate is growing through the Internet, satellite television and other forces, and elections this year will replace the Parliament and municipal councils first chosen in 2002 under a new Constitution. Members of the ruling Khalifa family describe this as a vibrant process that will ultimately establish a local strain of democracy. Yet some of its most senior members and their Sunni allies hint that the process is threatened because Bahrain's Shiites disloyally serve outside interests like the Shiites in Iran and Iraq.

    Members of the opposition call this nonsense and accuse the ruling dynasty of questioning their loyalty to avoid having to share power. They say King Hamad and his Khalifa clan, descendants of Bedouins from the Arabian mainland who conquered this island, taking it from its Persian masters in the 18th century, will only make cosmetic changes, noting that almost nothing has been done to alleviate the entrenched discrimination faced by the poorest segments of the Shiite population.

    "The problem with the royal family is that when they give us any democracy they think that it is a gift and we have to thank them for it," Mr. Abdulemam said. "The time when they were the lords and we were the slaves is gone. The new generation is well educated. They won't live like our fathers did in the past, when they said O.K. to whatever the royal family did."


    A 'Golden Time' Cut Short


    Bahrain's first Parliament, elected in 1973, proved too boisterous for King Hamad's father, who dissolved it after 18 months. Opposition demands to restore it increased through the 1990's, marked by bombings and other sporadic violence. The authoritarian government subjected the mostly Shiite opposition political activists to arrest, torture and forced exile.

    When King Hamad, now 55, inherited power in 1999, he promised a democracy that he described as "areeqa" or "well rooted."

    He announced changes that included amnesty for exiles and the disbanding of the dreaded State Security Courts. Bahrainis enthusiastically approved the new plan in a public referendum.

    It was then that Mr. Abdulemam established his groundbreaking Web site, determined to give Bahrainis a place to share ideas and develop plans to deepen political change. "It seemed like a golden time, when the country was moving from one period in its history to another," he said. "Everybody needed a place to talk so I provided it."

    But King Hamad soon hit the brakes. In 2002 he announced a new Constitution, formulated without public consultation.

    The cabinet, led by his uncle, a hard-liner opposing democratic change, would report to him, not the Parliament. Instead of a single 40-member Parliament, he added an appointed upper house. Amending the Constitution now required a two-thirds majority of both houses, giving the monarch full control. Parliament now could only propose laws, not write them. An audit bureau that had previously reported to Parliament was replaced with one that would not subject the spending of the royal court or the 2,500 royal family members to any public scrutiny.

    "I had been full of hope that a new era was coming to Bahrain," Mr. Abdulemam said. "But what happened next threw us all in the dirt. When the king brought in the new Constitution, everyone was crushed."


    Politics in the Internet Age


    In the old days, with its monopoly over television and radio and the ability to shut down newspapers, the Khalifa dynasty would have had less trouble controlling the debate. Now, with the Internet and satellite television outside its reach, the government resorts to tactics like tossing Mr. Abdulemam and two of his fellow Web masters into jail for a couple of weeks, as it did last year.

    At the time, the opposition orchestrated repeated demonstrations and international intervention to help win his release, but legal charges of insulting the king, incitement and disseminating false news remain pending and can be dredged up at any time.

    One reason the Internet is so popular - scores of villages have their own Web sites and chat rooms - is that far more can be said about the ruling family online than through any other means.

    "Freedom of expression is something you have to take, not something that will be granted to you," Mr. Abdulemam said, but he doubts that free speech alone will accomplish much. "Their policy basically comes down to, 'Say what you want and we will do what we want.' "

    BahrainOnline is the go-to political site, with princes, Parliament members, opposition leaders and others with an interest in politics saying they consult it daily to find out what the opposition is thinking.

    The easiest way to ensure a large turnout for any demonstration, the leader of the main Shiite opposition group said, is to post the announcement for it on BahrainOnline.

    "If something happens anywhere in Bahrain, usually within five minutes maximum something about it is happening on my site," Mr. Abdulemam said.

    Still, the site's Web masters are often criticized for creating a "tabloid" that spreads rumors and demeans those considered enemies. Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights advocate who criticized the Shiite clergy for opposing a proposed law that would give more defined divorce rights to women, said her face was pasted onto a naked body.

    Mr. Abdulemam said his site was blamed for trash posted on any site in Bahrain, and his Web masters, monitoring as many as 1,000 posts a day, remove anything that promotes violence. He laughs when he recalls his arrest and how little his interrogators knew about how the Internet works, blaming him for the content of every posting.

    Mansour Jamri, editor of a daily newspaper, Wasat, and the son of a famous Shiite opposition cleric, notes that many of those writing on the Web sites are very young.

    "If you don't shout with them you are a corrupt person, you are basically a dog used by the government," said Mr. Jamri, who has been portrayed as just that.

    Part of the issue is that the press remains hobbled. When Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, a prominent human rights advocate, was arrested in late 2004 after giving a speech attacking the prime minister over corruption, no newspaper printed what he had said. For that people had to turn to BahrainOnline.

    "This pocket of anarchy is a byproduct of half-hearted democracy," Mr. Jamri said.


    Simmering Frustrations


    In 2002, BahrainOnline led a fight to boycott the elections. As a result, Shiites mostly stayed away from the polls, and the vote exacerbated the sense among Shiites that the Khalifas and their Sunni allies were not interested in treating them as equals.

    Election districts were gerrymandered so that sparsely populated Sunni districts in the south got almost as many members as the heavily Shiite villages in the north. Opposition groups amassed evidence that the government gave passports to various Sunni Muslim groups, including members of a tribe in Saudi Arabia that had once lived on Bahrain, to alter voting demographics.

    Ultimately, Sunnis captured 27 of the 40 seats in the election. As in many parts of the Muslim world, fundamentalists were the best organized, and a group of Sunni fundamentalists became the largest bloc in Parliament. They muted any opposition to the government out of concern that it might help spread the influence of Shiite Islam.

    The new Parliament spent half its time bickering over religious practice. It won a fight to allow fully veiled women to drive. It proposed a ban on scantily clad window mannequins. It tried to separate the sexes in all classrooms. Last year, alcohol sales were banned during a Muslim holiday - a time when tens of thousands of visitors arrive from Saudi Arabia to drink.

    What Parliament did not do was really confront the government over a chronic housing shortage and unemployment, particularly among Shiites.The gap between the largely Sunni haves and the Shiite have-nots grows ever more apparent and feeds simmering frustration.

    Mr. Abdulemam, for example, earns a decent salary as a computer engineer at an American-owned company. With a wife who is expecting their first child any day, he can not afford $130,000 for a plot of land and does not ever expect to be able to.

    He is the youngest of 10 siblings, 4 of whom still live with their children in his father's house. Some 15 people live there, with each nuclear family allotted a room. "I know we deserve better," he said.

    Exact numbers are hard to pin down in Bahrain, but about 27,000 applications are pending for subsidized government housing, senior officials concede. Unemployment stands officially at 15 percent but runs as high as 28 percent among Shiite young adults ages 20 to 24, diplomats and Bahraini economists said.

    Opposition members accuse the royal family of monopolizing all available land, and say an expatriate community of 250,000 - from Asia and other Arab countries - blocks Shiites from most decent jobs. Shiites avoid some tough jobs like construction and are generally barred from joining the security services. Royal family members concede that more needs to be done to improve housing but deny hoarding land. A job training program is to begin this month.

    Last spring, the committee in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that monitors racial discrimination rebuked Bahrain. The report said that although Bahrain paid lip service in its laws to barring discrimination, actual practice lagged.

    When Mr. Abdulemam was arrested in February 2005, he found that his interrogator was an Egyptian, one of hundreds of Sunni Muslims from the Arab world and Pakistan recruited into the security services, given houses and usually citizenship.

    "He was asking me whether I was loyal to this country," Mr. Abdulemam said sourly. "How can an Egyptian ask me about my loyalty? There are many ways to love your country, and what I do is one of them."

    The poverty suffered by many Shiites seems particularly galling to them given the real estate boom. The capital's skyline is dominated by gargantuan luxury office blocs under construction, which Bahrainis contend are all owned by the royal family. The capital is also plastered with ads for housing developments like Riffa Heights, an upscale community with sea views and a golf course in a plush neighborhood already dominated by royal palaces where Shiites cannot buy land.

    Senior officials call it all essential development to attract investment to Bahrain, long the Persian Gulf's financial hub but one competing increasingly with far richer emirates like Dubai and Qatar.
    The young, American-educated crown prince even used a huge tract to build a $150 million Formula 1 racing circuit. Talal al-Zain, the investment banker who is the raceway's chairman, lauded it as a means of putting Bahrain on the international map. The track seems to baffle Bahrainis. For special races on National Day only about 500 people, most of them foreigners, sat in stands built for 30,000. One Web site mocks the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, as "Salman Schumacher," a reference to Michael Schumacher, a top racer.

    Formally, the Bush administration has declared that it supports democratic change across the region, that the United States will no longer laud despots just because they back American policy. "Hopeful reform is already taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain," President Bush said in his 2005 State of the Union address.

    Practically, though, the United States has not pushed for sweeping change out of concern for what might happen if states fell into the hands of Islamists.

    The Khalifas court the Bush administration particularly well. The foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, noted that a proposed port might provide the deep-water docking space needed for the aircraft carriers that now have to anchor offshore. Such cooperation has earned Bahrain a free-trade deal and praise from Mr. Bush.


    A Shiite-Sunni Divide


    During a protest march on National Day, some of the participants chanted "Death to Khalifa!" referring to Sheik Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, 69, who has remained prime minister since independence in 1971. They yelled it in Arabic and Persian, the language of Shiite Iran.

    With Iraq holding so much of the people's attention here, much the way Iran did after its revolution, the question is whether developments in Iraq will lead Bahrain to more sectarianism or more democracy. Signs of both exist. Some postings on BahrainOnline include portraits of prominent Iranian ayatollahs past and present, particularly Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. Members of the ruling family generally use such displays to buttress the accusation that the basic goal of the Shiites is to establish an Iranian-style theocracy in Bahrain.

    But Shiites here respond that the ayatollahs are strictly spiritual guides and that native Shiites have lived in Bahrain longer than the ruling family and have no intention of living under the thrall of yet another foreign power. To counter the accusation that their loyalties lie outside Bahrain, the Shiite activists stopped hoisting such pictures at rallies.

    "The new Iraq is the model," said Sheik Ali Salman, the 40-year-old Shiite cleric elected to lead Al Wifaq Islamic Society, the main Shiite opposition group, and a man who once organized rallies denouncing the American invasion of Iraq. The expectation that Shiites will dominate the Iraqi government has given Shiites across the region new confidence.

    Speaking fluent English learned during five years of exile in Britain, the cleric ticks off all the steps Iraqis have taken toward choosing their own leaders in the same period that King Hamad has been busy consolidating power while warning against moving too quickly to carry out change.

    Most Shiites follow one senior cleric on matters of religious practice in their daily lives. Mr. Abdulemam said he used to look to Khomeini in Iran, but recently switched to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the moderate and powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq.

    Sunnis in Bahrain are at times incensed when Shiites fax Ayatollah Sistani questions, like asking him whether they must obey traffic laws, because King Hamad is not, in their view, a legitimate Islamic ruler. (He faxed back to say yes, they do.)

    Where many Shiites here used to watch Al Manar, the satellite channel broadcast from Beirut by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah, they have switched to the Iraqi-run Euphrates channel. When a bombing kills Shiites in Iraq, some in Bahrain wear black.

    Shiites and Sunnis silently assess all events in Iraq, which are both feeding democratic yearnings and deepening the divisions between them.

    "If a Sunni area is bombed, the Sunnis wish it was a Shiite area; they don't say it, but they feel it," said Sheik Khalid al-Khalifa, a prince and an academic who serves on the Shura Council, the appointed upper house of Parliament. "It's the same for the Shiites. It's all reflected here."

    Abeer Allam contributed reporting for this article.

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