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Thanksgiving

Brendan Smialowski/AFP – Getty Images

President Bush pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys today. Marshmallow will serve as grand marshall of Disneyland's holiday parade.

November 23, 2005
Two Turkeys Pardoned, With First-Class Tickets
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - With Vice President Dick Cheney at his side, President Bush pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys, Marshmallow and Yam, on Tuesday and sent them off first class on a United Airlines flight to live out their lives at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.

In previous years, the pardoned birds were sent to Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Va., where many died within months.

"This year is going to be a little different," Mr. Bush said, moments before a handler wrestled the flapping 37-pound Marshmallow to the stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "Marshmallow and Yam were a little skeptical about going to a place called Frying Pan Park. I don't blame them."

After the bird had settled down, Mr. Bush cautiously stroked its white feathers, patted its head and invited a group of schoolchildren to the stage to do the same. Mr. Cheney, who has never been known as a lively campaigner, hung back in a corner of the stage and approached neither the turkey nor the children.

The other turkey, Yam, the alternate, was not on the premises. "He's in a pickup truck hanging out by the South Lawn," Mr. Bush said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has been pressuring the White House for years to stop sending the turkeys to Frying Pan Park, claimed credit for the switch to Disneyland. A spokesman for the organization, Bruce Friedrich, said that the birds were kept in a small enclosure at Frying Pan Park and that they looked lonely and neglected when he visited them there several times a year.

"It doesn't make any sense at all that the leader of the free world pardons two birds and then sends them to a life of squalor," Mr. Friedrich said. "It's hard to argue with Disneyland."

Joel Brandenberger, a spokesman and lobbyist for the National Turkey Federation, which handles the pardoned birds, said that the animal rights group had nothing to do with the decision to send the birds to Disneyland, "and if they think they did, they're absolutely delusional."

Mr. Brandenberger said that Frying Pan Park had always treated the pardoned turkeys well, but that Marshmallow and Yam were sent to Disneyland because it had asked for the turkeys this year to help celebrate its 50th anniversary.

On Thursday, the birds will be grand marshals in the Disneyland Thanksgiving Day parade and will then live in an enclosure in Frontierland, near the entrance to Santa's Reindeer Roundup, called Big Thunder Ranch the rest of the year. The birds, in cages, traveled first class to California, Mr. Brandenberger said, because Disney and turkey executives took up an entire United first-class cabin.

Shortly after granting the pardons, Mr. Bush left on Air Force One for a Thanksgiving holiday at his Texas ranch.

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New Orleans

Nature, Man and Politics at the Center of the Storm

Annapolis With the Kids

A Treasure Chest of Fun on Chesapeake Bay

Children and Visits to Washington, D.C.

Washington With Kids: First the Museums, Then the City

Key West

Mike Hentz for The New York Times

With places the 801 Bourbon Bar, Key West appeals to visitors of almost every stripe.

November 18, 2005
Is Key West Going Straight?
By ROBERT ANDREW POWELL

FOR decades, the remote Florida town of Key West has been a refuge for gay tourists, a kind of Southern bookend to Provincetown, Mass. - a place where drag shows, all-male guest houses (complete with communal hot tubs) and a spirit of unbridled hedonism attracted everyone from closeted Midwest accountants to Tennessee Williams.

But recently, soaring real estate prices and the popularity of events like Fantasy Fest - an annual bacchanal of parades, masquerade balls and celebrity look-alike contests that began as a tourism promotion in 1979 and has since evolved into a drunken open-air party that would be right at home on fraternity row - have begun to attract a more heterogenous crowd, one that can at times make Key West look like any other tourist town getting ready for Spring Break.

You can feel the change at the Lighthouse Court, a popular - some would say notorious - gay-only Whitehead Street guesthouse that recently went "all welcome," the local euphemism for accepting heterosexual guests as well as gays. And it's obvious clear across Old Town at the Heron House Court, formerly known as the Fleur de Key and long one of the premier gay-only guesthouses on the island. It started welcoming straight visitors to its 16 rooms in August.

Meanwhile Duval Street, the main commercial street of Old Town, continues to evolve into a strip of Hard Rock Cafes and Margaritavilles. On a sultry evening in late September, a cover band at Sloppy Joe's plowed through Tommy Tutone's lone hit, "Jenny (867-5309)." At Irish Kevin's, a troubadour was convincing his audience of fraternity brothers to sing along to Bon Jovi.

Could Key West, the place that Readers of OutTraveler magazine named the second best resort town in the world (behind Provincetown), be going straight?

"I'd say Key West is less gay friendly than it was 10 years ago," said Gregory Gearhart, a hairdresser from Fort Lauderdale who visits three times a year. Mr. Gearhart was sitting at the Atlantic Shores pool bar, an iconic gay hangout that plans to close next year. He took a sip from his Skyy and Coke and contemplated the impact of his words. "Actually, I wouldn't say it's gay unfriendly. It's becoming different, though. It's not what it once was."

Of course, Key West retains a gay sensibility. There are gay tourist charters to the Dry Tortugas and gay sunset cruises into the Florida Straits. Rainbow flags flutter across Old Town. It's nothing to see a pair of men or pair of women walking on Duval Street hand in hand. A sign posted on a house on Frances Street states: "That 'love thy neighbor' thing, I meant it. - God."

Key West was the first American city to openly recruit gay tourists, and current ads are specifically aimed at gay travelers. A gay and lesbian trolley tour rolls down gay guesthouse row on Fleming Street, passing the Equator, Coconut Grove, Oasis and the Coral Tree Inn. The Island House on Fleming not only remains gay-only, it also features a clothing-optional gym.

On Duval, the La Te Da cabaret continues to offer drag queen reviews. More drag queens work the sidewalk outside the 801 Bourbon Bar, beckoning passing tourists. At the Bourbon Street Pub, a man in a tight pink tank-top still looks right at home.

But for many longtime gay visitors to this 5.9-square-mile island, located about 150 miles southwest of Miami, there is a growing sense that Key West is no longer the gay destination it once was. Some of it is a generational shift, as younger gay travelers can take their choice of gay-friendly destinations like South Beach, Palm Springs, Puerto Vallarta and even - unlikely as it seems - Orlando.

But the shifts are a reflection of more significant changes in Key West itself. Once a low-cost retreat for those who wanted to get away from it all - both gay and straight - it is now one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. While transplants once could buy up attractive but dilapidated houses in Old Town, those "Carpenter Gothic" houses have now been restored with pastel paint and shiny tin roofs to a standard that would make Martha Stewart applaud. Today, a tiny bungalow in Old Town can sell for $600,000 or more.

"In 1985 you could go to a party that would include a famous writer, a millionaire and a woman who sold beads on Duval," said Michael Browning, one of the owners of the Atlantic Shores, which is scheduled to close in the spring, to be replaced by a 58-unit condominium complex. "That doesn't happen as much anymore. But people talk about how great it was 20 years ago. I'll bet you anything that 20 years from now, they'll talk about how great it was in 2005."

At the Atlantic Shores pool one sunny day this fall, what caught the eye first were the women, many of whom were topless. And then the men reclining on plastic lounge chairs padded with blue cushions. Several of the men were completely naked, soaking up sun as naturally as iguanas. In the pool, men in fluorescent bikinis stood submerged almost to their nostrils, motionless like Everglades alligators stalking deer.

In a survey of gay tourists conducted by the Key West Business Guild, several respondents specifically mentioned the Atlantic Shores as their favorite thing about Key West. "It was a simple business decision," Mr. Browning said of the condo conversion. "A lot of people love the Atlantic Shores, but they weren't necessarily booking rooms at the hotel."

Mr. Browning is not alone in blaming simple economics for many of the changes. The Lighthouse Court, for example, was bought in January by a group of investors who own four other hotels on the island. "They are all all-welcome, so we just folded it into our operation," said Julie Fondriest, the new managing owner of the Lighthouse Court. "It wasn't a slight against the gay community at all."

At Pearl's Rainbow, a former cigar factory that is the island's only women-only guesthouse, Loraine Quigley remained optimistic about the island's gay-friendly identity. "I wouldn't say there's a trend to eliminate gay guesthouses," she said. "One or two properties have switched owners, but that's about it."

Still, at one of the Atlantic Shores regular Sunday night tea parties earlier this fall, a sense of mourning hung in the humid and salty air. There was worry that condos like the ones to be built on this property will change the character of the city. There was talk of moving to Wilton Manors, a growing gay enclave outside Fort Lauderdale. Or perhaps Costa Rica.

"Key West is not going to be the gay Mecca that it was," Charlie Barry, 42, said. He wore jeans and no shirt. A can of Budweiser perspired in his hand. He is a native New Englander known as Woody; he said he first came to Key West in 1992 and has lived in Old Town for the last three years. "I mean, c'mon, it's just for the filthy rich. It's not going to be a gay Key West."

On the dance deck, a drag queen, Miss Angelica Duval, lip-synced her way through a set of disco hits. She redefined Amazonian, with muscular legs and buttocks showcased by a thong. Remove the makeup, the wig and the glitter and she could be a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins.

Another drag queen, Gina Maseratti, lamented the closing of the Atlantic Shores. "I've been coming here for many years," she said. She wore stiletto heels, a platinum wig and a full face of makeup. "Eventually the condos will be bought up by people who don't live here year-round. The real heart of Key West will sell and move on."

But, in many ways, Gina Maseratti's situation is as complicated and nuanced as Key West's future. Miss Maseratti's given name is Kerry Torr Cressman. He works in construction. He's involved in a committed relationship with a woman, whose shoulder he caressed while he spoke to a reporter. "I don't think people come to Key West for the typical stuff you get in Miami or Fort Lauderdale," he said. "They come to see people like me, a drag queen in a beautiful relationship with a beautiful woman who is a schoolteacher."

Miss Maseratti was about to step into the spotlight to lip sync a disco version of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" during which she would strip off her khaki skirt to reveal a blue maillot spangled with white stars. As she headed over to the stage, she insisted she was not about to leave the island, even if the Atlantic Shores did.

"I still love Key West," she said. "I love it. I'll be here until they drag me out screaming and kicking."

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'Memories of My Melancholy Whores'

Caleb Bach/Knopf Gabriel García Márquez http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/ November 22, 2005 Books of The Times | 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores' He Wants to Die Alone, but First . . . By MICHIKO KAKUTANI "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait. After the author's magical portrait of his own youth and apprenticeship in a classic memoir ("Living to Tell the Tale," 2003), this very slight novella - a longish short story, really - plays like a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time. Like the entries in his 1993 collection "Strange Pilgrims," this tale demonstrates that the shorter form of the story does not lend itself to Mr. García Márquez's talents: his penchant for huge, looping, elliptical narratives that move back and forth in time is cramped in this format, as is his desire to map the panoramic vistas of an individual's entire life. The fertile inventiveness that animated his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is decidedly muted in these pages, and the reverence for the mundane realities of ordinary life, showcased in more recent works, seems attenuated as well. As a result, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" feels like a brittle little fable composed on automatic pilot. For some time now Mr. García Márquez has been interested in writing from the vantage point of old age, and this story takes that impulse to an extreme. Its narrator, a former scholar known by his students as Prof. Gloomy Hills, is turning 90 and decides to celebrate his birthday by having sex with a young virgin. He places a call to the madam of his favorite brothel and makes arrangements to spend the night with a 14-year-old girl. In the course of recounting the relationship he develops with this girl, whom he calls Delgadina, the old man also ruminates about "the miseries" of his "misguided life." Prof. Gloomy Hills, we learn, lives in his parents' house, proposing "to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and painless." In addition to having taught Spanish and Latin grammar, he served for 40 years as the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, a job that involved "reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse code." He now scrapes by on his pension "from that extinct profession," combined with the even more meager sums he earns writing a weekly column. In his nine decades of life, the narrator has never had any close friends or intimate relationships. "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay," he says, "and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper." Such passages read like a sad parody of Mr. García Márquez's radiant 1988 novel "Love in the Time of Cholera," which chronicled love (not just sex) in all its myriad varieties. Worse, we receive no insight into why the narrator has led such a libertine but lonely existence, no insight into why he has never examined his inner life. All this changes, we are asked to believe, when Prof. Gloomy Hills meets Delgadina and, for the first time in his life, falls in love. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches as she sleeps next to him on the bed - exhausted from her day job at a factory, and overcome by the valerian potion the madam has given her to calm her nerves. As the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this innocent young woman - who, truth be told, does little ever but doze in his presence - fantasy and dreamlike hallucinations begin to take over. After one imagined exchange with her, he says: "From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at 20, a parlor whore at 40, the queen of Babylon at 70, a saint at 100." The narrator imagines that Delgadina has been to his house and prepared him breakfast. Later he flies into a jealous rage, convinced - with hardly any evidence - that she has been sleeping with other men. He assiduously courts her with flowers and presents, and reads books like "The Little Prince" to her as she sleeps. "We continued," he says, "with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings." The relationship between the narrator and his virgin is really a relationship that exists inside the narrator's head, and since Mr. García Márquez makes little effort to make this man remotely interesting - as either an individual or a representative figure - it's hard for the reader to care really about what happens. Moreover, the trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that's quite unworthy of the great Gabriel García Márquez's prodigious talents. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Woodward covered in Huffington Blog

Arianna Huffington Bio

11.22.2005

Memo to Woodward: Endlessly Evoking Watergate Won’t Make Us Forget Plamegate

READ MORE: Iraq, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby, Indictments, CIA, Valerie Plame, George W. Bush

Bob Woodward’s patronizing haughtiness was everywhere last night on Larry King. I haven’t been talked down to that much since I was introduced to Shaquille O’Neal. I get it now: we all just don’t get it. The heroic Woodward wasn’t trying to hide anything or maintain his access, he was just too busy doing “incredibly aggressive reporting” on “immense questions” about Iraq to be distracted by “a casual, off-hand remark” that, even on the eve of the Libby indictment, as Plamegate threatened to paralyze the White House, didn’t strike the legendary reporter as even “a firecracker” of a story.

Woodward’s performance was, to borrow a phrase, “laughable” -- particularly the way he kept tossing in references to Watergate, strapping on those glory days like a protective armor. Over the course of “the full hour”, he mentioned Watergate four times, Ben Bradlee three times, Deep Throat twice, Carl Bernstein twice, and Richard Nixon and Katharine Graham once each. Memo to Bob: we get this, too. Your reporting once brought down a president. But that only makes your “journalistic sins” on Plamegate all the more appalling and disappointing.

It was pathetic watching the real life Robert Redford reduced to holding up old headlines to fight off charges that he’s just carrying water for the powerful. Color me convinced. At least until I reread Plan of Attack.

I also found it really interesting that King’s interview with Woodward, like his recent interview with Judy Miller, was pre-taped -- making it impossible for either of them to have to interact directly with the public and deal with viewer calls and questions. Could it really be a coincidence that these two star reporters both took no viewer calls on a show famous for them?

Since King has a rule about always trying to do his show live -- it’s not called Larry King on Tape, after all -- we sent an email to the show asking why the Woodward interview had been taped. Scheduling conflicts we were told.

Which raised the question: who had the scheduling conflict, Woodward or King? I doubted it was Larry’s since I had been at the party at the Mondrian Hotel’s Skybar to celebrate the release of his wife Shawn’s new CD. The party was called for 7:00 p.m. and the Mondrian is located at 8440 Sunset Blvd. CNN’s Los Angeles studios are just down the road at 6430 Sunset, so King could easily have done the show live and been at the party before the first drink had been poured (I arrived at the party late, by which time Larry had already left to fly to New York for tonight’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld).

So I called Larry this morning. “I spoke to Woodward,” he told me, “and I told him we could either tape the interview or we could do it live and I’d be a little late for Shawn’s party. He said, ‘Let’s tape it’. But I don’t think he was ducking anything.”

I beg to differ. On the show, Woodward talked about a reporter’s “obligation to get information out to the public”. It sounded very noble. But when given the choice between doing the show live with calls for the aforesaid public or taping the show without viewer calls, he chose the latter. Maybe he just really, really didn’t want Larry to miss a second of Shawn’s big bash (incidentally, I’ve had the first track of Shawn’s new CD on repeat all morning).

As for Miller, King told me her interview had been taped because “she had to go to a dinner”. It was actually -- as I was told by people who were there -- a small dinner party thrown by Mitch Rosenthal of Phoenix House in New York. Hmm, let’s weigh those options: attend a small dinner party or allow the public you theoretically serve the chance to ask questions? No contest -- if you want to avoid all those tedious questions bloggers representing the public have been raising for weeks.

Thanks for the openness, guys.

It’s too bad. Maybe someone would have called in and asked Woodward why, despite all his “incredibly aggressive reporting” and all that has come out about Plamegate, he still claims he hasn’t yet “seen evidence” of an “organized effort” to “slime” Joe Wilson and his wife.

So we're supposed to believe that a gaggle of Bush administration officials just happened to decide on their own volition, at about the same time, to mention that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA to Bob Woodward, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper, Robert Novak, Walter Pincus, and lord who knows who else. Sure, Bob, whatever you say.

A quick review:

Matt Cooper was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly told his readers about it in an article called “A War on Wilson?”.

Bob Novak was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly did the leakers’ bidding by outing Valerie Plame.

Judy Miller was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly chose not to pursue the story, sticking “Valerie Flame’s” name into a forgotten drawer.

And Bob Woodward, Watergate hero and journalistic superstar, was leaked to but, apparently unable to understand what was really going on, promptly did nothing for close to two-and-a-half years… and still doesn’t get it.

Don’t worry, Bob. We’ll always have Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, Watergate…

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Xtreme Sports

Article30 August 2005 What's so extreme about extreme sports? There is a lot of PR puff behind the idea that new sports challenge our safety-first, shrink-wrapped world. by Josie Appleton

According to the ads, extreme sports are an antidote to our safety-first, shrink-wrapped world. They offer the opportunity to carve your own path and find out where your limits lie. There is a new extreme sport born almost every week, each seemingly more bizarre and dangerous than the last. BASE-jumping involves parachuting off buildings and cliffs; extreme ironing (inexplicably) involves ironing mid-skydive, up a mountain or under water. Hang-gliding and skydiving have spawned heli-bungee and sky-flying; skateboarding has spawned street luge, or lying on a skateboard and going fast downhill. Buildering is free climbing up skyscrapers, popularised by the Frenchman Alain 'Spiderman' Robert; free running treats the city as one big gymnastics circuit. Then there are events such as the Verbier Extreme, which challenges snowboarders to find the most daring way of descending a mountain. Extreme sports - also known as lifestyle sports - have roots in 1960s countercultural movements, and have been growing since the late 1980s. Research by American Sports Data found that new-style sports such as snowboarding and paintballing have increased at the expense of traditional sports. Snowboarding was up by 30 per cent between 1998 and 2004 (7.1million people tried it at least once in 2004), while paintballing increased by 63 per cent in the same period (to 9.6million participants), and artificial wall climbing was up by 63 per cent (to 7.7million). By contrast, the number of baseball players fell by 28 per cent between 1987 and 2000, declining to 10.9million players (though most of these would be regular players, whereas most paintballers would be one-offs). Softball and volleyball fell by 37 per cent and 36 per cent in the same period (1). Given the high-adrenaline image, it's unsurprising that male 15- to 24-year-olds are the prime market. In the UK, Mintel found that 22.7 per cent of 11- to 19-year-olds participated in BMX/mountain biking and 27. 5 per cent did skateboarding (2). But these sports attract a wide variety of participants. BASE jumpers include thirty- and fortysomething solicitors and accountants; and the new free running training academy in east London attracts 80 people a session, including everybody from kids to the middle aged. The myth of 'extreme' sports But it isn't really the danger factor that marks out extreme sports. According to Nicholas Heyworth from Sports England, many are less dangerous than traditional sports: 'Statistically, the most dangerous sport is horse riding.' One 'aggressive skating' website warns you to 'Skate safe, because pain and death suck!', and another cliff jumping website is packed with disclaimers and warnings, such as 'don't drink and jump', 'never jump alone' and 'know your limits'. Heyworth notes that 'many extreme sports guys have got safety equipment up to their eyeballs, and a complete safety team. You would be lucky to get a cold sponge and a bucket of water at a Sunday league rugby match'. A helicopter packed with medical equipment tracks participants in the Verbier Extreme. Improvements in equipment allow the reduction in risk and pain. In the 1960s, skydiving was done by penniless daredevils using surplus US airforce chutes. One veteran recalls: 'It hurt like hell and you drifted mercilessly at the will of the wind until you crashed to the ground and it hurt like hell again.' (3) Now, he says, there are 'high-income jumpers who not only make eight jumps a day, but pay someone to pack their parachutes'. Even the most extreme of extreme sport pales into comparison beside the exploits of the early climbers and explorers, for whom the risks were great and the outcomes unknown. The advert for Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914-17 Trans-Antarctic expedition read: 'Men wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.' Much of the hype about extreme sports comes not from the participants, but from the industry that surrounds it. Extreme sport goods - including TV programmes, graffiti art, design, drinks, and clothing - are a bigger business than the sports themselves. The Extreme Sports Channel has an estimated audience of 20million across Europe, most of whom wouldn't go anywhere near a half-pipe - it's popular among Portuguese women, for example. The Extreme Media Group sells a range of clothing and drinks. The 'Extreme energy' drink is formulated to 'deliver an intense physical and mental energy boost', using Asian fermented tea, Siberian ginseng and guarana (a natural form of caffeine). There is even 'Extreme water' ('the pure artesian mineral water from the Rockhead source in Buxton, will rehydrate you fast'), and Extreme Chillout ('new gen soft drink created to aid relaxation, recovery and all round chilling') (4). Meanwhile, there is an X-Games brand of mobile phone: 'Carry the excitement and attitude of X Games with you everyday. The tweaked out phone allows devoted fans to capture the signature style and personality of the X Games in a wireless phone.' (5) But it's not all image. Beneath the hype, lifestyle sports are a new kind of sport for a new age. While traditional sports elevated the values of commitment and fair play, these new sports offer individuals a more personal kind of challenge. Sport: from team to individual Most traditional sports were institutionalised in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, sport had been more informal, with the different teams in a rugby match deciding on the rules at the start of the game. Indeed, many sports were just a more or less organised form of fighting: early 'football' involved neighbouring villages scrapping over a pig's bladder. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm outlines in The Invention of Tradition, institutionalised sport provided a gel for an industrialising society. Factory owners set up football teams for their workers (Arsenal was the team of London gun-makers), to tie them into the firm and provide an outlet for aggression. Meanwhile, the ruling class formalised its own sports - tennis, golf, and rugby union - which Hobsbawm describes as a 'conscious…effort to form a ruling elite'. Business was done on the tennis court and golf course, and the values of sportsmanship and fair play became the signature tunes of the British elite. Now that class and community identity is on the wane, traditional sporting associations have suffered. A boys' football team, for example, requires parents as volunteer helpers, and for each member of the team to play by the rules and turn up for practice. Professor Neil Ravenscroft, a research fellow at the University of Brighton, tells me that 'Volunteers to run sport outside of school are declining. And young people have less commitment to the idea that you adhere to sets of rules that are not yours, and turn up to training regularly'. Lifestyle sports provide more individualised ways of pushing yourself. There is no winning and losing as such, and little organisation into teams or leagues. Each individual is really competing against himself: the founder of free running, Sebastien Foucan, said that the sport was about a 'desire to overtake yourself'. How a free runner tackles the urban landscape is up to him. There are some established moves - a cat jump, speed vault, a palm spin, and so on - but you are always free to invent your own. This contrasts with sports such as gymnastics, when athletes have a certain time to perform, a set piece of equipment and a limited series of moves. Extreme sports claim to be confronting authority. Rather than work within leagues and sporting bodies, participants say that they are doing it for themselves. Bandit canoeing goes down forbidden waterways, and off-piste snowboarding and skateboarding crash off set tracks. Free runners claim to challenge the official architecture of the city. Ez, who runs the east London free running academy, says: 'I like the freedom aspect, the fact that every individual has their own way of overcoming. The average person will be guided by pavements, but with parkour you interact with obstacles, you won't be guided by them.' The only rules are those tacitly agreed by participants. A street basketball site or skateboarding half pipe will have a set of agreements about what's allowed. At Brighton skateboarding park, for example, there are different times of the day for different abilities. For some, lifestyle sports can be character developing. Once boys were sent out to freezing football and rugby fields to make men of them; now they might assault a half-pipe instead. They go at a jump again and again, falling off and picking themselves up until they can finally do it. In this way, you bear the consequences of your actions. One climber explained the attraction: 'there must be something which can be won and something which can be lost. The winning can be the unutterable joy as your questing fingers latch a crucial edge. The losing can be life itself. Either way we choose.' (6) Extreme sports can also enable you to confront fears. Some free runners are scared of heights, yet will perform complicated leaps between high buildings. They still their minds before the jump, overcome the part of them that wants to balk. This isn't about taking risks for the sake of it: instead, it's the calculated judgement of the sportsman. Ez argues that free running 'requires discipline to do it properly, which is transferred to other aspects of life'. Some claim that the thrill of the jump can cast the grind of everyday life into perspective. One young BASE-jumper says: 'It's the way to refresh things, to keep the mind awake. You have plenty of time to think about yourself, the mountain you stand on, your life, people you meet, things you're doing.' Of course, some people look to these new sports for easy thrills. They want the appearance of doing something 'craaa-zy' like skydiving or bungee jumping, while relying on the instructor to ensure that nothing goes wrong. But some participants want to put themselves to the test. This comes at a time when institutionalised sports are being tied up in regulation, with risk analysis required before every rugby game and players suing the referee if they get injured. In schools, kids are encouraged to go for non-cooperative games that reinforce everybody's self-esteem. Lifestyle sports might provide an opportunity for some individuals to develop themselves. The limits of extreme sports Because lifestyle sports are so individualised, however, they are liable to go off in bizarre directions. Without social sanction and discipline, these sports can look like the more ridiculous parts of the Guinness Book of Records, with people riding bikes up trees or ironing up mountains. This is casting around, looking for something - anything - to test yourself. These sports can also revel in individuals' isolation, the fact that they don't have to rely on anybody else. This is a limited form of subjectivity: in reality, we develop ourselves by working with and against others. Traditional sports provided a way for individuals to push themselves through the challenge of competition, or by working together as a team. A hundred-metre runner, for example, is trying to beat the other runners rather than just his PB - and this challenge takes him to new heights. Lifestyle sports can encourage a narcissistic focus on individual performance, rather than pushing the limits of human achievement. There is something childish, too, about the desire to traverse official boundaries. Canoeing where you aren't supposed to be canoeing, jumping where you're not supposed to jump…this involves the guilty freedom of a child breaking the rules. Paradoxically, an obsession with breaking rules actually leaves you beholden to them. Hype and reality So there is both potential and limits to extreme sports. In order to understand the pros and cons, though, we have to cut through the hype that surrounds them. This hype owes less to the participants than to the extreme sports industry. This industry makes the idea of 'living on the edge' into a consumer product. Deep down, we all feel that we should be pushing ourselves a bit more; the extreme sports industry sells the image of aspiration. Wear a 'Just do it' cap; drink a can of 'Live life to the max' Pepsi; talk on an X-Games mobile phone. This is about the appearance of living on the edge, posing at taking risks while actually doing nothing at all. In the passive act of buying a consumer good, you are offered thrills and spills. It's not the real act of grappling with a challenge, but the image of 'pushing it to the MAX'. This is why extreme sports are so hyped up: the adrenaline factor is sold in concentrated form. Some of these new sports are little more than PR products. There are actually a tiny number of dedicated free-runners, and many of will only perform for the camera. The sport became a media phenomenon before it built up a decent base of participants; now it can be more for show than self-development. Extreme sports often have a short shelf life: they will be the in thing for a few months, but soon get overtaken by the next fad. XFL, an 'extreme' version of American football that was a mix of NFL and WWF wrestling, was set up in 2000, but folded after just one season (7). So let's put aside the extreme hype, and look at these sports as just another kind of sport. They offer some potential for individual development - although often only by leaping in odd directions. (1) American Sports Data website (2) Quoted in 'Lifestyle sports and national sports policy: an agenda for research' (3) You can buy a thrill: chasing the ultimate rush, American Demographics, June 1997 Vol 19, issue 6 (4) Extreme drinks (5) X-Games mobile (6) Quoted in 'Lifestyle sports and national sports policy: an agenda for research' (7) XFL - the history

Today's Papers

Still Pulling Your Cheney
By Eric Umansky
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 3:43 AM ET

The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with GM's announcement that it will shutter at least nine North American plants and cut an additional 5,000 jobs on top of the 25,000 planned cuts it announced over the summer. USA Today also leads with GM, but the paper highlights a point the others cruise past: Unless GM wins concessions from unions, the company's savings will be limited for a good while because union contracts require the company "to continue paying workers most of their salaries even when plants close." The New York Times leads with Iraq's major political parties getting together at an Arab League confab and asking for "a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces." Similar calls have been made before, and as with this time, none have included an actual time frame.

Again, GM just added 5,000 job cuts to the 25,000 it already announced months ago, a concept the WP seems to have had trouble digesting: "GM TO SLICE 30,000 JOBS, SHUT OR CUT 12 PLANTS."

The NYT not only properly parses the job numbers, it also points out that Wall Street analysts did as well and were unimpressed: "Analysts immediately questioned whether the plan was enough, saying it lacked the speed and breadth that had helped rivals make comebacks."

The NYT's lead emphasizes that this is the "the first time" Iraq's political parties have "collectively" called for withdrawal. Which is probably true and not particularly relevant: The big parties might not have made such a call collectively before, but they have individually, and that includes the governing Shiite parties. (The Times' editors might want to take a peek at item No. 2 in the Shiite coalition's platform for the last election: "A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.")

It's not that the NYT's lead story is so wrong—the piece mentions that the call for a time line isn't new—the problem is where editors put the story. After all, if the calls for withdrawal are symbolic and aren't new, then what exactly is the Page One-worthy news here?

The WP and NYT front Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as expected dropping out of the conservative Likud party, which he helped found, to start a centrist party aimed at creating peace with Palestinians by ... well, it's not clear yet. "Likud in its present form is unable to lead Israel toward its national goals," said Sharon. Israel's parliament is on its way to dissolving, and elections will soon be scheduled.

The WP emphasizes Sharon's at least rhetorical nod toward the U.S.-supported road map, which, among other things, calls for a settlement freeze. Top Israeli paper Ha'aretz, meanwhile, suggests that Sharon is considering a unilateral pullout and making large settlements near Jerusalem and the border part of Israel.

As the LAT, NYT, and WP all front, Vice President Cheney cooed about the importance of an "energetic debate" on the war, and then in the grand spirit of such debate Cheney explained that those who question the administration's use of prewar intelligence were "dishonest and reprehensible" as well as "corrupt and shameless."

Selective Cheney coverage scorecard: The NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller's piece is thin and padded with pingpong back-and-forth quotes. (Revealed in the story: Sens. Kerry, Kennedy, and Reid all object to Cheney's characterizations and, bonus scoop, they explain why.) The Post's Dana Milbank has the sharpest take. But the LAT comes in first, achieving near-poetry, "USING OLIVE BRANCH, CHENEY LASHES FOES."

The WP off-leads and others go inside with a former partner of shamed super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff singing to the feds and pleading guilty to conspiring to bribe lawmakers. Which means an unknown number of people in Washington are now sweating. The WP says among those being investigated are a "half a dozen members of Congress, current and former senior Hill aides, [and] former deputy secretary of the interior." One congressman pointed to in the plea agreement: Rep. Robert Ney.

The WP fronts the administration loosening some standards on the No Child Left Behind Act. Last week the government announced it will allow, as the WP describes it, "as many of 10 states" (?) to judge schools by improvements on tests rather than whether they're meeting mandated test scores.

A front-page USAT piece announces, "6,644 ARE STILL MISSING AFTER KATRINA; Numbers Suggest Toll Could Rise Significantly." ... Or not. We quickly learn that most of the missing are "probably alive and well" and "are listed as missing because government record-keeping efforts haven't caught up with them in their new locations." There's probably a story in there somewhere, but hyperventilating about the potential for large numbers of deceased MIA isn't it.

Well, at least that foreign-policy campaign was successful ... The Wall Street Journal and NYT cover President Bush's pleasant but brief stop in Mongolia, where, despite the lack of war protesters or locked doors, there was stress. When SecDef Rumsfeld visited a few months ago, he was given a horse. The president did not want a similar party favor. The WSJ:

White House aides say Mr. Bush was worried about the obligations of ownership. Would taxpayers be on the hook for upkeep? Was there any way to guarantee the horse's well-being down the road? The question occupied not one but several meetings at the National Security Council in the days leading up to Mr. Bush's trip, one participant said.

The president did not receive a horse.

Iraq War

Nowhere To Go
Stop the taunting, and let's have a real debate about the Iraq war.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 1:45 PM ET

So, Bill Clinton got it wrong as usual, by making a smarmy plea for a truce of civility from his Little Rock library redoubt. The Iraq debate does not need to become less rude or less intense. It needs to become much more bitter and much more polarized. As I never tire of saying, heat is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it.

No, the problem with the Iraq confrontation, as fought "at home," is not its level of anger but its level of argument. After almost three years of combat, the standard of debate ought to have risen and to have become more serious and acute. Instead, it has slipped into a state of puerility. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, squeals about cowardice and suggests that those who differ are stabbing our boys in the back—and then tries to revise her remarks in the Congressional Record. This is to sink to exactly the same level as those who jeer that sympathizers of the intervention should "send"—as if they could—their own children, if they should happen to have any handy. Or even to the level of those who claim that anti-war criticism demoralizes "our men and women in uniform." I can't be absolutely sure of this, but the "men and women in uniform" whom I have met, and who have patrolled edgy slums and nasty borders, are unlikely to burst into tears when they hear that someone even in their home state doesn't think they can stand it. Let's try not to be silly.

For a while, it seemed possible that the sheer reality of battle in Iraq—a keystone state in which we would try the issue of democracy and federalism vs. fascism and jihadism—would simply winnow out the unserious arguments. Those who had jeered at the president for "trying to vindicate his daddy" would blush to recall what they had said, and those who spoke of imminent mushroom clouds would calm down a bit. Those who had fetishized the United Nations would have the grace to see that it had been corrupted and shamed, and those who pointed out that it had been corrupted and shamed would demand that it be reformed rather than overridden. Those who had wanted to lift the punitive sanctions on Iraq because they were so damaging to Iraqis could have allowed that the departure of Saddam was the price they would have to pay for the sanctions to be removed. Those in power who had once supported and armed Saddam might have had the decency to admit it. Those who said that it was impossible, by definition, to have an alliance between Saddamists and fundamentalists might care to notice what they had utterly failed to foresee.

Instead, we have mere taunting. "Liar, liar, pants on fire." "Terrorist sympathizer." It's certainly appalling that Michael Moore should be saying that the Iraqi "insurgents" are the moral equivalent of the minutemen, but my tax dollars don't go to support Moore. My tax dollars do go to pay the salary of Scott McLellan, who ought to be looking for other work after he accused the honorable but simple-minded Rep. Murtha of being a Michael Moore type.

I am not myself trying to split this difference. For reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere, I think that the continuation of the Saddam Hussein regime would have been even more dangerous than the Bush administration has ever claimed. I also think that that regime should have been removed many years before it actually was, which is why the Bush administration is right to remind people of exactly what Democrats used to say when they had the power to do that and did not use it. No, there are two absolutely crucial things that made me a supporter of regime change before Bush, and that will keep me that way whether he fights a competent war or not.

The first of these is the face, and the voice, of Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and secularists. Not only are these people looking at death every day, from the hysterical campaign of murder and sabotage that Baathists and Bin Ladenists mount every day, but they also have to fight a war within the war, against clerical factions and eager foreign-based forces from Turkey or Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia. On this, it is not possible to be morally or politically neutral. And, on this, much of the time at least, American force is exerted on the right side. It is the only force in the region, indeed, that places its bet on the victory and the values of the Iraqis who stand in line to vote. How appalling it would be, at just the moment when "the Arab street" (another dispelled figment that its amen corner should disown) has begun to turn against al-Qaida and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, if those voters should detect an American impulse to fold or "withdraw." A sense of history is more important than an eye to opinion polls or approval ratings. Consult the bankrupt Syrian Baathists if you doubt me.

But all right, let's stay with withdrawal. Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between "over here" and "over there." There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his "exit strategy" from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just "over the horizon" in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, "altered everything except the way we think." A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens "over the horizon." But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word "isolationist" at least used to describe something real, even "realistic." The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.

Ted Koppel

ABC News/Associated Press
Ted Koppel, above in 1980, ends his run tonight as the anchor of ABC's "Nightline."

November 22, 2005
The TV Watch
With Little Fanfare, an Anchor Says Goodbye
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Leave it to Ted Koppel to quit "Nightline" in the same wry, superior way he began it 25 years ago. His choice for a valedictory broadcast is not a video scrapbook crammed with slow-motion clips and misty testimonials from world leaders. Nor is it a foreboding look forward at what network news will be like without him.

Instead, Mr. Koppel cunningly devotes his last half-hour on ABC News to someone else's last act. Eschewing the kind of self-referential pomposity that most anchors thrive on, "A Tuesday With Morrie" allows Mr. Koppel to take another look at a once-unknown man, Morrie Schwartz, a Brandeis University professor who in 1995 allowed "Nightline" to document the last year of his life as he battled A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

The show is a tribute to Mr. Schwartz's indomitable spirit, but the broadcast also serves as a veiled showcase for Mr. Koppel's proud, contrarian personality. He built his career on being different - professorial, not telegenic; cerebral, not entertaining; coolly amusing, not genial or avuncular. "A Tuesday With Morrie" tonight is Koppel's last chance on ABC to épater les bourgeois.

Those three interviews with Mr. Schwartz were among the most requested "Nightline" shows, rebroadcast several times and still available on DVD and VHS. Mr. Koppel intersperses clips of those shows with a more recent interview with Mitch Albom, a sportswriter and former student of Mr. Schwartz who was inspired by the "Nightline" show to write a book, "Tuesdays With Morrie," that became a best seller and later a television movie. (Mr. Albom went on to write another best seller, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven.")

Throughout his conversations with Mr. Schwartz, who died in November 1995, Mr. Koppel maintained his customary cool. Mr. Koppel asks Mr. Schwartz about death, dying and the daily indignities of his disease dispassionately, without condescension, pity or camera-pleasing pathos. And Mr. Schwartz was an ideal subject: lucid, good-humored and intellectually engaging to the end. The two men had a tender-tough rapport. Close to death, Mr. Schwartz asks softly, jokingly, if having led a good life entitles him to be an angel. Mr. Koppel replies, Bogart-style, "Yeah, you'd be - you'd be cute with a pair of wings, Morrie."

There were times when "Nightline" seemed tired and obsolete, but Mr. Koppel managed to stay on his game when it counted. He was at his personal best in the early days of the Iraq invasion as an embedded reporter. Traveling with the Third Infantry Division, Mr. Koppel wore a helmet too big for his head, and managed to deliver incisive, well-structured live reports, staying level-headed and dispassionate when many of his younger colleagues grew strained and emotionally involved with the troops they accompanied. He never lost his dry, deflating sense of humor. He once described enemy resistance during the invasion as "more annoying than devastating."

Mr. Koppel began as anchor of "Nightline" in March 1980, after first proving his mettle as host of a late-night program, "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage." Those were primordial days in television news, before CNN, easy live-by-satellite access, and the Internet. He stood out immediately, interviewing guests about the story of the day with crisp authority and a brisk, no-nonsense style. He was sometimes confrontational, but almost always in an impersonal, somewhat lofty manner.

Mr. Koppel leaves at a time when younger anchors are making a name for themselves by flaunting their personal feelings on the air. During the Hurricane Katrina debacle, NBC's Brian Williams was widely applauded for venting his anger and frustration over the government's failure to act quickly to help the victims. So was Anderson Cooper, who recently replaced Aaron Brown as CNN's late night anchor and famously gave Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana an on-air tongue-lashing.

Mr. Koppel also covered the scandal of Katrina, and was often quite scathing, asking the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, "Don't you guys watch television? Don't you guys listen to the radio?" But Mr. Koppel never lost his aplomb, or his aversion to the first-person pronoun.

And his reticence and reserve will be missed. ABC decided to replace him with three anchors, Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir, a former BBC and ITV reporter best known for sensationalist interviews with celebrities like Diana, Princess of Wales, and Michael Jackson. CBS News and ABC News have not yet announced their choices to take over their evening news broadcasts, but it is unlikely that either network will find an anchor with the same cool, impersonal manner and inquisitive style.

Mr. Koppel recently was a guest on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360°," a nighttime news program that is the un-"Nightline": Mr. Cooper jumps from topic to topic at top speed, everything from grisly true-crime stories to interviews with the likes of Nicole Richie. (Mr. Cooper has kept Hurricane Katrina on the air as a personal badge of honor with a nightly feature, "Keeping Them Honest," which highlights the latest disgrace in the recovery effort.)

Mr. Koppel was gracious, and kept his critique of television news light, noting dryly that he was disheartened by the cable news "obsession with being first with the obvious."

And he declined the opportunity to sound sentimental or nostalgic. When Mr. Cooper asked Mr. Koppel why he was leaving ABC News, Mr. Koppel gave a dry smile and replied, "Why not?"

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Smart Or Not ?

From the issue dated December 17, 2004 POINT OF VIEW Here's the Problem With Being So 'Smart' By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS How often have you heard about someone's work, "You have to read it -- it's really smart."? Or "I didn't agree with anything he argued in that book, but it was smart."? At a conference you might hear, "I want to go to that panel; she's quite smart." You've probably also heard the reverse: "How did he get that job? He's not very smart." Imagine how damning it would be to say "not especially smart, but competent" in a tenure evaluation. In my observation, "smart" is the highest form of praise one can now receive. While it has colloquial currency, smart carries a special status and value in contemporary academic culture. But why this preponderance of smart? What exactly does it mean? Why not, instead, competent? Or knowledgeable? Or conscientious? We might value those qualities as well, but they seem pedestrian, lacking the particular distinction of being smart. Historically, smart has taken on its approbative sense relatively recently. Derived from the Germanic smerten, to strike, smart suggested the sharp pain from a blow. In the 18th century it began to indicate a quality of mind. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary notes Frances Burney's 1778 use in Evelina: "You're so smart, there's no speaking to you." (We still retain this sense in the _expression "smartass.") Smart indicated a facility and manner as well as mental ability. Its sense of immediacy also eventually bled over to fashion, in the way that one might wear a smart suit. The dominance of smart in the academic world has not always been the case. In literary studies -- I take examples from the history of criticism, although I expect that there are parallels in other disciplines -- scholars during the early part of the 20th century strove for "sound" scholarship that patiently added to its established roots rather than offering a smart new way of thinking. Literary scholars of the time were seeking to establish a new discipline to join classics, rhetoric, and oratory, and their dominant method was philology (for example, they might have ferreted out the French root of a word in one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). They sought historical accuracy, the soundness of which purported a kind of scientific legitimacy for their nascent discipline. During midcentury the dominant value shifted to "intelligent," indicating mental ability as well as discerning judgment. Lionel Trilling observed in a 1964 lecture that John Erskine, a legendary Columbia professor, had provided "a kind of slogan" with the title he had given to an essay, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent." Trilling went on to say that he was "seduced into bucking to be intelligent by the assumption ... that intelligence was connected to literature, that it was advanced by literature." Literary scholars of this era strove to decipher that essential element of literature, and their predominant method was interpretive, in both the New Critics (of particular poems) and the New York intellectuals (of broader cultural currents). The stress on intelligence coincided with the imperatives of the post-World War II university. Rather than a rarefied institution of the privileged, the university became a mass institution fully integrated with the welfare state, in both how it was financed and the influx of students it welcomed. As Louis Menand recounts in "The Marketplace of Ideas," the leaders of the postwar university, such as James B. Conant of Harvard, strategically transformed the student body to meet the challenge of the cold war as well as the industrial and technological burgeoning of the United States. These leaders inducted the best and brightest of all classes -- as long as they demonstrated their potential for intelligence. Conant was instrumental in founding the Educational Testing Service, which put in place exams like the SAT, to do so. In the latter part of the century, during the heyday of literary theory (roughly 1970-90), the chief value shifted to "rigor," designating the logical consistency and force of investigation. Literary study claimed to be not a humanity but a "human science," and critics sought to use the rigor of theoretical description seen in rising social sciences like linguistics. The distinctive quality of Paul de Man, the most influential critic of the era, was widely held to be his rigor. In his 1979 classic, Allegories of Reading, de Man himself pronounced that literature advanced not intelligence but rigor: "Literature as well as criticism is ... the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself." Since the late 1980s rigor seems to have fallen out of currency. Now critics, to paraphrase Trilling, are bucking to be smart. This development dovetails with several changes in the discipline and the university. Through the 1980s and '90s literary studies mushroomed, assimilating a plethora of texts, dividing into myriad subfields, and spinning off a wide array of methods. In the era of theory, critics embraced specialization, promulgating a set of theoretical schools or paradigms (structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and so on). But while the paradigms were multiple, one could attribute a standard of methodological consistency to them. Today there is no corresponding standard. Individual specializations have narrowed to microfields, and the overall field has expanded to encompass low as well as high literary texts, world literatures as well as British texts, and "cultural texts" like 18th-century gardens and punk fashion. At the same time, method has loosened from the moorings of grand theories; now eclectic variations are loosely gathered under the rubric of cultural studies. Without overarching criteria that scholars can agree upon, the value has shifted to the strikingness of a particular critical effort. We aim to make smart surmises among a plurality of studies of culture. Another factor in the rise of "smart" has to do with the evolution of higher education since the 1980s, when universities were forced to operate more as self-sustaining entities than as subsidized public ones. As is probably familiar to any reader of The Chronicle, this change has taken a number of paths, including greater pressure for business partnerships, patents, and other sources of direct financing; steep increases in tuition; and the widespread use of adjuncts and temporary faculty members. Without the fiscal cushion of the state, the university has more fully modeled itself on the free market, selling goods, serving consumers, and downsizing labor. It has also internalized the chief protocol of the market: competition. Grafting a sense of fashionable innovation onto intellectual work, smart is perhaps a fitting term for the ethos of the new academic market. It emphasizes the sharpness of the individual practitioner as an autonomous entrepreneur in the market, rather than the consistency of the practice as a brick in the edifice of disciplinary knowledge. One reason for the multiplicity of our pursuits is not simply our fecundity or our fickleness but the scarcity of jobs, starting in the 1970s and reaching crisis proportions in the 1990s. The competition for jobs has prompted an explosion of publications; it is no longer uncommon for entry-level job candidates to have a book published. (It is an axiom that they have published more than their senior, tenured colleagues.) At the same time, academic publishing has changed. In the past, publishing was heavily subsidized, but in the post-welfare-state university the mandate is to be self-sufficient, and most university presses now depend entirely on sales. Consequently the criterion for publication is not solely sound disciplinary knowledge but market viability. To be competitive, one needs to produce a smart book, rather like an item of fashion. Smart still retains its association with novelty, in keeping with its sense of immediacy, such that a smart scholarly project does something new and different to attract our interest among a glut of publications. In fact, "interesting" is a complementary value to smart. One might praise a reading of the cultural history of gardens in the 18th-century novel not as "sound" or "rigorous" but as "interesting" and "smart," because it makes a new and sharp connection. Rigor takes the frame of scientific proof; smart the frame of the market, which mandates interest amid a crowd of competitors. Deeming something smart, to use Kant's framework, is a judgment of taste rather than a judgment of reason. Like most judgments of taste, it is finally a measure of the people who hold it or lack it. The promise of smart is that it purports to be a way to talk about quality in a sea of quantity. But the problem is that it internalizes the competitive ethos of the university, aiming not for the cultivation of intelligence but for individual success in the academic market. It functions something like the old shibboleth "quality of mind," which claimed to be a pure standard but frequently became a shorthand for membership in the old boys' network. It was the self-confirming taste of those who talked and thought in similar ways. The danger of smart is that it confirms the moves and mannerisms of a new and perhaps equally closed network. "Smart," as a designation of mental ability, seems a natural term to distinguish the cerebral pursuits of higher education, but perhaps there are better words. I would prefer the criticism I read to be useful and relevant, my colleagues responsible and judicious, and my institution egalitarian and fair. Those words no doubt have their own trails of associations, as any savvy critic would point out, but they suggest cooperative values that are not always inculcated or rewarded in a field that extols being smart. Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University and editor of the minnesota review. His most recent book is the collection Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (New York University Press, 2004). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 17, Page B16 Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 22, 1963 - November22,2005

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Lynne Truss

Photo of Lynne Truss by Jillian Lochner November 20, 2005 Lynne Truss Has Another Gripe With You By DEBORAH SOLOMON "To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation," Lynne Truss remarked on a recent afternoon in her gravelly British voice. She was sitting in her living room in Brighton, the seaside resort on the southern coast of England, where she inhabits a realm far removed from the vacationing families who stroll the Palace Pier, eating fried cod, lifting pinwheels into the breeze and gazing out toward the tip of France. Inside her stucco town house, the curtains were drawn and stillness prevailed. "That is why it is very painful to be interviewed or profiled," Truss continued. "Because you think when you read the piece, Oh, that is how I come across, as someone who is too interested in stationery, or as someone who doesn't know how to spend money." Two years ago, Truss was vaulted into unexpected celebrity when, after a long and quiet career as a novelist and critic, she published a short, witty book on punctuation. Initially brought out in London with a hopeful first printing of 15,000 books, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" went on to sell some three million copies in hardcover. It fared well even in foreign languages, including Japanese and Swedish, the go-to grammar book for those studying English as a second language. In America, the book easily held its own against "Harry Potter," diet books and the plethora of pre-election screeds, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for 44 weeks. The book's title, by the way, refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe. He eats a sandwich, fires a pistol into the air and then leaves. On his way out, he tosses a wildlife handbook at a bewildered waiter, who understands everything when he turns to the section marked "panda" and notices a grievously misplaced comma: "Eats, shoots and leaves." Truss, a self-described stickler, a woman incensed by the gratuitous apostrophes in grocery-store signs that say "Apple's for Sale" or "We Have Lemon's and Lime's and Video's," had achieved the not inconsiderable feat of making punctuation hot. She turned the apostrophe into a form of mass entertainment. No one seemed able to explain it. As publishers tried to capitalize on the phenomenon by rushing out new grammar rule books (or republishing old ones, like the campus classic "The Elements of Style," which has just been released with deeply charming illustrations by Maira Kalman), high-school English teachers ecstatically considered the possibility that people everywhere possess a long-suppressed passion for grammar. "O, to be an English teacher in the Age of Truss," the teacher-turned-novelist Frank McCourt noted adoringly in his foreword to the American edition of the book. Asked if he had any insight into the book's popularity, Andrew Franklin, whose tiny company, Profile Books, published it in Britain, appeared to give the question extended thought. "I have a theory," he finally said. "It's very sophisticated. My theory is that it sold well because lots of people bought it." Truss has just published her latest effort, and it, too, taps into the retro appeal of strict rules. The title offers its own mini-sermon: "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door." The book's basic contention is that people in public places no longer bother to treat one another with even a semblance of Old World courtesy or respect. Writing in a tone of comic hyperbole, Truss claims that the "politeness words" - her term for "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" - have dwindled to the point of near extinction. Is there a scintilla of truth to her findings? Possibly not. In her book, Truss acknowledges the research of the British social anthropologist Kate Fox, who has conducted field experiments on politeness, like bumping into random pedestrians to see how many would say "Sorry." As it turned out, 80 percent apologized, and Fox concluded that manners have not declined. But Truss remains unconvinced, and in her book she adopts an isolationist policy; instead of proposing a new code of social diplomacy, she laments the violation of her personal space. The offenders, as she sees it, include smokers, graffiti artists, moviegoers who chat in theaters, bicyclists who ignore red lights and children on skateboards and the "breeders" who created them. She is nearly always "shocked," except when she is "incensed," and at times she aims her ire at such seemingly innocuous subjects as waiters who say "There you go" when they put a plate a food in front of her. Rudeness follows her like an unwanted companion even when she is up in the sky. "Air travelers on long-haul flights change into pajamas in the lavatories," she notes with typical disapproval, leading you to wonder if it would be better if they changed in the aisles. Truss probably exercises her satirical gifts to their best advantage in her analysis of automated phone systems, in which nonhuman operators have come to represent the last defenders of courtesy and decorum. Isn't it confusing, she asks in one passage, "that our biggest experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards - who patently don't mean it? 'We are sorry we cannot connect you at this time,' says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No, it doesn't. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different combinations as it can think of. 'Please hold. Thank you for holding. We are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Excuse us for saying sorry."' The book, which lacks an index and is padded with anecdotes and sociological asides, makes no pretense of being exhaustive. It is not intended as a book of etiquette, and it is not instructive in the way that her book on punctuation is. Thus, if "Talk to the Hand" is to appeal to readers and become the mass sensation that its publishers assume it will be - in New York, Gotham Books, a division of Penguin, is running a first printing of 417,000 - it must do so as a comedic performance. And Truss, as a writer, does cast herself into a dramatic role, that of the moral scold, ill-tempered and loud-tongued, holding a high opinion of little besides her own opinions. It is hardly a new female type. You can take it back at least as far as Shakespeare's Kate, the tantrum-throwing, suitor-rejecting heroine of "The Taming of the Shrew," although Kate is probably too nuanced and sensitive a character to pass muster with her contemporary descendants. Lately, the archetype has enjoyed a resurgence, particularly on television, where game shows and news programs starring high-paid shrews can be described as either a new branch of entertainment or a deviant branch of feminism. There is Nancy Grace, hectoring her guests on CNN's "Headline News," or Anne Robinson, the host of the BBC's "Weakest Link," who interrogates hapless contestants with reform-school severity before beating up on the class dunce. Or Ann Coulter, the right-wing bully who seems too loud even when you mute the television. The scold is an innately comic figure, and Truss's achievement has been to elevate it into classically unfunny and fussy realms, namely that of punctuation and manners. o write a book on manners is to risk presenting yourself as an unattractive person, a sourpuss, a spirit-crusher, a crank at odds with the contemporary world. Truss is aware of this; she knows that her new book is not likely to endear her to a generation of adolescents who consider it the height of fashion to allow their underwear to peek out above the low-slung waistlines of their jeans. "It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex ('Oh, that's so RUDE!') presents itself in most people at just about the same time as their elbow skin starts to give out," Truss writes with typical informality. "Check your own elbow skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not be reading this book." To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity - of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to "republican manners" and promptly did away with titles. In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60's, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post's book of etiquette. In the years since, American culture has become more tolerant of individual desires and differences, and one probably understudied side effect has been the blurring of private space and public space, of domestic life and street life. Activities once reserved for the privacy of your home (playing loud music, cursing, eating, wearing underwear as outerwear) now routinely occur on sidewalks. Some people see this as liberating; others denounce it as a pandemic of impoliteness. But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled "Seduced by Civility," the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn't rather live with incivility - with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters - than with inequality? In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo. Asked why she would be moved to write a book of manners in the first place, she said: "I always think of myself as a traditional liberal lefty, but I've just written a book about manners, so I do obviously have reactionary tendencies. I am shocked by the world." That comment was made on the afternoon we first met, at her home in Brighton, where she settled about a decade ago. She lives on a street closely packed with stucco houses, at the top of a steep hill, away from the rocky beach and the barefoot, libertine atmosphere that draws tourists to this old resort town. "What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality," she said, somewhat cryptically. "Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again." Truss is a tall, large-boned woman of 50 with a helmet of blond hair and a booming voice, and on this August afternoon she was sunk into the enveloping fiber of a jumbo yellow chair, one of her two elderly cats, Buster, perched on the headrest. "He's a good boy, and he is my darling," she cooed. The interior of the house seems at once bookish and girlish, the sort of place where serious fiction and literary biographies share the shelves and table tops with a collection of bric-a-brac that includes miniature bottles of French perfume and a sculpture of two cats entwined in a kiss. Truss insists that her day-to-day life has remained basically unchanged since "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" lavished her with substantial income and attention. She still writes in a cluttered home office without the companionship of a secretary or an assistant, and on a typical night she eats her supper on a tray in front of the television. "My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,"' she remarked with a straight face, "so you can see what kind of sad person I am." Nonetheless, as if eager to furnish evidence of a budding talent for hedonism, she went on to list the material pleasures to which she has lately succumbed. In the past year, trying to burn through her book royalties, she renovated the top floor of her house and purchased a Volkswagen convertible. In the real-estate department, she has paid off her mortgage ($240,000) and her mother's mortgage ($40,000) and rented a furnished pied-à-terre behind the British Museum in London, for $5,000 a month, in the hope of venturing out more. "I suppose it is playing with identity," she said of the apartment. "I want to be someone who doesn't spend all her time sitting home watching 'The Simpsons' on the telly. It is on between 7 and 8, and I watched it every night." An hour or so into our meeting, she remembered that she had hoped to prepare tea. Hurrying into the kitchen, she turned on an electric kettle and took out two PG Tips tea bags from a bulk-size box of 240. I was trying to calculate the number of months the box was likely to last when I realized that there is no table in her kitchen and no dining room in her three-story town house. Asked where she seats her dinner guests, she replied: "I don't have any guests. When I redesigned the kitchen, I thought a table just would have taken up too much space." Her solitary life, it became apparent, is one she has actively chosen. When I mentioned at one point that I was traveling with my family, she frowned with marked displeasure. "I don't know how you put up with it, your kids and all that," she remarked. "I don't think I have ever felt that I was with the person I wanted to marry. I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important. I am probably not very good at compromise, and I am bound to get worse." As the afternoon wore on, it was hard not to wonder how a woman who, by her own admission, eschews engagements of both the social and the emotional sort could claim to be an expert on human behavior, could find fault, as she writes in her book, with "a generation of people who seem, more than ever, not to know how to interact." On the other hand, there is no law that says a writer of a book deploring public rudeness must be gracious and thoughtful herself, anymore than a restaurant chef is obliged to prepare gourmet meals in his off hours at home or an internist is required to have annual checkups. Or so I thought, as Truss turned on the television during my visit and began watching a cricket match. "I was never into cricket particularly," she said by way of explanation, "but this is a very important test series." Truss does venture out from time to time, and invitations arrive steadily from people eager to have a cultural personage in their midst. Last year, she was summoned to a private garden party given by Queen Elizabeth II. It seemed like a great honor, until she arrived at Buckingham Palace, where she was one of some 8,000 guests to be offered a cup of tea and a sliver of cake as the queen lingered in the far distance. "Why would we queue up just to get a look at her?" Truss said. She has fared better with Tony and Cherie Blair, whom she recently met for the first time. On the morning of July 7, Truss was waiting to board a plane at Gatwick Airport when she heard the awful news about the rush-hour bombings. Undeterred, she continued on to Gleneagles, Scotland, where Cherie Blair was giving a dinner that night for the wives of the G-8 leaders. Despite the terrorist attack, the dinner proceeded as scheduled. According to Truss, she was seated beside Jenna Bush, who raved over "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" and insisted that reading is one of her great passions. Born in 1955, the second of two daughters, Truss grew up in a working-class household in Richmond, just west of London. She speaks of her childhood as if it were an unpleasant obligation from which she tried to extricate herself as soon as opportunity permitted. Her family lived in a so-called council house, a red-brick row house owned by the government, and her mother worked as a maid. "My parents weren't terribly happy," Truss told me matter-of-factly. "They weren't particularly fond of one another, and they just had arguments and things. My mother was very disappointed in my father, who was a negative person. He didn't expect to have a great career. When I was about 15, he started an egg route and went around and sold eggs from a van. But he didn't keep it up. By the time people were getting them, they were very old eggs." Perhaps the anecdote says less about her father's passivity than about her own determination, her industry and self-reliance, her lack of debt, her refusal to own a kitchen table at which to while away the empty hours swilling tea. Asked if her parents pushed her to succeed, she shook her head and said: "No. My achievement thing is more about rejecting my family and going out there and doing it for its own sake." She studied at University College London, which, as someone once pointed out, could use a comma in its name. After graduation, she went into journalism, working as a literary editor at the Listener, as a television critic for The Times of London and even as a sports columnist at the same paper. "It was an interesting phase of my life," she said of her four years covering sports, "but it did throw me off course. I was concerned that watching sports might produce testosterone. I really did worry about turning into a bloke. I noticed that I was leaving towels on the floor." In 2000, she quit her job at The Times and turned her attention to radio, composing both original monologues narrated by actors and humor pieces she narrated herself for Radio 4, the BBC arts station. "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" was initially conceived as a spinoff from a five-part radio program on punctuation, "Cutting a Dash," and her new book, too, began life on the airwaves. There were also three comic novels, which were published in London in the 90's and have just been released in this country for the first time, in a bulky paperback titled "The Lynne Truss Treasury." Although her fiction has sold "nothing," as she says, it is solid and assured in its cleverness, and at times it can put you in mind of the verbal exuberance of P.G. Wodehouse. I was curious about the scale of her literary ambition, wondering if she sees herself as an essayist and humorist who has lately been blessed with commercial success, or rather as an unfulfilled novelist, an artist who still dreams of adding an object of beauty to the world. She has not received much acclaim in literary circles. When "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" was published in this country, Louis Menand lambasted it in The New Yorker as a sloppy work riddled with errors. In her new book on manners, Truss mentions The New Yorker review, claiming that she never read it and quoting her London publisher, who describes Menand as a "tosser," tosser being one of those British pejoratives whose meaning seems destined to elude Americans. "You have to take yourself very seriously to get the respect of certain people," Truss said, reflecting on her reputation among the literary elite, "and I do not take myself all that seriously. I undermine myself constantly. I write so many different things." Of all her books and essays, Truss described her 1996 novel, "Tennyson's Gift," as "the best thing I have ever done." Set in 1864, on the Isle of Wight, it sends up various eminent and artistically inclined Victorians, particularly the poet laureate of its title, an unrepentant egomaniac who recites his own verses to his furniture as his invalid wife hides his bad reviews in teapots or buries them in the garden. Getting up from her chair, Truss opened a cabinet where she keeps extra copies of her own books. Out came a paperback. Might she sign it for her visitor? She obliged, then chuckled as she closed the book. "This is terrible," she said, presumably referring to her inscription. "I'll do another one for you when I know you better." Who could have guessed that that book would inspire an act of rebellion less than an hour later? eaving her house around 6, I headed along a steeply sloping street that ran down to the waterfront, to the large white hotels and lacy cast-iron balconies that overlook the sea. By a pleasant coincidence, I had just stepped into the lobby of my hotel when I spotted someone I knew bounding toward the entrance, a novelist who lives in Manhattan, a tall, tautly muscled man with a shock of bleached hair. Michael Cunningham, as it turned out, was making the rounds in England to promote his new novel, the ambitious, Whitman-inspired "Specimen Days," and had stopped in Brighton for all of one night to read at a local library. And what twist of fate had brought me to Brighton? he asked, as he lighted a cigarette. I told him about my visit to the house up the hill, showing him the novel I happened to be holding. He leafed through a few pages until his gaze fell on the inscription. This is what it said in a large, bouncy script: "With all best wishes, Lynne Truss." It seemed harmless enough, but what followed was nearly unbelievable. He ripped the page from its spine, crumpled it into a ball and popped it into his mouth. He stood there chewing it, as if it were a piece of tough meat, perhaps realizing for the first time that paper is not easily pulverized. "I don't know what came over me," he said a few moments later, after he had removed the page from his mouth. "The inscription was so bland and generic, all I could think of to do is rip it out. She had just talked to someone for four hours, someone who had come from another continent. Writing is her business. She can come up with something a little more exciting." Perhaps there was something about being in England that had encouraged him to act out the role of the lawless American, to be free and incorrigible in a country that runs toward the rule-bound and civil (even if British civility exists nowhere more brilliantly than it does as a fantasy in the minds of Americans). Or perhaps the notion of a book on grammar had elicited in him a shiver of memory so sharp that he had momentarily felt himself slip back in time, a schoolboy enraged by the constraints of authority. But probably it was nothing as complicated as a clash between cultures or generations. This wasn't literature, it was merely life, and the truth is, he is a vivid person with a restless mind that chews up everything in sight. The next day, meeting with Truss again, I told her about my encounter with Cunningham and the torn-out page, curious to hear how she would assess this gross breach of etiquette. "Now why would he do an odd thing like that?" she asked cautiously. He is a wild spirit, I replied, a runaway horse. "Well," she concluded, "he obviously can't be that wild if he agreed to go on a book tour!" At the time, we were in her Volkswagen convertible. The day was bright and cloudless, and we were zipping through the verdant countryside toward Charleston, a remote 18th-century farmhouse enshrined in Bloomsbury lore. In the years following World War I, Vanessa Bell lived in the house amid predictable bohemian chaos, sharing the premises with her children and Duncan Grant, her fellow artist and occasional lover. Every inch of the house bears the imprint of its former occupants, who covered the walls with fantastic murals and obsessively painted the doors, fireplaces and furniture as well, slathering pigment on virtually everything except their pets. When Truss and I pulled up outside the stone farmhouse, a group of black-spotted cows were grazing. There was no one in sight, and the parking lot was nearly empty. Truss groaned when she saw a sign announcing the hours of operation. Although she had recently been invited to join the board of Charleston, she had forgotten that it is closed on Tuesdays. Sitting down on a wood-slatted bench overlooking the lily pond, in the warm late-summer sun, she wondered what we should do. As if to compensate for the disappointment of not being able to see any paintings, she eventually decided we should go somewhere else; the idea was to pay a spontaneous visit to two friends of hers who own an antiquarian bookshop. Within an hour, we were in the medieval village of Alfriston, walking along the old cobblestones of High Street, with its thatched cottages and ivy-laden ruins and weathered beauty. When we reached Much Ado Books, Truss gently pushed on the black-painted wooden door. It failed to swing open. Realizing that her friends had closed up early, she suggested that we walk to their house, a few blocks away. Again, no one answered. Driving back to Brighton late that afternoon, she chuckled over our futile outing. Three places, all of them closed. It had been a day of bolted doors and darkened windows, of shadows and silence. Yet in some ways, the experience - in itself a repudiation of experience, a temporary estrangement from the consolations of paintings and books and friends - seemed entirely apt, affirming the supposed British tendency to remain closed off and shut down to any display of feeling. For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people? As Truss writes in her new book, citing the research of the sociolinguists P. Brown and S.C. Levinson, "One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else's right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed." Now, as she sped along the winding road back toward Brighton, the wind flapping in her hair, Truss said: "I think the British are much ruder than Americans. Someone once said that British politeness is about keeping people at arm's length and American politeness is genuinely about wanting to be friendly. I think I've written about manners from the British point of view. "We aren't direct," Truss went on in a vexed tone. "We are known for not saying what we mean, for being ironic, and we use the word 'ironic' to cover anything. We are always covering ourselves, and then we wonder why people don't understand what we are saying. It is a fault in the British people." Even now, as she critiqued the British penchant for indirectness, it was unclear if she was being fully direct. Was she in fact speaking for the entire population of Britain, as she claimed, or rather referring, in a reflexively veiled and oblique way, to the limitations of her own ironic self? Perhaps she felt a twinge of remorse, regretted her careful life, the fixation on good punctuation and good manners, the compulsion to correct, to mock those around her. Was she sorry she had faced the world shielded in an armor of humor? Posed the question, she reflected in silence, as if preparing to bare her soul. But in fact she did no such thing. "While I was writing the book, I hardly went out," she said in her usual droll tone. "It was quite interesting, because when I did go out, people would be courteous, and I would think: For goodness sake, I'm only out for half an hour. Be rude to me! I've got to get material! I met any number of very charming and helpful assistants in shops. It was kind of galling to be presented with so much counterevidence." Deborah Solomon, a contributing writer for the magazine, is completing a book on Norman Rockwell. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

'Memories of My Melancholy Whores'

Caleb Bach/Knopf Gabriel García Márquez November 22, 2005 Books of The Times | 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores' He Wants to Die Alone, but First . . . By MICHIKO KAKUTANI "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait. After the author's magical portrait of his own youth and apprenticeship in a classic memoir ("Living to Tell the Tale," 2003), this very slight novella - a longish short story, really - plays like a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time. Like the entries in his 1993 collection "Strange Pilgrims," this tale demonstrates that the shorter form of the story does not lend itself to Mr. García Márquez's talents: his penchant for huge, looping, elliptical narratives that move back and forth in time is cramped in this format, as is his desire to map the panoramic vistas of an individual's entire life. The fertile inventiveness that animated his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is decidedly muted in these pages, and the reverence for the mundane realities of ordinary life, showcased in more recent works, seems attenuated as well. As a result, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" feels like a brittle little fable composed on automatic pilot. For some time now Mr. García Márquez has been interested in writing from the vantage point of old age, and this story takes that impulse to an extreme. Its narrator, a former scholar known by his students as Prof. Gloomy Hills, is turning 90 and decides to celebrate his birthday by having sex with a young virgin. He places a call to the madam of his favorite brothel and makes arrangements to spend the night with a 14-year-old girl. In the course of recounting the relationship he develops with this girl, whom he calls Delgadina, the old man also ruminates about "the miseries" of his "misguided life." Prof. Gloomy Hills, we learn, lives in his parents' house, proposing "to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and painless." In addition to having taught Spanish and Latin grammar, he served for 40 years as the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, a job that involved "reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse code." He now scrapes by on his pension "from that extinct profession," combined with the even more meager sums he earns writing a weekly column. In his nine decades of life, the narrator has never had any close friends or intimate relationships. "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay," he says, "and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper." Such passages read like a sad parody of Mr. García Márquez's radiant 1988 novel "Love in the Time of Cholera," which chronicled love (not just sex) in all its myriad varieties. Worse, we receive no insight into why the narrator has led such a libertine but lonely existence, no insight into why he has never examined his inner life. All this changes, we are asked to believe, when Prof. Gloomy Hills meets Delgadina and, for the first time in his life, falls in love. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches as she sleeps next to him on the bed - exhausted from her day job at a factory, and overcome by the valerian potion the madam has given her to calm her nerves. As the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this innocent young woman - who, truth be told, does little ever but doze in his presence - fantasy and dreamlike hallucinations begin to take over. After one imagined exchange with her, he says: "From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at 20, a parlor whore at 40, the queen of Babylon at 70, a saint at 100." The narrator imagines that Delgadina has been to his house and prepared him breakfast. Later he flies into a jealous rage, convinced - with hardly any evidence - that she has been sleeping with other men. He assiduously courts her with flowers and presents, and reads books like "The Little Prince" to her as she sleeps. "We continued," he says, "with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings." The relationship between the narrator and his virgin is really a relationship that exists inside the narrator's head, and since Mr. García Márquez makes little effort to make this man remotely interesting - as either an individual or a representative figure - it's hard for the reader to care really about what happens. Moreover, the trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that's quite unworthy of the great Gabriel García Márquez's prodigious talents. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Health Care Crisis

Mike Mergen for The New York Times

A surgeon at Harrisburg Hospital in Pennsylvania, one of a small group of hospitals forging ties with doctors to save money.

November 18, 2005
To Fight Rising Costs, Hospitals Seek Allies in the Operating Room
By REED ABELSON
It is a war on rising hospital costs, being fought one tiny balloon at a time. And as with most wars, some of the tactics are controversial.

Until recently, some cardiologists at the PinnacleHealth System hospital group in Pennsylvania would inflate a new artery-opening balloon each time they inserted a stent into a patient's clogged arteries. Now, if they can, these doctors will use a single balloon throughout a patient's procedure.

That simple step, which the doctors say poses no additional risk to patients, saves at least a couple of hundred dollars a procedure. And - here lies the controversy - the doctors share in any money they save the hospital. While the new approach gives them a financial incentive to be more cost- conscious, it also fundamentally recasts the traditional arm's-length relationship between a hospital and the doctors who practice there.

Without the special approval that PinnacleHealth has received from federal health regulators, such an arrangement would run afoul of longstanding rules meant to prevent hospitals from paying doctors to skimp on care or to steer patients their way. Similar experiments have been allowed at a handful of other hospitals around the country, but regulators are evaluating each plan case by case. HCA, the nation's biggest hospital chain, has proposed its own version of a savings program that has met resistance from some surgeons, and regulators have not yet weighed in.

PinnacleHealth says it saved 5 percent last year in cardiology supplies by conserving on balloons and getting cardiologists to agree, when feasible, to use stents, pacemakers and other cardiac devices that it pays at a negotiated volume discount. Those savings equaled about $1 million, which the hospital split with the participating doctors.

"A lot of it is just common sense," said Dr. Ken May, whose 17-doctor cardiology practice is among the groups involved.

But hospital administrators and consultants say getting doctors to agree to use certain brands or waste fewer supplies can be difficult. The only way to make doctors cost-sensitive, the hospitals say, is to pay them to pay attention.

The experiments are known as gainsharing in the industry, and while no one expects that alone to bring health care inflation to heel, it is gaining momentum. There is talk in Congress of relaxing some of the current prohibitions.

Regulators and others still worry that such programs, if not designed properly, could induce doctors to put money matters ahead of the interests of patients. Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat, has described Congressional enthusiasm for gainsharing as "not only misguided" but "potentially dangerous."

But many economists and health care experts say something needs to change. The soaring cost of medical devices - and major advances like drug-coated stents designed to keep arteries open better than stents without such coating - is a big reason that hospital care has become the largest component of the nation's nearly $2 trillion annual health bill.

"There's so much pressure to reduce costs across the board in health care, I would be surprised if this doesn't get traction," said Dara A. Corrigan, a former official in the inspector general's office of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. She is now a lawyer representing drug companies and device makers at Arnold & Porter in Washington.

As relations between doctors and hospitals have grown increasingly strained in recent years, many doctors now have closer ties to device makers, who sometimes pay them consulting fees, than to the hospitals, which must purchase the devices and swallow any portion of the price they cannot pass along to patients and insurers.

Often, hospitals say, they cannot negotiate better deals with device makers because too many doctors refuse to switch brands or to consider using anything but the most sophisticated models, even when a less expensive device might work as well. Without new approaches like PinnacleHealth's, the doctors, paid separately for their services, typically have no reason to care about prices.

"There has to be some way a hospital can get physicians involved," said Joane H. Goodroe, a consultant who has worked with all seven of the hospitals that have received regulatory approval to conduct the experiments to share savings. Besides PinnacleHealth Systems, the other hospitals include St. Joseph's Hospital in Atlanta and Sisters of Charity Providence Hospitals in Columbia, S.C.

Gainsharing's critics include device makers, whose profits are threatened if hospitals are able to demand better prices.

"We believe that gainsharing would have an immediate and significant negative effect on public health by encouraging the use of the least expensive option without consideration of long-term effects or overall health economics," said Martin J. Emerson, chief executive of American Medical Systems, a maker of pelvic devices based in Minnetonka, Minn.

He was speaking last month at a Congressional hearing convened by Representative Nancy L. Johnson, a Connecticut Republican. Not persuaded, Ms. Johnson plans to introduce legislation making it easier for hospitals and doctors to cooperate.

Federal officials do remain concerned, though, that doctors might reduce care to increase their own share of the savings. Regulators now carefully evaluate each hospital's plan, and many hospitals shy away from gainsharing because of the legal thicket, even when they think the idea makes sense.

"It's taking money from the manufacturers and giving it to the attorneys and consultants," said Kathleen Killeen, an administrator for HealthEast Care System in St. Paul.

For PinnacleHealth, the experiment is in its second year at the system's flagship, Harrisburg Hospital, in Pennsylvania's state capital. Doctors still have the ability to choose any device, but the hospital has worked with them to focus on a handful of companies that provide the bulk of the products used. The discounts are negotiated with that core group of manufacturers, and any savings from using less expensive devices are shared with doctors.

"We pick out vendors that have very good products and very good history," said Dr. May, the cardiologist. Doctors are still able to try new devices, he said, and because the contracts run for only a year, the physicians can change their minds.

Under its agreements with the device makers, PinnacleHealth cannot disclose which companies it uses or the prices it pays for devices. But the hospital said it was able to negotiate lower prices on many devices, saving about $370 for a pacemaker system, for example.

The eventual goal of these new cooperative programs with doctors is to develop certain standards of care, said Dr. Roger Longenderfer, the chief executive of PinnacleHealth. In one case, he said, doctors were able to identify patients suitable for smaller incisions when inserting a catheter, avoiding the need for a special vascular clamp costing a couple of hundred dollars. The hospital reduced the number of patients getting those devices to 30 percent from 40 percent, Dr. Longenderfer said.

To deter doctors from using cheaper devices simply to improve the overall savings, regulators have required PinnacleHealth and other pilot programs to develop guidelines indicating when more sophisticated and expensive devices are necessary, said Ms. Goodroe, the consultant. Doctors are not paid, for example, if they save money by implanting single-chamber defibrillators in patients who should be getting the costlier dual-chamber models.

And to reduce the likelihood of any one doctor's becoming a cost-cutting zealot to amass large individual savings, the hospitals dispense the payouts to the medical practices - not directly to individual doctors.

Dr. Longenderfer estimates that participating cardiologists earned an additional $10,000 to $15,000 each last year through gainsharing payouts from their group practices, although the practices decided how to allocate the money.

But not all plans are alike. The HCA approach rewards doctors individually, according to documents that outline the program to the orthopedic surgeons who practice at HCA's hospitals.

And unlike the gainsharing plans already approved by regulators, the HCA program strictly limits the doctors' choices to three manufacturers: Stryker, DePuy and Zimmer. "Your surgeon or doctor cannot use what he thinks is best for you," said one surgeon, who spoke on the condition he not be identified because he practices at an HCA hospital. He argued that devices made by other companies might be better for some patients.

But HCA says that its three chosen manufacturers, the largest in the industry, make a full range of devices, and that doctors who are doing repair work on a patient who has already undergone surgery are free to use whatever brand device the task requires. The company says it needs to limit its pool of suppliers to negotiate better prices.

"If you try to go out and contract with all vendors, you're going to get list price" with no discounts, said James A. Fitzgerald, a senior purchasing executive for HCA. Doctors who insist on using another brand can also petition HCA for an exception, he said.

Under the HCA plan, an orthopedic surgeon stands to get 20 percent of any savings, if the doctor had been using a different brand but switched to a preferred device. If the surgeon was already using a preferred device, the doctor earns 15 percent of those savings. A physician who performs 30 hip implants a year, for example, saving $1,200 per surgery, stands to make $7,200 through gainsharing, the documents show.

Such incentives make some surgeons uncomfortable, and the surgeon at the HCA hospital said he would prefer the money go to charity. HCA says it designed its program to motivate doctors but would work with federal regulators if they had concerns. So far, more than 200 surgeons at its hospitals have agreed to participate, and about 40 surgeons have switched brands. (Pending the plan's regulatory approval, HCA will not distribute any of the money to the doctors.)

It is debatable whether doctors can generate enough savings year after year to make it worth continuing gainsharing programs, even if they do catch on. To make sure the payments are only for gainsharing, regulators are requiring that savings be recalculated annually - meaning doctors would need to find new ways to reduce costs each year to generate new money for the hospitals to share.

With costs soaring, savings are fairly easy to achieve in the early going. But Dr. Longenderfer acknowledges that savings at PinnacleHealth are likely to be lower in the second year. He adds, though, that there is still ample opportunity to come up with more efficient ways of practicing medicine. "We're just beginning to scratch the surface," he said.

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The Sexual Revolution Online

You're Only a Newbie Once 

By Regina Lynn

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69600,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 18, 2005 PT

Researching last week's column about adult webcam chat made me nostalgic for the online community I used to belong to. The conversations in the webAffairs book could have taken place in my chat room, and I examined the screenshots closely to see if I recognized any faces or other body parts.

And yet, the most familiar theme in the book was the author's personal experience. She started modestly, became a cybersex diva, then found a balance point between those two extremes. She's still a regular in her community, but spends less time online, and her chat buddies are integrated into her life like any other friends.

Sex Drive

It's almost exactly what happened to me when I delved into adult chat. Some of you can relate, I'm sure.

You're a newbie for about a week. Then you become a "reg" and you spend as much time as you can in the room, bonding with people and flirting and cybering.

And then you level off. Maybe it's that you've slaked the need that brought you there in the first place. But you balance yourself between virtual space and physical space, and you find ways to fit everything and everyone into your life without making yourself crazy.

It might take some people two months and others two years or longer, but eventually, most of us get there. (If you can find your balance before you rip your existing relationship apart, so much the better. Unless of course the relationship is in sore need of ripping. But that's another column.)

My old chat room no longer exists, so I know I literally cannot go back. My life is not where it was back then, either.

Last time, a 12-year relationship was coming to an end. I had just started freelance writing full-time, paying my dues with high-volume, low-profit gigs like writing horoscopes and website descriptions for human-edited search engines.

It wasn't hard to keep IRC open in the bottom right corner of my screen and still produce quality content. (Honestly, having company helped me get through some of the more mind-numbing aspects of the daily word churn.)

Now, I have writing assignments that challenge me and a relationship that suits me well. I'm active in a dozen online discussion groups -- including the Sex Drive forum -- and I have 100 people on my Trillian contact list, 41 of whom are online right now.

And yet, I really miss the group energy of the chat room. I miss the freedom to say whatever's on my mind, no matter how ridiculous or how sexual. And I wondered whether a new online community could give me those things -- and whether it would be worth the black hole it could become on my time.

I reactivated myself in Second Life to find out. And even as I write this column, I'm dancing with a group of other folks in a virtual saloon in another window. (If I suddenly lose my train of thought and shout "Oh yeah!" you now know why.)

A quick primer for the newbies: Second Life is not so much a game as it is a place, although it has games in it. (Some would argue with me on this; see this explanation.) You represent yourself with a 3-D avatar and can pretty much build yourself a complete life in this online world.

And unlike plain vanilla webcam chat -- or the ancient medium of text chat -- you have lots of things to view, build, buy, sell and otherwise interact with that may or may not involve interacting with other people.

I chose Second Life because it represents the modern incarnation of the chat room I frequented. What you can build visually in Second Life, we created with text and imagination in IRC.

I met a nice woman who gave me cool clothes to keep in my inventory, so I can change outfits whenever I want without going through the hassle of shopping. Another woman gave me a winged horse (a "flyable Pegasus," in Second Life parlance), to make traveling more fun. A few people have added me to their Friends lists, and two have granted me a "positive" rating.

I'm chatting, I'm joking, I'm flirting. And while I have yet to engage in cybersex, I'm having a great time.

What I'm not doing is walking around all stunned by a new realm of possibility, opportunity, novelty. The realities of online community and virtual space are not new to me, although the graphics and individual people are.

What I find in Second Life is that I'm comfortable. I know how to make friends. I enjoy talking with people. I'll slip easily into the adult content when I have time to do it right.

I might even choose to decline a physical world invitation now and then in order to spend time online. But it's not going to take over my life, and it's not going to threaten my relationship.

I can't go back to the innocent times when everything was new. But now I realize that I don't want to.

By now I've not only "been there, done that" in cyberspace, I've folded those experiences into the rest of my life. I'm a better lover, a better friend and a better writer because of it.

Because, of course, the one thing virtual space and physical place have in common are you. And you can't undo an experience, like it or not. What's that old saying -- wherever you go, there you are?

So in that sense, no, I don't think you can go back after you leave adult chat. Just like you can't go back to being a virgin, or to being 17 (thank goodness).

But you can return to adult community with the maturity gained through experience and bring a deeper appreciation -- and hopefully, well-honed skills -- to the new neighborhood. Which, now that this column is written, I'm going to do right now.

Oh yeah.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn is the author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0. You can e-mail her at ginalynn@gmail.com if you promise to be patient about getting a reply.

Today's Blogs

Searching for Zarqawi
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 4:50 PM ET

Bloggers discuss rumors that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, as well as news that Ariel Sharon is leaving his Likud Party to forge a new, liberal party. At the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington mobilizes anti-Wal-Mart sentiment.

Searching for Zarqawi: The Jerusalem Post reports that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the senior al-Qaida leader in Iraq, might have died in a group suicide Sunday, when eight terrorists surrounded by coalition forces performing a raid purportedly blew themselves up in Mosul. U.S. officials downplayed the possibility, but the military is conducting DNA tests nonetheless.

"I'm not even religious," writes Andy O'Reilly at The World Wide Rant. "But I'm almost willing to pray this is true. … I generally don't wish death upon anyone, but I'll make an exception for al-Zarqawi. Here's hoping it's good riddance."

Conservative Kevin Aylward is also ready to believe. "One fact in support of the theory that al-Zarqawi's luck may have finally run out is the vow from Jordan's King Abdullah II to 'take the fight' to … the Jordanian born al-Zarqawi," he writes at Wizbang. "With active engagement from Jordan's security and intelligence forces it's not hard to believe that al-Zarqawi's location could have been pinpointed."

"It would be great if this rumor turned out to be true, but at this time it remains unconfirmed and it seems that rumors like this are rarely confirmed," cautions conservative homemaker PoliPundit Lorie Byrd. Others harbor more substantive doubts. At the Counterterrorism Blog, Evan Kohlman reports that an al-Qaida supporter, claiming to know the identities of those killed, denies that Zarqawi was among the dead. "Certainly, Al-Qaida doesn't seem to have been at all fazed by the reported Mosul raid," he observes.

Attorney John Hinderaker of conservative coterie Power Line is also skeptical. "The larger point, however, is that this is one more in a long series of successes against the terrorists: eight more of them have bitten the dust, probably based on intelligence received from the local population"

Some on the American left caution against what they see as premature, and overly militaristic, triumphalism. "The death if Zarqawi would be a positive step in fighting terrorism and, one hopes, suppressing the violence in Iraq," suggests prominent contributor Armando at liberal war room Daily Kos. "What it will not be however, is a solution for our troubles in Iraq, whose roots are political in nature," he says. "Zarqawi is not and has not been the source of our troubles in Iraq. It is the intractable political problems of the sectarian power struggle between Shia, Sunni and Kurd."

At Informed Comment, Middle East academic Juan Cole agrees, describing Zarqawi as merely a functionary. "If al-Zarqawi died or were captured, there would be many increasinlgy experienced guerrilla fighters to take his place," he writes. "Guerrilla movements … are social movements, and do not typically depend on one man."

Many bloggers are cheering a related story. Dr. Rusty Shackleford of My Pet Jawa, libertarian Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, and many more point to heartening news that, in half-page newspaper advertisements Sunday, Zarqawi's family publicly disowned him.

Read more about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Sharon's third way: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced today that he was leaving the ruling Likud Party to establish a new, liberal party dedicated to the pursuit of "peace and tranquility" in the region. Sharon asked Israeli President Moshe Katsov to dissolve Parliament so that new elections could be held.

"It's about time," approves Zionist watchdog J. of Justify This! At Talking Points Memo, discriminating liberal Joshua Micah Marshall calls the developments "tectonic plates moving in Israeli politics…ones that seem likely to have deep repercussions throughout the region and even in the world."

Sharon is apparently hoping to further jettison the settler base he alienated earlier this year with his decision to pull out of Gaza, suggests Patrick al-Kafir, waging war on jihad at Clarity & Resolve. "I think he may win this coming March, and I think this current maneuver is pretty shrewd—ingenious, actually. He's got a vision to settle this Arab/Islamic terror issue once and for all, I think, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him transform that vision into reality." Meryl Yourish, a conservative Jewish teacher and techie living in Richmond, Va., agrees. "It is rather strange to be thinking of Ariel Sharon as a centrist, but the man is an incredibly astute politician. I'm saying right now that he's going to come through this crisis as Prime Minister, again"

Head Heeb Jonathan Edelstein, a lawyer in New York, predicts increasing party clarity as various political interests shuffle themselves out. "Instead of being several parties in one, the Likud will once again be the party of the nationalist right. The next election will see a fairly clear choice between three parties, each representing a different approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he writes.

Read more about Ariel Sharon and more about the Likud Party.

Arianna vs. Wal-Mart: Hoping to direct readers' attention to the muckraking Wal-Mart movie, The High Cost of Low Price, blogmonger Arianna Huffington has assembled a remarkable coalition of the willing to denounce the corporate giant at Huffington Post.

"Wal-Mart sells itself as the all-American company, but it violates American family values every single day," blogs iconic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Renaissance-man RJ Eskow seconds the charge of corporate hypocrisy. "A population deprived of once-promised opportunities - for income, job security, and benefits - can only afford the least expensive items to make ends meet," he writes. "Wal-Mart lowers your living standards, then sells you the cheap goods that are all you can afford." Byron York of the National Review points out some of the movie's inaccuracies.

Read more about The High Cost of Low Price, more Huffington Post commentary, and more blog posts about the Huffington Post commentary.

Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

Today's Papers

The China Monologues
By Jay Dixit
Updated Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 6:56 AM ET

The New York Times' and Los Angeles Times' leads, the Washington Post's top nonlocal story, and the Wall Street Journal's top world-wide news item all report on President Bush's talks with the president of China, noting that the Chinese government was mostly unresponsive to Bush's appeals for economic and political reforms. USA Today leads with the CIA chief's denial that his agency uses torture.

Bush's trip to China "meets low expectations," snarks the WP headline, although everyone agrees that officials had specifically warned that progress would be slow. The NYT headline emphasizes China's promise to quicken the pace of economic reforms but goes on to talk about China's "quiet resistance" to Bush's requests, quoting an American official who says, "No Chinese leader was going to act immediately under the pressure" from a foreign leader. The WSJ is more skeptical from the outset, focusing on China's unresponsiveness with the headline "Beijing Brushes Off Bush's Plea" and noting that the Chinese president said China would address U.S. concerns "as it saw fit." The WP article emphasizes that the Bush administration had predicted no breakthroughs but is promising that this trip will lay the groundwork for future progress. The LAT article emphasizes questions about how forcefully Bush pushed the "freedom agenda," noting that although administration officials may have had low expectations, human rights advocates had high ones.

Among other things, Bush wants China to crack down on movie and video game piracy and allow the market to set its foreign exchange rate. The Chinese president indicated he was aware of Bush's concerns but said he would tackle them on his own timetable. Bush told reporters that the talks were "good" and "frank" but euphemistically added that America's relationship with China is "complex." China had not released any of the people the U.S. said were unjustly imprisoned and in fact apparently rounded up new political and religious dissidents before Bush arrived specifically so they wouldn't demonstrate during his visit. Bush also attended a Protestant church service near Tiananmen Square and urged Chinese leaders not to "fear Christians who gather to worship openly."

The CIA uses "unique and innovative" methods to extract information but does not torture, said Porter Goss, the agency's director. Goss said that officially, the CIA is neutral on John McCain's proposal to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment but that such methods have been valuable in the past. He said such methods are legal and do not include torture. McCain's proposal would restrict psychological techniques that some Republican representatives believe are necessary, such as isolating a detainee or calling him a coward. The White House has threatened to veto any bill including McCain's measure.

A related NYT front reports on the three Republican senators (including McCain) who are "making trouble for the Bush administration" by supporting the proposal.

The WP reports that money set aside so far for Hurricane Katrina relief is only "a drop in the bucket" compared with what the final tally will be. The money spent so far on removing debris, housing evacuees, and financially assisting victims already equals the money spent on Iraqi reconstruction. But the bulk of the Katrina cost will come when the government rebuilds infrastructure, including "roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, sewers, power lines, ports and levees." Estimates of the total price tag vary wildly, but everyone agrees it will be well over $100 billion.

In related news, USAT reports on post-Katrina donor fatigue, noting that people are feeling tapped out after having donated to Katrina relief. Food banks say they are seeing bare shelves as a "direct result of Katrina." Food donations are down 30 percent in New York and 50 percent in Milwaukee and Denver.

The NYT and LAT front the news that Israeli PM Ariel Sharon will leave the Likud Party to found a new centrist party with which to seek re-election. The NYT's sources are Israeli army radio and a senior Likud member, while the LAT gets a Sharon spokesman. The Israeli president will most likely dissolve the parliament and call for a new election within 90 days. Sharon has been battling dissenters within his own party who opposed his decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. But he has received "significant support" from President Bush, and early polls predict that Sharon's new party might win more seats than a Sharon-less Likud would.

Goats story … The LAT reports on the rising popularity of goat, "the other red meat." Demand for goat meat in the U.S. is growing, largely due to the millions of Americans who were born in "goat-eating nations." Even Whole Foods sells it, banking on Muslims, Latinos, and Asians, and on consumers who want to try "new and interesting meat choices."

Newspapers, Google, Bob Woodward

Woodward? Google? A Plague Week