December 14, 2005

  • Power User - The Best of Lifehacker


    READ MORE: Columns, Firefox, Gift, Power User, Software


    power-user-tryptich-2005-12.jpg




    This week at Lifehacker: Build your own gingerbread house. Finetune Firefox for fast or slow connections and computers. FTP to your Gmail account. Finally, stuff stockings with a narrated Ken Burns style photo movie.
















  •  







    What Men Want: Neanderthal TV




    Anthony Mandler/Fox
    Kiefer Sutherland on "24."



    C. Hodes/Fox
    Wentworth Miller on "Prison Break."


     


    What Men Want: Neanderthal TV




    THERE was a heart-wrenching moment at the end of last season's final episode of the ABC series "Lost" when a character named Michael tries to find his kidnapped son. Michael lives for his child; like the rest of the characters in "Lost," the two of them are trapped on a tropical island after surviving a plane crash. When word of Michael's desperate mission reaches Sawyer - a booze-hoarding, hard-shelled narcissist who in his past killed an innocent man - his reaction is not what you would call sympathetic. "It's every man for hisself," Sawyer snarls.


    Not so long ago Sawyer's callousness would have made him a villain, but on "Lost," he is sympathetic, a man whose penchant for dispensing Darwinian truths over kindnesses drives not only the action but the show's underlying theme, that in the social chaos of the modern world, the only sensible reflex is self-interest.


    Perhaps not coincidentally Sawyer is also the character on the show with whom young men most identify, according to research conducted by the upstart male-oriented network Spike TV, which interviewed thousands of young men to determine what that coveted and elusive demographic likes most in its television shows.


    Spike found that men responded not only to brave and extremely competent leads but to a menagerie of characters with strikingly antisocial tendencies: Dr. Gregory House, a Vicodin-popping physician on Fox's "House"; Michael Scofield on "Prison Break,"who is out to help his brother escape from jail; and Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis on "The Shield," a tough-guy cop who won't hesitate to beat a suspect senseless. Tony Soprano is their patron saint, and like Tony, within the confines of their shows, they are all "good guys."


    The code of such characters, said Brent Hoff, 36, a fan of "Lost," is: "Life is hard. Men gotta do what men gotta do, and if some people have to die in the process, so be it."


    "We can relate to them," said Mr. Hoff, a writer from San Francisco. "If you watch Sawyer on 'Lost,' who is fundamentally good even if he does bad things, there's less to feel guilty about in yourself."


    Gary A. Randall, a producer who helped create "Melrose Place," is developing a show called "Paradise Salvage," about two friends who discover a treasure map, for Spike TV. He said the proliferation of antisocial protagonists came from a concerted effort by networks to channel the frustrations of modern men.


    "It's about comprehending from an entertainment point of view that men are living a very complex conundrum today," he said. "We're supposed to be sensitive and evolved and yet still in touch with our Neanderthal, animalistic, macho side." Watching a deeply flawed male character who nevertheless prevails, Mr. Randall argued, makes men feel better about their own flaws and internal conflicts.


    "You think, 'It's O.K. to go to a strip club and have a couple of beers with your buddies and still go home to your wife and baby and live with yourself,' " he said.


    The most popular male leads of today stand in stark contrast to the unambiguously moral protagonists of the past, good guys like Magnum, Matlock or Barnaby Jones. They are also not simply flawed in the classic sense: men who have the occasional affair or who tip the bottle a little too much. Instead they are unapologetic about killing, stealing, hoarding and beating their way to achieve personal goals that often conflict with the greed, apathy and of course the bureaucracies of the modern world.


    "These kinds of characters are so satisfying to male viewers because culture has told them to be powerful and effective and to get things done, and at the same time they're living, operating and working in places that are constantly defying that," said Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Televisionat Syracuse University.


    Consequently, whereas the Lone Ranger battled stagecoach robbers and bankers foreclosing on a widow's farm, the enemy of the contemporary male TV hero, Dr. Thompson said, is "the legal, cultural and social infrastructure of the nation itself."


    Because of competition from the Web, video games and seemingly countless new cable channels, television producers are obsessed with developing shows that can capture the attention of young male viewers.


    To that end Spike TV, which is owned by Viacom and aims at men from 18 to 49, has ordered up a slate of new dramas based on characters whose minds are cauldrons of moral ambiguity. They will join antiheroes on other networks like Vic Mackey, Gregory House, Jack Bauer of "24" and Tommy Gavin, the firefighter played by Denis Leary on "Rescue Me" who sanctions a revenge murder of the driver who ran over and killed his son.


    Paul Scheer, a 29-year-old actor from Los Angeles and an avid viewer of "Lost," said that not even committing murder alienates an audience. "You don't have to be defined by one act," he said.


    "Three people on that island have killed people in cold blood, and they're quote-unquote good people who you're rooting for every week," Mr. Scheer said. The implication for the viewer, he added, is, "You can say 'I'm messed up and I left my wife, but I'm still a good guy.' "


    Peter Liguori, the creator of the FX shows "The Shield" and "Over There" and now the president of Fox Entertainment, said that most strong male protagonists on television appeal to male viewers on an aspirational level. Those aspirations, though, he said, have changed over time.


    In the age of "Dragnet," "everything was about aspiring to perfection," Mr. Liguori said. "Today I think we thoroughly recognize our flaws and are honest about them. True heroism is in overcoming those flaws."


    Part of the shift to such complex and deeply flawed characters surely has to do with the economics of television itself. Cable channels, with their targeted niche audiences, are no longer obliged to aim for Middle America, and can instead create dramas for edgier audiences.


    The financial success of networks like FX and HBO has also opened the door for auteurism that has embroidered scripts with dramatic complexities once reserved for film and literature, where odious protagonists - think of Tom Ripley, the murderous narcissist protagonist in Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" - have long been common.


    Still the morally struggling protagonist has been evolving over time, Mr. Ligouri said, pointing to Detective Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue."Sipowicz was an alcoholic who occasionally fell off the wagon, and he often flouted police procedure in the name of tracking down criminals. Like all good protagonists, Sipowicz was also exceedingly good at his job.


    Mr. Liguori took the notion of the flawed protagonist to new levels in the creation of Vic Mackey on "The Shield." At the end of the pilot for that show, Mr. Liguori said, Mackey turned to a fellow cop he knew to be crooked and shot him in the face.


    "There was a great debate at FX about how the audience would react," he said. "I thought 50 percent would say that's the most horrible thing, and 50 percent would say he was a rat." Mr. Chiklis, who plays Vic Mackey, won an Emmy for his performance in that episode, which was the highest rated at the time in the history of the network.


    "The ability to let the audience make that judgment was my 'aha' moment," Mr. Liguori said. "I think that moral ambiguity is highly involving for an audience. Audiences I believe relate to characters they share the same flaws with."


    Mr. Liguori added that in a world where people are increasingly transparent about their own flaws - detailing them on blogs, reality TV, on talk shows and in the news media - scripted TV drama had to emphasize characters' weaknesses.


    "The I.M.-ing and social Web sites, they're all being built on being as open and honest as possible," he said. "You cannot go from that environment to a TV show where everyone is perfect."


    With the success of shows featuring deeply flawed leads, the challenge for networks is to rein in the impulse to create ever more pathological characters. Pancho Mansfield, the head of original programming for Spike TV, said he could see network television going the route of "Scarface."


    "With all the competition that's out there and all the channels, people are pushing the extremes to distinguish themselves," Mr. Mansfield said. But for now, he argued, the complexity of characters on serialized TV shows is a kind of antidote to the increasingly superficial characters in Hollywood films, which he said, have come more to resemble the simplistic television dramas of yore.


    Dr. Thompson agreed. "On one level you could see the proliferation of these types of characters as an indication of the decline of American civilization," he said. "A more likely interpretation may be that they represent an improvement in the sophistication and complexity of television." If you accept that view, he added, "Then the young male demographic has pretty good taste."







     


     







    Tech in Estonia










    James Hill for The New York Times

    An Internet cafe announcing itself with an internationally known symbol in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia

    December 13, 2005
    The Baltic Life: Hot Technology for Chilly Streets
    By MARK LANDLER
    TALLINN, Estonia, Dec. 8 - Visiting the offices of Skype feels like stumbling on to a secret laboratory in a James Bond movie, where mad scientists are hatching plots for world domination.

    The two-year-old company, which offers free calls over the Internet, is hidden at the end of an unmarked corridor in a grim Soviet-era academic building on the outskirts of this Baltic port city. By 5 p.m. at this time of year, it is long past sunset, and a raw wind has emptied the streets.

    Inside Skype, however, things are crackling - as they are everywhere in Estonia's technology industry. The company has become a hot calling card for Estonia, a northern outpost that joined the European Union only last year but has turned itself into a sort of Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea.

    "We are recognized as the most dynamic country in Europe" in information technology, said Linnar Viik, a computer science professor who has nurtured start-ups and is regarded as something of a guru by Estonia's entrepreneurs. "The question is, How do we sustain that dynamism?"

    Foreign investors are swooping into Tallinn's tiny airport in search of the next Skype (rhymes with pipe). The company most often mentioned, Playtech, designs software for online gambling services. It is contemplating an initial public offering that bankers say could raise up to $1 billion.

    Indeed, there is an outlaw mystique to some of Estonia's ventures, drawn here to Europe's eastern frontier. Whether it is online gambling, Internet voice calls or music file-sharing - Skype's founders are also behind the most popular music service, Kazaa - Estonian entrepreneurs are testing the limits of business and law.

    And by tapping its scientific legacy from Soviet times and making the best of its vest-pocket size, Estonia is developing an efficient technology industry that generates ingenious products - often dreamed up by a few friends - able to mutate via the Internet into major businesses.

    These entrepreneurs grow out of an energetic, youthful society, which has embraced technology as the fastest way to catch up with the West. Eight of 10 Estonians carry cellphones, and even gas stations in Tallinn are equipped with Wi-Fi connections, allowing motorists to visit the Internet after they fill up.

    Such ubiquitous connectivity makes Tallinn's location midway between Stockholm and St. Petersburg seem less remote.

    Even the short icebound days play a part, people here say, because they shackle software developers to the warm glow of their computer screens. For the 150 people who work at Skype, Estonia is clearly where the action is.

    "What Skype has shown the world is that you can take a great idea, with few resources, and conquer the world," said Sten Tamkivi, the 27-year-old head of software development.

    Whether Skype poses a mortal threat to telephone companies, as some enthusiasts suggest, is an open question. But it has become an undisputed technology star - a status cemented in September when eBay, the Internet auction giant, bought the company in a deal worth $2.5 billion.

    More than 70 million people have downloaded Skype's free software from the Internet, Mr. Tamkivi said, and it is adding registered users at a rate of 190,000 a day. On a recent evening, 3.7 million people were logged on to the service, nearly three times the population of this country.

    Professor Viik and others relish the attention that Skype has brought Estonia. But he says his country cannot build a long-lasting technology industry on a single hit or even a few hits: Kazaa was hugely popular before it ran into a blizzard of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

    Silicon Valley, Mr. Viik noted, is composed of clusters of companies that feed off one another. Skype is a closed company, with proprietary software and owners who are so secretive about their plans that for a time local journalists did not know where its offices were.

    The company's two founders are not even Estonian. Niklas Zennstrom is a Swede, and Janus Friis is a Dane. Skype's legal headquarters are in Luxembourg; its sales and marketing office is in London. Although Estonian developers wrote Skype's basic code, only a fraction of the eBay bonanza went into Estonian pockets.

    Part of the problem for Estonia's entrepreneurs is the nation's inexperience in capital markets. It regained its independence only in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Estonia's entrepreneurs do not yet have the Rolodexes of their Scandinavian counterparts. Recently, Tallinn got its first high-tech venture capital firm.

    Then, too, there is its small size. Estonia's entire software development industry employs roughly 2,500 people, less than the research and development staff at a major American technology company.

    "Let's be frank," said Priit Alamae, the 27-year-old founder of Webmedia, another leading software design firm. "Estonia has 1.3 million people; we have 200 I.T. graduates a year; we do not have the resources to develop our own Microsoft."

    The competition for talented recruits is driving up salaries more than 20 percent a year, he said. While Estonia remains cheaper than neighbors like Finland or Sweden, the gap is narrowing rapidly.

    In some ways, however, Estonia's labor shortage has contributed to its success. Companies here are extraordinarily efficient. And they tend to focus on niche products or on business models - like Skype's or Kazaa's - that can expand from a small base by word of mouth.

    Skype and Kazaa are powered by so-called peer-to-peer technology, which allows computers to share files or other information on a network without the need for a centralized server to route the data. In Kazaa's case, the files being swapped are songs. In Skype's case, they are voices.

    "There is no new technology in Skype," Mr. Viik said. "It is an example of how you put together bits and pieces of technology in a clever way. Estonians are very good at putting together bits and pieces."

    Necessity is the mother of invention, but what is it about Estonians that makes them the Baltic's answer to Bill Gates?

    "People here are kind of introverted and into technology," said Jaan Tallinn, a tousled-haired man who looks younger than his 33 years and wrote the software code that is the basis of Kazaa and Skype. "We have long, cold winters when there isn't much to do, so it makes sense."

    Other people cite history: Estonia's long subjugation by the Soviet Union, and the euphoria that came with freedom.

    "It's as if a young country suddenly came into independence with great hopes but few material resources," said Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Mr. Jurvetson, whose family has Estonian roots, has invested in a few start-ups here, most notably Skype.

    Estonia owes one thing to its former oppressor. In the 1950's, the Soviets chose the Baltic states as the site for several scientific institutes. Estonia wound up with the Institute of Cybernetics - basically a computer sciences center - that now houses Skype and many other firms.

    That scientific legacy remains embedded in society, people say. It is most visible in Estonia's receptiveness to new technology. Internet penetration is estimated by the telecommunications industry to be 49 percent of the population.

    Estonians use mobile phones to pay for parking, among other things. Most conduct their banking online, and more than 70 percent file their taxes on the Internet. The state issues a digital identification card, which allows citizens to vote from their laptops.

    In a rare disappointment, less than 2 percent of the electorate, or 10,000 people, voted electronically during recent local elections. One hurdle was that voters had to buy a card reader to authenticate their ID's. The government hopes for better numbers for the next election, in March 2007.

    Some people contend that Estonia's success is a function of hard work and happy circumstance rather than raw talent.

    "I can't say that Estonians are the greatest software programmers," said Allan Martinson, who last June started the first high-tech venture capital fund to be based here. "You can find more talent in Russia."

    While entrepreneurs complain about the shortage of skilled workers, more and more young foreigners are ready to trek to this northernmost Baltic nation for a job. Skype employs people from 30 countries; in the halls, one hears plenty of English, and even some Spanish.

    Oliver Wihler, 38, a Swiss software developer, moved to Tallinn from London in 1999, drawn by the heady professional atmosphere and by Estonia's parks and forests. Now he and a business partner, Sander Magi, 28, run a company called Aqris, which reformats Java software.

    "The commute in London was a drag, and I missed not having any green space," Mr. Wihler said.

    Estonia offers plenty of that. But Skype is relying on more than a pleasant lifestyle; it is taking a more traditional approach in its recruitment by offering stock options in eBay. But Mr. Tallinn says that is only part of the company's appeal.

    "The other draw," he said, "is that if you want to work for a company that influences the lives of tens of millions of people, and you want to do it in Tallinn, there really isn't any other choice."

    Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

December 12, 2005


  • Side Channels


    Thoughts, rants and ramblings, courtesy of Saar Drimer





    been blogging 6 months



    I’ve been blogging for about 6 months now and wanted to share my experiences and what I have learned about this medium thus far. It might even be useful for other greenhorn bloggers.


      Original? I often start a draft and while writing it debate whether I am bringing something new to the table. My intention is to be original and not recycle headlines or repeat common wisdom. However, realistically, most things have been said in one form or another. If I think my point is not strong or the “original is marginal” I chuck the draft. Otherwise, I post it and then look for what other people had to say about it. I never knowingly present ideas that are not solely my own; if they are not, I give credit.

      Controversy. Controversial post spark a discussion which is the essence of the “blogosphere.” The right balance, however, is to create a place for civilized discourse while not being blatantly offensive to any of the readers. I try to maintain that balance by not yielding to spontaneous ranting that might not suit this medium or reflect poorly on me with time. I try to consider each cpleted post for a while and sometimes let others read it before I publish it.

      Length. People don’t read long posts, so I try to keep them short. In most cases I don’t write everything I can or want to say for the sake of brevity. I am not en expert (yet!) with an audience craving for my new insights, so I feel like every post should be regarded as an elevator pitch. The goal is to have people come back for more and be intrigued enough to start a discussion.

      Frequency. It seems that people read only the most recent entries when they come upon the weblog. I think that the frequency should be proportional to the traffic in order to maximize the exposure of each post. At this time, I believe that a new entry every 2-3 days is optimal. It also depends on the content; some posts are duds and others are more popular. I am always surprised by my inability to guess the popularity in advance.

      Time. I found that it takes me at least an hour to complete each post. It is more than I expected originally (hey, it looks easy, right?) but quality takes time and I won’t settle for mediocrity.

      Thread. This weblog is a mishmash of topics with little connection between them; they reflect my thoughts at the time. The common thread is therefore, me.

      Read and comment on other people’s weblogs. Thats the best way to increase traffic on your weblog if you have one. In turn, other authors will visit your weblog and there is good potential for “cross-traffic” and making new aquentances.

      Linking to other people’s posts increases traffic and gives credit where it is due.

    Overall, I enjoy blogging tremendously and I intend to continue posting for as long as I have time to do so and still be original. I also appreciate comments; it is always a delight to get remarks from people because it means they actualy read something I wrote.


    If you read my weblog, like it, hate it or have anything to say, please speak up.


    My most viewed post, btw, is #33, “the solitaire effect”.


    Thanks for reading.
    saar.



    4 Responses to “been blogging 6 months”



    1. Stuart Berman Says:

      Congratulations on the milestone and wishing you many more.


      This is a great post and highlight many of the reasons I moved you on my blogroll from “Technical Blogs” to “Best Blogs”. I typically put those from the IT field into that list so as not to knock people into shock (helum) but your posts are truly as broad, insightful and varied as you describe.


      I would add that anything an aspiring blogger to do to increase visibility will help to attract those people that really are trying to find your blog. Make sure google is away of your presence (you can submit your blog to them), make sure your technical configuration makes your blog as public as possible, enroll in free services like TTLB, Blogshares, Technorati, SiteMeter.com, tags, whatever you are comfortable with. When I started my blog about nine months ago putting ny name in google yielded everything but me - now I am the first entry due to the ‘weight’ of the cross posts which are not bogus. (Google tries to fight paid marketing services that try to artifically jack up your page rankings.)


      Your acquaintance through blogging is one of the more valuable gains of my blogging activity.


      Kol ha kavod.


    2. Saar Drimer Says:

      Stu,
      Todah Rabah. You made me blush.


    3. Side Channels » Blog Archive » other people’s advice on blogging Says:

      […] “Been blogging 6 months” - Great advice from a pure genius. […]


    4. GreatNexus Webmaster Blog

December 11, 2005




  • The New York Times is Blogospheric

    It was only a matter of time before the New York Times became active in the blogosphere. The Times has launched an entertainment blog called Carpetbagger and have a real estate blog and a few others planned. The new blog has a designated URL, permalinks and comments. L.A. Observed has a memo from the Times explaining the new blog launches.
    We're blogospheric.

    Yesterday we launched a genuine, authentic, by-the-book New York Times blog. It's Carpetbagger, by David Carr. It's part of a new movie-awards-season web site called Red Carpet, which includes a bunch of things you won't see in the newspaper, like weekly columns by Joyce Wadler and Caryn James. You'll see a refer on today's front page, which I boldly, if ignorantly, declare to be our first-ever page-1 refer to a web-only feature. At the very least, it's our first-ever page 1 refer to a blog.

    Within a few days, we'll put up a real estate blog by Damon Darlin and others. More blogs are in the works. Even more are at the idea stage. We've come late to blogging, obviously, though we've put toes in the water on a number of occasions, as when our movie critics sent running commentary from last year's Cannes film festival.
    Micropersuasion pulled this quote from the memo "A blog is nothing more than a piece of technology... We'll use the technology our way."

    But Heather Green at Blogspotting says pulling just that quote is unfair:
    Wait a minute. That seems a little unfair and seems to portray the Times as denigrating blogs.

    Read the memo yourself (via L.A Observed) to decide if you think that's the case. But here's the graph that struck me.

    "But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr's. It's full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it."
    The mainstream media is starting to get the blogosphere. Corante's Get Real says the Times is getting sort of clueful. More media companies are launching blogs with unique URLs and permalinks. These are better than many of the initial MSM blog launches that lacked permalinks or only lasted for a short time. MSNBC.com told us earlier this week that they have switched to a more weblog-centric model. This is likely to become the trend -- permalinks and direct URLs make it much more likely blogs will be linked to by other bloggers. Bloggers need to be able to link directly to a particular post.

    Posted on December 8, 2005
    Permalink
    Blogs linking to this post: Bloglines | BlogPulse | IceRocket | Technorati



















  • Villanova




    This makes me very proud of my alma mater.

    Again and again it becomes powerfully evident that we are a nation of extraordinary people. These kinds of cooperative efforts are the foundation of our greateness and our future.

    In our present dilema we are prone to apathy because it may seem that there is nothing that can stem the tide of cynicism resulting from the blatant deception and continued arrogance of our current leadership.

    But if ever there were a time when we need to realize that this country is inhabited by commonly decent, generous, competent, and caring citizens, that time is now.

    Villanova creates a wave of positve energy as they step up to help fellow Americans in a quick and decisive way.

    This is an example to the entire community, all of the students, faculty, families extended, and those considering Villanova as an option in their higher education plans.

    Villanova's example clearly defines a value system permeating the atmosphere and shows that they are so capable of accomplishing more than fielding the undefeated, number 4 ranked,NCAA men's basketball team.

    (Sorry, but I could not resist inserting this most vital bit of info).

    Merry Christmas One and All, and Most of All Thank You and Merry Christmas to Each and Every One of Our Service Men and Women.

    Our Christmas here at Home would not be possible without your sacrifice which is ever so much greater in this holiday season.

    God Bless Us One and All,

    The Whelan Family, Olivia Frances, Michael Patrick, and DA.

    An inspiring semester for displaced scholars
    By: Melissa Weigel
    Issue date: 12/9/05

    As a University, Villanova prides itself on its sense of "community." It's a word that is hard to define; it's something that one can only know by truly seeing it in action.
    This past semester, the University exemplified its mission of being a welcoming community to all by opening its arms to 29 students from New Orleans-area colleges. Twenty-two students came from Tulane University, six from Loyola and one from College of the Holy Cross.
    The transition process has been difficult but rewarding for both the students and the faculty and staff involved.
    "It was hectic trying to catch up on all of the work," freshman Maggie Ferrante from Tulane said. "But the teachers were really good about giving us enough to time to make it up."
    "It was hard not being where we had planned," said freshman Mina Hariri, also from Tulane. "I had prepared myself all summer to go to Tulane, and here we didn't really get an Orientation or anything."
    The students were quick to counter any negative comments with positive ones, though. The administration met with them periodically throughout the semester in order to ensure a smooth transition.
    "They were always sending us e-mails, having meetings to learn about clubs, taking us to dinner at Burns Hall," freshman Angela Deeb from Loyola said. "They gave us mentors, which were upper class students, and they were a good resource."
    Villanova was one of the first universities across the country to accept students whose educations were suspended due to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. According to George Walter, the Associate Dean of Enrollment Services, it all started with a phone call to the admission office from the parent of a student from a New Orleans college.
    From there, the University formed an ad hoc committee with representatives from each of the colleges, as well as ones from the Registrar's, Bursar's, Financial Assistance and Residence Life offices. In a period of about 72 hours, they met, came up with a plan, and initiated it.
    Walter said that they met on the Wednesday before Labor Day, and the following Tuesday, students arrived at Villanova.
    The experience of finding a new school was a bit harder on the students.
    "The biggest problem with finding a school was money," Ferrante said. "Villanova waived tuition costs, which made it a lot easier."
    The University agreed to not charge tuition, which allowed the New Orleans colleges, which had already accepted the students' tuition payments, to use that money for rebuilding efforts.
    The students left New Orleans with almost nothing. When evacuating, they were told that they would be able to return in a few days, so many took only the essentials. Some had only a small duffel bag of clothes with them. Deeb did not even bring her computer, but Villanova provided her with one as she is a student in the College of Commerce and Finance.
    The majority of the students were only able to return to their campuses to pick up the rest of their belongings in mid- to late November.
    Despite the hardships - being the "new kid," living at Harcum, making up schoolwork, having few of their possessions - the students came through the experience with a positive outlook.
    "I feel like we should say thank you somehow," Ferrante said. "This is something I'll always remember."
    "It was a crazy first semester, but it was definitely a memory," Deeb said.
    Even for the faculty, the experience was an inspiring one.
    "I came to Villanova in 1989, and one of the reasons I decided to join the community was the sense of warmth and welcoming it had," Walter said. "This experience has served to reinforce that impression, and prove that we live what we say, that we really are a community."
    Many students will return to their universities when they open for the spring semester. Several students, however, have chosen to remain at Villanova and have applied for regular admission.



     


     







    Gator Becomes Claria










    Don't Call It Spyware 


    Three years ago the company was considered a parasite and a scourge. Today it's a rising star - selling virtually the same product. How a pop-up pariah won the adware wars.

    By Annalee Newitz


    Back in 2002, Gator was one of the most reviled companies on the Net. Maker of a free app called eWallet, the firm was under fire for distributing what critics called spyware, code that covertly monitors a user's Web-surfing habits and uploads the data to a remote server. People who downloaded Gator eWallet soon found their screens inundated with pop-up ads ostensibly of interest to them because of Web sites they had visited. Removing eWallet didn't stop the torrent of pop-ups. Mounting complaints attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. Online publishers sued the company for obscuring their Web sites with pop-ups. In a June 2002 legal brief filed with the lawsuit, attorneys for The Washington Post referred to Gator as a "parasite." ZDNet called it a "scourge."


    Today Gator, now called Claria, is a rising star. The lawsuits have been settled - with negligible impact on the company's business - and Claria serves ads for names like JPMorgan Chase, Sony, and Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal praises the company for "making strides in revamping itself." Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Microsoft came close to acquiring Claria. Google acknowledges Claria's technology in recent patent applications. Best of all, government agencies and watchdog groups have given their blessing to the company's latest product: software that watches everything users do online and transmits their surfing histories to Claria, which uses the data to determine which ads to show them.


    Apart from plush new offices at the northern edge of Silicon Valley, it's remarkable how little the latter-day Claria differs from the old Gator. It's true that the company has toned down its most aggressive tactics. Journalists, watchdogs, and regulators seem mollified. For the most part, though, the company is in the same business as before, courting the same customers and selling a product that does the same thing in the same ways. Claria wears in a sharp suit and has a scrubbed face and coiffed hair - but it still looks a lot like Gator.


    CEO Scott VanDeVelde doesn't deny this. "I don't feel like there's a need to wipe the slate clean," he says. "Our technologies are dead center of where the market is going."


    The spyware wars are over - and spyware has won.


    Like many dotcoms born in the late 1990s, Gator began with an idea for a product - but no clear way to make money from it. "Our idea was a program that would store your passwords and automatically log you into password-protected sites," says Wally Buch. Buch brainstormed the software with a friend, Symantec founder Denis Coleman, who would remain involved in the company until early 2004. They called it eWallet.


    Buch came up with the missing revenue model a few weeks later as he waited in the checkout line at a grocery store. The woman in front of him bought diapers, and he noticed that her receipt included coupons for baby products. Buch realized that the Web could do the same thing for advertising: If he kept track of sites people visited, he could deliver ads that reflected their interests and thus increase the chance of triggering a sale.


    Along with then-CEO Jeff McFadden and VP of marketing Scott Eagle, Buch and Coleman decided to give away eWallet and use it as a sort of Trojan horse for pop-up ads. As users surfed the Web, ads would appear based on the site they were visiting.


    The gambit worked. Millions of people downloaded eWallet, and Gator's bank balance began to grow. A host of similar companies followed, including WhenU, 180Solutions, and DirectRevenue.


    In 1999, Gator parlayed its early success into $12.5 million in financing. That's when McFadden and Eagle decided the company's main product was not password-storing freeware but a covert ad-delivery platform. "Things really changed after that," Buch recalls. "It's not that I thought pop-ups couldn't be valuable, but the way they did it was over the top. It was an invitation to trouble." Uncomfortable with the company's direction, he left before the year was out.


    The business took off without him. In 2000, The Industry Standard called Gator one of the "10 companies to watch." The firm pulled in $14.5 million in 2001; revenue totaled $40.5 in 2002, when Gator delivered pop-ups to 12 million desktops. "We had 300 retailers, and the click rates were amazing," Eagle says. "All we were thinking about was how to continue growing."


    While Gator was raking in profits and plaudits, computer users were growing frustrated. One minute they were downloading seemingly benign freeware, the next their systems were spewing pop-ups and uploading private data. Programs they hadn't deliberately installed and didn't want anyway were interfering with other apps and dragging down system performance. All this spawned a backlash, leading to a new market for antispyware utilities, like Lavasoft's Ad-Aware, designed to remove the offending software, including Gator's, from users' computers.


    Meanwhile, executives at Web operations noticed that pop-ups interfered with their own ability to do business. For one thing, the ads enticed visitors to click links that whisked them off to other sites. For another, the ads papered over their own sites' ads. Advertisers who didn't get an adequate response on publishers' sites wouldn't renew, and that was bound to compromise potential revenue.


    As the leading distributor of pop-up software, Gator became a lightning rod for criticism. By summer 2001, the Interactive Advertising Bureau was telling the press about Gator's "deceptive" practice of "illegally" interfering with Web businesses.


    Gator wasted no time in striking back. In August, the company had sued IAB for "malicious disparagement" that interfered with its right to deliver pop-ups. The parties settled in November, agreeing to cooperate in the development of future Gator products.


    In June 2002, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones, and seven other online publishers filed a lawsuit, charging Gator with nine counts, including interfering with business and violating trademark. Gator's software, they claimed, infringed on their trademarks because it used their brand names to trigger ads for competitors - that is, when it detected a user logging into The New York Times' site, it would pop up an ad promoting The Wall Street Journal.


    The publishers hoped to convince the court that Gator was specifically targeting their businesses and delivering competing pop-ups. They hired Ben Edelman, a Harvard economics graduate student with a law degree and a techie bent, to trace the trail of secret signals, both within users' computers and over the Net. Thanks to his forensic work and eventual testimony, the publishers won a preliminary injunction forcing Gator to stop targeting their sites.


    Ben Edelman is the world's premiere spyware epidemiologist. In his Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab near Harvard Yard, he deliberately infects a sacrificial PC with programs like eWallet. Then he tracks the way the applications sink their tendrils into host desktops, collect sensitive information, and transmit it to the mothership.


    This research has earned him few friends in the industry. Eagle, ever on the defense against competitors, believes Edelman is a spy for his rival WhenU. After I tell the Claria VP I'm planning to visit Edelman, he turns grim. "Why don't you ask him who he works for?" he asks testily.


    The fact is, Edelman works for the same kind of customers Eagle does: large organizations with a substantial Web presence. His consulting clients include AOL, the National Football League, and Wells Fargo.


    In Edelman's testimony on behalf of the publishers in their 2002 suit, he gave a step-by-step overview of how Gator's user tracking and ad delivery software wound up on the machines of unwitting users. When someone downloaded eWallet, Edelman found, another program called OfferCompanion came along for the ride. Whenever the browser loaded a new site, OfferCompanion sent the new URL to Gator, which served a related pop-up for the software to display. Moreover, Edelman discovered, the stealth program couldn't be removed using the Windows uninstall command. Once it was on a PC, it took some effort to erase.


    He also found that thousands of smaller companies were also distributing OfferCompanion (along with similar programs) bundled with Kazaa and AudioGalaxy. These distributors made deals with yet another tier of companies that gave away the bundle along with still more freeware. Whenever a user clicked on an ad, everyone along the chain took a cut. So if Gator got $10 for each click on a Home Shopping Network pop-up, the second-tier distributors might get 10 cents each and the third-tier distributors 5 cents each.


    Sometimes, though, the middlemen didn't wait for a user to click; they simply made it look that way. When someone clicks on a pop-up ad, the advertiser puts a cookie - a small text file - on the user's browser to track his movements. The more active the user is on the advertiser's site, the more the distributors get paid - especially if the result is a sale. These companies realized they could add code that stashed a cookie in the browser whenever a pop-up appeared. Thus, each pop-up served made them another dime, whether or not it ever got clicked. The scam, known as cookie stuffing, became endemic to the industry. "Quite simply, affiliates use spyware to rip off marketing departments," Edelman says.


    The publishers' suit set off a cascade of bad news for Gator. L.L. Bean, Hertz.com, and Overstock.com piled on during 2003 and 2004, launching separate suits for unfair business practices and trademark infringement. In April 2004, the FTC held a summit to address the spyware problem and followed up with lawsuits against companies like Seismic Entertainment. Seismic's code embedded itself so deeply in the operating system that trying to delete it occasionally ruined the host PC. The agency didn't go after eWallet or OfferCompanion, but it was clear that the Feds were paying attention. Then Yahoo! announced that its toolbar would block pop-ups from Gator, among others.


    Amid the string of setbacks, Gator canceled plans for an IPO. Eagle declines to talk about it. "Suffice it to say that market conditions weren't right," he says.


    The lawsuits and bad publicity left the company wounded, but the numbers were exploding anyway: Profit grew from $91,000 (on revenue of $40.5 million) in 2002 to nearly $35 million (on revenue of $90 million) in 2003. The user base was roughly 35 million and growing 50 percent annually. Apparently, Gator didn't need to change its software; it needed to change its image. So, as Eagle puts it, "we shifted the momentum and grabbed the mike."


    The first move was to give the company a new name. Thus, in October 2003, Gator, the fearsome snapping reptile, became Claria, the paragon of transparency and light.


    Next Claria went to work replacing the pejorative word spyware with the more business-friendly adware. The adware model was already an accepted way for software companies to support otherwise free products - the free version of the Eudora email program, for instance, displays ads in a small window that can't be closed while the program is in use. Claria execs argued that eWallet was no different. Moreover, they policed the distinction with diligence: Anyone who called the company's products spyware risked a lawsuit.


    In late 2003, Claria filed a libel suit against PCPitstop.com, a mom-and-pop site that distributed spyware-removal tools. The suit claimed that PCPitstop was infringing on Claria's business by including the company on a list of firms that distributed spyware. As part of a settlement, PCPitstop took down several pages on its site describing how the company's pop-up generator ruins PC performance and tracks every move consumers make online.


    Meanwhile, Claria quietly settled the suits filed by L.L. Bean, Hertz.com, and Overstock .com. All parties signed nondisclosure agreements, so the terms are secret and nobody will discuss them.


    The next step was to cozy up to regulators. Claria offered to help government agencies and industry watchdogs establish guidelines for spyware, and perhaps show how its own practices were more benign. To that end, the executive suite made room for a new position: chief privacy officer. Reed Freeman, a former staff attorney at the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, took the job. Freeman spoke at industry events about the importance of privacy and consumer rights, and Claria became a supporter of the Antispyware Coalition, a lobbying group headed by the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC.


    Claria seemed to embrace the Coalition's business-friendly list of rules for pop-up advertising companies that sought to rise above the spyware label. The rules are simple: There must be "conspicuous notification" when adware is downloaded, and that notice must include a clear explanation of what the software will do and how it can be uninstalled. But for all Claria's rhetoric, critics pointed out, its actions suggested a less than hearty embrace of the coalition's intent. For example, it complied with the notification provision by adding to the installation procedure a pop-up window full of small type explaining how Claria's products work. Edelman scoffs at this solution, arguing that the notification text is "longer than the US Constitution and nobody reads it."


    If Edelman wasn't convinced, several makers of antispyware software were. In April 2005, Claria issued a press release saying it had convinced McAfee to "acknowledge" that Claria's software apps weren't "malicious threats"; McAfee had "inadvertently labeled" Claria a "top threat of 2004." Claria also persuaded Microsoft and Aluria to remove its products from the list of programs targeted by their antispyware apps. Eagle won't discuss how he made his case to these companies, but Aluria CEO Rick Carlson says he's satisfied with Claria's disclosure policy. "At some point the consumer has to take responsibility and read," he says. As for whether it's easy enough to remove Claria's software, "users are never more than two clicks away from uninstalling," he says.


    Claria's cleanup strategy very nearly paid off in a big way. According to a June 30, 2005, New York Times piece, Microsoft considered acquiring Claria. The two went as far as holding meetings to discuss terms. However, Redmond employees who were aware of Claria's reputation demurred, setting off what the Times called an "internal battle" among Microsoft execs. Neither company will comment on the article.


    The reported deal didn't go through, but Eagle says he's not worried. His company's revenue for 2004 topped $100 million. Claria is back.


    As Claria sheds the last of Gator's skin, Eagle is keen to talk about the final element in the company's corporate makeover. "We're moving into the personalized content business," he says. Translation: The company plans to stop delivering pop-ups altogether.


    At first blush, the news sounds like solid evidence that Claria has emerged from the spyware wars with a new focus. Having taken pop-ups as far as it could, the company has decided to leave the format behind. But this isn't to say it's finished tracking customers and using the information to sell advertising.


    PersonalWeb, a Claria product scheduled to launch in January, is a close cousin of the OfferCompanion program that hitched a ride on eWallet. It tracks everything users do on the Internet and sends the information to remote servers for analysis. Then it places ads on partnering publishers' Web sites, changing them depending on the profile of the visitor. The crucial difference is that PersonalWeb doesn't display irritating pop-ups that might make users wonder what else has been installed on their PCs. Better yet, publishers will get a cut of the clickthrough commissions for ads Claria places on their sites. There will no more fights over territory. "It's great for everybody," Eagle says. "Merchants make money, publishers make money, and so do we."


    The new product doesn't alter Claria's course. Rather, it cuts a more viable pathway through the wilderness McFadden and Eagle first opened in 1999. PersonalWeb reflects the key lesson the company has learned since then: While everyone hates pop-ups, nobody much minds behind-the-scenes spying. In fact, surreptitious tracking is all the rage.


    Google - with its interconnected search, email, chat, blogs, and social networks - is also in the business of targeting ads based on user behavior. So are MSN and Yahoo! All three maintain profiles of everyone who signs up for their services. They use cookies to track what visitors do on their sites while they're logged in; the downloadable Google and MSN toolbars track which sites users visit when they're logged out. Like Claria, Google has amassed a vast database of user profiles that it plans to use for even better targeting in the future.


    Few people in the online business community question the idea that marketing software should track user behavior. Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it's possible to track people online without being underhanded. The FTC is in favor of online advertising, she explains, "and sometimes tracking makes advertising work better for consumers." Esther Dyson, who has been harshly critical of spyware companies in her influential newsletter, Release 1.0, agrees. "As long as there's disclosure and people are given a choice, I think monitoring users' behavior isn't a problem," she says.


    That's the kind of green light Gator could never get. But in the evolving world of behavioral marketing, Claria is the hottest, um, adware company around.


    Contributing editor Annalee Newitz (brainsploitation@yahoo.com) wrote about the female orgasm in issue 13.07


     







    Harold Pinter Nobel Prize




    Janerik Henriksson/European Pressphoto Agency

    The playwright Harold Pinter, who has cancer, addressed the Swedish Academy by video from London.

    December 8, 2005
    Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S.
    By SARAH LYALL

    LONDON, Dec. 7 - The playwright Harold Pinterturned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

    "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," Mr. Pinter said. "You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

    Sitting in a wheelchair, his lap covered by a blanket, his voice hoarse but unwavering, Mr. Pinter, 75, delivered his speech via a video recording that was played on Wednesday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Doctors told him several years ago that he had cancer of the esophagus and recently ordered him not to travel to Stockholm for the speech, his publisher said.

    The playwright, known in recent years as much for his fiery anti-Americanism as for his spare prose style and haunting, elliptical plays like "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming," was awarded the $1.3 million Nobel literature prize in October. In its citation, the Swedish Academy made little mention of his political views, saying only that he is known as a "fighter for human rights" whose stands are often "seen as controversial." It mostly focused on his work, saying that Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."

    The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers José Saramago of Portugal, Günter Grassof Germany and Dario Foof Italy.

    When he won the award, Mr. Pinter said he did not know if the academy, whose deliberations and reasoning are kept secret, had taken his politics into account. He clearly welcomed the platform the award gave him to bring his views, long expressed in Britain, to a larger audience.

    Dressed in black, bristling with controlled fury, Mr. Pinter began by explaining the almost unconscious process he uses to write his plays. They start with an image, a word, a phrase, he said; the characters soon become "people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort."

    "So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction," he continued, "a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time."

    But while drama represents "the search for truth," Mr. Pinter said, politics works against truth, surrounding citizens with "a vast tapestry of lies" spun by politicians eager to cling to power.

    Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road," he said. "Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love."

    He returned to the theme of language as an obscurer of reality, saying that American leaders use it to anesthetize the public. "It's a scintillating stratagem," Mr. Pinter said. "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."

    Accusing the United States of torturing terrorist suspects in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Pinter called the invasion of Iraq - for which he said Britain was also responsible - "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He called for Prime Minister Tony Blairto be tried before an international criminal court.

    Mr. Pinter said it was the duty of the writer to hold an image up to scrutiny, and the duty of citizens "to define the real truth of our lives and our societies."

    "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man," he said.

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    Abercrombie & Fitch








    John Lei for The New York Times

    Let's dance! I mean shop: Images of scantily clad young men appear all over Abercrombie & Fitch

    December 8, 2005
    Critical Shopper
    Browsing Out Loud
    By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

    NEVER has a store that sells bluejeans and T-shirts more closely resembled a hookup joint.

    The four-story Abercrombie & Fitchflagship on Fifth Avenue is a sprawling nightclub of a place with muscled young men standing guard at the front entrance, their smiles entreating passers-by to look. At their backs, the front windows are mysteriously shuttered. Inside, the lighting is a moody chiaroscuro, and the music thumps at such high volume that you have to shout to be heard. A central staircase with subtly lit frosted glass-block flooring is a dramatic sculptural counterpoint to the darkness.

    On a weekend afternoon, knots of conspiratorial-looking teenagers huddled out front, blowing on their cupped hands, talking on cellphones, casting eager gazes at one another from beneath eyelids at studied half-mast. In the store, which opened last month, hotties circulate the catwalklike floors, touching up their lip gloss, gossiping with one another. Only the fact that they occasionally lean over to fluff at a sweater, their hair fanning silkily across their shoulders, would lend you an inkling that they are actually employees.

    Right. Because you are not in a nightclub. You are here to shop.

    This is what Abercrombie does with distinction: the most efficient way to move tons of jeans and T-shirts is not to sparkle with antiseptic, anodyne cleanliness like Gap, but to sell these relatively generic pieces of clothing using the sexual ideology of the new millennium, an era informed by readily available pornography, the strip-club aesthetic and a post-AIDS abandon. The nightclub setting and the racy marketing campaigns make the clothes more appealing to the kids. And tick off the parents. Which, in turn, makes the clothes even more appealing to the kids.

    For all the hype surrounding Abercrombie, the clothes are, well, just clothes. Upon entry, you find a row of glass cases displaying denim jeans. This is the denim "bar," a term increasingly employed by public relations people to connect the act of shopping to the act of ingesting food or drink, to subtly convince shoppers that buying clothes is an intimate activity providing either nourishment or intoxicating pleasure. And the jeans are fine, priced from $69.50 to $198 for the Ezra Fitch premium styles.

    For women the preppy Ezra Fitch collection includes tailored shirts, embroidered with a tiny moose on the front, and saucier camisoles, like a strapless beaded one with an Empire waist for $128. In gray or white, it was actually elegant. I would skip the holiday T-shirts with phrases that are as corny as lines from the 1970's show "Love, American Style," like "Santa loves a hot cookie," "Never a silent night" and, my personal favorite, "Is that a candy cane in your pants?"

    Men's clothes are simple: polos, fleece items, jeans, khakis, sweaters, overcoats. I liked the cable-knit sweaters in lamb's wool, nylon and cashmere, many of them bearing the embroidered moose.

    On the walls of the store a three-story mural depicts a kind of adolescent sexual Guernica: young male athletes in all manner of gymnastic contortion, mostly stripped to the waist, their torsos striated with muscle, their pants packed with cartoonishly provocative, eye-popping bulges of which even Porfirio Rubirosa would have been skeptical.

    Abercrombie has a long history of provocation. In 2002 the company marketed thong underpants for the 8-to-10-year-old set that bore slogans like "wink wink" and "eye candy." In 2003 it released its Christmas Field Guide, a catalog that featured naked or nearly naked young models and offered advice on oral sex, group masturbation and orgies. "Sex, as we know can involve one or two, but what about even more?" one layout proposed. Abercrombie recalled it after protest from parents' groups. Even teenagers have finally taken offense. Earlier this year a group of Pennsylvania girls organized a "girl-cott" of T-shirts with slogans like "Who needs brains when you have these?"

    In May the company settled a class-action lawsuit charging that it discriminated against nonwhite job applicants. Abercrombie agreed to pay $50 million, including nearly $40 million in damages to female and minority employees and job applicants who claimed that because they did not conform to the Nordic, preppy Abercrombie & Fitch look they were exiled to the backroom, fired or never hired in the first place.

    If I were an employee today, the thing I would be most concerned about is the noise in the store. A booming sound system delivers ear-splitting dance music every minute of the day. On my first visit I couldn't stay in the store longer than 10 minutes because the thumping club-mix version of Erasure's"Oh L'Amour" - an annoying piece of postdisco detritus - was so loud. On my way out I approached a sales clerk.

    "How can you stand this noise all day long?" I asked.

    Her mouth moved as if to say, "What?"

    "HOW CAN YOU STAND THIS NOISE ALL DAY LONG?"

    She nodded. "I EAT TYLENOL LIKE IT'S CANDY," she shouted, holding her hands up to her head. Oh, great, I thought. By this time next year she'll be deaf and need a liver transplant.

    ON my second, third and fourth visits, I arrived with a decibel meter because I wanted to find out exactly how loud the place was. Following guidelines set forth by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I recorded decibel levels from the low to the high 80's most of the time I was in the store, although a few songs were played at higher volumes. One reached a peak of 97 decibels. Anything over 85 decibels can damage hearing, according to Amy K. Boyle, the public education director of the League for the Hard of Hearing.

    "If you have to shout in order to be heard, you are probably in an environment that could be damaging to your hearing," she told me. "A simple rule of thumb is that if you have to yell from three feet away, the background noise is too high." (Typical conversation registers at about 60 decibels, busy city traffic at about 85; gas mowers and tractors register in the 90's.)

    On one of my visits I sought auditory refuge in the dressing room, but even there speakers pumped out the music. Half-naked in the semi-obscurity, the bam-bam-bam of the music a continuous assault, I wondered if perhaps Abercrombie's marketing director had ever worked psy-ops for the military. I asked a clerk if she could ask the manager to turn the music down.

    "I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it," she said.

    Thomas D. Lennox, the Abercrombie vice president for corporate communications, said the company monitors music levels throughout its stores. "It is loud," he said. "And we do monitor it." He added that the company had not received any complaints from customers.

    With the exception of the moose-imprinted clothing and the slogan-bearing T-shirts, there are lots of perfectly lovely things to like at Abercrombie, like a women's long-sleeve T-shirt in silky cotton and polyester ($24.50) and a lamb's-wool-viscose-nylon-angora-cashmere belted cable-knit sweater ($228) that Katharine Hepburn would have worn with, perhaps, the khaki cargo pants ($69.50).

    But I'll have to buy items I like from the user-friendly Abercrombie Web site. Because shopping at the flagship store is among the more unpleasant experiences to be had in usually retail-friendly Manhattan.

    Abercrombie & Fitch

    720 Fifth Avenue (56th Street), Manhattan; (212) 381-0110

    ATMOSPHERE Marquee without the cocktails.

    PRICES Inexpensive to moderate. Men's down jackets, $178; Ezra Fitch cashmere sweaters for women, $148; vintage bead necklaces, $19.50; cotton T-shirts embellished with the word "Lust," $39.50.

    SERVICE Not attentive, considering there are enough staff members on hand to make the place look like a bustling club at any hour of the day. Best line from a sales clerk (while peering at my hand-held decibel meter): "Dude. That is the weirdest looking phone I have ever seen."

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December 7, 2005

  •  
























    Wednesday, December 07, 2005







     




    William Safire is a man of many careers: journalist, speechwriter, historian, novelist, lexicographer. He worked on the first Eisenhower Presidential campaign and later became a senior speechwriter in the Nixon White House. He escaped from there in time to write Before the Fall, a history of the pre-Watergate White House. As a lexicographer, he is author of Safire’s New Political Dictionary, a half-million-word study of the words that have inspired and inflamed the electorate. As an historical novelist, he wrote Freedom about the Civil War, and his latest novel is Scandalmonger about the origins of America’s press freedom. His anthology of the world’s greatest speeches, Lend Me Your Ears, has become a classic. As a political columnist, he began his twice-weekly column thirty years ago in The New York Times, writing from the point of view of a libertarian conservative. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and is now a member of the Pulitzer Board


    December 4, 2005
    On Language
    Whitelist
    By WILLIAM SAFIRE

    At last month's annual conference of the Computer Security Institute, the keynote speaker was one of those privacy nuts who exhorts businesses to tighten up their software and databases lest they threaten customers with ever-more-dangerous identity theft.

    In passing, the keynoter noted that a hot word at the conference was whitelist, and would somebody please explain it to him. I was that anti-penetration, word-hungry keynoter. Sure enough, as the ballroom darkened to spotlight the next speaker, a brilliant female executive hurriedly slipped a note into my hand along with her business card, whispered "Whitelist!" and disappeared into the crowd.

    I was reminded of the opening to my favorite short story, "The Green Door," by O.Henry, which I cited last year in a review of current spookspeak. "Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner.. . .You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman.. . .She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, 'parallelogram!' and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder. That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it?"

    How could any adventuresome word maven refuse the challenge to get a firsthand definition by an early user of an arcane word of the future? Here is the mysterious message: "Blacklist (noun) a list of known senders of unwanted messages. Blacklist (verb) to block messages automatically by comparing sender to members of a blacklist. Whitelist (n) a list of senders of wanted messages that is used by automated spam-filtering systems to override any rule that would result in those messages being blocked. These rules may include membership in a blacklist, string-matching on 'bad' words, or probability-based rules such as 'any message addressed to more than fifty receivers must be spam.' Also a verb, 'to whitelist."' The attached business card identifies this incipient lexicographer as Jennifer Bayuk, chief information security officer of Bear, Stearns & Company.

    PC World magazine reported that "this new idea of creating a whitelist of authorized applications is going to be more widely adopted by security vendors because the traditional antivirus technique of blocking known malware is simply becoming too unwieldy." (Malware is software that d oes evil things like spamming, viruses and worms. Worm first appeared in the context of evilware in a 1975 sci-fi novel by John Dunner.) The Yankee Group's Andre Jaquith says that "whitelists are probably the way to go," but there is a management downside: administrators have to get involved every time software is updated. "If Microsoft sends out a hotfix, you're probably going to have to reregister those applications."

    Have you noticed how many new words are an amalgam of opposites? In 1958, John Tukey got the idea that the opposite of hardware should be software. The lexicographer Charles Levine calls them "analogical formations" (on the analogy of analogy), often with a switch on one-half of the word: the Free Software Foundationgrants reuse and reproduction rights to anyone who is willing to pass along a program with rights to use, modify and redistribute its "open sourced" code. Defenders of artists' copyrights usually disapprove of its name - Copyleft - which appears on T-shirts in Seattle, but the founder, Richard Stallman, informs me that "in 1984 or '85 I received a letter with amusing slogans stamped in red including Copyleft - all rights reversed."'

    In the mid-80's, the pejorative term whitewash sired a more specific form of mind manipulation with greenwash, defined by Fiona Harvey last month in The Financial Timesas "a way of presenting oneself as environmentally friendly while continuing to deploy destructive tactics in the background." The same pattern of analogical degeneration can be found in the switch from brainstorming to blamestorming, from multitasking to multislacking, from upsizing to downsizing to management's rightsizing to workers' dumbsizing.

    The overwhelming evidence is underwhelming. Follow that lady's linguistic lead to language's little green door: Parallelogram!

    Murder Board

    Veteran pundits who appeared in July on "Meet the Press" told Tim Russert that the two key phrases central to the coming battle for Supreme Court philosophical supremacy were the Latin stare decisis, loosely translated as "respect precedent," and murder board.

    In 1944, The Times Magazine defined murder board as a "selection board that passes on Wac officer candidates." It became part of the political-judicial war in 1987, when a Legal Times correspondent, Aaron Freiwald, wrote, "A senior White House official acknowledges that the 'murder boards,' as the moot-court sessions are known to administration officials, did not prove effective with [Robert] Bork."

    The tough questioning by a group eager to prepare the nominee apparently proved helpful to Judge John Roberts. One member of that murder board was the White House counsel, Harriet Miers; when it came her turn to be nominee after the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist, it was reported that she did not perform well. Stellar performance before the Senate, in a television courtroom age, is dispositive, to use Senator Joe Biden's favorite word.

    Now Judge Sam Alito is willingly taking his murder boards, which are like the bat weighted with steel shot that a baseball hitter swings before trading it for a lighter one as he steps up the plate. The phrase has a literal base in German criminology: in 1916, The Fitchburg Daily Sentinel in Massachusetts reported, "Germany's Police: How the 'Murder Board' Works to Solve a Mystery." The current Justice Ministry in Berlinconfirms that the term used was Mordkommission.

    Send comments and suggestions to: safireonlanguage@nytimes.com.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



     







    Illness as More Than Metaphor




    Mitch Epstein for The New York Times

    Fighting the Odds: Determined to live, Susan Sontag scoured the Internet for information about M.D.S


    December 4, 2005



    Ilness as More Than Metaphor




    My mother, Susan Sontag, lived almost her entire 71 years believing that she was a person who would beat the odds. Even during the last nine months of her life, after she was discovered to have myelodysplastic syndrome, or M.D.S., a particularly virulent blood cancer, she continued to persevere in the belief that she would be the exception. M.D.S. is technically a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia. On average, its survival rates across the generational cohorts are no better than 20 percent, and far worse for a woman in her early 70's who had had cancer twice before. It wasn't that she didn't know that the biological deck was stacked against her; as someone who prided herself on her ability to grasp medical facts, she knew it only too well. In the immediate aftermath of her diagnosis, she went online to learn all she could about M.D.S. and despaired as the fact of its lethality sank in. But that despair was almost the flip side of a lifelong confidence in her ability to defy the odds. "This time, for the first time," she told me, "I don't feel special."


    Remarkably, in only a few weeks she had righted herself psychologically and was gearing up, just as she had done during her successful fights to survive two previous cancers, to find the doctors and the treatments that seemed to offer her some hope of defying those terrifyingly long odds and once more becoming the exception. How she did this, I don't know. Perhaps it was the spirit that had led her, when she recovered from her first cancer, to write a little proudly in her book "AIDS and Its Metaphors" of "confounding my doctors' pessimism." Perhaps she was able, somehow, to confound her own as well. What I do know is that the panic attacks that had overwhelmed her after her diagnosis began to lessen, and in the M.D.S. literature that she found on the Web she began to find reasons for hope rather than despair. She even began to work again, writing a fiery piece on the Abu Ghraib torture photographs for this magazine at the same time she was readying herself to become a patient at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where the bone-marrow transplant that was her only realistic hope of cure had been pioneered.


    Her "positive denial," as I always thought of it, whether with regard to her health, her work as a writer or her private life, had not been extinguished by the hard facts of M.D.S. after all. On her 70th birthday, 15 months before she found out she was ill again, she talked to me at length and with the characteristic passion she brought to her work about how she was only now starting a new and, she thought, the best phase of her writing life. Leaving for Seattle, she began speaking again of projects she would undertake - above all the novel she had been outlining - after her return to New York and even to speculate about whether she would feel strong enough to write during her treatment.


    Was it bravado? Doubtless it was, but not bravado alone. During the two years of chemotherapy she underwent in the mid-1970's to treat her first cancer - Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into 31 of her lymph nodes - she managed to publish a book on photography and, a year later, her book "Illness as Metaphor." That time, she had beaten the odds. William Cahan, then her principal doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told me at the time that he saw virtually no hope. (Those were the days when doctors often told patients' relatives things they did not disclose to the patients themselves.) But as her friend Dr. Jerome Groopman, chief of experimental medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told me a few months after her death: "The statistics only get you so far. There are always people at the tail of the curve. They survive, miraculously, like your mother with breast cancer. Her prognosis was horrific. She said: 'No, I'm too young and stubborn. I want to go for it"' - meaning treatment. "Statistically, she should have died. But she didn't. She was at the tail of that curve."


    "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The line is Joan Didion's, and looking back on my mother's life, I've been wondering lately if we don't tell them to ourselves in order to die as well. In retrospect, I realize that death was never something my mother talked about much. But it was the ghost at the banquet of many of her conversations, expressed particularly in her single-minded focus on her own longevity and, as she got older, by her frequent voicing of the hope of living to be 100. She was no more reconciled to extinction at 71 than she had been at 42. After her death, a theme in many of the extremely generous and heartfelt letters of condolence I received from her friends puzzled me: it was surprise - surprise that my mother hadn't beaten M.D.S. as she had beaten both breast cancer and the uterine sarcoma that struck her in her mid-60's.


    But then, she, too, was surprised when the doctors in Seattle came in to tell her the bone-marrow transplant had failed and her leukemia was back. She screamed out, "But this means I'm going to die!"



    I will never forget that scream, or think of it without wanting to cry out myself. And yet, even that terrible morning, in a pristine room at the University of Washington Medical Center, with its incongruously beautiful view of Lake Union and Mount Rainier in the background, I remember being surprised by her surprise. I suppose I shouldn't have been. There are those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't. Increasingly, I've come to think that it is one of the most important ways the world divides up. Anecdotally, after all those hours I spent in doctors' outer offices and in hospital lobbies, cafeterias and family rooms, my sense is that the loved ones of desperately ill people divide the same way.


    For doctors, understanding and figuring out how to respond to an individual patient's perspective - continue to fight for life when chances of survival are slim, or acquiesce and try to make the best of whatever time remains? - can be almost as grave a responsibility as the more scientific challenge of treating disease. In trying to come to terms with my mother's death, I wanted to understand the work of the oncologists who treated her and what treating her meant to them, both humanly and scientifically. What chance was there really of translating a patient's hope for survival into the reality of a cure? One common thread in what they told me was that interpreting a patient's wishes is as much art as science. Dr. Stephen Nimer, my mother's principal doctor, heads the division of hematologic oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and is also one of America's foremost researchers in the fundamental biology of leukemia. As he explained it to me: "The fact is that people are never as educated as the doctor. You have to figure out something about the patient" - by which he meant something that takes both patient and physician beyond the profound, frustrating and often infantilizing asymmetry between the patient's ability to comprehend the choices to be made and the doctor's.


    Still, the doctor's task here is not impossible. As Nimer put it: "There are risk takers and risk-averse. There are those who say, you know: 'I'm 70 years old. If I get another four or five months, that would be fine.' Others say, 'You do everything you can to save my life.' Then it's easy. You can go straight into a discussion of what a patient wants."


    For Nimer, as for Jerome Groopman, the ethical challenge, vital for a doctor to recognize and impossible (and ethically undesirable) to deal with formulaically, comes not with the 30 percent of patients Nimer estimates know for certain whether they want aggressive treatment or not, but with the "undecided" 70 percent in the middle. As Nimer told me somewhat ruefully, the doctor's power to influence these patients, one way or the other, is virtually complete. "There are ways to say things," he said. "'This is your only hope.' Or you could say, 'Some doctors will say it's your only hope, but it has a 20 times better chance of harming you than helping you.' So I'm pretty confident I can persuade people." Groopman, in his clinical practice with patients like my mother, patients for whom, statistically, the prognosis is terrible, at times begins by saying, "There is a very small chance, but it comes with tremendous cost."


    In these situations, doctors like Groopman and Nimer see their job as, in effect, parsing the patient's response and trying to determine a treatment plan that is responsive to the patient's wishes but is also not what physicians refer to as "medically futile" - that is, offering no real chance for cure or remission. That is hard enough. What makes the doctor's decision in such situations even more painful is that "medically futile" means different things to different physicians. After my mother's transplant failed and she was medevacked from the University of Washington hospital back to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Nimer tried one last treatment - an experimental drug called Zarnestra that had induced remission in some 10 percent of the small number of patients to whom it had been administered. I would learn from the nurses' aides who attended my mother in the last weeks of her life that some of the doctors and nurses on the transplant floor were uncomfortable with the decision, precisely because they saw my mother's situation as hopeless, that is, medically futile. As division head, in consultation with Dr. Marcel van den Brink, the hospital's chief of bone-marrow transplantation, Nimer could overrule these objections. But neither man would have denied the difficulty of drawing a clear line between what is and is not medically futile.



    My mother was determined to try to live no matter how terrible her suffering. Her choices had been stark from the outset. Unlike some other cancers that can be halted for years through treatment, there are few long-lasting remissions in M.D.S. Her only real chance of survival lay in the possibility of an outright cure offered by an adult-blood-stem-cell transplant. Otherwise, to quote from one of the medical Web sites my mother visited repeatedly during the first weeks after her diagnosis, treatment offered her only an "alleviation of symptoms, reduction in transfusion requirements and improvement of quality of life." During their second meeting, Nimer offered her the option of treatment with a drug called 5-azacitidine, which gave many M.D.S. patients some months during which they felt relatively well. But the drug did little to prolong life. My mother replied, with tremendous passion, "I am not interested in quality of life!"


    What Nimer knew with the horrified intimacy of long clinical practice, but what my mother could not yet know, was just how agonizing the effects of an unsuccessful stem-cell transplant can be: everything from painful skin rashes to inordinately severe diarrhea to hallucinations and delirium. To me, torture is not too strong or hyperbolic a word. After my mother's declaration, Nimer only nodded and began talking about where the best place might be for her to have the stem-cell transplant, going over with her the variations in different medical research centers' approaches to transplantation. After the transplant failed, and my mother returned from Seattle, Nimer obviously knew how long the odds were against an experimental drug like Zarnestra inducing even a brief extension of her life. But he said he felt that he had to try, both because the drug had had some success and because my mother had told him (and me) from the outset that she wanted her doctors to do everything possible, no matter how much of a long shot it was, to save or prolong her life.


    "Always assuming it's not medically futile," he told me a few weeks before her death, "if I can carry out my patients' wishes, I want to do that."


    My mother could express herself only with the greatest of difficulty in the last weeks of her life. "Protective hibernation" was how one Sloan-Kettering psychiatrist described it. Like most people who have lost someone dear to them, I would say that one of my dominant emotions since my mother's death has been guilt - guilt over what I did and failed to do. But I do not regret trying to get her to swallow those Zarnestra pills even when her death was near, for I haven't the slightest doubt that had she been able to make her wishes known, my mother would have said she wanted to fight for her life to the very end.


    But this does nothing to change the fact that it seems almost impossible to develop a satisfactory definition of what is and is not medically futile. What is the cutoff? A 10 percent chance of success? Five percent? One percent? When does the "very small chance" my mother's doctors bought at the "tremendous cost" in suffering that Groopman described for me become so infinitesimal as to make it no longer worth trying?


    I have found no consensus among the oncologists I have spoken with in the aftermath of my mother's death, and I don't believe there is one. There are those who take a strong, consistent stance against not just such treatments but also against the general orientation of American medicine, particularly oncology, toward doing everything possible to save individual patients, no matter how poor their chances. These doctors seem inspired by a public-health model based on better health outcomes for communities rather than individuals, viewing it as the most moral and the only cost-effective way of practicing medicine. This view, often associated with the work of the medical ethicist Daniel Callahan, is increasingly influential.


    One reason for this is that the current American medical system is breaking down. Several physicians with little sympathy for Callahan's approach pointed out to me that, like it or not, American society either can't afford or no longer chooses to afford to underwrite the kind of heroic care people like my mother, whose prognoses are obviously poor, still receive in the United States. Dr. Diane E. Meier, a palliative-medicine specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, remarked that if we as a society spent the sort of money on medical care that we spend, say, on the military, the challenge facing physicians would be very different. But neither Meier nor any other doctor I spoke to seemed to believe that there is much chance of that. If anything, medical financing has moved and is likely to continue to move entirely in the opposite direction. As Meier put it to me, "The cost crisis facing Medicare will lead to substantial and real reductions in access to care."


    One illustration of Meier's point is that Memorial Sloan-Kettering already treats, through funds received from private philanthropists, many patients whose treatment is not covered by Medicare or who have had their applications for treatment at major cancer centers refused by their insurance companies. But it is one of only a few cancer centers in a position to do so. (Even more sobering is the statistic that only a small percentage of Americans with cancer are treated in a cancer center.) Philanthropy aside - and even the most generous philanthropy can never make up the shortfall the continuing cuts in federal financing are likely to produce - it may well be, as Meier suggests, that we are rapidly moving toward a health care system in which "only the rich will be able to choose the treatment they want."


    In a sense, the financial background of my mother's treatment prefigured the world Meier was describing. Once she and Nimer agreed that she would have a bone-marrow transplant at the Hutchinson Center, and she was accepted as a patient there, she applied to Medicare - her primary insurance - for coverage of the treatment. Medicare refused, saying that coverage could begin only once her M.D.S. had "converted" to full-blown leukemia; in other words, when she was far sicker. My mother then applied to her private insurance company. The response was that her coverage did not extend to organ transplants, which was what it considered a bone-marrow transplant to be. Later, my mother's insurance company relented but still refused to allow her to go "out of network" to the Hutchinson Center, even though Nimer was convinced that the doctors there stood the best chance of saving her life. Instead, the insurer proposed four "in network" options - hospitals where it would pay for the transplant to be done. But three out of the four said they would not take a patient like my mother (because of her age and medical history). The fourth did agree to take her but admitted, frankly, that it had little experience with patients of her age.


    My mother was determined to get the best treatment possible, and Nimer had told her that treatment was to be found in Seattle. So she persevered. She was admitted to the Hutchinson Center as a so-called self-pay patient and had to put down a deposit of $256,000. Even before that, she had to pay $45,000 for the search for a compatible bone-marrow donor.


    The knowledge that she was getting the best treatment available, both at Sloan-Kettering and at Hutchinson, was a tremendous consolation to my mother. It strengthened her will to fight, her will to live. But of course she was getting that treatment only because she had the money to pay for it. To be sure, as she was doing so, her doctors both in Seattle and New York very generously helped with her appeal of her insurance company's decision - calling and writing letters providing documentation and expert opinions explaining why the only viable treatment option was the one they had recommended. But both she and they knew that whatever hope she had of cure depended on moving rapidly toward the bone-marrow transplant. This would have been impossible had she not had the money to in effect defy her insurer's verdict, even as she was appealing it legally.


    Let me state the obvious: The number of Americans who can do what she did is a tiny percentage of the population, and while I shall always be thankful beyond words for the treatment she received, and believe that she and her doctors made the right choice, I cannot honestly say that there was anything fair about it.



    How or whether the realities of the health care system in America today can be reconciled with the fundamental aspiration of science, which is discovery, and the fundamental aspiration of medicine, which is to cure disease, is impossible for me to say. But if the time I have spent in the company of oncologists and researchers convinces me of anything, it is that these aspirations are almost as fundamental in serious doctors as the will to live is in cancer patients. The possibility of discovery, of research, is like a magnet. Marcel van den Brink, the Sloan-Kettering bone-marrow chief, who is Dutch, told me that one of the main reasons he is in the United States is that here, unlike in the Netherlands or, he thought, in the other major Western European countries, there is money for his research. For his part, Jerome Groopman emphasized the overwhelming number of foreign researchers in his lab. He described it as "the opposite of outsourcing - it's insourcing."


    Researchers find inspiration in the example of AIDS research, an almost paradigmatic example of heroic, cost-indifferent medicine. By public-health standards, AIDS has received a big share of the nation's medical resources, in large measure thanks to the tireless campaigning of gay Americans who have had the economic clout and cultural sophistication to make their voices heard by decision-makers in the medical establishment and in government. As Dr. Fred Appelbaum, clinical-research director of the Hutchinson Center, pointed out to me, understanding AIDS and then devising treatments for it at first defied the best efforts of research scientists. And though a cure has not yet been found, effective treatments have been - albeit, extremely expensive ones.


    If there is a difference between AIDS research and cancer research, it is that while advances in AIDS came relatively quickly, advances in cancer treatment and, indeed, in the fundamental understanding of how cancer works have come far more slowly than many people expected. Periodically since 1971, when President Nixon declared his war on cancer, the sense that the corner is about to be turned takes hold. We appear to be in such a moment today. The National Cancer Institute has recently put forward ambitious benchmarks for progress in cancer research and treatment. As its director, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, a respected surgeon and a cancer survivor himself (he is also acting head of the Food and Drug Administration), put it recently: "The caterpillar is about to turn into a butterfly. I have never known more enthusiasm among cancer researchers. It's a pivotal moment." The suffering of cancer, he argued, will be well on its way to being alleviated by 2015.


    The media have mostly echoed this optimism. It is not unusual to read about the latest "breakthrough" in cancer treatment, both in terms of understanding the basic biological processes involved and with regard to innovative new drug therapies. On the level of research, there is no doubt that significant progress has been made. Dr. Harold Varmus, the Nobel laureate who now heads Memorial Sloan-Kettering, is emphatic on the subject. "Fifty or 60 years ago," he told me, "we didn't know what genes were. Thirty or so years ago we didn't know what cancer genes were. Twenty years ago we didn't know what human cancer genes were. Ten years ago we didn't have any drugs to inhibit any of these guys. It seems to me we've made an awful lot of progress in one person's lifetime."


    Other research scientists seemed far more pessimistic when I spoke with them. Dr. Lee Hartwell, also a Nobel laureate, is president and director of the Hutchinson Center. He has urged that the focus in cancer treatment shift from drug development to the new disciplines of genomics and, above all, proteomics, the study of human proteins. Though he acknowledged the profound advances in knowledge made over the past two decades, Hartwell emphasized a different question: "How well are we applying our knowledge to the problem? The therapy side of things has been a pretty weak story. There have been advances: we cure most childhood leukemias with chemotherapy, for one thing. But the progress has been surprisingly weak given the huge expenditures that we've made. We're spending over $25 billion a year improving cancer outcomes, if you include the spending of the pharmaceutical companies. So you've got to ask yourself whether this is the right approach."


    The focus needs to be on "diagnostics rather than therapeutics," Hartwell said. "If you catch a cancer at Stage 1 or 2, almost everybody lives. If you catch it at Stage 3 or 4, almost everybody dies. We know from cervical cancer that by screening you can reduce cancer up to 70 percent. We're just not spending enough of our resources working to find markers for early detection."


    Some researchers are even more skeptical. Mark Greene, the John Eckman professor of medical science at the University of Pennsylvania and the scientist whose lab did much of the fundamental work on Herceptin, the first important new type of drug specifically designed to target the proteins in the genes that cause cells to become malignant, agrees with Hartwell. The best way to deal with cancer, he told me, is to "treat early, because basic understanding of advanced cancer is almost nonexistent, and people with advanced cancer do little better now than they did 20 years ago."


    Varmus, who appears to be somewhere in the middle between the optimists and the pessimists, told me that so far the clinical results are mixed. As he put it: "Many cancers are highly treatable. I am optimistic, but I'm not saying, 'Here's when."'


    The irreducible fact is that failure is the clinical oncologist's constant companion. Each of those who treated my mother seemed to have evolved a strategy for coping with this. Stephen Nimer said: "I'd have to be an idiot to think everything I do works. I mean, where have I been the last 20 years? I'm not afraid to fail." Fred Appelbaum put it still more plainly. "You get victories that help balance the losses," he said. "But the losses are very painful."



    Appelbaum's almost studied understatement brought home a question that had recurred through the savage months of my mother's illness and also after her death. I kept wondering how the doctors who were treating her with such determination, against all the odds, could possibly stand swimming in this sea of death that they confronted every day, since they did not have the luxury of pretending, at least to themselves, that they didn't know which of their patients were likely to make it and which were not.


    The question made sense to some. For Nimer, though, it did not. "I prefer 'swimming in a sea of life,"' he said, adding: "I know I'm not going to save everyone, but I don't think of myself as swimming in a sea of death. People who have congestive heart failure, their outcomes are like the worst cancers. People think of it as a cleaner death and cancer as a dirtier death, but that's not the case. I approach things with the question 'What would it be like if I were on the other side?' The first thing is being dependable. I give people a way to always reach me. They're not going to call me frivolously. There's a peace of mind that comes with knowing you can reach a doctor. I think if you have one of these diseases, you know you can die. Before people get to the time of dying, people want to have some hope, some meaning, that there's a chance things can get better."


    And when they don't, Nimer continued, "whatever happens is going to happen. But how about the ride? How rough will it be? If I were dying, the thing I'd worry about most is how much I'm going to suffer. I've had a lot of people die over the years. One thing is to reassure people, 'Look, I'm going to do whatever is humanly possible so that you don't suffer.' We're all going to die, but I'm going to spend just as much time paying attention to your last days as I do at the beginning."


    And with my mother, that is exactly what he did in the moment of her death - one of the many, too many, Nimer has seen. With all due respect to him, if that's not swimming in a sea of death.. . .


    If my mother had imagined herself special, her last illness cruelly exposed the frailty of that conceit. It was merciless in the toll of pain and fear that it exacted. My mother, who feared extinction above all else, was in anguish over its imminence. Shortly before she died, she turned to one of the nurses' aides - a superb woman who cared for her as she would have her own mother - and said, "I'm going to die," and then began to weep. And yet, if her illness was merciless, her death was merciful. About 48 hours before the end, she began to fail, complaining of generalized low-grade pain (possibly indicating that the leukemia was in her bloodstream). Shortly after, she came down with an infection. Given the compromised state of her immune system, the doctors said, there was little chance that her body could stave it off. She remained intermittently lucid for about another day, though her throat was so abraded that she could barely speak audibly and she was confused. I feel she knew I was there, but I am not at all sure. She said she was dying. She asked if she was crazy.


    By Monday afternoon, she had left us, though she was still alive. Pre-terminal, the doctors call it. It was not that she wasn't there or was unconscious. But she had gone to a place deep within herself, to some last redoubt of her being, at least as I imagine it. What she took in I will never know, but she could no longer make much contact, if, indeed, she even wanted to. I and the others who were at her side left around 11 p.m. and went home to get a few hours' sleep. At 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, a nurse called. My mother was failing. When we arrived in her room, we found her hooked up to an oxygen machine. Her blood pressure had already dropped into a perilous zone and was dropping steadily, her pulse was weakening and the oxygen level in her blood was dropping.


    For an hour and a half, my mother seemed to hold her own. Then she began the last step. At 6 a.m., I called Nimer, who came over immediately. He stayed with her throughout her death.


    And her death was easy, as deaths go, in the sense that she was in little pain and little visible anguish. She simply went. First, she took a deep breath; there was a pause of 40 seconds, such an agonizing, open-ended time if you are watching a human being end; then another deep breath. This went on for no more than a few minutes. Then the pause became permanence, the person ceased to be and Nimer said, "She's gone."


    A few days after my mother died, Nimer sent me an e-mail message. "I think about Susan all the time," he wrote. And then he added, "We have to do better."


    David Rieff is a contributing writer for the magazine.










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    Wednesday, December 07, 2005







    A Violin Doctor




    Ed Alcock for The New York Times

    “You are like a doctor doing a verification of the health of the instrument, to see if all is in place.”
    - ÉTIENNE VATELOT


    December 3, 2005


    The Saturday Profile

    A Violin Doctor in Sync With the Strings




    PARIS


    IT was the 1980's and the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was performing at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. "He played an encore, and I'm sitting in the orchestra and I said to my wife, 'Something happened to his violin,' said Étienne Vatelot, one of the world's great violin restorers, warming to the story.


    After the concert Mr. Vatelot asked Mr. Menuhinwhy the sound was different during the concert and the encore. "He laughed and explained that he had two Stradivari with him in the dressing room," Mr. Vatelot said. "He used one for the concert, but when he came out for the encore he accidentally picked up the second."


    As Mr. Vatelot spoke, he cradled with a trembling hand the top of an 18th-century violin that appeared to have been stepped on by a high-heel shoe. "I come in every day," he said, a smile curling his lip, "but I can no longer do certain things that require a steady hand."


    So four younger violin restorers sat around him tapping, sawing and shaving in a mad jumble of rusted tools, varnish pots and, of course, stringed instruments whose bodies lay about like tortoise shells.


    Certainly a steady hand was one of the attributes, along with a passion for musical instruments, that helped Mr. Vatelot, 80, become one of the leading luthiers, as makers, restorers and dealers of stringed instruments are called. But what keeps him in the business is above all a keen ear for the qualities of a violin and a physician's diagnostic skill for analyzing what may be wrong with it. For more than half a century, virtuoso violinists and cellists from around the world have brought their instruments to him to be fixed, tuned and generally brought back to life. Along the way, he has helped revive a craft in France that nearly disappeared in the decades after World War II.


    Mr. Vatelot was born in Mirecourt, known as "the city of violins," the son of a violin maker and the great-great-grandson of a guitar maker. "There were 1,000 violin makers in a city of 6,000," he said.


    In 1909 his father, Marcel Vatelot, moved to Paris to open a workshop in the central Rue Portalis, in the rooms still used by Mr. Vatelot. Marcel Vatelot gained entry into Parisian musical circles through his wife, Jehane, the daughter of a noted cellist of the time, André Hekking. Their circle included the composer Maurice Ravel. Later, Marcel Vatelot sent his son to Mirecourt and to New York, where he worked with Rembert Wurlitzer, who ran the foremost violin restoration shop in America, to learn the craft.


    While Marcel Vatelot was respected, he was not nearly as gifted as his son, who soon eclipsed him. It was just after 1950 that the great soloists began to beat a path to Mr. Vatelot's door. "I had particularly at heart the search for the why of a tone, and the modifying of a tone," he said. "This permitted me to have a clientele of great soloists, Pablo Casals, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern."


    BUT business was slow in those years. "Classical music was not fashionable, the business was reduced to some old amateurs," Mr. Vatelot said, seated in his office surrounded by violins and photos of great soloists who entrusted their instruments to him and became his friends: the cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, the violinists Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh and Ivry Gitlis.


    So with the filmmaker Claude Santelli, who produced a moving documentary on violin restoration, and with the cooperation of soloists like Mr. Menuhin and the violinist Arthur Grumiaux, Mr. Vatelot labored on a project to establish a school for young luthiers in Mirecourt. "At the start I was at pains to find five apprentices," he said, a twinkle in his lively eyes. "Now, there are 200," he said, lumping together current students and graduates.


    As prices for violins soared in the decades after the war the business became lucrative, but Mr. Vatelot poured much of what he made back into his craft. In 1975 he founded the Marcel Vatelot Foundation to give scholarships to apprentice violin makers from disadvantaged families. But his greatest gift remains his passion for music and ability to diagnose what ails any stringed instrument, but particularly a violin, and to prescribe treatment. "If someone comes in with a Stradivarior a Guarneri, he comes in and checks it out," said the conductor David Stern, whose father, Isaac, was a regular client and close friend of Mr. Vatelot's.


    Isaac Stern normally took his violins to the New York violin maker René Morel, but at least once a year he would visit Mr. Vatelot in Paris. On one occasion, when Mr. Vatelot coaxed him to say what he thought was wrong with his instrument (he played aGuarneri), Mr. Stern replied, "Étienne, you know better than I do!"


    He believes there is a tonality that fits the violinist's personality, so he tries when possible to hear the violinist in concert. (In fact, he still maintains his lifetime practice of attending violin concerts virtually every night of the week.) Failing that, he will have the violinist play in his workshop and, on occasion, will play the instrument himself.


    "I may find the instrument is whistling a bit, or is not quite in form," he said. "It can be due to several things. First of all the humidity, if the instrument is too dry, or too humid. In Indonesia, for example, there is very high humidity. Secondly, if the tone is bad you do various tests."


    He may order the violin cleaned or, if there is damage to the wood, repaired; the finger board, usually made of soft ebony wood, may be uneven and in need of being sanded down. He may adjust the tension of the strings, the angle of the bridge, the tiny wood piece that supports the strings. He may adjust by fractions of an inch the sound post, the slender wedge of wood inside the violin that the French call l'âme, or the soul, of the violin, for its crucial role in creating the tone.


    MR. VATELOT has often compared his activity to that of a physician, diagnosing an illness and prescribing the remedy. "You are like a doctor doing a verification of the health of the instrument, to see if all is in place," he said. "In general, a soloist is like other people: he doesn't want to change doctors. He chooses a violin maker and keeps his confidence in him."


    Which may explain why, when friends celebrated Mr. Vatelot's birthday in November with a concert at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the guests included the virtuoso violin soloists Salvatore Accardo and Anne-Sophie Mutter, in addition to the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim.


    Mr. Vatelot has handed over the day-to-day running of the shop to Jean-Jacques Rampal, the son of the virtuoso flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, who was a close friend of Mr. Vatelot's. The younger Mr. Rampal said that with the exception of Mr. Rostropovich, Mr. Vatelot's musical generation is almost gone. "It's sad for him," Mr. Rampal said. "It was his faithful universe."


    For the time being, Mr. Vatelot says, he will continue coming to the workshop every day. Pointing to an overstuffed armchair in his office, he said: "In 1959 my father handed over his workshop to me. Every afternoon he would sit in that armchair and he would say, 'I want to die gazing at the restoration of violins.' "







     







    Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror




    Roland Quadrini/Reuters

    Jean-Michel Dubernard, right, and Bernard Devauchelle explained how they performed the first partial face transplant today in Lyon, France.

    December 3, 2005
    Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror
    By CRAIG S. SMITH

    LYON, France, Dec. 2 - The world's first person to wear a new face awoke Monday, 24 hours after her operation in the northern city of Amiens, and looked in the mirror.

    The swollen nose, lips and chin she saw there were not her own - those had been ripped from her head by her pet Labrador in May - but for the 38-year-old woman, whose face had become a raw, lipless grimace, they were close enough. She took a pen and paper and wrote for the doctors, "Merci."

    On Friday, those doctors defended their rush to give the woman a partial face transplant just months after her disfigurement, despite the enormous risks of death and psychological difficulties. They dismissed objections that they were bent on glory at the expense of the patient, whose identity is being withheld at her request.

    "We are doctors," said Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the transplant team and who helped carry out the first hand transplant in Lyon seven years ago. "We had a patient with a very severe disfigurement that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repair with classic surgery."

    In a news conference at Édouard-Herriot Hospital in Lyon, where the patient was transferred for monitoring of immunosuppressive therapy that will continue throughout her life, the doctors explained how the woman's gruesome wounds almost immediately made her a candidate for the world's first face transplant. They heatedly denied local news reports that quoted her estranged teenage daughter as saying she was suicidal, raising questions about whether she was psychologically stable enough for the operation.

    Dr. Dubernard has faced such accusations before. Clint Hallam, the man he selected for the world's first hand transplant, refused to keep up with the lifelong drug regimen required to suppress immune responses, along with regular exercises to train the new hand. After three years he had the hand removed.

    According to Dr. Dubernard, the woman had quarreled with her daughter one evening in May at her home in the northern city of Valenciennes, and the daughter had left to spend the night at her grandmother's.

    The woman was agitated, he said, and took a sleeping pill. At some point during the night, he said, she arose and stumbled through the house, encountering the dog.

    Local news reports have suggested that the woman, who is divorced, fell unconscious and that the dog chewed and clawed her face in an attempt to revive her. But Dr. Dubernard said the dog had been adopted from the local pound and was known to be aggressive. The dog has since been destroyed.

    Shortly after the woman's injury, Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, head of face and jaw surgery at Amiens University Hospital, decided that the woman was a candidate for a partial face transplant and sent an urgent request for help in locating a donor to the French Biomedicine Agency, which oversees the allocation of organs for transplant in France. The window for a successful transplant was narrow, the doctors said, because the wound was developing scar tissue.

    Dr. Benoît Lengelé, a Belgian surgeon who assisted in the transplant, said the woman would have required at least three or four traditional plastic surgery operations to rebuild her face with skin flaps from other parts of her body, but the results would never have been aesthetically or functionally satisfactory.

    Meanwhile, the woman's injury had made it difficult for her to talk or even drink and eat, because food and liquid spilled easily from her mouth. The doctors said her ability to open her jaw was also progressively diminishing as her wounded tissue stiffened. In July, Dr. Devauchelle consulted with Dr. Dubernard, who visited the woman in early August.

    "The moment she removed her mask, which she always wore, I had no more hesitation," Dr. Dubernard said Friday.

    No information was given about the donor, a brain-dead woman whose anonymity is protected by law. She was located on Saturday at a hospital in the northern city of Lille, 85 miles from Amiens.

    Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by next of kin is not normally required. But given the delicacy of the case, the donor's family was consulted about the possible harvesting of part of the donor's face during the initial interviews that are undertaken to ensure that the deceased had not given instructions preventing organ donations.

    A special team of psychologists worked with the family on Saturday afternoon as the doctors involved were notified that a potential donor had been found. By midnight Saturday, Dr. Devauchelle, who led the surgical team, was in Lille to begin harvesting the face while another team of surgeons in snowy Amiens began removing scar tissue from the patient in preparation for the transplant.

    Harvesting of the face was complicated by the convergence of several teams to remove other organs from the donor, but the operation was complete by 5 a.m. Sunday. Before the donor's funeral, a separate team of doctors reconstructed her face with a silicone prosthesis made from a cast taken before the dissection.

    "The restoration was remarkable," Carine Camby, the director of the French Biomedicine Agency, said of the prosthesis. Dr. Devauchelle rushed to Amiens with the patch of face, chilled in a saline solution to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and began the transplant, starting with microsurgery to connect the blood vessels feeding the face. Dr. Devauchelle said blood circulation to the transplanted portion was restored at 9 a.m. Sunday, four hours after it had been severed from the donor.

    The operation continued into Sunday afternoon as a team of eight surgeons connected muscle and nerves "as fine as the fibers hanging from a string bean," Dr. Dubernard said. Finally they sewed up the skin and mucous membranes of the mouth, working 15 hours in all. As they were cleaning the woman's face and preparing bandages, silence fell over the operating room.

    "The result was beyond our expectation," said Dr. Lengelé, part of the surgical team. "It was marvelous."

    A nurse asked if they might applaud, and when one of the doctors nodded, the nurses began to clap.

    By Friday morning, the woman was eating and drinking and speaking clearly, the doctors said. Though she does not yet have muscular control or feeling in the transplanted portion of her face, she is able to open and stretch her mouth with the facial muscles that had remained intact.

    The doctors said it would be months before they knew how much, if any, feeling or motor control she would have in the graft, though they said the swelling had already begun to recede and her appearance was relatively normal.

    "There is only a thin scar running around the transplanted area," said Dr. Lengelé, adding that the patient had already showed signs of psychologically accepting the transplant, saying Thursday, "This is my face."

    The doctors stressed that the appearance was determined as much by the underlying bone structure as by the features of the skin, but added that the donor's skin color, texture and thickness presented a "stunning" match to the recipient's. If the transplant is ultimately successful, they said, the woman will look neither exactly as she did before nor like her donor.

    "It will be a new face," Dr. Devauchelle said.

    A patch of tissue taken from the donor's forearm and transplanted under the woman's arm will allow doctors to monitor the body's response to the graft without having to take scarring biopsies from her face. The doctors said the woman had already passed the period when thrombosis, or blood clots, presented the greatest risk to her life, but that the most critical time for a possible rejection of the graft would come in the next week.

    Dr. Dubernard said he had already injected stem cells from the donor's bone marrow into the patient in an attempt to enhance her body's tolerance of the transplanted tissue. After reviewing successful hand transplants, he theorized that cells produced by the marrow of the donor's hands were the critical element in the operation's success. He added that another "infusion" of the donor's bone marrow stem cells would be given to the patient on the 11th day after the transplant. The transplant did not include bone.

    As with all transplants, the doctors said, there was about a 33 percent risk of death, a 33 percent risk that the body will reject the graft and only a 33 percent chance that the transplant will prove successful. Surgical teams in other countries, including the United States, are closely watching the outcome before proceeding with face transplants they are planning.

    "We think of all the people who have been disfigured to whom we could give new hope," Dr. Dubernard said.

    Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting from New York for this article.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



     







    Blast in Falluja Kills 10 Marines; 11 Are Wounded



    December 3, 2005


    By JOHN F. BURNS



    BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 2 - A year after marines led an American assault force in recapturing Falluja, 10 marines conducting a foot patrol on the edge of the city were killed at dusk Thursday by a bomb fashioned from several large artillery shells.


    Eleven other marines were wounded in the blast, the worst in a drumbeat of insurgent attacks on American troops in and around Falluja that never ceased after the Nov. 2004 offensive there that cost 60 American marines and soldiers their lives.


    Details of the Falluja bombing were sparse, with the Marine Corps' command officially holding to a policy of releasing few facts about the circumstances of combat deaths in their statement on Friday.


    But an American official in Falluja said Friday that the attack that killed the 10 marines occurred at or near an abandoned factory on a peninsula that juts into the Euphrates River on the city's western edge, an area that was the target of the first Marine attack in the eight-day offensive last November that reduced much of Falluja to rubble.


    The official, who asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the attack, said the Marine unit that suffered the casualties had only recently been moved to the area.


    The high casualty toll in the Falluja bomb attack brought to 205 the total number of American combat deaths in the western desert province of Anbar in the last nine months, since a major rotation of Marine units there that handed much of the fighting to the Second Marine Division, according to figures supplied by the Marines.


    Marine combat deaths in the province, west of Baghdad, heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, have been proportionally the highest of any American units in Iraq. According to the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count, a nonprofit organization that tracks American military deaths on its Web site, 2,127 American servicemen and women have died, including the 10 marines, since the invasion 32 months ago.


    The worst American losses in Anbar this year, before Thursday's bombing, involved a Marine helicopter that crashed in poor visibility, killing 31 marines at Rutba, near the Jordanian border, in January; and a roadside bombing that killed 14 marines in an amphibious troop carrier near the western town of Haditha in August.


    With the death toll in the Falluja attack, the number of announced American military deaths across Iraq in the 72 hours ending at midnight Friday rose to 18, including two marines killed by small-arms fire on Wednesday who belonged to the same unit struck by the bomb attack on Thursday, Regimental Combat Team Eight of the Second Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.


    In their statement on the Falluja bombing, the Marines said 7 of the 11 wounded men had returned to duty.


    A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said President Bush had been informed of the Falluja attack on Thursday and briefed again on the incident on Friday. "We are saddened by the loss of lives, whether it is one soldier who loses his or her life, or 10 or 11," Mr. McClellan said.


    "Our hearts and prayers go out to their families, their loved ones," he said. "We are forever grateful for their service and sacrifice."


    Other new deaths announced Friday included a soldier serving alongside Marine units in Ramadi, 50 miles west of Falluja, who was killed by rocket fire on Thursday, and three soldiers who died in a vehicle accident on Friday near the American air base at Balad, north of Baghdad.


    The only other area of Iraq where the Americans have suffered casualties on a similar scale, proportionally, has been in and around Baghdad, 25 miles east of Falluja. The American force that controls security in the capital region, known as Task Force Baghdad, with a somewhat larger force than the American military presence in Anbar, has had more than 225 service members killed since February. Many of those deaths have been from troops serving with the Third Infantry Division, the largest component of the Baghdad garrison.


    The peninsula where the bombing occurred Thursday lies at the western end of the steel trestle bridge where insurgents hung charred bodies taken from an attack in the center of Falluja in March 2004 that killed four American security guards, an incident that prompted a first, aborted American military attempt to recapture the city from insurgents who had made it their principal bastion in Iraq.


    The second offensive, eight months later, was the most relentless American attack against the insurgents. It ended with American forces in control of the largely devastated city, but with many of its 300,000 residents having fled.


    American commanders said their forces had killed 1,200 insurgents in that offensive, while taking more than 500 American casualties. But insurgent groups said later that many of their fighters had left the city for Ramadi, Mosul and other insurgent strongholds before the American assault.


    Under a pledge to rebuild the city and compensate those who lost their homes, the Americans have spent about $100 million. But insurgents who never left under the American bombardment, or who infiltrated back through the tight cordon that American and Iraqi troops have thrown around the city, have kept up a steady stream of attacks, including suicide bombings, roadside explosions and assassinations of Iraqi government officials and others who have drawn the insurgents' wrath.


    Earlier this week, a leading cleric in Falluja, Hamza Abbas al-Issawi, 70, considered the city's grand imam, who had urged Sunni Arabs to defy the insurgents and vote in the Dec. 15 elections for a full four-year national government, was shot and killed. He had received insurgent death threats in recent months.


    Tensions appeared to be rising ahead of the election, when American and Iraqi officials are hoping for a repeat of the October constitutional referendum, when 170,000 votes were cast in Falluja, the strongest turnout of any Sunni Arab area in Iraq. Iraqi election officials calculated that 80 percent of the votes were against the constitution, but celebrated the fact that the city had chosen to take part in the political process.


    In Falluja's mosques, angry residents have vowed in recent days to avenge the clerics' killings by hunting down Islamic extremists loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America's most-wanted man in Iraq. The anger spread on Friday to fiery condemnations at the main weekly prayers at two of Baghdad's most militant Sunni Arab mosques.


    At the Mother of All Battles Mosque in the west of the city, the preacher, Sheik Ali Abu Hassan, called the killers "murderers" and said believers should respond by voting in large numbers. At the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the eastern Adhamiya district, a stronghold of support for Iraq's ousted ruler, Saddam Hussein, the preacher, Sheik Ahmad al-Samarrai, said, "The election is both legitimate and necessary, and your duty to vote is heavier than a mountain."


    In another threat of violence by the insurgents, a new videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera satellite television on Friday evening threatened to kill four Western Christian peace activists kidnapped in Baghdad last Saturday, one of them an American, unless all insurgent prisoners held in American and Iraqi detention centers are released.


    Al Jazeera said a statement accompanying the tape, from a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, gave the two governments until Dec. 8 to meet the demand. The American hostage, Tom Fox, 54, from Clearbrook, Va., was abducted with two Canadians and a Briton, all men.


    In the new tape, the four men appeared frightened, and two, Mr. Fox and Norman Kember, 74, from London, were shown speaking to the camera, without sound, according to a Reuters report. Al Jazeera, quoting from the kidnappers' statement, said they were appealing for American and British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.


    Reuters said that a separate sequence showed the two Canadians, James Loney, 41, of Toronto, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, eating what appeared to be Middle Eastern sweets.


    The United States, Britain and Canada have reaffirmed policies of not negotiating with hostage takers.






     







    The Right Price for Digital Music




    The Right Price for Digital Music
    Why 99 cents per song is too much, and too little.
    By Adam L. Penenberg
    Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 5:46 PM ET




    In the early 1900s, jazz musicians refused to record phonograph records because they feared rivals would cop their best licks. We can laugh at their shortsightedness, but it's reminiscent of today's music industry, which is so afraid of piracy it still hasn't figured out how to incorporate digital downloads into a sustainable business model. Each year record companies ship about 800 million compact discs—nearly 10 billion songs. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the 13 billion songs that were available (according to download tracker BigChampagne) for free on peer-to-peer networks in 2004.



    The one bright spot for the industry has been Apple's iTunes store, which has sold 600 million songs since 2003, accounting for 80 percent of legal downloads in the United States. Piracy is clearly here to stay, but as iTunes has shown, the record companies' best strategy is to provide an easy-to-use service that offers music downloads at a fair price. But what price is "fair"? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver—4 cents—while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more. One option is a tiered pricing model, with the most popular tunes selling for as much as $3. After all, the music honchos reason, people pay up to $3 for cell-phone ring tones, mere snippets of songs.


    Steve Jobs, who has been willing to take a few pennies per download so long as he sells bushels of iPods, calls tiered pricing "greedy." That view is shared by millions of consumers who believe the record companies have been gouging them for years. From the buyer's perspective, however, Apple's 99-cents-for-everything model isn't perfect. Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?


    What we need is a system that will continue to pack the corporate coffers yet be fair to music lovers. The solution: a real-time commodities market that combines aspects of Apple's iTunes, Nasdaq, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Priceline, and eBay.


    Here's how it would work: Songs would be priced strictly on demand. The more people who download the latest Eminem single, the higher the price will go. The same is true in reverse—the fewer people who buy a song, the lower the price goes. Music prices would oscillate like stocks on Nasdaq, with the current cost pegged to up-to-the-second changes in the number of downloads. In essence, this is a pure free-market solution—the market alone would determine price.


    Since millions of tunes sit on servers waiting to be downloaded, the vast majority of them quite obscure, sellers would benefit because it would create increased demand for music that would otherwise sit unpurchased. If a single climbed to $5, consumers couldn't complain that it costs too much, since they would be the ones driving up the price. And enthusiasts of low-selling genres would rejoice, since songs with limited appeal—John Coltrane Quartet pieces from the early 1960s, for example—would be priced far below 99 cents.


    The technology for such a real-time music market already exists. The stock exchanges keep track of hundreds of millions of transactions every day and calculate each stock to the quarter-penny in real-time. Banks are able to do the same with hundreds of millions of ATM withdrawals. A music market would actually be much simpler. When a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange buys soybean futures, he has to take into account weather, crop yields, supplies in other parts of the world, and the overall economy. On the Digital Music Exchange, there is only one input: demand.


    The interface could look something like Apple's iTunes, where users search for songs they want. One important addition would be a ticker that calculates the number of times a track has been downloaded. Click on the icon to see how much it costs right now. Click again and you freeze the price—we'll give you something like 90 seconds to make up your mind—and make the purchase. If you buy a track for $1, that doesn't necessarily mean the price goes up for the next person. Just like on the stock market, it might take a lot of transactions to move the market. Another potential feature, stolen from Priceline: If you tell the system how much you're willing to pay for the new 50 Cent single—say, less than 50 cents—it could send you an e-mail alert when the market is willing to meet your price.


    This is all really just a corollary to Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory. In the material world, stores sell goods that generate a satisfactory return on the space they eat up. According to Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, your run-of-the-mill record store has to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to compensate for the half-inch of space it takes up on the shelf. But in the digital realm, there is no shelf space. Infinite amounts of product are available. Instead of a hit-driven culture, we experience what a friend of mine calls "an embarrassment of niches." A record company doesn't have to depend on one album to rack up sales of 5 million. They can make the same money selling 500 copies of 10,000 different titles, or, for that matter, 5 copies of 1 million titles.


    Of course, there are modest fixed costs associated with this pricing model: bandwidth, servers, office space, electricity, and the salaries of people who maintain the business. That means there would have to be a price floor, perhaps 25 cents a song. But each obscure indie rock or klezmer song that gets sold for a quarter is almost pure profit, and the bargain-basement price would induce people to download even more tunes.


    The big wild card here is the impact of illegal file sharing. David Blackburn, a doctoral student at Harvard, has argued that peer-to-peer systems increase demand for less popular recordings but dampen sales of hits. If that's the case, charging extra for top sellers might just push legal downloaders back into the outlaw world of peer-to-peer file trading. If that happens, perhaps the record companies will start offering free digital downloads of top-100 hits (with ads embedded inside, of course), while charging whatever the market will bear for the rest. A Digital Music Exchange may not be a perfect solution, but who would you prefer to set the price of music: consumers or record executives?


    Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the school's department of journalism. You can e-mail him at penenberg@yahoo.com.



     







    Today's Papers


    Show and Trial
    By Eric Umansky
    Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 3:25 AM ET


    The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox and New York Times lead with a double suicide attack at Baghdad police academy that killed about 30 people. The Los Angeles Times leads with Saddam's trial, where one woman recalled her torture after having been tossed in Abu Ghraib at 16 years old. "They forced me to take off my clothes," she said. "They lifted my legs up and beat me with cables." The LAT notes that, for a second day, a prosecution witness seemed to be on shaky ground. Her testimony "veered seamlessly from her own experiences to stories apparently picked up from relatives or friends. Her account was long on dramatic flourishes and short on detail." The Washington Post's top nonlocal coverage also goes with Saddam's trial but focuses on the former dictator's habit of playing to the crowd. "America wants to execute Saddam Hussein," said Saddam Hussein. "It is not the first time." USA Today leads with the Energy Department projecting that home heating bills will be up about 25 percent from last year.


    The first police-academy bomber—who was inside the heavily guarded grounds—hit as police were gathering for roll call. The Post says cops then went running for the protection of blast walls, where another bomber was waiting and exploded.


    The NYT says the attacks "showed that the insurgents have infiltrated the deepest levels of the Iraqi forces." At the least, they got through a heckuva lot of security. "At each checkpoint, there is a thorough search," said one police trainer who was wounded. "Every man has to raise up his shirt to show there are no explosive belts, and it's the same for women."


    In other Iraq news, Arab TV stations received footage of what appears to be another American hostage, a 40-year-old security contractor. Meanwhile, 11 Iraqi (Sunni?) men were found handcuffed and shot in the head west of Baghdad.


    The WP and NYT front a federal jury acquitting a Florida professor of conspiring to aid Palestinian terror groups. The case was the first terrorism prosecution to rely on material based on loosened subpoena rules from the Patriot Act. The Post plays up the Patriot angle: "FLA. PROFESSOR IS ACQUITTED IN CASE SEEN AS PATRIOT ACT TEST." The paper says in the first paragraph that the decision deals the U.S. "a setback in its efforts to use secretly gathered intelligence" for terrorism cases. Except maybe not so much. According to one juror, the verdicts were based on the facts in the case itself. "I didn't see the evidence," he said. How exactly is that a comment one way or the other on the Patriot Act? (Of course, it may end up being a "setback" to the law if the coverage consistently portrays the verdict as such.)


    A day after seriously subpar coverage of Secretary of State Rice's (disingenuous) defense of the U.S.'s treatment of al-Qaida suspects—coverage bemoaned in yesterday's TP—the NYT comes back with strong second-day play. Right up at the top, the Times notes that Rice was "pelted with questions about covert prisons and a mistaken, secret arrest. ... she declined to answer most of them." More important, the NYT reverses its credulous reading of Rice's insistence that the U.S. does "not condone torture" and that the U.S. is following American law to a T. As today's Times notes:



    The American definition of torture is in some cases at variance with international conventions, and the administration has maintained in recent years that American law does not apply to prisoners held abroad.


    The NYT fronts the Supreme Court's skeptical hearing yesterday of a challenge to a law that withholds federal money from universities that don't allow military recruiters in. Many law schools have kept recruiters out, arguing they don't want to be complicit in the military's anti-gay policies. The Supremes were not sympathetic. "It seems to me quite a simple matter for the law schools to have a disclaimer on all of their e-mails and advertisements that say the law school does not approve, and in fact, disapproves of the policies of some of the employers who you will meet," said Justice Kennedy. "That's the end of it."


    Knocking Heds …
    The NYT: "AMID PARTY STRUGGLES, HOUSE REPUBLICANS SAY THEY WON'T MOVE TO FILL DELAY POST"


    The WP: "LIKELIHOOD OF BATTLE INCREASING OVER DELAY'S FUTURE AS LEADER"


    Customer-service segment! TP occasionally uses newspaper jargon—"reefering," for example, is not a synonym for "hotboxing." Here's a Slate glossary of TP terms. It is a bit Clinton-era. So, we're about to update it. If there is any other TP jargon that leaves you wondering, let us know.

    Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

     







    In Debate Over Safety, No Neutral Corner




    Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press
    Dr. Margaret Goodman quit as chief ringside doctor in Nevada over concerns about efforts to protect boxers.

    December 3, 2005
    In Debate Over Safety, No Neutral Corner
    By GEOFFREY GRAY

    In the last decade, Dr. Margaret Goodman, a neurologist in Las Vegas, has developed a reputation as one of the most aggressive ringside doctors in the country. Boxing promoters have criticized her for stopping fights too soon, while fellow regulators have praised her efforts to make an inherently violent sport safer.

    But for tonight's middleweight championship rematch between Jermain Taylor and Bernard Hopkins, Goodman will not make her customary check-ups between rounds. If she monitors the fight at all, it will be from home, on television.

    After two deaths and two career-ending injuries to boxers in Nevada this year, Goodman resigned as the state's chief ringside doctor. She made the decision after months of infighting among colleagues at the Nevada State Athletic Commissionand ringside doctors over adopting more stringent safety measures, she said. She remained as chairman of the commission's Medical Advisory Board, which periodically reviews boxers' medical issues.

    "If our job is to give these boxers the best medical care we can, we need to be doing a much better job," Goodman said in a recent telephone interview. "How many deaths does it take for us to start taking this stuff seriously?"

    Marc Ratner, executive director of the boxing commission, called Goodman "one of the best ringside doctors in the world," but he declined to comment on her resignation.

    The commission, based in Las Vegas, regulates the biggest and most lucrative boxing matches in the country. And while the commission has developed a reputation as a leading regulatory agency, requiring boxers to submit to a battery of medical tests, the deaths and injuries have prompted officials to review their procedures.

    In Las Vegas bouts last spring, Leopoldo Gonzalez, a 22-year-old bantamweight from Tijuana, Mexico, sustained a career-ending subdural hematoma, as did William Abelyan, a 27-year-old featherweight from Armenia.

    But the deaths of Martin Sanchez, a 26-year-old featherweight from Mexico City, after a bout on July 1, and Leavander Johnson,a 35-year-old lightweight, after losing a title fight on Sept. 17, were the real catalysts to action.

    The commission's internal review of Sanchez's death concluded that all regulations had been followed. Yet Sanchez's medical records, on file with the commission and obtained by The New York Times, contained several red flags.

    His boxing application, filled out at the weigh-in in Nevada before the fight, stated his height as 5 feet 9 inches. The mandatory form for a physical examination, conducted by Dr. Ramon Cruz in Tijuana two days before the fight, listed it as 6-1.

    Several questions about Sanchez's history were left blank on the form: How many knockouts had he suffered? What was the date of the last knockout? What was the longest duration of unconsciousness?

    And Sanchez never signed the forms for his physical and eye exams.

    "It's nonacceptable," Dr. Michael Schwartz, president of the American Association of Professional Ringside Physicians, said in a recent telephone interview. "If the fighter isn't signing the forms, how do you know he's taking the test?"

    Cruz did not return calls.

    Jeff Grmoja, the director of Guilty Boxing, which promoted Sanchez's match and submitted his medical records, declined to comment.

    Sanchez had never boxed in the United States, as was the case with three of the six boxers who died in Nevada in the past decade. Although some states do not accept medical records from doctors in Mexico, Ratner said in a telephone interview that it would be unfair to disqualify all of their tests.

    In Sanchez's case, Ratner said, the most important signature on the medical form was the doctor's. He added that Sanchez appeared to be "as healthy as could be," despite trying to lose several pounds shortly before the match.

    Relatives of Sanchez in Mexico City said in telephone interviews through an interpreter that he never had health problems. Martin Sanchez Sr., the boxer's father, said the family was seeking to sue the state of Nevada.

    After Johnson died in September, Ratner said, the boxing commission formed a five-member panel to investigate the recent deaths in the hopes of proposing reforms. The panel, the Advisory Committee on Boxer Health and Safety, is expected to release its findings next spring.

    The safety committee is led by Sig Rogich, the Republican consultant and fund-raiser who is a former chairman of the boxing commission. Boxing regulators have criticized the safety panel because every member has links to the boxing commissioners in Nevada or has political ties to the state's Republican governor, Kenny Guinn, who appoints the commissioners.

    Tim Lueckenhoff, president of the Association of Boxing Commissions, a consortium of the nation's boxing regulators, said in a telephone interview that the makeup of the safety committee did little to address boxer safety.

    "What this panel means is that Nevada could care less about their boxers," Lueckenhoff said. "It just seems like one of these feel-good things where you come out with a report, make a little splash in the newspapers, then everybody goes back to business as usual."

    Raymond Avansino Jr., the chairman of the commission, said in a telephone interview that members of the safety panel were familiar with boxing's nuances and were qualified to hear from independent experts and propose reforms.

    Last month, Guinn came under additional criticism by boxing regulators for replacing Dr. Edwin Homansky, a longtime companion of Goodman's who has also worked as a ringside doctor in Nevada for more than two decades, with Theodore Day, a businessman in Reno.

    "The governor just felt like he wanted a change, someone with a fresh perspective," said Steve George, a spokesman for Guinn.

    Day said his close relationship with Guinn was the motivating factor behind his appointment. According to campaign records, he contributed $9,750 to Guinn's 2002 campaign, while Homansky gave $1,500 and Goodman $1,000.

    "Boxing has a major financial impact on the state, and I'm a major financial man in the state," said Day, chairman of Dacole Company, an investment firm.

    Day said a background in business is more important for a boxing commissioner than a background in medicine.

    "If I need some help from doctors and the safety people, I can find those people, but it's a lot harder to find a qualified businessman," he said.

    If doctors, trainers or boxers have concerns about the way the state regulates matches or ideas about how officials can limit injuries, Avansino said, the safety panel will address them and propose reforms.

    "We're taking a wide-open look at everything we do here," Avansino said.

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    Austin-Healey 100




    Frank Schott for The New York Times

    October 9, 2005
    Auto Biography
    By BRIAN FARNHAM

    When it was first introduced to the world at the London Motor Show in 1952, the Austin-Healey 100 caused a rock-star-like commotion. A mean two-seat roadster with a folding windscreen, carved "tumblehome" sides and a grille as finely slotted as a whale's baleen, the 100 took its name from the fact that the little "four banger" engine could do 100 miles per hour. Then, as now, people who didn't know a camshaft from a carburetor took one look at its jazzy Italian-influenced design and felt a sense of longing.

    That's especially true for the glass artist Dale Chihuly. He got his first 100 under terrible circumstances - he inherited a 1956 model from his brother, who died in a Navy-Air Force training accident. Youth being youth, Chihuly sold the car a few years later, when he was 19, and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta turned his head. Other automotive love affairs would follow, none as passionate as the one he began with Aston Martin: at one point he owned 28 of them. But he is now down to this 1954 Austin-Healey 100M.
    He spent $15,000 on the car and another $30,000 to return it to its Eisenhower-era perfection. The "M" means his 100 is the more rare LeMans edition: 110 horsepower and a beautiful louvered hood with leather straps. He drives it only a couple of times a year because, as he admits, "I'm much more involved with the aesthetic than I am with the mechanical part of it."

    The relationship between man and sports car will always be complicated. A serious car accident in 1976 left Chihuly blind in his left eye, but that still didn't douse his automotive obsession. The 100M's perfect design makes it feel paradoxically frozen in time even while it's racing down the highway. "I just love a beautiful car," Chihuly says. "I can't explain it."[?][?][?]Brian Farnham

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  • Losing the Battle for European Hearts and Minds




    REUTERS
    US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice points the way for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

    Letter from Berlin

    Losing the Battle for European Hearts and Minds

    By Marc Young

    US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had hoped her visit to Berlin would mark a new start to German-American ties, but her trip has been completely overshadowed by concerns about secret CIA flights. Has America just lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Europe?


    Condoleezza Rice's first visit to Berlin after German Chancellor Angela Merkel took office was originally intended to be a rather harmless and straightforward affair. Following the trans-Atlantic discord of the Gerhard Schröder era, Merkel has repeatedly said she wishes to make improving relations with Washington a priority of her new government.

    But Tuesday's joint press conference by Rice and Merkel was never going to be the pleasant affair both women had probably hoped it would be. Growing German concerns -- more from the press and the public than the government -- about the actions of US intelligence agencies across Europe made the possibility of simple consultations and a happy photo op afterwards impossible.

    Following weeks of increasing evidence that the CIA has been using several European airports as transit stations for flights with terror suspects aboard, pressure has been building for Berlin to clarify the scope Washington's so-called "extraordinary renditions" program. But in recent days it's become increasingly clear that both the current and previous German governments have been privy to what the spooks from Langley have been up to for years.

    Specifically, former German interior minister Otto Schily was informed by the US ambassador to Berlin about the wrongful abduction by US intelligence services of a Lebanese-born German citizen, Khaled al-Masri. Detained in Macedonia, he was taken to a jail in Afghanistan and held for five months without evidence of any wrongdoing before being released.

    Though Rice on Tuesday studiously avoided admitting that the United States was wrong to kidnap Masri, Washington was unwittingly outed by a seemingly careless Merkel. "We spoke about that one case and the US government accepted that it has made a mistake," Merkel said plainly, as Rice listened stony-faced to the English translation of her comments.

    But that slip aside, US officials can generally be pleased with what Merkel said to the press corps in an extremely packed corner of Berlin's massive chancellery. As masses of journalists, photographers and TV crews all jockeyed for position, Germany's new chancellor made clear she was backing the way Washington is prosecuting its global war on terror. She spoke of "new threats" and "finding balance" between combating unconventional enemies and the laws and standards of free societies -- all very similar to the official Bush administration line.

    "My foreign policy will have a very clear compass," Merkel said, explaining her intention to align Berlin closer with Washington.

    If that appears like an abrupt shift compared to the sometimes seemingly anti-American course of her predecessor Schröder, it shouldn't. The revelations that Berlin kept quiet about the Masri case make clear that there has long been tacit approval of the methods used by the US intelligence communities.

    On Tuesday, Rice justified using controversial measures to protect the citizens of both America and Europe from terrorism. "We will use any means to do so," Rice said, reiterating, however, that the United States would not condone torture or anything that contravened US or international law.

    Losing hearts and minds

    That the secretary of state is even forced repeatedly to assure the United State's friends and allies that the country does not violate the most basic human rights is the surest sign that Washington has long since lost the battle for hearts and minds of many Europeans. In Germany and elsewhere, America is simply no longer given the benefit of the doubt.

    Khaled al-Masri was held for five months.
    Of course, it would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies were not operating on the borders of western laws and norms. But the question worrying many on both sides of the Atlantic right now is just how far governments are willing covert operations go?

    Merkel is hoping to deflect unwanted scrutiny about Berlin's silence on the Masri abduction by having her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, testify to a closed parliamentary committee about why Germany simply accepted the kidnapping of one of its own citizens. Steinmeier, who was chief of staff in Schröder's chancellery, was almost certainly informed about the rendition gone wrong.

    Will it be enough? Many Germans are sure to be upset that there was less distance between Schröder's government and the Bush Administration than they had thought. And they may now begin to ask whether Merkel's compass is pointed in the right direction.

    © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
    All Rights Reserved
    Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH



     







    Interview with Ex-Powell Aid Wilkerson





    DPA
    The Bush Administration has lost its ethical compass, says Wilkerson



    US President Bush and Vice President Cheney. "Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought."



    LAWRENCE WILKERSON
    Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's closest aides and was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.


    Interview with Ex-Powell Aid Wilkerson

    "A Leaderless, Directionless Superpower"

    Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was instrumental in helping then Secretary of State Colin Powell assemble the dossier against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now, however, he is one of the Bush Administration's sharpest critics. He spoke with SPIEGEL about America's disdain for international law, Vice President Dick Cheney's oversized influence, and the loss of US moral authority.


    SPIEGEL: Colonel Wilkerson, hardly an insider of the Bush Administration has ever criticized it as sharply as you are now. Why?

    Wilkerson: The straw that broke the camel's back, what made me finally decide to go public, was the issue of departure from the Geneva Conventions. It was the departure from international law and treaty with regard to what I perceive to be a policy that permeated the leadership from the Vice President through the Defense Department and out to the military forces in the field. In my view, it was not only damaging to the armed forces -- and I was a member of the Army for 31 years -- but also damaging ultimately to America's image and credibility in the world and damaging to our capability to win this conflict against Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others like them. You can't win what essentially is a war of ideas by departing from your own ideas.

    SPIEGEL: How has it come to this?

    Wilkerson: What I saw from my perspective at the State Department was essentially involvement in what I prefer to refer to as the statutory process. The President gets advice from every side and ultimately goes away and makes his decision. What I saw was the President making a decision that appeared to be a compromise. He said it was indeed a new enemy and perhaps Geneva did not pertain. But at the same time he said very clearly in the same memorandum, which I saw, that all detainees should be treated in accordance with American values and the spirit of Geneva.

    SPIEGEL: So what went wrong?


    Wilkerson: In execution of that decision the other side won, the side who thought that terrorists are the new beast, and they had to be dealt with differently. That happened because this is the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, and he wanted it to happen. It was a secretive little known cabal, led by Cheney and Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld who short-cut the statutory process. In the case of Geneva they thought there were no holds barred, that the demand for intelligence was so great that there was enormous flexibility in how you interrogated prisoners. And I saw that go all the way down to the lowest level of the armed forces. And when you put those two pressures together, the demand for intelligence and the implicit fact that this isn't the old ball game, then you have opened Pandora's Box. You contaminate the armed forces and you can expect to have things like Abu Ghraib and deaths.

    SPIEGEL: How many people have died in American detention?

    Wilkerson: When I left the State Department, there were over 70 deaths of people in detention, some of them being investigated, some of them covered up.

    SPIEGEL: Is the CIA torturing people?

    Wilkerson: I don't know. If the President signed a presidential finding and authorized a certain select group of the CIA, highly trained, to do other than Geneva-type interrogation-techniques, only a very few people will know. I'm not even sure the Secretary of State would know about it.

    SPIEGEL: You prepared Colin Powell's now famous speech for the Security Council in which he blamed Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida. Was this claim a lie to generate support for the war, as some democrats now allege?

    Wilkerson: I don't know. I wish I did. I was the task force leader at the CIA, putting together Powell's presentation. I was housed there for five or six days and nights. Today, I know that the Germans warned about the credibility of their agent "Curveball", who stated that Iraq has mobile production units for biological weapons. Why wasn't I told? Why wasn't the secretary of state told? We used the information from the al-Qaida member Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi who claimed that Iraq was training the jihadis in chemical and biological weaponry. Now he has recanted. We are hearing that his confessions were obtained under less than Geneva methods -- waterboarding for example.

    SPIEGEL: The administration was also choosing the facts that best illustrated the supposed dangers presented by Iraq and overselling the case for war, isn't that right?

    Wilkerson: That is true, at least with regard to Douglas Feith, then the number three in the Pentagon. And there is no question that the vice president overstated the case. I mean, all you have to do is run his tapes. By the way, they tried to get the alleged Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraq Intelligence officials -- which was discounted by almost everyone -- into the presentation. But we refused.

    SPIEGEL: Colin Powell recently said this is a blow to his reputation ...

    Wilkerson: ... I call it the low point in my professional career. I mean, I look back on it, and I rack my brain again. I wasn't a novice. I had been an intelligence user for years. How did we get so fooled?

    SPIEGEL: Have you been able to find an answer?

    Wilkerson: Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought. He actually was a very smart man. He knew his principal enemy was Iran; his second most threatening enemy was his own people. And somewhere in there was the US, but way down at the bottom. And the only way he could maintain the brusque 'I'll knock you out if you try to hit me' attitude that he did was to maintain the myth that he had WMDs. And so he managed to conduct a disinformation campaign.

    SPIEGEL: Shouldn't then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have ensured that President Bush was better advised than he proved to be?

    Wilkerson: There was a single word used by countless people in the government to describe the National Security Council under Dr. Rice and that is "dysfunctional." And if you think about it for a moment, this dysfunctionality of the statutory process was a nice camouflage for the alternative decision-making process that revolved around the vice president.

    SPIEGEL: Rice had the president's trust and seemed focused on becoming ever closer to him.


    Wilkerson: It worked. She had her eye on the prize. And finally she became secretary of state.

    SPIEGEL: The Pentagon always claimed that a stable government could be installed in Iraq within a matter of months. Was there a climate of arrogance?

    Wilkerson: Yes there was. Incredible arrogance. I call it the administration of hubris. How could anyone look at that region and believe it? As opposed to the Pentagon, we in the state department never signed up to that idea that our troops would be greeted with flowers. There were so many mistakes from the very outset of the administration -- beginning with sticking our finger in the world's eyes with our rejection of Kyoto without offering an explanation. The gracelessness, the ineptitude of how we confronted the world made foreign policy and international relations in general very difficult in the first Bush term.

    SPIEGEL: Now, though, the mood has changed dramatically and the American public is no longer supportive of Bush's Iraq policies. Should the US troops be pulled out of Iraq?

    Wilkerson: There are two dimensions to that. First, because Secretary Rumsfeld made the decision not to enlarge the army two years ago, it's inevitable that they'll be pulled out. Otherwise we will break our Army and Marine Corps, sometime in 2006, or 2007. That's the reality. The second and far more important dimension is the situation in Iraq. We now have to finish the job, otherwise we will, at a minimum, have a civil war and the whole Middle East would be in danger; I could see a tragedy of monumental proportions developing. So I agree 100 percent with the President that we have to stay until we get it right -- and I hope that can be done in the one to two years we have before we destroy the Army and the Marine Corps.

    SPIEGEL: There is a proposal from the Democrats whereby the President should acknowledge the mistakes that have been made and then ask the country and the world for renewed support.

    Wilkerson: I think many Americans, including myself, would be encouraged by some admission of fault and some change. But I don't think it's in this president's disposition and character to do that.

    SPIEGEL: Isn't the loss of America's moral authority the biggest problem?

    Wilkerson: Yes. Recently I had occasion to be on a panel with a former prime minister of Canada who said, 'It's not so much that we Canadians are anti-American, it's that we are very, very worried about a headless giant.' And that stuck with me because that is an apt metaphor in some cases for this superpower right now. It seems leaderless. It seems directionless.

    SPIEGEL: Are there not indications of a more measured foreign policy now emerging?

    Wilkerson: I hope so. There have been some changes, and I'm encouraged by them. Dr. Rice is doing some things that would indicate to me that she has learned and that she is working now off a sheet of music that sounds pretty sweet to our allies and friends. That's wonderful. But I still detect, especially from the vice president, a note of unbridled unilateralism that concerns me: the willingness to go it alone, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we're the big guy on the block, to hell with you. I mean that sort of attitude is out of place in the 21st century.

    SPIEGEL: Haven't the neo-conservatives and their policies failed?

    Wilkerson: They are not neo-cons. They are not new conservatives. They're Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. And to say that these people are dead, dormant or lying quiescent is not encouraging because there are enough of them left. And it's going to be incumbent on the rest of us, in this country at least, to watch these trends and make sure that their ugly head doesn't rise up and cause more problems in the future.

    Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo

    © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
    All Rights Reserved
    Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH











  • Whitney Biennial 2006




    Regen Projects, Los Angeles
    Liz Larner's sculpture "RWBs."


    Whitney Museum of American Art
    Lucas deGiulio's "Can Barnacles" (2005)



    Whitney Museum of American Art
    A still from "A Journey That Wasn't," a musical in Central Park, (2005) by Pierre Huyghe.



    Whitney Museum of American Art
    A still from "Jump" (2004) by T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater



    Whitney Museum of American Art
    A still from Kenneth Anger's film "Mouse Heaven" (2005).



    Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
    Rudolf Stingel's "Untitled (After Sam)," a 2005 oil painting. More Photos >



    Jochen Littkemann/Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
    Peter Doig's painting "Day for Night" (2005). That is also the biennial's title.



    Whitney Museum of American Art

    Coming soon to the Whitney Biennial: Marilyn Minter's "Stepping Up," a 2005 painting on metal that explores the seedy side of glamour.

    November 30, 2005
    This WhitneyBiennial Will Take In the World
    By CAROL VOGEL

    For 70 years, the sprawlingWhitney Biennialexhibition of contemporary art has prided itself on its insistence on an American point of view. But as times and tastes change and art world boundaries dissolve, the 2006 biennial's two foreign-born curators have ventured across the Atlantic.

    Not content with just recording what's happening in contemporary art around the United States, the curators have scoured artists' studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin, a first for Whitney Biennial curators. European artists have been in recent biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but the majority have had American addresses or studios. This year, Europeans who live and work abroad will be represented, as well as American artists who reside in Europe.

    Another first claimed by the museum is that this year's biennial, which is to open on March 2, has a title: "Day for Night."

    It is inspired by the English title of François Truffaut's 1973 film, "La Nuit Américaine," which became famous for using a cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day by using a special filter. The title was chosen to reflect the kind of restless, in-between moment that the curators believe defines art now - somewhere between day and night, when work may be irrational, religious, dark, erotic or violent.

    "We wanted the biennial to feel more like an exhibition than simply a checklist, to provide a context, which art fairs and Chelsea gallery shows cannot," said Chrissie Iles, the Whitney's curator of contemporary art.

    This is Ms. Iles's second biennial; she was one of three Whitney curators who organized the 2004 event. This year Ms. Iles, who is British, has teamed up with Philippe Vergne, the French-born deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Each has worked in the United States for eight years.

    "Historically Europe and America have been in bed together for so long that to separate them would be very artificial," Mr. Vergne said. "You can't have one without the other."

    Given the proliferation of large art fairs all over the world and the speed by which images travel across the Internet, the curators said they wanted to make this biennial something more than a rambling show of new art.

    "There are now over 200 biennials in the world," Mr. Vergne said. "It's one thing to take the pulse of the art world, but the situation has become so complex we felt serious editing was required."

    Occupying all of the Whitney except its top floor, the 2006 version of what is always a highly anticipated but also often heavily criticized event will include some 100 artists, about the same number as in 2004. There will be a fairly equal representation among mediums: painting and sculpture, photography, film, video and performance.

    For the last biennial the three curators split up, traveling in different directions and seeing artists on their own. They then put together an exhibition that melded three different points of view. Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne purposely did everything together, they said, to form a single vision.

    The 2006 biennial will explore various aspects of the newest art. One is its ambiguous nature, reflected in the fact that there are artists who show anonymously and others - Reena Spaulings and Otabenga Jones & Associates, for example - whose names are fictitious. (Reena Spaulings is also the name of a Lower East Side gallery.)

    There are works that blur definitions, like a painting that is also part of an installation project or a film that records a performance piece. Or a work may be left for the viewer to translate, like Troy Brauntuch's black-and-white canvases of softly drawn images that seem to emerge from the darkness or Mark Grotjahn's creamy white paintings that camouflage a masklike face.

    The biennial's roster also underscores the growing number of artist collaboratives, an increasingly important part of the contemporary landscape. One is the Bernadette Corporation, an international group of young artists formed in 1994 that has created films, albums, magazines and books. (One of its permanent members is John Kelsey, who, not coincidentally, is a co-director, with Emily Sundblad, of the Reena Spaulings gallery.)

    While the 2006 biennial will have its share of young talent whose works have never been in a museum show, it will also feature some veterans, including mature artists who, Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne say, have been underrecognized. Among them are the 81-year-old Warhol Factorystar Taylor Mead and the painters Dorothy Ianonne, 72; Marilyn Minter, 57; and Ed Paschke, who died last year at 65.

    As always, there will be political messages. Outside, in the Whitney's sculpture court, Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija are recreating Mr. di Suvero's "Peace Tower," first constructed in Los Angeles in 1966 as a protest against the Vietnam War. There will also be a drawing by Richard Serra for his poster "Stop Bush," a version of which was plastered around Manhattan to protest the war in Iraq during the 2004 Republican convention.

    Not everything is meant to be serious. There will be a good deal of tongue-in-cheek in this year's biennial. The Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli's "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's 'Caligula,' " which had its premiere this summer at the Venice Biennale, will be shown. The four-minute film depicts the decadent government of a Roman emperor and stars Courtney Love, Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich and Helen Mirren, with Mr. Vidal narrating.

    In a gallery on the museum's fifth floor, outside the main exhibition, there will be a show-within-a show. It is being organized by Wrong Gallery, the Chelsea space that was the brainchild of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and the art critics Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. When it opened three years ago, the gallery consisted of a glass door that looked like all the other Chelsea gallery entrances but was always locked. The one-square-foot exhibition space behind the door has been the scene of an array of performance and art projects.

    The gallery does not represent any artists, nor does it sell work; it simply serves as a laboratory for art experimentation. What it plans to do at the Whitney is still unclear, Ms. Iles said. But playing off the gallery's eccentric nature, the dates of its show will not match those of the biennial. It will open on Jan. 21 and run through May 21.

    "They're planning to do a show about the dark side of American culture and outlaws," Ms. Iles said. "In some ways the Wrong Gallery's unconventional approach echoes what we have tried to do throughout the entire biennial."


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    A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance




    Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

    The edge of Escalante Canyon in Utah is shown in a composite of images. Standing at the right is Bill Hedden, the leader of an effort to retire grazing rights in the hope of preserving the area's delicate ecosystem.



    Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

    Brent Robinson, with his sons Tyler and Quincy, recently relinquished his grazing rights on public lands.


    December 1, 2005
    A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance
    By FELICITY BARRINGER

    BOULDER, Utah - No cows remain on the federal lands set aside for grazing here above the Escalante River.

    At first glance, this would seem a boon to land and cow alike. The layered rockscape just west of this small town is immense, rolling from the river toward the sky. The grass is thin and dry. The soil, the same. How fat could a cow get?

    So, seven years ago an environmental group based in Arizona, the Grand Canyon Trust, began paying ranchers to give up their grazing rights when their herds, or bank accounts, had failed to thrive. By this fall, the trust had spent more than $1 million to end grazing on more than 400,000 acres.

    The deals seemed to suit all concerned, until a group of local officials decided that they were bad for the local economy and a threat to the ancestral tradition of living off the land. The group set out to end this latest, uncharacteristically civil chapter in the fraught history of cattlemen, environmentalists and dueling visions of the West's future.

    Michael E. Noel, a former Bureau of Land Management employee who now is a Republican state representative from southern Utah, led the charge to roll back agreements the trust had forged. Mr. Noel said the loss of the grazing allotments would hurt ranching, which would in turn deprive the area's young people of the character-building chance to work on the land.

    "Yes, it's a free market to buy and sell," Mr. Noel said recently. "But if you buy it, you use it."

    By retiring the lands, he said, the trust is reneging on an implicit agreement, and "if we allow that to occur, we go down the path of eliminating all grazing on public lands."

    The Grand Canyon Trust's strategy had been to look amid Utah's ancient russet cathedrals for lands that needed a long rest from grazing. If the rancher with the grazing rights wanted to relinquish them to the Interior Department, the trust would pay him to do so.

    One deal involved simply paying a rancher to relinquish his grazing rights and find new pastures or reduce his herd. The trust also started a round of musical chairs, paying three ranchers to yield their allotments, then consolidating cattle on one grazing area while leaving the riverbanks free of livestock.

    In tandem with the trust's efforts, the federal land bureau was conducting environmental reviews that tended to find that grazing should end on the acreage at issue.

    Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, said he could not understand why his efforts, involving transactions between a willing buyer and willing sellers, seemed a threat to Mr. Noel.

    Mr. Hedden said he had hoped to create a situation with no losers. Ranchers could consolidate their herds in more congenial settings. Federal officials could bar grazing during a drought without bankrupting ranchers. The trust, dedicated to preserving the Colorado plateau, could show its financial supporters results.

    Besides, he said, the land in question is marginal economically and at risk environmentally.

    Pointing to the soil's crust, a mat splotched with bacterial growths that replenish soil nitrogen, Mr. Hedden said grazing left both grass and crust in tatters.

    "We don't know how long this land takes to heal," he said.

    But given the resistance of local officials, Mr. Hedden is shelving the strategies he used here.

    The arc of his efforts to preserve the plateau says much about the evolution of the environmental movement in the West, where the fight over grazing goes back years. Anger over the government's stewardship of public lands helped feed the Sagebrush Rebellion, which in turn fed the Republican revolution of the 1980's.

    In the years since, the canyons that lace the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near here drew cows and hikers. The cows sought forage on the banks of the Escalante River; the hikers sought spiritual forage in the same places. They did not mix well.

    Throughout the 80's era of state rebellion against the Bureau of Land Management and the 90's period of criticism of grazing policies by environmentalists, the Interior Department was buffeted with lawsuits.

    Grazing, in the view of local ranchers and officials like Mr. Noel, "can be one of the best tools to use to improve watersheds, to improve forage, to improve soil structure on public lands." Grass grows better when cut back, Mr. Noel said. Manure can improve the soil.

    Dave Hunsaker, the manager of the national monument, an area of 1.7 million acres, relies on the land bureau's experts to settle that issue.

    "The idea of grazing decisions is to achieve rangeland health objectives, No. 1," Mr. Hunsaker said. "No. 2, it is to provide stability to those ranching operations on the monument right now.

    "The Grand Canyon Trust," he said, "can provide us flexibility for the future."

    Brent Robinson sold the 25,000-acre Clark Bench grazing allotment to a trust subsidiary in 2000, though he retains a basic distrust of environmentalists. Mr. Robinson said his intention was "to scale down a little bit" his herd of 300 head, a sizable herd in these parts.

    But Mr. Noel and members of the Kane County commission were concerned enough about the potential retirement of the Clark Bench acreage that they sought out ranchers to appeal the bureau's decision to let Mr. Hedden's group buy it and to seek the allotment for themselves.

    "Most of the herds here are very small," Mr. Noel said. "But because the income in this area is very low, those 25 to 30 cows are what make the difference between being able to really provide for family that extra little thing. They can buy a pickup truck or send a kid to college or on a Mormon mission."

    Ranching is a small and declining part of the economy of Kane and its northern neighbor, Garfield County. In several recent years, the total ranching income was in negative numbers in one county or the other. But Kane officials, after some effort, found people to seek the retired grazing permits for themselves.

    Trevor Stewart, one of the ranchers seeking the Clark Bench allotment, is Mr. Noel's son-in-law. Mr. Noel said he was able to get $50,000 from the state to support Kane County when it joined Mr. Stewart's suit.

    The county's challenge before an administrative law judge in the Interior Department is pending. But even the remote prospect that the complex choreography of ending the grazing might have gone for naught has been enough to dissuade the Grand Canyon Trust from doing more in Utah, Mr. Hedden said.

    The eight-year process, however, did result in some cross-pollination. As ranchers like Mr. Robinson have warily shed suspicions and made common cause with an environmental group, the trust itself is gingerly adopting ranching to achieve conservation goals.

    The purchase of the Kane and Two-Mile Ranches north of Grand Canyon National Park - 1,000 acres of land and grazing allotments on an additional 830,000 acres - was recently completed by the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Va. Instead of retiring the allotments, they will use them, though for fewer head of cattle.

    By running cattle on some of the land, the groups may inoculate themselves against new lawsuits, even as they restore acreage damaged by grazing.

    Mr. Hedden, however, remains quietly angry at the circumstances that led him to abandon his campaign to use free-market tools to curb grazing.

    "We've been out there dealing with this," he said. "We solved the problems of the B.L.M., and we're hurting the Kane County economy by buying out guys who are going bankrupt? I don't get it."


    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

December 5, 2005


















  • My Space We Are The World




    DECEMBER 12, 2005

    COVER STORY

    The MySpace Generation
    They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing

    COVER STORY PODCAST

    The Toadies broke up. It was four years ago, when Amanda Adams was 16. She drove into Dallas from suburban Plano, Tex., on a school night to hear the final two-hour set of the local rock band, which had gone national with a hit 1995 album. "Tears were streaming down my face," she recalls, a slight Texas lilt to her voice. During the long summer that followed, Adams turned to the Web in search of solace, plugging the lead singer's name into Google repeatedly until finally his new band popped up. She found it on Buzz-Oven.com, a social networking Web site for Dallas teens.

    Adams jumped onto the Buzz-Oven network, posting an online self-portrait (dark hair tied back, tongue out, goofy eyes for the cam) and listing her favorite music so she could connect with other Toadies fans. Soon she was heading off to biweekly meetings at Buzz-Oven's airy loft in downtown Dallas and helping other "Buzzers" judge their favorite groups in marathon battle-of-the-bands sessions. (Buzz-0ven.com promotes the winners.) At her school, Frisco High -- and at malls and concerts -- she passed out free Buzz-Oven sampler CDs plastered with a large logo from Coca-Cola Inc., () which backs the site in the hope of reaching more teens on their home turf. Adams also brought dozens of friends to the concerts Buzz-Oven sponsored every few months. "It was cool, something I could brag about," says Adams, now 20 and still an active Buzzer.

    Now that Adams is a junior at the University of North Texas at Denton, she's online more than ever. It's 7 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and she has just sweated her way through an online quiz for her advertising management class. (The quiz was "totally out of control," write classmates on a school message board minutes later.) She checks a friend's blog entry on MySpace.com to find out where a party will be that night. Then she starts an Instant Messenger (IM) conversation about the evening's plans with a few pals.

    KIDS, BANDS, COCA-COLA
    At the same time, her boyfriend IMs her a retail store link to see a new PC he just bought, and she starts chatting with him. She's also postering for the next Buzz-Oven concert by tacking the flier on various friends' MySpace profiles, and she's updating her own blog on Xanga.com, another social network she uses mostly to post photos. The TV is set to TBS, which plays a steady stream of reruns like Friends and Seinfeld -- Adams has a TV in her bedroom as well as in the living room -- but she keeps the volume turned down so she can listen to iTunes over her computer speakers. Simultaneously, she's chatting with dorm mate Carrie Clark, 20, who's doing pretty much the same thing from a laptop on her bed.

    You have just entered the world of what you might call Generation @. Being online, being a Buzzer, is a way of life for Adams and 3,000-odd Dallas-area youth, just as it is for millions of young Americans across the country. And increasingly, social networks are their medium. As the first cohort to grow up fully wired and technologically fluent, today's teens and twentysomethings are flocking to Web sites like Buzz-Oven as a way to establish their social identities. Here you can get a fast pass to the hip music scene, which carries a hefty amount of social currency offline. It's where you go when you need a friend to nurse you through a breakup, a mentor to tutor you on your calculus homework, an address for the party everyone is going to. For a giant brand like Coke, these networks also offer a direct pipeline to the thirsty but fickle youth market.

    Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions also hang out at other up-and-coming networks such as Facebook.com, which connects college students, and Xanga.com, an agglomeration of shared blogs. A second tier of some 300 smaller sites, such as Buzz-Oven, Classface.com, and Photobucket.com, operate under -- and often inside or next to -- the larger ones.

    Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they're already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions. In fact, today's young generation largely ignores the difference. Most adults see the Web as a supplement to their daily lives. They tap into information, buy books or send flowers, exchange apartments, or link up with others who share passions for dogs, say, or opera. But for the most part, their social lives remain rooted in the traditional phone call and face-to-face interaction.

    The MySpace generation, by contrast, lives comfortably in both worlds at once. Increasingly, America's middle- and upper-class youth use social networks as virtual community centers, a place to go and sit for a while (sometimes hours). While older folks come and go for a task, Adams and her social circle are just as likely to socialize online as off. This is partly a function of how much more comfortable young people are on the Web: Fully 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, vs. two-thirds of adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

    Teens also use many forms of media simultaneously. Fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds average nearly 6 1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Net, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey. A quarter of that time, they're multitasking. The biggest increase: computer use for activities such as social networking, which has soared nearly threefold since 2000, to 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on average.

    Aside from annoying side effects like hyperdistractibility, there are some real perils with underage teens and their open-book online lives. In a few recent cases, online predators have led kids into dangerous, real-life situations, and parents' eyes are being opened to their kids' new world.

    ONE-HIT WONDERS
    Meanwhile, the phenomenon of these exploding networks has companies clamoring to be a part of the new social landscape. News Corp. () Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has spent $1.3 billion on Web acquisitions so far to better reach this coveted demographic -- $580 million alone for the July purchase of MySpace parent Intermix Media. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures are pouring millions into Facebook and other social networks. What's not yet clear is whether this is a dot-com era replay, with established companies and investors sinking huge sums into fast-growth startups with no viable business models. Facebook, barely a year old and run by a 21-year-old student on leave from Harvard, has a staff of 50 and venture capital -- but no profits.

    Still, consumer companies such as Coke, Apple Computer (), and Procter & Gamble () are making a relatively low-cost bet by experimenting with networks to launch products and to embed their brands in the minds of hard-to-reach teens. So far, no solid format has emerged, partly because youth networks are difficult for companies to tap into. They're also easy to fall out of favor with: While Coke, Sony () Pictures Digital, and Apple have succeeded with MySpace, Buzz-Oven, and other sites, P&G's attempt to create an independent network around a body spray, for one, has faltered so far.

    Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year's peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline -- if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages "person-to-person, which is more credible," says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

    So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them. To understand how such networks get started, share a blue-cheese burger at the Meridian Room, a dive bar in downtown Dallas, with Buzz-Oven founder Aden Holt. At 6 feet 9 inches, with one blue eye, one brown one, and a shock of shaggy red hair, Holt is a sort of public figure in the local music scene. He started a record label his senior year at college and soon turned his avocation into a career as a music promoter, putting out 27 CDs in the decade that followed.

    In 2000, as Internet access spread, Holt cooked up Buzz-Oven as a new way to market concerts. His business plan was simple. First, he would produce sample CDs of local bands. Dedicated Buzzers like Adams would do the volunteer marketing, giving out the CDs for free, chatting up the concerts online, and slapping up posters and stickers in school bathrooms, local music stores, and on telephone poles. Then Holt would get the bands to put on a live concert, charging them $10 for every fan he turned out. But to make the idea work, Holt needed capital to produce the free CDs. One of his bands had recently done a show sponsored by Coke, and after asking around, he found the marketer's company's Dallas sales office. He called for an appointment. And then he called again. And again.

    Coke's people didn't get back to him for weeks, and then he was offered only a brief appointment. With plenty of time to practice his sales pitch, Holt spit out his idea in one breath: Marketing through social networks was still an experiment, but it was worth a small investment to try reaching teens through virtual word of mouth. Coke rep Julie Bowyer thought the idea had promise. Besides, Holt's request was tiny compared with the millions Coke regularly sinks into campaigns. So she wrote him a check on the spot.

    DEEP CONNECTIONS
    By the time Ben Lawson became head of Coke's Dallas sales office in 2001, Buzz-Oven had mushroomed into a nexus that allowed hundreds of Dallas-area teens to talk to one another and socialize, online and off. A middle-aged father of two teens himself, Lawson spent a good deal of time poring over data about how best to reach youth like Adams. He knew what buzzer Mike Ziemer, 20, so clearly articulates: "Kids don't buy stuff because they see a magazine ad. They buy stuff because other kids tell them to."

    What Lawson really likes about Buzz-Oven is how deeply it weaves into teens' lives. Sure, the network reaches only a small niche. But Buzzers have created an authentic community, and Coke has been welcomed as part of the group. At a recent dinner, founder Holt asked a few Buzzers their opinions about the company. "I don't know if they care about the music or they just want their name on it, but knowing they're involved helps," says Michael Henry, 19. "I know they care; they think what we're doing is cool," says Michele Barr, 21. Adds Adams: "They let us do our thing. They don't censor what we do."

    Words to live by for a marketer, figures Lawson, particularly since Coke pays Buzz-Oven less than $70,000 a year. In late October, Holt signed a new contract with Coke to help him launch Buzz-Oven Austin in February. The amount is confidential, but he says it's enough for 10,000 CDs, three to four months of street promotions, and 50,000 fliers, plus some radio and print ads and a Web site promotion. Meanwhile, Buzz-Oven is building relations with other brands such as the Dallas Observer newspaper and McDonald's () Chipotle restaurants, which kicks in free food for Buzzer volunteers who promote the shows. Profits from ticket sales are small but growing, says Holt.

    Not so long ago, behemoth MySpace was this tiny. Tom Anderson, a Santa Monica (Calif.) musician with a film degree, partnered with former Xdrive Inc. marketer Chris DeWolfe to create a Web site where musicians could post their music and fans could chat about it. Anderson knew music and film; De Wolfe knew the Internet business. Anderson cajoled Hollywood friends -- musicians, models, actors -- to join his online community, and soon the news spread. A year later, everyone from Hollywood teen queen Hilary Duff to Plano (Tex.) teen queen Adams has an account.

    It's becoming a phenomenon unto itself. With 20 million of its members logging on in October, MySpace now draws so much traffic that it accounted for 10% of all advertisements viewed online in the month. This is all the more amazing because MySpace doesn't allow those ubiquitous pop-up ads that block your view, much less spyware, which monitors what you watch and infuses it with pop-ups. In fact, the advertising can be so subtle that kids don't distinguish it from content. "It's what our users want," says Anderson.

    As MySpace has exploded, Anderson has struggled to maintain the intimate atmosphere that lends social networks their authenticity. When new users join, Tom becomes their first friend and invites them to send him a message. When they do, they hear right back, from him or from the one-quarter of MySpace's 165 staffers who handle customer service. Ask Adams what she thinks of MySpace's recent acquisition by News Corp., and she replies that she doesn't blame "Tom" for selling, she would have done the same thing. She's talking about Anderson, but it's hard to tell at first because she refers to him so casually, as if he were someone she has known for years.

    That's why Murdoch has vowed not to wrest creative control from Anderson and DeWolfe. Instead News Corp.'s resources will help them nourish new MySpace dreams. Earlier this month they launched a record label. In the next few months, the duo says, they will launch a movie production unit and a satellite radio station. By March they hope to venture into wireless technology, perhaps even starting a wireless company to compete with Virgin Mobile or Sprint Nextel's Boost. Says DeWolfe: "We want to be a lifestyle brand."

    It's proof that a network -- and its advertising -- can take off if it gives kids something they badly want. Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noticed that the college students who make up most of his 9.5 million members were starting groups with names like Apple Students, where they swapped information about how to use their Macs. So he asked Apple if it wanted to form an official group. Now -- for a fee neither company will disclose -- Apple sponsors the group, giving away iPod Shuffles in weekly contests, making product announcements, and providing links to its student discount program.

    The idea worked so well that Facebook began helping anyone who wanted to start a group. Today there are more than a dozen, including several sponsored by advertisers such as Victoria's Secret and Electronic Arts. Zuckerberg soon realized that undergrads are more likely to respond to a peer group of Apple users than to the traditional banner ads, which he hopes to eventually phase out. Another of his innovations: ads targeted at students of a specific college. They're a way for a local restaurant or travel agency to advertise. Called Facebook Announcements, it's all automated, so anyone can go onto Facebook, pay $14 a day, and fill out an ad.

    SPARKLE AND FIZZLE
    Still, social networks' relations with companies remain uneasy. Last year, for example, Buzz-Oven was nearly thrown off track when a band called Flickerstick wanted to post a song called Teenage Dope Fiend on the network. Holt told Buzzers: "Well, you can't use that song. I'd be encouraging teenagers to try drugs." They saw his point, and several Buzzers persuaded the band to offer up a different song. But such potential conflicts are one way, Holt concedes, that Buzz-Oven's corporate sponsorships could come to a halt.

    Like Holt, other network founders have dealt with such conflicts by turning to their users for advice. Xanga co-founder John Hiler has resisted intrusive forms of advertising like spyware or pop-ups, selling only the conventional banner ads. When advertisers recently demanded more space for larger ads, Hiler turned the question over to Xanga bloggers, posting links to three examples of new ads. More than 3,000 users commented pro and con, and Hiler went with the model users liked best. By involving them, Hiler kept the personal connection that many say they feel with network founders -- even though Xanga's membership has expanded to 21 million.

    So far, corporate advertisers have had little luck creating such relationships on their own. In May, P&G set up what it hoped would become a social network around Sparkle Body Spray, aimed at tweens. The site features chatty messages from fake characters named for scents like Rose and Vanilla ("Friends call me Van"). Virtually no one joined, and no entries have comments from real users. "There wasn't a lot of interesting content to engage people," says Anastasia Goodstein, who documents the intersection between companies and the MySpace Generation at Ypulse.com. P&G concedes that the site is an experiment, and the company has found more success with a body-spray network embedded in MySpace.com.

    The most basic threat to networks may be the whims of their users, who after all are mostly still kids. Take Friendster, the first networking Web site to gain national attention. It erupted in 2003, going from a few thousand users to nearly 20 million. But the company couldn't keep up, causing frustration among users when the site grew sluggish and prone to crash. It also started with no music, no message boards or classifieds, no blogging. Many jumped ship when MySpace came along, offering the ability to post song tracks and more elaborate profiles. Friendster has been hustling to get back into the game, adding in new options. But only 942,000 people clicked on the site in October, vs. 20.6 million who clicked on MySpace in the same time.

    That's the elusive nature of trends and fads, and it poses a challenge for networks large and small. MySpace became a threat to tiny Buzz-Oven last year when Buzzers found they could do more cool things there, from blogs to more music and better profile options. Buzzer message board traffic slowed to a crawl. To stop the hemorrhaging, Holt joined MySpace himself and set up a profile for Buzz-Oven. His network now operates both independently and as a subsite on MySpace, but it still works. Most of Holt's Dallas crowd came back, and Buzz-Oven is up to 3,604 MySpace members now, slightly more than when it was a stand-alone network.

    Even if the new approach works, Holt faces a succession issue that's likely to hit other networks at some point. At 35, he's well past the age of his users. Even the friends who helped him launch Buzz-Oven.com are in their late 20s -- ancient to members of his target demographic. So either he raises the age of the group -- or replaces himself with someone younger. He's trying the latter, betting on Mike Ziemer, the 20-year-old recent member, even giving him a small amount of cash.

    Ziemer, it turns out, is an influencer. That means record labels and clothing brands pay him to talk up their products, for which he pulls down several hundred dollars a month. Ziemer has spiky brown hair and a round, expressive face. In his MySpace profile he lists his interests in this order: Girls. Music. Friends. Movies. He has 4,973 "friends" on MySpace. At all times, he carries a T-Mobile Sidekick, which he uses to text message, e-mail, and send photos to his friends. Sometimes he also talks on it, but not often. "I hate the phone," he says.

    Think of Ziemer as Aden Holt 2.0. Like Amanda Adams, he's also a student at UT-Denton. When he moved to the area from Southern California last year, he started Third String PR, a miniature version of Buzz-Oven that brings bands to the 'burbs. He uses MySpace.com to promote bands and chats online with potential concertgoers. Ziemer can pack a church basement with tweens for a concert, even though they aren't old enough to drive. On the one hand, Ziemer idolizes Holt, who has a larger version of Ziemer's company and a ton of connections in the music industry. On the other hand, Ziemer thinks Holt is old. "Have you ever tried to talk with him over IM?" he says. "He's just not plugged in enough."

    Exactly why Holt wants Ziemer on Buzz-Oven. He knows the younger entrepreneur can tap a new wave of kids -- and keep the site's corporate sponsor on board. But he worries that Ziemer doesn't have the people skills. What's more, should Ziemer lose patience with Buzz-Oven, he could blacklist Holt by telling his 9,217 virtual friends that Buzz-Oven is no longer cool. In the online world, one powerfully networked person can have a devastatingly large impact on a small society like Buzz-Oven.

    For now, the gamble is paying off. Attendance is up at Buzz-Oven events, and if the Austin launch goes smoothly, Holt will be one step closer to his dream of going national. But given the fluid world of networks, he's taking nothing for granted.


    By Jessi Hempel, with Paula Lehman in New York
    Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
    Terms of Use Privacy Notice



     







    Dr. Ecstasy




    Reuters Photo:

    Alexander Shulgin, pharmacologist and chemist known for his creation of new psychoactive chemicals, is interviewed...

    Back to Story - Help
    "Dr. Ecstasy" laments the rave drug's notoriety By Jason Szep
    Fri Dec 2, 7:02 PM ET

    The scientist who introduced Ecstasy to the world in the 1970s fears the drug's notoriety and popularity at nightclubs is destroying any chance that it might be used to treat the mentally ill.

    "It's very excellent potential for being used as medicine has been badly jeopardized," Alexander Shulgin, told Reuters after defending the merits of mind-altering drugs at a symposium on the human brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week.

    "It's gone out of control," lamented Shulgin, a tall Californian with a mane of white hair and a Santa Claus-like beard, who is widely known as "Dr. Ecstasy."

    A psychopharmacological researcher who once had a license from the U.S. government to develop any illegal drug, Shulgin believes so strongly in the power of psychedelic drugs in unlocking the human mind that he plans to publish a 1,500-page encyclopedia next year of all his creations.

    The 80-year-old former lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, who self-tested many of his experiments and admits to more than 4,000 psychedelic experiences, finds little comfort in Ecstasy's image as the drug of choice at all-night nightclub dance parties or raves.

    "These rave scenes have added kindling to the fire of governmental disapproval," he said.

    Use of the drug, known for inducing euphoria and energy while reducing inhibitions, surged 70 percent from 1995 to 2000, according to United Nations data.

    Ecstasy-related deaths, while relatively rare, make enough headlines to force authorities to regularly issue health warnings. Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in April said users risked harmful psychological effects.

    Tracing that rise of the drug leads straight to Shulgin. A gifted biochemist and former National Institutes of Health consultant, he unearthed a formula for MDMA -- a synthetic drug with psychedelic and stimulant effects -- in a 1912 chemistry text and synthesized it into Ecstasy in 1976.

    After testing it on himself, he became convinced of its power to treat mental illness. He gave the drug to psychotherapist and close friend, Leo Zeff, who sampled it, agreed, and passed it to hundreds of other therapists.

    Shulgin, who had already quit a senior job at Dell Chemical after sampling mescaline in 1960 in a life-changing introduction to psychedelic drugs, enjoyed a period of celebrity as a cutting-edge chemist.

    He described his first experiment with psychedelic drugs as a "very delightful experience" in which he could "see clearly what he could not appreciate before."

    Ecstasy was used in its early days as a treatment for depression and other illnesses, but that ended abruptly in 1986 when it was banned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

    Recently, however, Ecstasy has had a modest comeback in clinical therapy. U.S authorities gave researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina permission last year to use MDMA in a small study of patients suffering post-traumatic stress.

    In August, researchers at Duke University in North Carolina found that amphetamines, including Ecstasy, reversed the effects of Parkinson's disease in mice, raising the possibility of exploring related treatments for humans.

    Meanwhile, Shulgin, whose involvement in psychedelic drug research spans 40 years, is at work compiling his encyclopedia on 1,000 psychedelic compounds. It is modeled on the Merck Index of chemical properties.

    "It will be everything that is known to be, has been tried but not found yet to be, or should be tried because they are apt to be psychedelic," he said of the work, which he expects to self-publish by the middle of next year.



     







    Face Transplant in France




    Amiens University Hospital, via Reuters

    A woman who received a partial face transplant was taken from the operation in Amiens, as shown in this image released Friday in Lyon.


    December 3, 2005


    Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror




    LYON, France, Dec. 2 - The world's first person to wear a new face awoke Monday, 24 hours after her operation in the northern city of Amiens, and looked in the mirror.


    The swollen nose, lips and chin she saw there were not her own - those had been ripped from her head by her pet Labrador in May - but for the 38-year-old woman, whose face had become a raw, lipless grimace, they were close enough. She took a pen and paper and wrote for the doctors, "Merci."


    On Friday, those doctors defended their rush to give the woman a partial face transplant just months after her disfigurement, despite the enormous risks of death and psychological difficulties. They dismissed objections that they were bent on glory at the expense of the patient, whose identity is being withheld at her request.


    "We are doctors," said Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the transplant team and who helped carry out the first hand transplant in Lyon seven years ago. "We had a patient with a very severe disfigurement that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repair with classic surgery."


    In a news conference at Édouard-Herriot Hospital in Lyon, where the patient was transferred for monitoring of immunosuppressive therapy that will continue throughout her life, the doctors explained how the woman's gruesome wounds almost immediately made her a candidate for the world's first face transplant. They heatedly denied local news reports that quoted her estranged teenage daughter as saying she was suicidal, raising questions about whether she was psychologically stable enough for the operation.


    Dr. Dubernard has faced such accusations before. Clint Hallam, the man he selected for the world's first hand transplant, refused to keep up with the lifelong drug regimen required to suppress immune responses, along with regular exercises to train the new hand. After three years he had the hand removed.


    According to Dr. Dubernard, the woman had quarreled with her daughter one evening in May at her home in the northern city of Valenciennes, and the daughter had left to spend the night at her grandmother's.


    The woman was agitated, he said, and took a sleeping pill. At some point during the night, he said, she arose and stumbled through the house, encountering the dog.


    Local news reports have suggested that the woman, who is divorced, fell unconscious and that the dog chewed and clawed her face in an attempt to revive her. But Dr. Dubernard said the dog had been adopted from the local pound and was known to be aggressive. The dog has since been destroyed.


    Shortly after the woman's injury, Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, head of face and jaw surgery at Amiens University Hospital, decided that the woman was a candidate for a partial face transplant and sent an urgent request for help in locating a donor to the French Biomedicine Agency, which oversees the allocation of organs for transplant in France. The window for a successful transplant was narrow, the doctors said, because the wound was developing scar tissue.


    Dr. Benoît Lengelé, a Belgian surgeon who assisted in the transplant, said the woman would have required at least three or four traditional plastic surgery operations to rebuild her face with skin flaps from other parts of her body, but the results would never have been aesthetically or functionally satisfactory.


    Meanwhile, the woman's injury had made it difficult for her to talk or even drink and eat, because food and liquid spilled easily from her mouth. The doctors said her ability to open her jaw was also progressively diminishing as her wounded tissue stiffened. In July, Dr. Devauchelle consulted with Dr. Dubernard, who visited the woman in early August.


    "The moment she removed her mask, which she always wore, I had no more hesitation," Dr. Dubernard said Friday.


    No information was given about the donor, a brain-dead woman whose anonymity is protected by law. She was located on Saturday at a hospital in the northern city of Lille, 85 miles from Amiens.


    Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by next of kin is not normally required. But given the delicacy of the case, the donor's family was consulted about the possible harvesting of part of the donor's face during the initial interviews that are undertaken to ensure that the deceased had not given instructions preventing organ donations.


    A special team of psychologists worked with the family on Saturday afternoon as the doctors involved were notified that a potential donor had been found. By midnight Saturday, Dr. Devauchelle, who led the surgical team, was in Lille to begin harvesting the face while another team of surgeons in snowy Amiens began removing scar tissue from the patient in preparation for the transplant.


    Harvesting of the face was complicated by the convergence of several teams to remove other organs from the donor, but the operation was complete by 5 a.m. Sunday. Before the donor's funeral, a separate team of doctors reconstructed her face with a silicone prosthesis made from a cast taken before the dissection.


    "The restoration was remarkable," Carine Camby, the director of the French Biomedicine Agency, said of the prosthesis. Dr. Devauchelle rushed to Amiens with the patch of face, chilled in a saline solution to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and began the transplant, starting with microsurgery to connect the blood vessels feeding the face. Dr. Devauchelle said blood circulation to the transplanted portion was restored at 9 a.m. Sunday, four hours after it had been severed from the donor.


    The operation continued into Sunday afternoon as a team of eight surgeons connected muscle and nerves "as fine as the fibers hanging from a string bean," Dr. Dubernard said. Finally they sewed up the skin and mucous membranes of the mouth, working 15 hours in all. As they were cleaning the woman's face and preparing bandages, silence fell over the operating room.


    "The result was beyond our expectation," said Dr. Lengelé, part of the surgical team. "It was marvelous."


    A nurse asked if they might applaud, and when one of the doctors nodded, the nurses began to clap.


    By Friday morning, the woman was eating and drinking and speaking clearly, the doctors said. Though she does not yet have muscular control or feeling in the transplanted portion of her face, she is able to open and stretch her mouth with the facial muscles that had remained intact.


    The doctors said it would be months before they knew how much, if any, feeling or motor control she would have in the graft, though they said the swelling had already begun to recede and her appearance was relatively normal.


    "There is only a thin scar running around the transplanted area," said Dr. Lengelé, adding that the patient had already showed signs of psychologically accepting the transplant, saying Thursday, "This is my face."


    The doctors stressed that the appearance was determined as much by the underlying bone structure as by the features of the skin, but added that the donor's skin color, texture and thickness presented a "stunning" match to the recipient's. If the transplant is ultimately successful, they said, the woman will look neither exactly as she did before nor like her donor.


    "It will be a new face," Dr. Devauchelle said.


    A patch of tissue taken from the donor's forearm and transplanted under the woman's arm will allow doctors to monitor the body's response to the graft without having to take scarring biopsies from her face. The doctors said the woman had already passed the period when thrombosis, or blood clots, presented the greatest risk to her life, but that the most critical time for a possible rejection of the graft would come in the next week.


    Dr. Dubernard said he had already injected stem cells from the donor's bone marrow into the patient in an attempt to enhance her body's tolerance of the transplanted tissue. After reviewing successful hand transplants, he theorized that cells produced by the marrow of the donor's hands were the critical element in the operation's success. He added that another "infusion" of the donor's bone marrow stem cells would be given to the patient on the 11th day after the transplant. The transplant did not include bone.


    As with all transplants, the doctors said, there was about a 33 percent risk of death, a 33 percent risk that the body will reject the graft and only a 33 percent chance that the transplant will prove successful. Surgical teams in other countries, including the United States, are closely watching the outcome before proceeding with face transplants they are planning.


    "We think of all the people who have been disfigured to whom we could give new hope," Dr. Dubernard said.


    Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting from New York for this article.







     


    Friday, December 02, 2005







    Cool Clothes for Cool People




    December 1, 2005
    Dress Like Your Dad? He Rocks
    By RUTH LA FERLA

    DEBORAH DEJAH, a New Yorker and the mother of two, has long shared her daughter's tastes in music. Now she shares her dress size too. So it was probably inevitable that Mrs. Dejah, 48, and Olivia, 14, would find themselves at Marsha D. D., a Third Avenue store specializing in children's fashion, squeezing their diminutive frames into identical Doors T-shirts, the image of Jim Morrison emblazoned on the front.

    The Dejahs' infatuation with the accouterment of classic rock 'n' roll does not stop there. Olivia makes regular forays into her mother's closet, ferreting out the old T-shirts, frayed jeans and weathered cowboy boots that were once the emblems of her mother's renegade look, hoping they will lend a subversive edge to her own.

    Mrs. Dejah is thrilled. "These clothes resonate from your childhood," she said. "That you could share them with your kid is really wonderful."

    It is also fashionable, perfectly in tune with the current revival of an old-school aesthetic founded on the relics of classic rock's glory days, an era roughly from the mid-1960's through the early 70's. In the last year or two, the trappings of that raucous era have acquired a mass appeal, recycled or reinvented for a candidly nostalgic age.

    Rock's funky, flamboyant aesthetic has been part of the cultural landscape for so long that to some it may not register as new. But the look is now being revisited simultaneously by a young generation enchanted with rock's golden age and by their parents, many of them seeking to reconnect with their past lives.

    A high-low roster of retailers - including Fred Segal, Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York; vintage shops like Cherry and Resurrection; and youth-driven chains like Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic - have added components of classic rock style to their inventories. That stock encompasses original and contemporary variations of Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin T-shirts; biker and cowboy boots and winkle-pickers; low-rise drainpipes and patched and shredded denim flares; Sergeant Pepper-style marching band coats; glitter tops; and faux folkloric tunics worthy of Janis Joplin or Stevie Nicks.

    "Rock 'n' roll is part of everybody's uniform right now," said Jaye Hersh, the owner of Intuition, a popular Los Angeles boutique and Web site selling rock-inflected items like studded belts and newly minted concert T-shirts, even baby onesies imprinted with an AC/DC logo.

    Aspiring hipsters of any age can buy their rock paraphernalia from mass marketers like H&M, which is selling skinny black velvet jackets reminiscent of Mick Jagger's; companies like Trunk, a maker of reissued concert T-shirts; or catalog merchants like Worn Free, which publishes a promotional gazette styled like an alternative newspaper, advertising a "heritage line" of clothing bearing images of Frank Zappa and John Lennon. "This is rebellion made ready-to-wear," the catalog copy boasts.

    Those who like their look raw and authentic flock to shops like Resurrection in the East Village, a purveyor of used concert shirts, leather jackets and accessories priced from $200 to several thousand dollars. For older shoppers, high prices are no hurdle. "They are buying all those things that they wanted as a kid, that they didn't get to have," said Katy Rodriguez, an owner of the shop.

    Others turn to eBay, which reports a recent run on vintage pieces like hardware-embellished hipster belts, motorcycle jackets, leather wristbands, old concert T-shirts and Nike sneakers customized with a portrait of Bob Marley.

    Last month Cherry, a boutique in Greenwich Village and Los Angeles that sells vintage rock clothing to the fashion set, opened an outlet at the Virgin Megastores in Times Square and in Los Angeles, an indication that the music emporium, which sells new band T-shirts and accessories to teenagers and young adults, has made a commitment to the old-time style.

    Ed Baker, a student from England, strolled inside Virgin's Cherry shop in Times Square on Tuesday and gazed longingly at an olive drab field jacket, an artifact from his father's time. "My dad was a Mod back in the day," Mr. Baker, 23, said. "He rode scooters and stuff, and he was fond of the Beatles, the Stones and the Who."

    That his father might have worn one of the styles on display "is definitely part of the appeal for me," he said.

    Shoppers partial to more lacquered rock interpretations can wait until early next year, when spring fashions from houses like Comme des Garçons, Undercover, Balenciaga and Dior Homme begin trickling into stores. In her men's show in February, Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garçons designer, introduced a procession of suits and shirts gaudily done up with the Stones' famous lips-and-tongue logo. Undercover, an influential women's line by Jun Takahashi, includes playful riffs on the concert T-shirt, sliced up and reassembled as A-line dresses, tunics and hip-wrapped skirts.

    Rock's stylistic revival comes at a time when the signature music of the 60's and 70's reverberates in the popular consciousness by way of made-for-TV movies and books, the latest including "The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man," out this week from St. Martin's Press. Boomers with families in tow have packed a recent run of concerts, including the Stones, who performed in New York City in September, and Cream, who reunited for a three-night blockbuster at Madison Square Garden in October. A Times Square billboard trumpets the 1971 "Concert for Bangladesh," now on DVD.

    It was only a matter of time before the wholesale commercialization of classic rock would find a new outlet in fashion. That old-school style is "valid today," said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts retail trends. "It is very much a part of our time, being adopted by a younger generation looking for a way to rebel within the boundaries being set by mainstream society."

    Lisa Koenigsberg, an adjunct professor of arts at New York University and the founder of Arts Initiatives, which organizes conferences on the arts, observed that rock's raw style is just as potent a magnet to the middle-aged. "It conjures an Arcadia, a time when the boomers felt they could change the world," she said.

    Ms. Koenigsberg, who will preside at "Dressing the Part," a New York University conference that runs today through Saturday and addresses the allure of rock style, added that for parents and children alike, that style "represents a narrowing of the bridge between the generations, a visual argument that both are on the same page."

    The appeal of rock fashion lies primarily in its authenticity. "It's not about taste," argued the aptly named Mick Rock, who has been photographing rock bands since 1969. "It's more about energy. These are people very involved in their own style. Quite often they are self-styled. They are pulling together unlikely elements, and it's their attitude that makes them work." An exhibition of Mr. Rock's photographs opens today at the gallery in the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan.

    Paradoxically, a denatured, stylized version of the look prevails on the runways and in fashion glossies. This month Harper's Bazaar features a homage to the likes of Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin using designs from Yves Saint Laurent, a look that is anything but gritty.

    "Rock is not destroyed anymore," said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys, where best sellers include glamorized versions of the classic biker's boot. "It's cleaned up. Everything is done with such precision that you're going to look as if you thought about it long and hard."

    At Bergdorf, which does a robust business with Chrome Hearts rock-inspired accessories, shoppers have embraced the tough-as-rivets look as a complement, or sometimes an antidote, to the prim runway fashions of the last several seasons. It appeals to "luxury customers who do not necessarily want to look as if they are conforming," said Robert Burke, the store's fashion director.

    Mrs. Dejah, the mom who shops at Marsha D. D., is among those likely to incorporate the look into a more refined ensemble, pulling on a Stones T-shirt, for instance, to punch up a fastidiously tailored blazer and black pants. "Rock is not my whole look," she said. "If I have to do something grown-up, I'll make some adjustments."

    And Bergdorf's interpretation of classic rock will not be literal, Mr. Burke said, but will highlight hard-edged elements from the collections of Alexander McQueen and Dsquared, a mix intended for customers who want to roughen up and lend ballast to the season's wispy doll-like looks.

    Today rock style is increasingly pitched to an audience grown comfortable with its casual if somewhat mannered appearance. "Formality doesn't really exist in everyday fashion like it did in the times of our parents and grandparents," said Cesar Padilla, an owner of Cherry. "That's why the things we take for granted - denim and leather and boots - which were embraced by the rock movement, have become part of modern street chic."

    Nor will the sight of a baby boomer tricked out in leather and flares raise many eyebrows, Mr. Padilla added. "In the 60's, if you had a record executive walking around in a Sonic Youth T-shirt, you would have thought he was out of his mind.

    "But today it's O.K. for a 50-year-old to wear a Sonic shirt, because everybody in Sonic Youth is 50 years old."

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