Slate eBook Club
December 2003
The Best of Slate Edition

Politics:
Blinding Justices Rod Smolla
Violence Silence Robert Weisberg and David Mills
Moore's Law Christopher Hitchens
"Natural-Born" Killer Jefferson Morley

History:
Dallas Through the Looking Glass David Greenberg
Monumental Folly Christopher Benfey
Everybody Loves Reagan David Greenberg
Adolf's Alive! David Greenberg
Trading Places Carol Kino
The End of History Fred Kaplan
America's Forgotten Empire Mark Lewis
Marching Orders Mark Scheffler

Poems:
"Every twelve years, give or take this moment" Dionisio Martínez
Elegy for the Saint of Letting Small Fish Go Eliot Khalil Wilson
Not a Poem About Driving at Night Erika Meitner

Books:
The Not-So-Wild Thing Ann Hulbert
The Storyteller's New Clothes Adam Kirsch
L.A. Without a Map Adam Kirsch
Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright Tim Wu
Cents and Sensibility Adelle Waldman
Drop the Gun James Surowiecki

Television and Movies:
Alien Autopsy Michael Agger
Swan Song Alex Abramovich
Assessment: Pixar Chris Suellentrop
Cinema of the 'Stans Ed Finn
Slain, at Last Hillary Frey
Clueless Patricia Cohen
Assessment: The Simpsons Chris Suellentrop

Music:
OutKast Is Good Sasha Frere-Jones
Hasten Down the Wind Bill Barol
The Beethoven Mystery Jan Swafford
Steely Dan Is Getting Old Fred Kaplan
Moscow in the Meantime John Morthland

Sports:
Needles and Pens Charles P. Pierce
Baseball and the Bird Josh Levin
Whither the Fridge? Josh Levin
Presumed Innocent Jeremy Derfner
The Anti-Ichiro David Shields
The Nightmares of NASCAR Mike Shropshire
Chuck Those Woods Nick Schulz

Food, and Wine:
Romancing the Microbe Sara Dickerman
Grape Deceptions Mike Steinberger
The Marvelous Michelin Man Mike Steinberger
The Liberace of Chocolate Sara Dickerman
"I Say the Hell With It!" Ann Hulbert

Diary:
Diary of a Development Worker in Afganistan Rahul Chandran
Diary of an Activist in Zimbabwe Bev Clark

Science and Technology:
Why You Can't Keep Up Timothy Noah
Digging for Googleholes Steven Johnson
Have You Flown a Ford Lately? Brendan I. Koerner
Iraq: The Computer Game David Plotz
My So-Called Universe Jim Holt
What Fuel Does Voyager 1 Use? Brendan I. Koerner
Geomagnetic Storms Brendan I. Koerner
Why Don't Hurricanes Hit L.A.? Andy Bowers

Health and Medicine:
Trick or Treatment Maia Szalavitz
Estrogen Uncovered Eliza McCarthy
Wake Up, Little Susie David Plotz
Did I Violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban? Warren M. Hern

Money:
It Oughtta Be the Shoes Rob Walker
The Economics of Suicide Charles Duhigg
Lies, Damn Lies, and Focus Groups Daniel Gross
You're Not Rich, but Now You Can Fake It Daniel Gross
Make Money Fast!!!! Jonathan Rauch
The Great Rebate Scam Carol Vinzant
Fantasy Economics Robert Shapiro

Home and Family:
Tween-Age Wasteland Ann Hulbert
Abolish Marriage Michael Kinsley
Holy Matrimony Dahlia Lithwick
Canine-11 Jon Katz
Love by the Numbers Jordan Ellenberg
Oh, No: It's a Girl! Steven E. Landsburg

Travel:
Tokyo on One Cliché a Day Seth Stevenson

Humor:
Mime Is Money Emily Yoffe
Hello, Moon Amanda Fortini
My Life as a Phone Psychic Emily Yoffe
The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld Hart Seely
Bimbo Contest Dahlia Lithwick

Miscellaneous Articles:
The Access Trap Jack Shafer
Smoke and Mirrors Douglas Gantenbein
How Big Is Rhode Island? Andy Bowers



Blinding Justices
Does the Constitution allow us to scrap the judiciary?
By Rod Smolla
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2003, at 12:09 PM PT

Affirmative action, abortion, the Ten Commandments, the Pledge of Allegiance, coddling criminals, protecting terrorists. Pick your poison, and somewhere, someone's arguing that this is all the work of federal judges—a godless, gay-loving, politically correct cabal conspiring to foist the liberal agenda on a pliant people. Say you are dead-set certain that federal judges from the Supreme Court on down have hijacked the Constitution, holding the country hostage. What can you do about it?

The judges seem to have you in a constitutional lock-hold. It's fourth-grade social studies run amok: The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Whenever an ordinary law passed by Congress or a state legislature conflicts with the Constitution, the Constitution trumps. Federal judges decide what the Constitution means. And judges have lifetime tenure, provided they exhibit good behavior. You could try to impeach the bums, but that takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate, which you'll never get—look at the Bill Clinton fiasco.

What galls you the most, what really sticks a constitutional crick in your craw is that federal judges are themselves the ones who invented this system. They're the ones who came up with the idea that a judge can strike down an act of Congress—a rule that does not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution.

And then it hits you! A brilliant, blinding insight, piercing the mind like a diamond bullet: a constitutional loophole. A loophole codified in the Constitution itself. Thus, with the singsong tremolo of a preacher reading Scripture, you intone the words of the "exceptions clause," Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution: "In all other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

That's the ticket! Maybe the courts control the Constitution, but Congress controls the courts. It gets better: Article III vests the judicial power "in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." So all those lower federal courts are the creatures of Congress. The judges may have tenure, but the courts don't. Congress could eliminate them all!

And so it is that a number of imaginative conservative pundits, afraid the federal courts will oppose the Ten Commandments, impose same-sex marriage, and install a pledge to one nation not-under-God, have begun floating the claim that Congress could and should abolish the jurisdiction of federal courts to hear any such cases and that we should be lobbying our congressmen to do just that. Lower courts owe their existence to Congress, they argue in op-eds across the land, and Congress thus has plenary power to limit the jurisdiction of lower federal courts as it pleases. As to the Supremes, the exceptions clause in Article III clearly instructs that the appellate jurisdiction is subject to such "exceptions" and "regulations" as Congress shall make. In theory you could use these powers to "except" the whole liberal agenda from judicial review.

Will the plan fly? The story starts with a case titled Ex parte McCardle, decided in 1868. The Supreme Court was confronted with an appeal brought by a newspaper editor from Vicksburg, Miss., named McCardle. He had been jailed by the Union Army for his editorials attacking Reconstruction legislation, on grounds that he was disturbing the peace and inciting insurrection. He filed a petition for habeas corpus challenging the legality of his confinement, and his case was ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court, under a federal statute granting the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over such cases. While McCardle's case was pending, however, Congress repealed the jurisdictional law McCardle had been using to support his appeal. The question then arose whether the Supreme Court could go forward and rule in McCardle's case anyway or was instead bound to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. The Supreme Court dropped the case like a hot rock. Why? Under Article III of the Constitution, the court reasoned, it would normally have the power to hear cases involving questions of federal law, such as McCardle's. When Congress passed the original statute authorizing habeas corpus appeals, Congress was just, in effect, "confirming" this jurisdiction. Yet the court felt that Congress, having given, could taketh away. So, citing the exceptions clause, the court held that once Congress repealed the law on which McCardle's appeal had been based, the court had no choice but to leave him out in the cold.

The McCardle decision, coupled with the text of the exceptions clause, makes the argument for the legitimacy of jurisdiction-stripping seem strong. But it's not so simple. Because while Congress had cut off the specific statutory route that McCardle had used, it had not eliminated all recourse that McCardle or others like him had to the Supreme Court. Alternative routes to the court remained open, and indeed, the same year McCardle was decided, the Supreme Court entertained a habeas petition from a person named Yeager who also challenged his confinement and the legality of Reconstruction legislation. Yeager used a different federal statute than McCardle to support his appeal, and the court accepted it. McCardle thus tells us that Congress may eliminate a specific statutory path to Supreme Court review, but it does not tell us whether Congress could zero-out an entire class of cases. In other words, Congress may apply the squeeze, but perhaps not the full freeze.

It is usually unsound to interpret any one constitutional provision in isolation. The exceptions clause must coexist with many other constitutional guarantees, such as equal protection or free exercise of religion. Congress could not use its power to regulate federal court jurisdiction, for example, to declare that while the courts may hear civil rights cases, they may only hear them when they are brought by white people. Nor could Congress pass a law limiting religious free-exercise challenges to Catholics only. And Congress could not say, for example, that the Supreme Court may take cases involving abortion, but only if it rules pro-life. Beyond rights laid out in the Constitution itself, other limitations on the exceptions-clause power may also exist. Many scholars and jurists have argued that Congress may use the exceptions clause only to enact neutral jurisdiction laws, run-of-the-mill rules of procedure that regulate jurisdiction but do not attempt to control substantive outcomes. True jurisdiction laws are driven by administrative and procedural factors that properly influence policies regarding jurisdiction—issues like the size of a court's caseload or the efficiency of court procedures. When Congress, under the guise of limiting jurisdiction, tries to kick out all Pledge of Allegiance cases, however, the underlying agenda is transparently not about caseloads but results.

In setting up a regime of three co-equal branches of government, creating the classic system of checks and balances, the framers devised a constitutional version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Each branch has its own unique strengths and its own unique weaknesses. Rock, Paper, Scissors would lose its point if we gave one of the implements a superkibosh power. And the system of checks and balances will lose its balance if one branch gets a supercheck.

The framers did not create a system of direct democracy. They created a republic and divided power. The idea of democracy is not America's great contribution to human history. America's great contribution is the idea of rights. The power of independent judges to "call 'em as they see 'em" is a cornerstone of this system. There is nothing wrong with intense debate over the nature of our constitutional rights. Citizens and members of Congress are of course entitled to rail against the courts when they don't like judicial rulings. But there is something wrong with stealth efforts to overrule the courts, using phony jurisdiction laws to manipulate judicial outcomes. That's poaching. The practice threatens to devolve into a kind of interbranch blackmail: Watch how you rule, or we'll shut you down. In thinking about our constitutional system of checks and balances, it is important to take the long view. Over the long haul of history, our nation has proved stronger and more resilient because of our commitment to taking constitutional principles seriously. Preserving an independent judiciary is an indispensable element of that commitment.



Violence Silence
Why no one really cares about prison rape.
By Robert Weisberg and David Mills
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2003, at 11:07 AM PT

Imagine the following defense argument being put forth to a judge who's about to sentence a defendant—an attractive long-haired young man of small but athletic build and gentle demeanor—after he has been convicted of molesting a teenage victim:

Your Honor, it is unfair and disproportionate to sentence my client to jail, since it will almost certainly subject him to violent and probably sexual assault while incarcerated. As the evidence we will proffer shows, there is a 50 percent chance he will suffer an aggravated assault and at least a 40 percent likelihood he will be raped and sodomized on multiple occasions while imprisoned. We thus urge you, Your Honor, to recognize that any sentence of incarceration effectively includes these "secondary" sanctions.

This motion seems fanciful, but it would be perfectly plausible for a defense lawyer to make. In fact, one wishes more defense lawyers would do so, since all these contentions are essentially true. While hard data on sexual assaults in prison is not easy to find, and observers dispute the precise frequency, no one who knows American jails and prisons doubts that rape and sexual assault—usually perpetrated by other inmates but occasionally by prison staff—are facts of daily life. What is surprising is how easily the citizenry and the judicial system have come to accept the brutal reality of our prisons and absorbed it into mainstream culture. A new bill adopted by Congress purports to address this widespread apathy toward prison brutality. But, whether or not its proponents were sincere, the bill is a superficial gesture of little substance.

This past July Congress enacted the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, providing $60 million for a two-year survey of state and federal prisons to determine the pervasiveness of prison rape and creating various panels to offer remedies. Congressional sponsors of the bill included the most improbable political allies, and support for the bill ranged from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch to conservative evangelical organizations. (The clear interest of the latter in promoting religion among inmates has helped create a strange-bedfellowship with leftist prisoners' rights groups.) The bill passed both houses unanimously, and President Bush, flanked by two former inmates who had been raped in prison, signed it in early September. The reason you've never heard of the Prison Rape Elimination Act is probably that no one who knows our criminal justice system believes it will do much of anything to eliminate prison rape.

Even the more modest earlier title for the bill—the Prison Rape Reduction Act—was an ambitious predictor of its likely outcome. Because despite its grand words and its sponsors' passionate expressions of concern, the main thing the law aims to do is collect data, and that may be, paradoxically, both quixotic and redundant.

It is quixotic because the obvious problems of unreliable observations and underreporting inherent in prison assault make highly refined objective data a fantasy. It is redundant because the relevant facts are already clear: A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years. And, as HRW notes, prisoners with certain characteristics—first offenders, those with high voices and passive or intellectual personalities—face far higher probabilities. Moreover, the reports reveal that sexual slavery following rape is also an ordinary occurrence. Stories abound of prisoners who, once they are "turned out" (prison jargon for the initial rape) become the rapists' subordinates, forced to do menial jobs and sometimes "rented out" to other inmates to satisfy their sexual needs.

Of course, prisoners face not only sexual assault from other inmates, but violence of all forms, often leading to horrific injuries and death. All too typical is the story, repeated by HRW, of a raped Texas prisoner with obvious injuries who reported the rapes (eight alleged rapes by the same rapist) to prison authorities. The authorities interviewed the rapist and the victim together, concluded it was nothing but a "lovers' quarrel," and sent them both back to their cells, where the victim was again repeatedly raped and beaten even more brutally. Also surprisingly typical is the very recent, notorious killing of Father John Geoghan, the Massachusetts priest imprisoned for sexual assault, whom the state correctional system effectively, if unintentionally, sentenced to death in a non-capital punishment jurisdiction.

Even if allocating the time and funds to collecting this additional data were somehow useful, how does the federal government propose to find it? Does the Department of Justice, charged with overseeing the study, have some secret methodology at its disposal that it's not sharing with us? And even if all this further data collection somehow dramatizes the problem, what then? Despite promises (or threats) in the new law to take prison officials or state governments to task for failure to stop rape and assault, the real cause probably lies in a more mundane and intractable reality: Inmates will attack inmates if enough of them live in sufficient proximity, with insufficient internal security, for long enough periods of time. That means that while Congress funds lots of studies, we already know that the key variables are really the sheer rates of incarceration in the United States, the density of prison housing, the number and quality of staff, and the abandonment of any meaningful attempts at rehabilitation. If it is honest, the new DOJ commission created by the law will suggest what we already know is necessary: that we lower incarceration rates, reduce the prisoner-to-space ratio, train huge numbers of new guards to protect prisoners, and abandon the purely retributive and incapacitative function of prisons. But there is no political will for such changes, which is perhaps why we fund studies of the obvious in the first place.

The truth is that the United States has essentially accepted violence—and particularly brutal sexual violence—as an inevitable consequence of incarcerating criminals. Indeed, prison assault has become a cliché within mainstream culture. The news and entertainment media refer to it nonchalantly. Prime-time TV shows, such as Oz, depict the most awful scenes of rape and carnage. Popular TV dramas routinely depict police taunting potential defendants with threats of the violence and sexual abuse they will face in prison. Indeed, last year 7UP ran a TV advertisement in which a teasing threat of sexual assault in prison was part of a lighthearted pitch for selling soda. The advertisement ran for two months without objection and was only pulled after criticisms from prisoners' rights groups.

So accepted is assault as part of prison life that an outsider might conclude that on some basic, if unarticulated level, we think it an appropriate element of the punishment regimen. Perhaps we believe that allowing prisons to be places of horrific acts will serve as part of the utilitarian deterrent effect of criminal sentences. Or perhaps we recognize that prison rape and assault are an unavoidable byproduct of the rape and assault in society generally, so that our goal here is not utilitarian but retributive: that is, even though we cannot eliminate rape and assault, we can at least reallocate them. Thus, when we purport to incapacitate convicted criminals, what we are really doing is shifting to them, the most "deserving" among us, the burden of victimization.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act is better than nothing—unless, of course, it represents the last gesture politicians intend to make in the direction of addressing this problem. Assuming the study does not blinker reality by denying the prevalence of the problem, it will presumably mandate or exhort state and federal officials to monitor, train, and discipline prison staff and enhance inmate security—all under a threat of withdrawal of federal funds or the firing of negligent officials. Of course, the government would thereby be implicitly forcing prison officials to spend vast amounts of money they do not have and that Congress is unlikely to give state legislatures in the first place.

Perhaps while this federal study is under way, there are other, more honest ways of acknowledging what the American prison system has created. Perhaps every sentencing judge should require that a defendant headed for prison be given extensive "pre-rape counseling" in the hope that he or she can take some small personal steps to reduce the risk of attack. Or perhaps we could require judges to demand data about the differential risks of rape and assault for different types of prisoners in different prisons and begin to factor such data into any sentence. "You committed murder, so let's send you somewhere where you're really likely to be raped." In that way we will be at least as brutally honest with ourselves as we are literally brutal with our prisoners.



Moore's Law
The immorality of the Ten Commandments.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 2:04 PM PT

The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).

The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.

So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art—and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). The next instruction is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant, sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute prohibitions were best avoided.

There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole enterprise.

In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.

One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.

It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.



"Natural-Born" Killer
Abolish the idiotic constitutional clause barring immigrants from the presidency.
By Jefferson Morley
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003, at 12:57 PM PT

Any section of the Constitution that kept Henry Kissinger out of the White House can't be all bad, but Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, is pretty close. The clause, which forbids anybody but a "natural-born" citizen from becoming president of the United States, is a national embarrassment.

The discriminatory effects of Article II are not small. The last U.S. Census counted 12.5 million foreign-born, naturalized citizens, about 4 percent of the population. ("Natural born" is not the same thing as American born. John McCain, for example, was born in Panama, but to American parents. He is a "natural-born" American citizen.)

Eliminating the natural-born clause might expand the presidential talent pool and improve the contest. It would almost certainly foster a more ethnically diverse field of contenders. Say you're a Democrat looking for new faces. You might wish for a telegenic, up-and-coming woman with executive experience. What about Michigan's new governor, Jennifer Granholm? Forget it. She was born in Canada. Maybe you think a Democratic ticket should include someone with business experience. How about liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros as a candidate? Nope. He was born in Hungary.

If you're a Republican tired of candidates named Bush, don't bother weighing the presidential potential of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. She was born in Taiwan. Perhaps you think it's high time the GOP cultivated a Hispanic candidate for the Oval Office, someone like Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez from Florida. Sorry, he was born in Cuba. Do you yearn for another charismatic Californian with proven screen appeal a la Ronald Reagan? There will be no President Schwarzenegger: His Austrian origins bar him.

No natural-born requirement exists for the vice presidency, but constitutional scholars agree that an immigrant vice president could not assume the presidency upon the death or incapacitation of the president. This effectively prevents an immigrant vice presidential candidate, since the entire purpose of the veep is to be able to succeed the president.

The actual effects of the natural-born clause are not as important as its symbolism. Barring immigrant citizens from the White House is a pointless insult. Such nativism is weirdly out of place in the charter of a multicultural nation where immigrants run our largest businesses, command our armies, and preside over our courts. The natural-born clause elevates the accident of birth over the accomplishments of the individual. It compromises the American faith that social mobility and openness foster national strength.

The natural-born clause has an unimpressive pedigree. Stanford historian Jack Rakove says it was drafted by a committee at the 1787 constitutional convention, which was charged with designing a chief executive position for the new American government. The language was "silently inserted into what became Article II and was adopted without debate" by the constitutional convention, Rakove says. Nor was the provision discussed during the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, he adds.

The founders' motivation, Rakove says, "was almost certainly the fear of foreign influence over an official who would be commander in chief of the armed forces and would have significant foreign relations duties and so on."

But if there is a risk of undue foreign influence on the president, a proposed constitutional amendment introduced in 2001 by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., would take care of it. Under the language of House Joint Resolution 47, anybody who had been a citizen for 20 years would be eligible for the White House. Frank plans to reintroduce a version of the bill this year.

It doesn't take a Karl Rove to recognize that abolishing the natural-born clause could be a winning political issue for either party. The most immediate beneficiaries of eliminating the natural-born clause would be Hispanics, the country's largest ethnic minority. For Republicans, such a constitutional amendment would give substance to their rhetoric of inclusion. For Democrats, it would signal to Hispanics that the party is serious about expanding opportunity for immigrants. For either party to take the lead in pushing for Congress and state legislatures to approve HJR 47 would encourage the other to get on board, if only in self-defense.

Granholm in 2008! From the White North to the White House!



Dallas Through the Looking Glass
The plot to link JFK's death and Watergate.
By David Greenberg
Posted Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

In November 1973, on the 10^th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, the New Left muckraking magazine Ramparts ran a long essay titled "From Dallas to Watergate: The Longest Cover-Up." The author, Peter Dale Scott, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, put forth the idea that Kennedy's murder and the scandals then engulfing the Nixon administration were linked. Though a reader could search the article in vain for any direct connection, Scott made much of the hints of what he called a "sinister overlapping of conspiracies." Noting that key players in both incidents had ties to organized crime and U.S. intelligence networks, he claimed that secret American efforts to kill Fidel Castro held the key to an ongoing massive cover-up.

In late 1973 theories like Scott's were proliferating. From that historical vantage point, the twin traumas of Dallas and Watergate seemed to bracket a decade of disorientation and dashed promise. Many Americans, wondering how an era ripe with hope could devolve so fast into turmoil and crisis, began to reach for conspiracy theories to explain where "the '60s" had gone awry. This was the moment, with dreams of revolution (or merely reform) now dead, when outlandish notions about Kennedy's death—and, more important, a cynicism about the workings of American democracy—took root.

Elaborate speculations about Kennedy's murder had begun, of course, earlier—almost from the moment he was shot. Shock and grief, along with lingering mysteries surrounding the killing and the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, stoked doubt that a lowly maniac could really snuff out such an august leader. But what started as normal human disbelief evolved in the next decade into a conscious program of radical skepticism, especially among the ranks of the New Left.

From authors like Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein (whose 1966 books poked holes in the official Warren Commission Report holding that Oswald had "acted alone") to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (who in 1967, amid much fanfare, indicted a local businessman in the alleged plot), assassination sleuths imagined a rogue's gallery of villains—Soviet agents, CIA operatives, Mafiosi, oil barons, Fidel Castro, even Lyndon B. Johnson—enmeshed in the intrigue.

Garrison's failure to convict his suspect set back the nascent conspiracy movement. But soon the all-too-real secret plotting of the Nixon administration revived speculation. "With Watergate, in '73 and '74, you start to see a new wave of theorizing about it," said Max Holland, who is completing a history of the Warren Commission. "Groups start springing up independently, looking backward at the assassination through the lens of Watergate." Watergate, after all, was a conspiracy—a grand jury named the president an "unindicted co-conspirator"—and the crisis seemed to validate the worst suspicions about the dark machinations of government officials.

It only whetted suspicions that certain people and places from assassination lore resurfaced in the Nixon saga. It turned out that Nixon had visited Dallas the day before Kennedy's assassination—his law firm represented Pepsi-Cola, whose bottlers were meeting there—and the coincidence piqued those who were inclined to implicate Tricky Dick. Skeptics pounced, too, on learning that some of the men who burgled the Democratic Party headquarters in June 1972 had participated in the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs 11 years earlier. And when Nixon's successor, Gerald R. Ford, pardoned the ousted president in September 1974, conspiracists, aware of Ford's service on the Warren Commission, concluded that the new chief executive was simply sealing the grand cover-up once more.

Some, enterprisingly, sought to link Dallas and Watergate in a single octopus-like plot. Mae Brussell, a Stanford graduate, had spent much of the 1960s cross-referencing the 26-volume Warren Report into a 27,000-page concordance, according to Paul Krassner, then editor of the underground paper the Realist. (Now deceased, she still inspires assassination buffs who call themselves "Brussell Sprouts.") When she heard about the fateful break-in, she recognized certain names and affiliations from her research and banged out a 21-page article for the August 1972 issue of the Realist. As in Peter Dale Scott's Ramparts piece, the exact argument was hard to find. But the thrust was clear: that a clandestine government serving the interests of military and industrial hard-liners had murdered Kennedy and was responsible for the Nixon scandals then coming to light.

If Brussell was the first writer to link Dallas and Watergate, the most earnest was the New Left activist Carl Oglesby, who hoped to solve, as he put it, "not just the murder mystery but the political mystery." A former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Oglesby was devastated by the organization's implosion in 1969. In the Watergate years he moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he founded a group called the Assassination Information Bureau that sought "to politicize the question of John F. Kennedy's assassination." The bureau's activism helped bring about a congressional committee that in 1979 concluded, on the basis of acoustic evidence, that a second gunman had in fact shot at Kennedy (although later findings cast doubt on that conclusion).

The congressional committee, alas, did not endorse Oglesby's larger theory, what he called "a drama of coup and countercoup" that stretched from Dealey Plaza to the Nixon White House. In The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), Oglesby posited two oligarchic cabals of businessmen, once allied in supporting the Cold War, that split in the 1960s over Vietnam and Cuba. The "Yankees," old-money Northeastern businessmen and liberal internationalists, had begun to oppose the Indochina war and soften their hostility toward Castro. In contrast, the "Cowboys," the extreme anti-communist real-estate and oil moguls of the Southwest, wanted to keep expanding America's economic frontiers in Asia. In Oglesby's theory, the Cowboys killed Kennedy because of his timidity in foreign policy and supported Nixon; but eventually the Yankees, through the CIA, struck back and sabotaged the Watergate break-in to bring Nixon down. "Kennedy was offed so that Vietnam could be escalated," Oglesby said. "Nixon was offed so that Vietnam could be brought to a close."

Oglesby's journey from New Left activist to full-time assassination buff was emblematic of a trend. While some radicals abandoned politics in the '70s to take up personal searches for meaning, others sought answers in sorting out the disaster-ridden history of recent times, trying to explain what went wrong. Baroque conspiracy theories, illustrating how a power elite blocked avenues for radical change, promised to restore logic to the broken narrative of the 1960s.

As Ramparts had proclaimed on the 10^th anniversary of the assassination, research into its history represented "a social and political affair, aligned in spirit with the antiwar movement." The rise of conspiracy theories can be understood in this way, as an effort to make sense of the lost promise of the previous decade. Rejecting the Warren Commission's explanations meant sharing the left's distrust of official, spoon-fed answers; despairing over the protracted war often entailed seeking solace in the wish that Kennedy might not have escalated the conflict as Johnson did.

Above all, in the 1970s increasing numbers of Americans were concluding that the government was hopelessly unresponsive to the popular will. After a decade of seemingly fruitless protest, once-impassioned activists withdrew into cynicism, accepting the bleak view that all politics was a rigged game. "Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy," Norman Mailer later wrote, "we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia."

Today the political climate is cooler than in 1973. But if frustration over an open-ended war, misgivings about the honesty of government officials, and cynicism about the health of our democracy tend to foster a belief in conspiracies, then it shouldn't surprise us that most Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.



Monumental Folly
A look at telling absences in art history tells us why not to build a monument at the WTC.
By Christopher Benfey
Posted Monday, June 16, 2003, at 1:11 PM PT

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has announced an open competition, with submissions accepted until June 30, to design a memorial for the victims of Sept. 11 and the attack on the World Trade Center in February of 1993. The memorial site takes up some 4.7 acres within Daniel Libeskind's planned building complex and includes the "footprints" of the two original towers, bounded on one side by an exposed slurry wall, the only part of the original structure of the World Trade Center to have survived the attacks. According to the New York Times, the victims' families, New York firefighters, and downtown residents have already launched an "intense lobbying effort" to influence the 13-member jury. There have been calls for separate recognition of rescue workers and for filling in the sunken pit so that the memorial will be at street level. In the end, we're likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed—and inevitably "controversial"—monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the "soaring" memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space—that it be left as a hollowed-out void.

There are powerful precedents for such a thing. Libeskind himself built empty spaces—or "voids"—into the design of his Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001. When I visited the museum with my father, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Berlin, both he and I found these to be the most moving parts of the museum. Elsewhere in Berlin, on the cobblestone expanse called the Bebelplatz, Micha Ullman, an Israeli-born artist, has commemorated the Nazi book-burning there of May 10, 1933, with a window at ground level that looks down into an empty subterranean white room lined with empty bookshelves. And then there's van Gogh's haunting "portrait" of Gauguin's Chair, empty since Gauguin abandoned him in Arles—an idea repeated in the one empty chair per victim of the monument for the Oklahoma City bombing victims.

An empty chair was also a mourning motif in early Buddhist art, and lately I've found myself thinking about how the Japanese, as the first wave of American visitors discovered during the Gilded Age, have always known the power of understatement. When Henry Adams, himself a literary master of absence, traveled to Japan in 1886, he particularly admired the Great Buddha at Kamakura, where a 15^th-century tidal wave had swept away the huge temple housing the 40-foot statue. Did the Japanese rebuild the temple? No. Its very absence, with its "footprint" marked by broken pillars, was a powerful presence. Adams' guide in Japan, the connoisseur and author of The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura, deplored the way Westerners filled their houses with pictures, statuary, and bric-a-brac. He proposed that the tearoom be an "abode of vacancy," a description that directly inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's absence-creating "architecture from within."

In the heart of Adams' autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, there is a gap or void of 20 years, a period during which he got married; his wife, Clover, committed suicide; and he went to Japan on a journey of mourning in the company of painter and designer John La Farge. Recently I was on a panel at Yale to discuss it, along with Peter Gay, a distinguished historian of psychoanalytic bent. "What kind of man leaves his marriage out of his autobiography?" he asked, expecting—I suppose—the answer: an immature man in need of therapy. (Gay isn't the first to complain. In a long piece on Gertrude Stein in a recent New Yorker, Janet Malcolm quotes a 1933 letter from Thornton Wilder in which he remarks on Adams' silence about his wife: "It's possible to make books of a certain fascination if you scrupulously leave out the essential.")

I myself find Adams' decision perfectly justified and deeply moving. Clover Adams, a gifted photographer devastated by her father's death, hated monuments anyway. During her honeymoon on the Nile, she complained that Egyptian mortuary art was oppressive; and during a stopover in Rome she chastised the sculptor William Wetmore Story for spoiling "nice blocks of white marble." Adams' 20-year gap is the perfect "countermonument," to borrow a term—for a monument that refuses to be a traditional monument—from James E. Young, a scholar of memorials who serves on the selection committee for the World Trade Center memorial competition.

We all know that memory is primarily an inner, not an outer, process. No monument can do justice to the horror of the Civil War, which is why Lincoln's simple words at Gettysburg (often invoked after Sept. 11) remain its most compelling monument. The movingly minimalist wall designed by Maya Lin (a member of the WTC jury) came more than a decade after the American pullout from Vietnam, at a time when many Americans wanted to consign the war to oblivion. During the months after Sept. 11, thousands of people came to view the site of the devastation, contemplating what Wallace Stevens called "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." We need to heed the message in Emily Dickinson's stanza about "a certain slant of light":

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

There may be a time during the coming decades when memory will require some more specific physical reminder of what happened on Sept. 11. That time is not now. We should be looking instead for ways to honor the "internal difference," starting with the void at the heart of Ground Zero.



Everybody Loves Reagan
How a divisive president became an American Idol.
By David Greenberg
Posted Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, at 9:30 AM PT

Anyone who has taken the time to read the script of the two-part miniseries The Reagans, which CBS deep-sixed after much hectoring from the rabid right, will note an irony: For all the attacks on its portrait of Ronald Reagan—painted as something less than Albert Einstein in his intelligence and something less than Albert Schweitzer in his compassion—the program is in fact mild as criticism, silly as politics, and toothless as a weapon in the culture wars (if it were even conceived as such). Judging from this teleplay, no viewer could possibly carry away from it a diminished view of Reagan's presidency, for the simple reason that it barely deals with the substance of his presidency at all.

Much of the script is given over to cornball incidents from the Reagan family soap opera. Whole scenes exhume forgotten tabloid fare such as Patti Reagan telling her mother, "I got my tubes tied. … I'll be damned if I bring any kids into this world," or Ron Jr., a dancer, coping with insinuations of his homosexuality. To be sure, these episodes are not always flattering to the Reagans, especially to Nancy, who comes off as stereotypically shrewish. But Ronnie emerges, to the degree that he figures in these scenes, as a cheery, loving dad. Amid such bathos, most substantive issues of the presidency are either omitted altogether or dealt with cursorily. The script dispatches the landmark 1981 tax cuts with a mere glimpse of newspaper headline. Homelessness is treated by a shot of three protesters bearing anti-Reagan placards outside the White House gates.

In fairness to the conservatives' gripes, Reagan is rendered in classic space cadet form. He relies on aides to brief him on the most elementary matters. ("This is Nicaragua," CIA chief William Casey tells him. "These are the Contras. They're fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan dictator. … ") He mixes up Hollywood movies and reality, as of course he did in real life. And Iran-Contra, not inappropriately, is featured prominently. But in the end, the general inanity of the whole miniseries is enough to keep it from being deployed either for or against Reagan's record. The only ones who should take offense are defenders of quality network television.

All of which points to a more important conclusion to be drawn from last week's donnybrook. That this innocent treatment of Reagan should elicit the ire it did shows one thing above all: how successful the Reaganauts have recently been in goosing his reputation beyond recognition. It is a second irony of the recent row that the complaints about Reagan-bashing come at a time when the former president has never been more popular or impervious to criticism. America of late has not only been bathing Reagan in a warm glow but forgetting just how controversial—and at many points, how unpopular—he really was.

Every president's reputation fluctuates after he leaves office. Harry Truman quit the presidency with a 32 percent approval rating and is now roundly saluted. But people noticed Truman's rehabilitation, whereas Reagan's has occurred imperceptibly over the last few years. Most people would be surprised to hear that in 1992, significantly more people viewed his presidency unfavorably than favorably—and that his approval ratings stayed in the middling range until about 1999.

This fall marks the high-water mark in the Reagan comeback bid. Along with the miniseries, two new collections of his letters have appeared, intended (in the spirit of a 2001 anthology of his radio-speech drafts, In His Own Hand) to dispel the airhead image of liberal lore. In another new book, a former speechwriter has written the idolatrous How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Even Reagan's longtime Boswell, Lou Cannon, has gotten into the game, with a fair-minded but strikingly admiring portrait of his subject's pre-presidential years, Governor Reagan.

All these efforts come on the heels of years of lobbying to permanently enshrine a mythic image of the former president. The Reagan Legacy Project, founded by antitax zealot Grover Norquist, scored a coup in 1998 by renaming Washington National Airport for its hero (although everyone still calls it "National"). The outfit is now hoping to remove Alexander Hamilton from the $10 bill to make room for Reagan's visage and to build a Reagan Memorial on the Washington Mall, despite a law barring the erection of any monument there until a quarter century after its namesake's death—a law signed in 1986 by President Reagan.

The current love-in stems from more than conservative cheerleading. It has received unintentional help from many of the president's liberal biographers—Frances FitzGerald, author of Way Out There in the Blue, being the most recent—who persist in denigrating his achievements as nothing but public relations. And it probably owes its strength mostly to the 92-year-old's sad, senescent condition. Afflicted with Alzheimer's and unable to appreciate much of what goes on around him, Reagan lives in a twilight limbo, arousing the kind of sympathy normally associated with the deceased.

Whatever its causes, the Reagan celebration obscures the divisiveness that followed him during most of his public life. As Tim Noah has written, many traits of Reagan's that the CBS show was censured for showing—mainly, his intellectual deficiencies—were once routinely acknowledged, even by close aides. Furthermore, for most of Reagan's career whole segments of the public—often majorities—looked upon him with dismay, scorn, or disapproval. We forget that only in the years just preceding and following his landslide 1984 re-election did Reagan enjoy truly wide popularity. In the first and last phases of his presidency he rarely won approval from a sizable public majority.

Consider the early years. As Elliot King and Michael Schudson pointed out in a classic Columbia Journalism Review article, for the first 24 months of Reagan's first term he was one of the least popular presidents of recent times. At the end of his first year in office, he was less popular than were Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower (his four predecessors elected into the presidency) at the end of their first years. At the end of his second year, he posted only a 37 percent job-approval rating from Gallup, again lower than the four elected predecessors.

The middle years of Reagan's presidency did see a rebound in his fortunes, fueled by a rebound in the economy, and into late 1986 he commanded high (though never astronomical) approval ratings. But with the revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal, his popularity plummeted, not to recover until his administration's tail end, when it was buoyed by farewells and retrospectives. (In February 1987, for example, 53 percent of the public disapproved of Reagan's performance while just 40 percent approved.)

For most of his career, Reagan took bold and provocative (and often wrongheaded) positions. For that boldness, he elicited affection but also distrust and even hatred, and not just from a small band of liberals in Hollywood. By airbrushing out those qualities that made Reagan controversial, by trying to turn him into a beloved George Washington-like icon, his boosters are doing him a disservice. In forsaking insight into the antipathy he often engendered, they seek to render him a sunny, universally adored, wholly benign, and two-dimensional figurehead—a portrait that, even more than this idiotic docudrama, would utterly conceal for posterity the reasons that Ronald Reagan mattered.



Adolf's Alive!
Saddam Hussein and the persistent myth of Hitler's survival.
By David Greenberg
Posted Monday, June 2, 2003, at 8:44 AM PT

The question of whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead may not affect the future of Iraq, but it has consumed the attention of the press and the public. Did he die in the attacks on Baghdad? Was that him on the videotape? Did he abscond with his treasure, and to where?

All this conjecture about Saddam's fate, however beside the point, has ample precedent in the annals of deposed tyrants—most memorably in the feverish speculation after World War II about whether Adolf Hitler survived the fall of Berlin. The Hitler mystery—born of real confusion, stoked by the Soviet Union for political purposes, nurtured by conspiracy theorists, and spun into kitschy movies and novels—has spawned a full-fledged body of lore, what historian Donald McKale labeled (in the title of his book on the subject) "The Survival Myth." The myth that McKale documents is worth revisiting since its longevity indicates the tenacious hold that fallen dictators have over our imagination—and reveals our surprising ambivalence about total victory.

In the last months of World War II, as the Allies closed in on Berlin, rumors spread about what happened to Hitler. Many of those rumors have found echoes in today's guesswork about Saddam. Some said that Hitler had a body double who had died in his place, even as the Nazi leader decamped to South America or to his Bavarian mountain retreat. Others held that Eva Braun had borne Hitler a child who might someday revive Nazism—worries akin to the fear that even if Saddam has died, his sons may be alive.

Although Hitler and Braun, it is now known, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, that was not certain for many months. The interval of ambiguity allowed wild suppositions to flourish. The first seemingly authoritative statement came on May 1, with the Soviet Army in Berlin, when a Hamburg radio station announced that the Führer, fighting valiantly at his offices at the Reich Chancellery, had been killed and named Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the head of the Navy, as his successor. "Our Führer Adolf Hitler is dead," Doenitz came on the radio to say. "… He died a hero's death." But just then a voice of unknown origin interrupted, declaring, "This is a lie!" and urging listeners to "rise against Doenitz."

This bizarre broadcast, especially in the context of the Nazis' well-known mastery of propaganda, produced a strange blend of hope and disbelief. That the German capital had fallen not to the Americans or the British but to the Soviets—hardly known themselves for objective and honest news reporting—added to the unreliability of the information. Little in the following weeks clarified Hitler's fate. On May 2, President Harry Truman told reporters that the United States had "official information" that Hitler was dead, but neither he nor his aides could provide any proof. For months, conflicting press reports fed the confusion. One much-hyped article in the Chicago Times placed Hitler and Braun in Argentina, living on an estate in frigid Patagonia; though based wholly on hearsay, it was picked up by every major American and European newspaper.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin and his regime actively encouraged doubts about Hitler's death. On May 2, Tass, the Soviet news agency, warned that the radio announcement of the Führer's demise was a "fascist trick" designed to allow him to go "underground." This proposition became the official Soviet line. On June 6, Red Army officials in Berlin declared that they had found Hitler's corpse, but just three days later, their commander, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, denied that Hitler's body had been identified and suggested that "He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment." In June and July, Stalin personally told Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and American envoy Harry Hopkins that he was sure Hitler was alive. Most audaciously, Moscow charged in September 1945 that the British had been hiding Hitler and Braun in a castle in Westphalia.

Stalin's motives for this disinformation remain inscrutable. Although given his paranoia, he might have believed it, more likely he hoped to use the threat of Hitler's survival for strategic advantage. If the resurgence of a Nazi-led, expansionist Germany remained a prospect, then Stalin might gain leverage for reparations and more favorable postwar borders. In the ideological war with the West, he could portray the capitalist Allies as soft on fascism and Soviet communism as fascism's true enemy.

The British sought to refute the outrageous charge with a thorough investigation that involved numerous interviews with witnesses to Hitler's death. The resulting report, which conclusively fixed Hitler's death as a suicide on April 30 in his bunker, helped quell much rumor-mongering. So did the publication (and astonishing popularity) two years later of The Last Days of Hitler, by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had helped conduct the British government's inquiry and enriched that account with meticulous sourcing.

But even these reports couldn't satisfy every skeptic. Because they stated that the bodies of Hitler and Braun were burned with as much as 180 liters of gasoline, some enterprising amateur scientists undertook showing that such an amount of gas couldn't consume a human body, in one experiment setting fire to a pig. Others revived the doppelgänger thesis, suggesting that the man whom witnesses saw retreat to his room to shoot himself wasn't really Hitler at all.

The survival myth endured for decades in a multitude of forms, even as additional witnesses and information from the Soviet Union emerged to confirm Hitler's death. Pulp magazines ran lurid headlines proclaiming that his suicide had been faked or recounted stories about his absconding to distant shores. A Hungarian exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published a book entitled, Je Sais Que Hitler Est Vivant (I Know Hitler Is Alive). In 1955, a magazine that was circulated to American high-school students demanded that the government "Clear Up Hitler's Death."

One set of stories argued, in all seriousness, that Hitler was hiding out at the South Pole. Real-life Hitler look-alikes continued to get stopped at customs, and as late as 1969, German authorities were still rounding up men who resembled Hitler—including one retired miner, Albert Pankla, whose refusal to change his hairstyle or shave his mustache led to his arrest, he claimed, on some 300 occasions. In more recent times, the trope has been fodder for an endless catalog of bad (and some good) art, from the delightfully trashy 1976 novel (and 1978 movie) The Boys From Brazil (which had Josef Mengele surviving Berlin's fall to undertake Hitler's resurrection) to George Steiner's novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

The persistence of the survival myth suggests several interpretations. It reveals a worry over the rebirth of Nazism, a fear that all the sacrifices of World War II still might not have permanently expunged this horrible evil. It is also a vehicle for admitting a perverse kind of awe for Hitler, a way to acknowledge his power without seeming to profess admiration. Or, as McKale suggests, it may betray an unwillingness "to allow Hitler to have the peace of death."

But there is something more universal in the survival myth as well. The trope of the monstrous villain that won't die has a long lineage. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, when St. George slays the dragon, the onlookers at first refuse to believe it is dead. In almost every Hollywood action or slasher movie of the last 20 years, the bad guy, when presumed dead, rises one last time to give the audience a final scare. Our emotions in watching the war are not so different. In the Onion's recent parody "Military Promises 'Huge Numbers' For Gulf War II: The Vengeance," Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as saying, "In the original, as you no doubt know, we defeat Saddam Hussein, only to let him slip away at the very end," and promises to finish the job this time around.

As is often the case, the Onion may be onto something. I suspect that for all of our triumphalism, we are actually ambivalent about total victory. There is pride, of course, in having achieved Saddam's quick removal, just as there was in ending the Third Reich. But it makes sense, too, that we should at some level want to see our victory as less than complete. Swift and total conquest brings the disconcerting shock that our military might is even more potent than we knew. It induces an anxiety about the ease with which we decide to topple a regime. And it leaves a let-down and dissipated sense of purpose after an all-out fight against an arrant villain. After all, if Saddam is really dead—if evil personified is permanently put down—what's left for the United States and its military to do?

Thanks to Donald McKale's Hitler:The Survival Myth and to Ron Rosenbaum and his book Explaining Hitler.


Trading Places
Cultural property disputes are reshaping the art world—but how?
By Carol Kino
Posted Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

It's a sad truth that the depredations of war and imperialism have sometimes had positive side effects for art history. Take the Metropolitan Museum's recent "Manet-Velázquez" show, on the influence of 17^th-century Spanish painting on 19^th-century French art. For most of the 18^th century, Spanish artists like Murillo, Zurbaran, and Velázquez were little known outside their homeland. Then in the early 1800s, hundreds of Spanish paintings arrived in Paris as Napoleonic war loot. Some were briefly shown at the Louvre before Napoleon's defeat, after which they were returned. Later that century, French artists began adopting the Spanish artists' realist aesthetic and loose, sensuous brushwork—a move that laid the foundations of Impressionism and radically changed the course of modern art.

Unlike many European museums, American museums were built with civic and capitalist muscle, rather than imperial might. Yet well into the 1970s their attitude toward acquisitions—as any expert will admit off the record—was frequently "don't ask, don't tell." But today American courts are dealing with an unprecedented number of Holocaust reparation cases. And last year, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted a well-known New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, for conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. As a result, some foreign collectors and museums have become more cautious about loaning work to museum shows—particularly those in America—and everyone has become vastly more diligent about conducting provenance research before buying.

What prompted this shift in global attention, when the world often turned a blind eye in the past?

The laws that allow countries to seek restitution of what's known as "cultural property" are a byproduct of the early 20^th century, when art-rich countries like Turkey, Italy, and Greece began to introduce what are known as "patrimony laws." (These essentially deem all newly discovered artifacts found within their borders to be the property of the state.)

The movement to protect world culture dramatically intensified after World War II, during which the Nazis and the Russian army confiscated unprecedented numbers of artworks from individuals and public institutions throughout Europe. 1954 saw the drafting of the Hague Convention—the first major international agreement to establish guidelines for protecting cultural property during wartime. Then, in the 1960s, the international art market heated up so much (resulting in increased trade of stolen goods) that UNESCO, in 1970, drafted another convention that encouraged countries to work together as much as possible to enforce each other's export restrictions. (By 2003, UNESCO's guidelines had been ratified by 96 countries, including the United States.) As Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, famously wrote in his 1993 memoir, Making the Mummies Dance, "I recognized that with the UNESCO hearings, the age of piracy had ended."

Today, trying to make sense of all the different international laws is enough to set anyone but a lawyer wailing like the tortured figure in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." In 1995, UNIDROIT (originally the legal auxiliary of the old League of Nations) drafted a convention that aims to enforce export restrictions and help unify cultural property laws worldwide. Within most countries, illegally gotten cultural property is generally covered by a nation's stolen property laws. But transport that cultural property across a border, and you may have violated civil law, criminal law, an import or an export prohibition, or a combination of the above, depending on which country we're talking about, what the object is, and who owns it—and that's just for starters. Much also depends on the particulars of the bilateral and multilateral agreements, if any, between the countries in question, which stipulate whether and to what degree one will honor another's export restrictions.

Obviously, when the dispute is between nations, national pride, politics, and political grandstanding tend to take precedence over law. That's probably why such disputes have a habit of becoming so emotional, and so unresolvable—as evidenced by the long-running brouhaha over the Elgin Marbles, which escalated about 20 years ago. Britain holds that the sculptures, removed from the Parthenon in the early 19^th century, were legally purchased by Lord Elgin from the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled Greece—a move that thereby saved them from destruction during Greece's War of Independence and by modern-day Greek air pollution. Yet Greece counters that the seller was an occupying force, therefore the purchase shouldn't count. Both nations regard the sculptures as their cultural patrimony. But Greece didn't exist as an independent nation until 1832—and in any case, its 20^th-century patrimony laws can't be applied retroactively. Perhaps that's why Greece, so far, has attempted to resolve the matter through diplomacy, rather than in court.

Last December, an alliance of about 40 major museums, known as the Bizot Group, issued a statement in support of the so-called "universal museum"—one whose collection brings together work from many periods and cultures. (18 museum directors signed the statement, including those of the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hermitage.) The statement argues that with time, objects become "part of the heritage of the nations which house them." Clearly, the signatories were also trying to protect their own backs: If the British Museum were ever to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, the act would likely unleash a torrent of similar claims that could drain the resources—and the collections—of some of the world's great treasure-house museums.

Nonetheless, the Bizot statement has since been slammed by various museum associations and cultural watchdogs for being "Eurocentric" and for taking "a George Bush approach to international relations."

Yet when it comes to cases that can be fought in court, the United States (New York State and California in particular) is actually one of the best jurisdictions in the world in which to recover stolen art. For one thing, our common-law legal system offers theft victims better protection, because it mandates that even a good-faith purchaser cannot acquire stolen property.

The United States also has a record number of especially tough bilateral agreements with other countries, like Italy, Cyprus, and Peru, which allow those countries to pursue their own illegal export cases here. Yet to much of the world, our prosecutorial approach seems to miss the point. Europe and Japan, when balancing international relations against free trade, have tended to favor the latter—the argument in favor of a more relaxed art market being that it helps grease the wheels for traveling loan shows and allows museums to keep on collecting, thereby helping culture to circulate globally.

Of course, it doesn't matter what laws or bilateral agreements are in place if no one enforces them—as we've seen recently in Iraq. Yet using legal parameters as the restitution cut-off point makes total sense. Clearly, the issues underlying each case are complex; thus each must be judged individually. But a legal measuring stick—rather than a more amorphously moral one—still permits prosecution of cases involving Holocaust spoils and many 20^th-century export restriction breaches, while avoiding the Pandora's box of centuries-old claims that could be opened if the British Museum were to return the Elgin Marbles.

And ironically enough, as some recent conflicts have shown, it's not always such a terrible thing to have some of a country's treasures dispersed throughout the world. If an Elginesque diplomat had struck a dicey deal for Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas in the 19^th century, the Taliban wouldn't have been able to shell them into smithereens in 2001. In May, just after the Baghdad Museum was looted and many of Iraq's Mesopotamian treasures were lost, the Metropolitan opened "Art of the First Cities," its own Mesopotamian survey, which relies heavily on loans from the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Hermitage. Were it not for 18^th- and 19^th-century imperialist depradation, that history might well not exist today.

Culturebox thanks Lawrence M. Kaye and Howard N. Spiegler of Herrick, Feinstein, LLP; Jason Hall, director of government and public affairs, the American Association of Museums; and the U.S. State Department's International Cultural Property Protection Web site.

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 The wording of these laws generally applies to objects found "on and under the ground," in order to cover undocumented antiquities taken from archeological sites.

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 Later in the century, European countries like Britain, France, and Italy, realizing that their own cultural legacy was being sold piecemeal to the new world economic power, America, began to establish their own export restrictions. These usually give a government first right of refusal when an object deemed essential to national heritage is sold. By 1983, most Communist countries and developing nations had also established their own such restrictions, ranging from qualified sale limitations to full-scale export embargos.

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 After the Second World War, the Allies returned many displaced artworks to the nations they'd been stolen from, the assumption being that the countries themselves would locate the rightful owners. Frequently, this didn't happen. And because many of the nations that received returned work were part of the Soviet Union, their archives were sealed until recently, making it impossible for survivors and their descendents to gain the evidence needed to press claims. Thus the dissolution of the USSR has provoked a rash of new claims.

Many U.S. museums maintain public registries of artwork whose provenance has gaps during the Nazi era (1933-1945). In September, a searchable national registry of such work, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, will go live on the American Association of Museums' Web site. Several states are also in the process of enacting Holocaust exception legislation. The toughest of these is a California law that became effective in January 2003: It doesn't permit museums and other institutions to use the statute of limitations defense for any action commenced before the end of 2010.

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New York's statute of limitations runs for three years, and the clock doesn't start ticking till the day after the plaintiff's demand has been refused.


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 After the Second World War, the Allies returned many displaced artworks to the nations they'd been stolen from, the assumption being that the countries themselves would locate the rightful owners. Frequently, this didn't happen. And because many of the nations that received returned work were part of the Soviet Union, their archives were sealed until recently, making it impossible for survivors and their descendents to gain the evidence needed to press claims. Thus the dissolution of the USSR has provoked a rash of new claims.

Many U.S. museums maintain public registries of artwork whose provenance has gaps during the Nazi era (1933-1945). In September, a searchable national registry of such work, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, will go live on the American Association of Museums' Web site. Several states are also in the process of enacting Holocaust exception legislation. The toughest of these is a California law that became effective in January 2003: It doesn't permit museums and other institutions to use the statute of limitations defense for any action commenced before the end of 2010.

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The United States may have some of the toughest restitution and repatriation laws in the world, but we've done a lousy job of protecting our own cultural patrimony. Among our few cultural heritage laws, the gold standard is probably the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (known as NAGPRA). Enacted in 1991, it established guidelines for tribes to reclaim anything associated with a burial ground, such as funerary objects and human remains, as well as sacred and communally owned objects. It's one of the toughest such laws in the world, and its principles have helped influence legislation in other countries with indigenous native populations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.



The End of History
How e-mail is wrecking our national archive.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, June 4, 2003, at 4:22 AM PT

When tomorrow's historians go to write the chronicles of decision-making that led to Gulf War II, they may be startled to find there's not much history to be written. The same is true of Clinton's war over Kosovo, Bush Sr.'s Desert Storm, and a host of other major episodes of U.S. national security policy. Many of the kinds of documents that historians of prior wars, and of the Cold War, have taken for granted—memoranda, minutes, and the routine back-and-forth among assistant secretaries of state and defense or among colonels and generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—simply no longer exist.

The problem is not some deliberate plot to conceal or destroy evidence. The problem—and it may seem churlish to say so in an online publication—is the advent of e-mail.

In the old days, before the mid-to-late 1980s, Cabinet officials and their assistants and deputy assistants wrote memos on paper, then handed them to a secretary in a typing pool. The secretary would type it on a sheet of paper backed by two or three carbon sheets, then file the carbons. Periodically, someone from the national archive would stop by with a cart and haul away the carbons for posterity.

Nobody does this today. There are no typing pools to speak of. There are few written memos.

Eduard Mark, a Cold War historian who has worked for 15 years in the U.S. Air Force historian's office, has launched a one-man crusade to highlight, and repair, this situation. He remembers an incident from the early '90s, when he was researching the official Air Force history of the Panama invasion, which had taken place only a few years earlier. "I went to the Air Force operations center," Mark says. "They had a little Mac computer on which they'd saved all the briefings. They were getting ready to dump the computer. I stopped them just in time, and printed out all the briefings. Those printouts I made are the only copies in existence."

That was a decade ago, when computers were not yet pervasive in the Pentagon and many offices still printed important documents on paper. The situation now, Mark says, is much worse.

Almost all Air Force documents today, for example, are presented as PowerPoint briefings. They are almost never printed and rarely stored. When they are saved, they are often unaccompanied by any text. As a result, in many cases, the briefings are incomprehensible.

The new, paperless world has encouraged a general carelessness in official record-keeping. Mark says that J5, the planning department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not, as a rule, save anything. When I talked with Mark on the phone Tuesday, he said he had before him an unclassified document, signed by the Air Force chief of staff and the secretary of the Air Force, ordering the creation of a senior steering group on "transformation" (the new buzzword for making military operations more agile and more inter-service in nature). The document was not dated.

Mark has personal knowledge of the situation with the Air Force. However, officials and historians in other branches of the national-security bureaucracy say, on background, that the pattern is pretty much the same across the board.

Certain high-level documents are usually (but, even then, not always) saved—memos that cross the desks of the president, Cabinet secretaries, and military chiefs (the Air Force and Army chiefs of staff, and the chief of naval operations). But beneath that level, it's hit and miss, more often miss.

An enterprising historian writing about World Wars I or II can draw on the vast military records at the National Archive, as well as letters from Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, and others. (Who writes letters anymore?) Those chronicling the Cold War or the Vietnam War can plumb the presidential libraries of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford (less so of Nixon because it's a privately funded library), and find plenty of illuminating memos written to and from not just Cabinet officers, such as John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk, but the crucial sub-Cabinet officials and security advisers, such as Andrew Goodpaster, Walt Rostow, John McNaughton, McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball.

Twenty years from now, if someone went looking for similar memos by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams on, say, the Bush administration's Middle East policies, not many memos would be found because they don't exist. Officials today e-mail their thoughts and proposals. Perhaps some individuals have been fastidious about printing and saving their e-mails, but there is no system in place for automatically doing so.

Robert Caro, author of the revealingly massive and detailed biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, often advises aspiring historians, "Turn every page." What to do, though, if there aren't any pages to turn?



America's Forgotten Empire
How 50 years of imperialism in the Philippines changed the United States—and my family.
By Mark Lewis
Posted Friday, May 2, 2003, at 7:34 AM PT

In these heady days of incipient empire, Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden"—written as advice to Americans following our seizure of the Philippines—is enjoying an unlikely revival. In Empire, Niall Ferguson quotes from it at length while urging Americans to accept their long-prophesied destiny in Iraq and elsewhere. But in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Ferguson notes a problem with American empire: Too few Americans are willing to make imperialism a full-time career. "Send forth the best ye breed," wrote Kipling, "in patience to abide." That's how the Brits managed to run much of the world for more than a century. The Yanks? No staying power, says Ferguson.

It's true: Americans today have little interest in running the world, except by remote control. But that may be because we've already learned our lesson. Speaking as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Americans who answered Kipling's original call, I'm obliged to point out that we've already tried the British Empire approach at least once before, in the Philippines—not for days or weeks but for half a century. Thousands of Yanks eagerly donned pith helmets and ventured east of Suez, hoping to remake the world and perhaps to make a buck or two in the process. Recalling the results of this grand experiment might give pause to some of today's empire enthusiasts.

On May 1, 1898, my great-grandfather Charles "Bud" Tomlinson signed up with the 1^st Montana Volunteer Infantry, eager to avenge the USS Maine and fight for Cuba libre. On the same day, Commodore George Dewey steamed into Manila Bay, annihilated a Spanish squadron, and established the United States as a world power, to the astonished delight of the folks back home. As a result, Bud never made it to Cuba; he was shipped off to Manila to help plant the Stars and Stripes in Asia. A brief but intense vogue for empire swept the nation: Congress annexed the Philippines, and Bud helped subjugate the Filipinos in a nasty but successful war.

Bud soon went home to Montana. But many ex-soldiers remained in the islands, hoping to strike it rich. They were joined by thousands of idealistic nation-builders from America who came out by the boatload to teach school, build roads, and preach the democracy-and-capitalism gospel. For the Filipinos the results were mixed, but the impact on both nations was considerable.

The first U.S. governor-general was William Howard Taft, whose success in Manila diverted him from a judicial career and put him on the fast track to the White House. The governor-generalship was a high-profile job: Among Taft's successors were such political heavyweights as Leonard Wood and Henry Stimson. For the U.S. military, the Philippines functioned as a proving ground for the future commanders of World Wars I (John J. Pershing, Peyton March) and II (George Marshall, Chester Nimitz, and Douglas MacArthur, among many others).

Our Philippines colony consciously emulated the British Empire, complete with sepoys (the Philippine Scouts), a Hill Station (at Baguio, laid out by no less than Daniel Burnham), and a tame maharajah (the Sultan of Sulu). For awhile, the American Raj stuff played well back home. Bud Tomlinson's daughter Thelma (my grandmother) was reared on stirring tales of his "Road to Mandalay" adventures. Decades later, she (along with her husband, Bryan Kerns, and their young daughter Karen) fled Depression-era America for the Philippines. Bryan found work as a mining company accountant, while Thelma happily took up the life of a pukka memsahib.

Alas, by then America's enthusiasm for empire had faded. As it turned out, there was relatively little money to be made in the Philippines, and the Filipinos seemed less than entirely grateful for the decades of tutelage. So Congress voted to cut the islands loose, after a suitable period of transition. Full independence was scheduled for 1946. Still, my grandparents loved their life in the islands—so much so that they ignored the war clouds and were still there on Dec. 7, 1941. As a result, they and my mother spent the war in a very unpleasant internment camp, just like the one in Empire of the Sun.

That was the biggest problem with America's Philippines empire: Its acquisition put us on a collision course with Japan that led directly to Pearl Harbor. Hawaii was merely raided; the Philippines were invaded and conquered, the worst defeat ever suffered by an American Army. The surrender of Bataan and Corregidor was a searing national humiliation. Then came the infamous Death March, and MacArthur's "I shall return" vow. In due course he waded ashore at Leyte, as pictured in the famous photograph. What followed was the biggest U.S. land campaign of the Pacific war. Thousands of GIs died to recapture an empire Congress already had decided to abandon.

The surviving Bataan POWs were rescued in the commando raid celebrated by Hampton Sides in Ghost Soldiers. Less well-remembered are the thousands of U.S. civilian captives who were on the verge of starvation when they, too, were rescued by GIs, in a daring mission into the heart of occupied Manila. A photograph in the Time-Life book Return to the Philippines shows my grandfather among a crowd of liberated internees, all gazing adoringly at MacArthur.

That was pretty much the end of America's grand colonial experiment. Manila was destroyed in the battle to retake it from the Japanese. There was little to stay for, so the Kernses and their fellow internees were shipped home to San Francisco on troop transports. They got a nice welcome but nothing spectacular. Ex-colonials were old news in 1945—especially in San Francisco, then getting ready to host the conference that would establish the United Nations, set up by the United States to lead the world into a post-colonial future. (Unilateralists in those days were almost as scarce as imperialists.) The Philippines got their independence right on schedule in 1946. We kept some military bases, but the notion of formal empire was abandoned, and the American Raj in the Philippines was dismantled. Then it was forgotten.

When GIs returned to the islands last year to help chastise Muslim separatists, journalists dutifully filed dispatches from Zamboanga recalling the days of Pershing and MacArthur. These stories failed to ring the mystic chords of memory. America's original Philippines empire was an epic mistake, so we prefer not to remember it.

Now, Kipling's 1899 message to America is being revived, minus the politically incorrect bits (e.g., "Your new-caught sullen peoples,/ half devil and half child"; click here for the full text of the poem and here for Christopher Hitchens' take on what Kipling really thought about imperialism). Ferguson and others invite us to go abroad and make the world a better place.

Well, perhaps we will. Our problematic experience in the Philippines need not discourage us from taking on greater international responsibilities—or even from giving empire another shot, if necessary, to establish a beneficial Pax Americana. But before we embark on so ambitious a project, it might be useful to make a closer study of our earlier imperial adventure and its unintended consequences, some of which were quite severe.

Some, in fact, are still with us. The still-festering Muslim separatist movement in the southern Philippines, for example, is a legacy of American empire. Before 1898, these Moros largely governed themselves. Then we came along and conquered the entire archipelago, creating a unified nation and establishing a putative democracy in which the Catholic majority would inevitably dominate the restive Muslim minority. Now in 2003 we're about to send GIs back to the Philippines yet again, to help deal with Moro issues that Pershing supposedly resolved almost a century ago. Just something to think about, as we set out to design a new, improved Iraq.



Marching Orders
Goose-stepping, the dance craze of tyrants.
By Mark Scheffler
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2003, at 11:34 AM PT

Much of the TV footage used these days to shed light on the bizarre, hermetically sealed regime of North Korea features its massive army parading through the streets of Pyongyang in extremely tight-knit, highly synchronized marching formations. A prominent and chilling feature of these marches is the goose-step, in which thousands and thousands of troops kick their legs up like belligerent, robotic Rockettes. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il ("Dear Leader") is just the latest in a long line of vicious rulers whose soldiers have stepped the goose. Where and when did the goose-step originate, and why has it been so common among recent history's most sadistic tyrants?

Norman Davies, author of Europe: A History, traces the origins of the march back to the Prussian army in the 17^th century. The body language of goose-stepping, he wrote,

transmitted a clear set of messages. To Prussia's generals, it said that the discipline and athleticism of their men would withstand all orders, no matter how painful or ludicrous. To Prussian civilians, it said that all insubordination would be ruthlessly crushed. To Prussia's enemies it said that the Prussian army was not made up just of lads in uniform, but regimented supermen. To the world at large, it announced that Prussia was not just strong, but arrogant.

The marching mode proved so effective that it became a prime feature of German and Prussian parades well into the 20^th century. It was also adopted by the Russian army and later, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, by the Red Army. Even after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, honor guards could still be seen goose-stepping around Lenin's tomb in Moscow. But for many people the step is most closely associated with the Nazis. Hitler believed that tighter bonds of solidarity could be achieved through gestures that demonstrated loyalty in a physical sense (the stiff-armed salute falls into this category, too).

George Orwell, who knew totalitarianism when he saw it, succinctly articulated the menacing nature of the goose-step in his wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941). Sitting in Britain, while "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me," he wrote:

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. … The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me." … Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.

North of the 38^th parallel, Kim's vainglorious propaganda parades are clearly designed to evoke Hitler's gargantuan Nuremberg rallies of the 1920s and '30s. North Korea's sinister, macro-scaled, Vegas-on-acid shows—which involve incredibly choreographed mass games, acrobatic displays, and the aforementioned goose-stepping troops—top even the Nazis' efforts to visually convey the toxic grandeur of mass ideology.

Goose-stepping is the ultimate tactical anachronism—yet another sign that Kim is stuck in the delusional global-domination schemes of yesteryear. Though he clearly intends his marches to be shows of prowess (and though he claims to have the nuclear weapons to back it up), the whole notion of conveying military might by way of a rigid march seems almost quaint in a world where smart weapons, special operations units, and state-of-the-art air forces are steadily supplanting large-scale ground forces.

And though the association between the goose-step and authoritarian regimes is permanently sealed in the collective cultural consciousness, the march today is mostly viewed as an obsolescent remnant of a maniacal past. "Since World War II," writes William McNeill, author of Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, "widespread revulsion against everything associated with the Nazis has discredited mass muscular manifestations of political attachments." Except in North Korea, apparently.

Where there isn't revulsion, there's humor. Years of sarcastic derision—both in the popular culture at large and by comedians such as Mel Brooks and ex-Monty Python cast member John Cleese—have ultimately relegated the goose-step to the realm of the ridiculous. In his short-lived but still beloved mid-'70s British sitcom Fawlty Towers, Cleese played Basil Fawlty, proprietor of a hotel where, in one classic episode, a group of Germans has come to stay. "Don't mention the war!" becomes Fawlty's ruling mantra as he tries to accommodate his guests. But of course he can't do anything but mention it, and at one point even finds himself goose-stepping around the dining room, turning a method of propaganda into a punch line.



"Every twelve years, give or take this moment"
By Dionisio Martínez
Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 7:26 AM PT

Every twelve years, give or take this moment, there are horses within
reach—wild, nameless horses like beasts before the flood, their hoof-

beats provoking the disheveled winds to mark an unremarkable spot
where the lesser roads became the plain; it's not a stampede or the swish

of a drummer's brushes or even imaginary breathing; it begins like
a story, which is to say: it begins by disappointing. Paper horses cut

out of comic books, their riders calling out their own names from what's
left of them on what's left of the pages. Each of the rooms in the house

is swept according to tradition, dust neatly piled in the center. It is some-
times possible from this vantage point to see the difference between

wholeness and a semblance of wholeness, to understand the duties of a
bystander when dark grass rises through sheets of ice. One horse carved

out of wood too green for burning—in a nod to innocence, when it was
possible not to pay attention to detail: Is a child drawn to the intricacies

of the saddle, or is there an innate compulsion to ride bareback? We carve
the past as we see it, and our vision is, at best, no more reliable than

TV reception avoiding sunspots. There's always memory, of course—that
rented room paid in full before we move back in: if the horse were

hollow, we'd be thinking of places we know precious little about; we
would climb inside and wait for orders; we are willing to be that small.



Elegy for the Saint of Letting Small Fish Go
By Eliot Khalil Wilson
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003, at 10:05 AM PT

I. You too might step into a puddle of fire,
or splash through a stream of glowing lava
where only moments before you were barefoot
in your kitchen after a late night of too much wine
and, nearly naked, frying bacon at the stove.

A burn like this is a different thing the doctor said
and I can believe it. I was a different thing.

I was a man with an unquenchable oil well fire on his feet
that would blaze up as the medicine ebbed.
And the skin curled over, brown-red,
too much like the meat I was cooking in the pan that I dropped
—an irony not lost on even the youngest of nurses
drinking and bacon don't mix
she kidded as I healed.

Yet had my wounds burned like Vulcan's forge
they'd be a distant fire in light of the child
behind the glass in the opposite bed.

II. Where were you saints when the fire first licked his hands?
Hadn't he in living prayed to you?

I want the saint of ice cream trucks
to turn off the carnival, climb down, and explain it all—
account for all the betrayers—
The saints of reachable branches and bank envelope lollipops,
the saints of his mother's cool arms, of new basketball shoes, and professional wrestling.
The saints of tree forts, pocket knives, and stadium food.
The saints of waffles and eyebrows and box turtles.
The saint of jam.
The saint of his own bed.
Where were you saints of wheelies and rodeo clowns and rockets?

III. I was at home when the sepsis took him
and they wheeled him to that all-light room
and when they covered his face.

Yet I had seen his grafts and debridements,
the twice daily baths and dressings,
and the shock at that last turn of gauze
—how the fire bit at his summer legs and arms—
black skin, blacker still, and red.

I was there to see the lost mother
who would live in fire for the child she had known.
There to see all who entered shake their heads
as if wondering as I wondered
how so small a thing can carry such pain
—pain that pushed through the morphine push—
—pain that conquered even those numbing Nordic gods—
Vicodin, Ativan, and Tylox.

It is not my place.
He was not my child,
and I could never speak to him,
but hold him out of the fire.
I would not have him burned again.

Give him back to rocking water,
to pendulum down through the fingers of the sun.
Let the ocean run his veins and heart—
full, then empty, then full again.

Or return him to the folding ground,
face up to the sky.
A boon for dreamlessness,
this petty thief of time.



Not a Poem About Driving at Night
By Erika Meitner
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2003, at 8:55 AM PT

Light production is associated with the survival of a species,
but the insect crawling across my dash seems uneventful—
looks so much like a roach that without hesitation, I kill it.

I don't realize what I've done until my scrap of parking ticket
begins to glow phosphorescent green, specks trailing like radar,
like bridge lights or necklace beads over the odometer.

When I die the Buddha will ask questions. Because of this error
I will be reincarnated smaller. Murderous girl, what is the speed of light?

What if I were winged and luminous? Could I shatter like a constellation
across the night sky? Could my body light a path through darkness?

All summer fireflies filled the field behind our house with morse code,
with patterns. Blinking to mate, you said. Male flashing spontaneously in flight.
Love is scientific—we glow, shudder, rest once they come to us.

I think of you steadily farther away, not thinking of me, thinking of me,
getting up from the couch and shutting the lights,
feeling your way along the familiar wall to bed.

Remember my head in the crevice of your armpit,
my ear suctioned to your chest? Something feeds the fire,
then it goes out. They blink, I blink;
red tips to their wings, and no song.



The Not-So-Wild Thing
What lessons is Maurice Sendak's Brundibar really teaching?
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

When Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are 40 years ago, both fans and detractors called him a Wild Thing. Until then, he'd been best known as the illustrator of Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear books, which launched Harper & Row's "I Can Read" line in 1957. But here was Sendak making mischief of one kind and another in a picture book all his own as the 1960s got under way. Gone was the tractable (and adorable) cub who had lured baby boomers like me into reading by themselves. Gone, too, was the attentive mother of those stories, so deft in dealing with her furry 5-year-old's fledgling efforts to define his identity. Instead Sendak had conjured up a hellion in a wolf suit (Max is a classic 4-year-old) whose fed-up mother sends him to bed without dinner. And Sendak had created a centerfold of cavorting monsters—a rumpus he dared to let loose on a younger read-aloud crowd.

Librarians issued warnings—"It is not a book to be left where a sensitive child might come upon it at twilight," one worried—and Sendak won the much-coveted Caldecott Award for the book in 1964. He couldn't have asked for a better ticket out of the tame confines of what he has derided as "Kiddiebookland." Joining Dr. Seuss (whose antic The Cat in the Hat debuted the same year as Little Bear), Sendak acquired the status of an "agent of revolution and liberation," as Tony Kushner puts it in the forthcoming Art of Maurice Sendak.

In fact, Sendak is something arguably more subversive than that: an agent of sublimation. From Little Bear (and before) on through his collaboration with Kushner on his new picture book, Brundibar, Sendak stands out in postwar children's literature as America's most imaginative spokesman for, as Freud would say, the reality principle. Mischief-maker though he is, Max lays down the law to the wild things; he parrots his bossy mother as he rebukes the beasts. Meanwhile, she's plainly cooling down offstage; on the last page, she has his supper set out for him in his bedroom. Sendak's is a spiky parable about the struggle for self-control, and it speaks to big readers and small listeners alike. It's a far cry from the chaos the Cat in the Hat wreaks while the kids watch aghast and their mother is off doing who knows what.

I don't mean to slight the gift for delving into kids' dream lives that has become Sendak's signature. Those yellow-eyed wild things, the surreal cityscapes of In the Night Kitchen (1970), the hooded goblins of Outside Over There (1981), the weird underworld of We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy (1993): His pictures, and also his texts, bring to life what Bruno Bettelheim called the "id pressures"—the nightmarish fears, grandiose desires, anger—that buffet children.

At the same time, Sendak's books have the power to remind adults that we can still be baffled by such primal urges ourselves—especially when we're dealing with our children, whose deep need to rely on us, and defy us, is enough to unnerve and sometimes enrage any parent. His monsters and animals—who often serve as stand-ins for those inner forces and outer influences that kids have to contend with—aren't really so alien; you can't help feeling there's a big human inside the shaggy forms. And though the trademark Sendak child has the impish look of an upstart, there's also a curiously ancient, Old World aura about almost all of them. An implicit message emerges again and again in his books: The road to maturity entails a long struggle to master unruly impulses and appetites and acquire a moral imagination. It's a message Sendak seems to have become increasingly convinced we grown-ups need to hear as much as kids do.

Or maybe even more than kids do. In Brundibar, which Sendak has pronounced his "crowning achievement, my last great collaboration," he has teamed up with his baby-boomer acolyte Kushner to burst out of the nursery and into history with his most overtly didactic drama yet. Brundibar, as its adult readers will know from the flap copy, is based on a Czech opera created in 1938 by a Jewish composer. An allegory of resistance to Hitler, it was staged 55 times by children in the Terezin concentration camp—with the approval of Nazi officials. They recognized the propaganda value of permitting, and even publicizing, a kiddie performance about two penniless siblings who go in search of milk for their sick mother and discover there's strength, and wealth and health, in numbers.

Kushner and Sendak in turn mine the opera and its grim history for these dark ironies—and for lessons for our own time, too. The setting is Old Town Prague, portrayed in bright drawings in Sendak's "fat" folk-art style. (The artist has described his eclectic, yet completely distinctive, repertory as consisting of "a fine style, a fat style, a fairly slim style, and an extremely stout style.") His fans old and young can pore over what amounts to a reprise of his classic scenes and figures, some given new twists (a growling Little Bear!). Sendak has also dreamed up several garish new ogres (with truly awful tongues and in the case of the Hitlerian organ grinder, Brundibar, a telltale mustache).

Meanwhile, Kushner, the gay socialist playwright who brought us Angels in America, imports some more up-to-date polemics into the text. Into the mouths of the little sibling narrators, he's slipped not just an indictment of Hitlerian tyranny but a criticism of capitalist selfishness, greed, and clamorous competition—an outcry against our consumerist, post-Columbine era. The children's pleas for help are drowned out by the "teeth-chattery bone rattley horrible song" of the hurdy-gurdy man Brundibar, who's showered with gold by grown-ups too busy "buying buying busy buying" to attend to the youthful woe.

But the siblings (with the help of animals) rally a chorus of townschildren. A haunting ballad about the brevity of blissful mother-baby bonding melts the mercenary hearts of the adults, who join the kids in a communal assault on Brundibar. Never one to pass up an internal rhyme, Kushner has him getting "thumped and bumped and squished and vanquished." Brother and sister bring milk home to save mommy, proclaiming as they go that you need only "be brave and bullies will behave!" The authors arm the townsfolk large and small with banners proclaiming "our friends make us strong" and "the wicked never win."

Sendak and Kushner have come up with a story that might almost pass muster with William Bennett—except, of course, that in their telling the moralizing isn't dispensed from above. The preachers and teachers here are children, summoning big wild things to heel. Certainly no one can accuse these authors of indulging in dreams of infantile transgression. But Sendak fans might be forgiven for wondering whether in striving to face the bleakest reality, he has succumbed for the first time ever to sentimentality.



The Storyteller's New Clothes
A new translation of Hans Christian Andersen.
By Adam Kirsch
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2003, at 8:17 AM PT

Beloved writers are like lenient jailers—they let their creations sneak off the page and roam at large through our imagination. Most writers are lucky to grant such freedom to one character, a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn; the greatest, like Dickens or Shakespeare, leave behind a whole family. But an even rarer achievement is to invent characters so inevitable, so primal that they seem never to have had an author at all. Surely no one person sitting at a desk created the Little Match Girl, Thumbelina, the Ugly Duckling?

Of course, all of these characters—along with such stories as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Snow Queen," and "The Red Shoes"—were either invented or given their definitive form by Hans Christian Andersen. But Andersen is almost never thought of as a literary artist, like his contemporaries Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Flaubert. He is usually grouped instead with the Brothers Grimm, who did not invent their folk tales but recorded them; or else he is reduced to a cliché, a kindly uncle surrounded by tots, as in the classic movie with Danny Kaye.

But a new edition of Andersen's most famous tales, translated by Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, means to change all that. The Franks declare their intention to treat Andersen as he is treated in his native Denmark: as a sophisticated modern writer, to be read and studied as seriously as his fellow Copenhagener, and one-time reviewer, Søren Kierkegaard. They translate Andersen's Danish into idiomatic contemporary English, capturing his deliberate colloquialism. More strikingly, they provide each of the 22 stories with footnotes, demonstrating their roots in Andersen's own life. In many ways the book itself strains against their scholarship—it is a luxurious, oversized volume, featuring 19^th-century illustrations, obviously meant to be read to children at bedtime. In this setting, the Franks' introduction—which by Page 4 is analyzing Andersen's masturbation habits—seems oddly adult.

Yet the tension between the adult and the childlike, the literary and the folk, drove Andersen's stories from the beginning. His ambition was not to bring joy to children but to become a famous artist. "I covet honor and glory in the same way as the miser covets gold," he admitted. While Andersen's novels, plays, and travel-writing gained him a certain reputation in Denmark, it was not until 1835, when he published Tales Told for Children, that he achieved international celebrity. His first stories were retellings of folk tales heard in childhood. Soon, however, he put the form of the fairy tale at the service of an intensely personal and modern kind of fiction.

Part of that modernity has to do with style. In the famous opening of "The Snow Queen," Andersen uses a broken narration that both imitates traditional storytelling and looks forward to stream of consciousness. "All right, let's get started! When we're at the end of the story, we'll know more than we do now, because there was an evil troll, one of the worst—it was the devil." There is an echo here of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just as "Auntie Toothache"—framed as the journal of a student tormented by toothaches—anticipates the frantic unreliable narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger. And a post-Freudian age has no trouble understanding Andersen's sexually fraught, surreal metaphors, as in "The Red Shoes":

She could think only about those shoes—even when the vicar put his hand on her head and talked about the holy baptism, about the covenant with God, and how she was about to become a grown-up Christian. The organ played solemnly, the children's choir sounded beautiful, and the old cantor sang, but Karen could think of nothing but her red shoes. By afternoon everyone had told the old lady that Karen's shoes were red. The old lady said that red shoes were altogether inappropriate and that Karen had done a horrible thing.

But Andersen's spirit belongs to his age, not ours. At its best, that spirit is Romantic, devoted to the sanctity of individual imagination. Andersen's Ugly Duckling who turns out to be a swan is, as the Franks note, a coded autobiography, drawing on his own transformation from gauche provincial to friend of kings. But it is still more a defense of the artistic imagination and a defiance of bourgeois conformity—a staple of Romantic literature. The Little Mermaid, redeemed by unselfish love, is a close cousin to Crime and Punishment's Sonya and La Traviata's Violetta. And "The Snow Queen," Andersen's attack on cold, calculating reason, echoes every 19^th-century writer from Wordsworth to Tolstoy.

And when Andersen becomes cloying and condescending, he is no less representative of his time. Like Dickens—whom he once visited for five unhappy weeks—Andersen is prone to moralizing and sentimentality. Dickens's Little Nell has become a byword for Victorian mawkishness, but the bathetic death-scene of Andersen's Little Match Girl is just as bad ("There was no more cold, no hunger, no fear—they were with God"); and few mothers today will want their children to absorb the lesson of "Father's Always Right." ("Yes, indeed, it always pays when the wife realizes that Father is wisest and what he does is always right.") But in his worst moments, as in his best, Andersen is much more complex and challenging than the Disney version we know today. Even when he was writing for children, he was talking to grown-ups.



L.A. Without a Map
Has the American literary imagination gotten Los Angeles wrong?
By Adam Kirsch
Posted Monday, June 30, 2003, at 12:00 PM PT

Last year, the Library of America published the excellent Writing Los Angeles, a massive anthology of a century of writing about the city. But if you are a native of Los Angeles, paging through all the travel notes and memoirs and short stories is a strange sensation. Where you expect to find the city itself, there is only a carnival of metaphors.

Again and again, writers with the briefest experience of Los Angeles use it as a blank screen on which to project their own fantasies, prophecies, and fears. For Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust, it was famously a "dream dump," a "Sargasso of the imagination" in which civilization is reduced to "plaster, canvas, lath and paint." For Truman Capote, it was a nightmare city where "a crack in the wall, which might somewhere else have charm, only strikes an ugly note prophesying doom." And those are some of the milder opinions. H.L. Mencken thought "there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth." Aldous Huxley wrote that "the truest patriots, it may be, are those who pray for a national calamity" to wipe the smile off the face of "Joy City."

What did Los Angeles do to deserve all this? Writing Los Angeles makes the answer clear: Although it is the second-largest city in America, in the literary imagination it is still a colony. Instead of speaking for itself, the city is spoken about. Our classic descriptions of Los Angeles were written by visitors who spent only a few weeks or months in the city; or by imported slaves of Hollywood, who act out their rebellion against the city at large; or even by natives writing mainly for an audience somewhere else. What is missing, with a few notable exceptions, is a Los Angeles literature unconcerned with the outside world, intent on explaining the city to itself—as Dickens did with London, or Balzac with Paris. Instead, visitors from the East or from Europe write about it just as English visitors used to write about Ireland or India, or for that matter the United States itself. Only such breezy condescension could explain some of the nonsense in the volume—for instance, Umberto Eco's remark that "for a Californian, leaving his car means leaving his own humanity," which sounds like the kind of thing an early anthropologist might have said about a Polynesian tribe.

What makes this condescension so irritating is that, in every arena except the literary, Los Angeles is a powerhouse of American and even world culture. West's "dream dump" is really a dream depot, supplying every city from Tokyo to London with its indelible images. In fact, that may be the very reason literary visitors since Huxley have taken such joy in imagining the city's destruction: Hollywood is the capital of post-literate culture, the place where writers were first transformed from unacknowledged legislators to "content providers." No wonder that, as Mike Davis wrote in The Ecology of Fear, "at least 138 novels and films since 1909" have dealt with the destruction of the city by fire, flood, earthquake, nuclear holocaust, or alien invasion. Apocalypse is the writer's best revenge.

Or so it might appear in Writing Los Angeles. But now a new book offers a more serious and hopeful view. The Misread City, edited by journalist Scott Timberg and poet and National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, attempts to rebut the Library of America volume with its very title. A collection of essays and articles by and about L.A. writers, it shows that the city is more than ready to leave its colonial days behind.

In fact, Gioia's essay "On Being a California Poet" expresses the very paradox that has driven post-colonial poets, from Ireland to the West Indies: "The classics of English—Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats and Tennyson—are my classics. ... And yet this rich literary heritage often stands at one remove from the experiential reality of the West. ... There's no use listening for a nightingale in the scrub oaks and chaparral." It is almost exactly the same sentiment as in Derek Walcott's poem about his Caribbean youth, "Another Time":

from childhood he'd considered palms
ignobler than imagined elms,
the breadfruit's splayed
leaf coarser than the oak's ...

Yet as Walcott's own achievement shows, the collision between an inherited language and a new world should be a fruitful one, provoking entirely new ways of writing. To write about Los Angeles as it feels to those who live there is just the kind of challenge that led to Walcott's poetry about Saint Lucia, or Saul Bellow's novels about Chicago.

The Misread City suggests what needs to be done to create the literary culture in which L.A. writing can flourish. In a city where architecture is replaceable and films ephemeral, there needs to be a solid understanding of the literary past. David Fine's "Surviving Apocalypse" and Paul Skenazy's "A World Gone Wrong: L.A. Detectives" contribute to this understanding by surveying two of the hardiest tropes in Los Angeles writing, while essays on John Rechy and Walter Mosley size up the strengths—and the limitations—of major local figures.

The great hole at the heart of Los Angeles literature has always been the lack of venues where L.A. writing can be published and discussed. As Timberg writes, "Los Angeles keeps to itself, favors the private. ... What L.A. has always needed is institutions that can knit the private factions together and instill in people a sense of living in a community." Several pieces in the book talk about how radio shows and lecture series provide such a community; and the Los Angeles Times Book Review is now widely recognized as perhaps the best newspaper book section in the country. (Full disclosure: My father writes a column for it.) An immense amount of good could be done by introducing a few literary quarterlies in the model of the Southern Review and Sewanee Review, which in the 1930s made the South the home of the most intelligent literary criticism in the English-speaking world. In fact, The Misread City often reads like such a magazine, and with the right patron could become one.

Most important, however, Los Angeles literature should resolutely ignore the issue of authenticity. The poet Laurence Goldstein takes note of the "sense of cultural inferiority passed from one literary person to another in the Southland like some swamp fever on the lowest slopes of Parnassus." No wonder, since visitor after visitor has told the world that L.A. is a simulacrum, a fiction—"a perfect imitation," in Eco's words. But Christopher Isherwood, who lived in the city for half of his life, was closer to the truth when he wrote that "It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is 'unreal.' " When Los Angeles achieves the literature it is capable of, no one will dare to say it again.



Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright
Should Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass be banned?
By Tim Wu
Posted Friday, June 27, 2003, at 9:42 AM PT

If you're a serious Harry Potter fan, you finished The Order of the Phoenix over the weekend and are already impatient for the sixth book. While you wait (and wait) for it, how about trying some of the international versions of Potter? In China last year, it was easy to buy the unusual Potter sequel Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, in which Harry encountered sweet and sour rain, became a hairy troll, and joined Gandalf to re-enact scenes from The Hobbit. The book, while credited to J.K. Rowling, wasn't authorized or written by her, but that didn't prevent it from selling like butterbeer.

Meanwhile, in Russia, you can still meet Harry's Slavic twin: "Tanya Grotter," star of Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass. Tanya rides a double bass, sports a mole instead of a bolt of lightning, and attends the Tibidokhs School of Magic. In an interview with journalist Steve Gutterman, author Dmitry Yemets called her "a sort of Russian answer to Harry Potter," and described his books as "cultural competition" for the original. Grotter is a hit: Yemets has already sold more than 1 million copies. And next door in Belarus you'll find Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher. In something of a departure, Harry's Belarussian clone wields a grenade launcher and re-fights the White Russian wars.

You're unlikely to be able to get your hands on any of these works, since J.K. Rowling and her publisher have launched an aggressive worldwide legal campaign against the unauthorized Potter takeoffs. It began last year when Rowling and Time-Warner threatened the publishers of Chinese Potter, who agreed to stop publication. On April 4 of this year, Rowling persuaded a Dutch court to block the import of Tanya Grotter to Holland. Harry Potter in Calcutta, in which Harry meets up with various characters from Bengali literature, was recently pulled by its Indian publisher under threat. Potter takeoffs have become international contraband.

Rowling's ability to stop the Potter pretenders is largely a function of the new regime of international copyright. Until recently, countries varied considerably in how they protected literary works, especially works from abroad. The United States, for instance, has a long history of providing less protection than the Europeans. Benjamin Franklin was a kind of pirate: He did good business as a printer of unlicensed English writing. In the 19^th century, the United States generally refused to recognize foreign copyrights, allowing American readers to get the latest Dickens and Doyle cheaply. And the borrowing of characters itself has a longer tradition. For example, the princess we know as Cinderella originally hails from China, where she goes by the name Yeh-Shen and relies for help on a magic fish who gives her golden slippers.

Today, nations still maintain and enforce their own copyright laws, but for members of the World Trade Organization (that is, nearly everyone that matters), those statutes must meet extensive minimum standards. Under the Trade Related International Property treaty, original authors "enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works." In other words, there is little scope for secondary authors to write local adaptations of the Potter-clone variety, since their country must abide by the international norms guaranteeing Rowling's monopoly everywhere. The result: Rowling can use the courts in WTO-compliant countries to club her Potter rivals.

You might think it a good thing that Rowling can stop the Potter cloning industry, whether it is in Brighton, Bangalore, or Bratislava. Who wants to see Harry turned into a hairy troll or forced to gallivant with foreign literary figures? But on closer examination the argument for letting Potter crush his international competition is quite weak.

The case for preventing literal copying—in which a foreign publisher simply reprints a work without permission—is strong. But Potter follow-ons are different from the American Dickens piracy of the 19^th century and DVD piracy of today. Literal copies are what come out when you use a photocopier. Potter's takeoffs are different: They either borrow characters and put them in a new, foreign context (Potter in Calcutta) or just use the themes and ideas of Potter (as in Tanya Grotter's case) as inspiration for a different kind of story. They aren't a direct replacement for a Potter book, the way a literal copy is, but rather a supplement or an adaptation.

One of the main justifications for a unified and strong global copyright system is that it is supposed to facilitate international trade. That's why it's a part of the WTO system. But as trade economists will tell you, trade often works when countries imitate and improve the inventions of others. America invents the hi-fi, Sony turns it into the Walkman, and then Chinese companies make still cheaper imitations.

This is basically what's going on in the world of Harry Potter. The English original is clearly the best. The imitators aren't as good but are cheaper and come out much more frequently (there are already three Tanya Grotter books). There is, in short, a secondary Potter market. Isn't this the international trading system at its best?

Moreover, the writers of secondary Potters are probably better at creating versions of Potter suited to local conditions. According to Reuters, at least some Russian children prefer Tanya Grotter to Harry, some on account of her Russian name. Local writers do things to Harry that Rowling can't, like introducing him to local literary figures and putting him in local wars. It may be good and it may be bad, but it's a market failure to prevent it.

Potter's publishers, in defense of strong global copyright, would say that works like Tanya Grotter are theft, and such theft destroys the incentive to write in the first place. But the incentives argument is surprisingly unpersuasive in the international setting. To say Rowling will stop writing for fear of international parody is a difficult case to make. Only the most famous and lucrative works are parodied overseas. If an international adaptation is a sign you've made it rich, how can it be a serious financial deterrent for new writers?

The truer complaint is that Potter's overseas competitors may mean slightly less profit for Rowling and her publishers. It is also true that Burger King means slightly less profit for McDonald's. You could say that Burger King and Wendy's stole the idea of a fun, plastic burger joint from McDonald's and are unfairly profiting from their evil deed. But when it comes to burger joints, we accept that the consequence of a competitive market is less profit for the first mover (McDonald's). Copyright should be no different. So long as it provides Rowling sufficient incentive to write, it should strive to maintain as much competition and facilitate as much international trade as possible.

It is also true that these rip-off works make authors angry and may tarnish the reputation of the character. But what makes authors angry is precisely what they are least likely to write, and therefore often what copyright needs to permit. For example, in 1989 the rap group 2 Live Crew recorded an obscene version of Roy Orbison's song "Pretty Woman." Orbison's "Pretty Woman" became, successively, "big hairy woman," "bald woman," and eventually, "two-timin' woman." There was little question that it made Orbison's estate angry, tarred the reputation of the original, and was a commercial competitor that threatened Orbison's profits. But the U.S. Supreme Court found it a parody: a non-infringing fair use. The faux Potter books are not quite parodies, but they're similar. Just as refusing 2 Live Crew permission to parody would have destroyed the market for parodies (since authors rarely parody their own works), so Rowling's campaign destroys the market for international follow-ons, since Rowling could never write a Potter book that could capture the Russian spirit the way Grotter does. Rowling is using the cudgel of international copyright not to destroy something she could have created, but to destroy something she could never create.

In the end, few people are likely to mistake Tanya Grotter for Harry Potter; it is akin to mistaking Burger King for McDonald's. The international copyright system is justified in preventing the most basic forms of piracy. But it doesn't need to stop works like Tanya Grotter. The original Harry Potter is good enough to compete with its foreign cousins. So let a hundred Harrys bloom and let a hundred schools of magic contend.



Cents and Sensibility
The surprising truth about sales of classic novels.
By Adelle Waldman
Posted Wednesday, April 2, 2003, at 2:03 PM PT

This January, Penguin Group USA launched a half-million dollar marketing campaign to promote books that will probably never show up on a best-seller list. And Penguin doesn't even own exclusive rights to these particular titles. The books in question are classic novels—those pastel-colored books with scholarly introductions and period paintings on their covers. As it turns out, Aristotle and Charles Dickens and James Joyce don't just add a dash of class to a publishing house's list. They're serious money-makers.

Take Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It sold 110,000 copies last year, according to Nielsen BookScan, which excludes academic sales from its calculations—which means these numbers aren't inflated by students who have no choice but to buy Austen. Compare it to figures for, say, The Runaway Jury by John Grisham, which was the No. 1 best seller in 1996: Last year, Grisham's novel sold 73,337 copies—almost 40,000 fewer than Pride and Prejudice.

Measured against a best seller in its first flush, sales of any classic book are piddling, of course (unless the classic has just been made into a blockbuster movie, in which case all bets are off). But the overall sales picture resembles the proverbial tortoise-and-hare scenario: As the race goes on, the classics win out. This may seem intuitive; but what's surprising is that often the race doesn't have to go on long at all.

Until recently, this had been impossible to know—or at least quantify. Because classics, particularly those that are more than 100 years old, are usually in the public domain, no single publishing house monitors sales of Wilkie Collins' 19^th-century thrillers, the way Simon & Schuster does for Jackie Collins' romances. But in 2001, Nielsen BookScan, a sister company of the TV-ratings firm, began electronically tracking book sales at cash registers (following in the footsteps of SoundScan, which had done same thing for music). Before then, sales data was manually reported by bookstores. But stores tallied up figures for only a short list of books expected to be big sellers; it was considered too taxing to compile and send off the numbers for every title sold.

A book's success is usually measured by its place on the best-seller list. But the best-seller list measures sales transacted over a highly limited period of time, usually a week, sometimes a year. What the Nielson BookScan shows is that short spurts of high sales volumes don't provide an accurate picture of the overall equation: Take Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace—which runs some 1,400 pages and is not a book you associate with light bedtime reading. Last year, it sold 33,000 copies, according to BookScan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin, another Russia-set novel, by spy-genre grandee Tom Clancy, and 1988's No. 1 best-selling book, just barely scraped ahead of War and Peace, with 35,000 copies sold. Its sales have been dropping, and it probably won't hit those figures next year, or ever again. In contrast, War and Peace will, by all evidence, continue at its steady pace—never rivaling the astronomical heights of the Clancy novel when it was first released, but never dipping low enough to go out of print, either.

It's not clear whether these new figures will have an effect on the business. In the music world, the introduction of comprehensive sales figures led to an increased promotion of Christian rock—until then, mainstream labels simply hadn't realized just how popular the genre was. The book industry has been slower to respond to the fount of data now available, in part because classics' popularity isn't self-evident. Those 110,000 copies of Pride and Prejudice, for example? To get that number, you have to look up BookScan's sales numbers on each edition of the book—the Penguin Classic, the Signet, the Bantam, the generic Barnes & Noble, etc.—and add them together. And that's no small task: There are more than 130 editions of Pride and Prejudice listed on Amazon.com.

Interestingly, even recent books that are considered literary don't compare to tried-and-true classics. At Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility sold 18 copies last year, while Snow Falling on Cedars, a literary novel that spent 87 weeks on the Publishers' Weekly best-seller list in 1995, sold only seven. So it's not just because bookstore owners want to edify us that they're as likely to stock Vanity Fair as Bonfire of the Vanities. "A best seller from 10 years ago, nobody wants to read—unless it's by someone like [Gabriel García] Márquez," said Donald Davis, a book-buyer for East Village Books in New York.

And that's why Penguin has seen fit to spend $500,000 promoting Sense and Sensibility, along with its 1,300 other Penguin Classics titles. It wants to corner the market. The paperback edition of The Nanny Diaries may be the rage right now, but authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus should look over their shoulders; another story about tending the children of the rich, a book by the name of Jane Eyre, is chugging along, slow and steady.



Drop the Gun
The Two Towers' wishful technophobia.
By James Surowiecki
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003, at 10:50 AM PT

Without digital technology, there's no way a visually convincing film version of The Lord of the Rings—like the one we now have—could ever have been made. The irony is that J.R.R. Tolkien was a pure Luddite, a man deeply skeptical of modernity, horrified by "mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic," and nostalgic for the English countryside before it had been scarred by the railroad and the car. The sight of the digitized figure of Gollum in The Two Towers would undoubtedly have appalled him.

Tolkien's hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes, while the noble men are horse people and farmers. The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a "mind of metal and wheels," while Tolkien writes of the orcs—who are born fully-grown from a monster-making assembly line of Saruman's design—that "wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them."

Most of the time, Tolkien's technophobia is harmless enough, manifesting itself as a kind of quaintly radical environmentalism, as in the scene in The Two Towers where the giant Ents (treelike creatures who care for the forests) destroy Saruman's "factory." But elsewhere its effects are more dubious, particularly when it comes to Tolkien's depiction of war. The climax of The Two Towers is the battle of Helm's Deep, where a small force of men and elves are besieged by an army of orcs who outnumber them 10 to 1. And what the film's version of that battle makes clear is that Tolkien's reflexive distrust of technology led him to a profound misrepresentation—and misunderstanding—of the roots of Western military success.

Now, to accept this argument you'll have to accept that, in some vague sense, the men and hobbits of Middle Earth are stand-ins for the English (and, more generally, Westerners), while the orcs represent the enemies of freedom and light. This has become a hot debate topic of late, with some critics decrying what they see as Tolkien's racism and pro-war propaganda and others insisting that the orcs are just orcs. Without stepping too deeply into this, and recognizing that Tolkien disclaimed any allegorical purpose for his books, it seems to me impossible to watch The Two Towers and not be reminded of those battles in British history—Crécy, Agincourt, Inkerman, Rorke's Drift, or for that matter the Battle of Britain—where small contingents of brave Englishmen successfully repelled wave after wave of enemy troops.

There is, though, a profound difference between Helm's Deep and all those real-life battles. At Helm's Deep the men and elves get by purely on quickness of wit and strength of arm, while the orcs deploy all manner of newfangled technology—explosives, catapults, siege ladders. The victory of men is a victory of the heart over the machine. In the real world, though, technological superiority—and in particular the ability to turn it to pragmatic military ends—has historically been the engine of British, and Western, military dominance. The longbow at Crécy and Agincourt, the Enfield rifle and massed artillery at Inkerman, the Martini-Henry rifle at Rorke's Drift, and radar during the Battle of Britain ensured victory for outnumbered armies. And this paradigm remains in place today, as evidenced by the Gulf War and the battle of Mogadishu. Of course, Western armies have also benefited from excellent training and discipline. But the machine played a central role in every real Helm's Deep in Western history.

On a deeper level, the machine has also been the engine of the West's economic vitality. And in that sense, it's Tolkien's Luddism that defines The Lord of the Rings as not allegorical but escapist, since it's an attempt to imagine England without the very things that made England possible. It may be comforting to think that bravery and a good heart are enough to repel the Dark Lord. But having guns that fire 4,000 rounds a minute makes a difference, too.



Alien Autopsy
What makes Ridley Scott's horror film so unnerving?
By Michael Agger
Posted Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003, at 4:14 PM PT

In Pauline Kael's essay "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers," which she published in 1980 after a brief, unhappy stint as a producer in Hollywood, she lamented that moviegoers had become "jaded" and wanted "images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level." She singled out Ridley Scott's new picture Alien as an example, writing that the audience "thought it was terrific, because at least they'd felt something: they'd been brutalized." Most of us don't go to the movies to be brutalized, but Kael's comment gets at the mysterious appeal of horror films: Why do we subject ourselves to them? Alien was the fourth-highest-grossing picture of 1979. Its release opened a perennial fault line in the moviegoing public: those who sought out its lacerating horrors and those who preferred The Black Stallion.

Now, Alien has returned to theaters with a director's cut, once again daring audiences to come and see it. The original trailer offered one of the great taunts in movie history—"In space no one can hear you scream"—and few earthbound horror fans could resist the provocation. But the open secret about Alien, then and now, is that if you discard its notorious scene of indigestion, the movie contains few bloody appendages. It will, however, scare you to pieces.

The late-'70s pitch meeting is all too easy to imagine: "Star Wars meets Jaws!" Yet Alien does something neither of those movies does: For the first 45 minutes, nothing happens, just like some European art-house films. It's all buildup, all prologue. Scott shows the crew waking up from hypersleep and exchanging pithy banter. He feeds you details about how a commercial towing starship operates. Although Scott admits to being influenced by the technophilia of Stanley Kubrick, this is not the antiseptic future of 2001: Everyone is smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee—it's just another day at the office. Scott is laying down a foundation of reality; he's showing us that the shadows are empty, for now. The scariest movie in history is actually a bit shy. The subtle, romantic score by Jerry Goldsmith is what keeps the tension at a simmer.

The cast is your standard motley crew: the black guy (Yaphet Kotto), the black guy's white sidekick (Harry Dean Stanton), the science stiff (Ian Holm), the European (John Hurt), the babe (Sigourney Weaver), the other babe (Veronica Cartwright), and the handsome captain (Tom Skerritt). But Scott sets up a great decoy. Audiences were expecting Skerritt to survive the voyage since he was the star with top billing, but it's Weaver, young and smooth-faced, who faces down the alien and lives to make the sequels. Critics have called Weaver's character, Ripley, an influential and trailblazing female action hero, but outside of perhaps Linda Hamilton in the Terminator series, the trail seems to have faded. My guess is that Scott had simpler motives: He wanted to fool the audience and then exploit the sexual frisson of the movie's final scene, when he has Weaver dodging the alien in her underwear.

The dissenting view on Alien has always been that it's just a haunted-house movie in outer space, and Scott couldn't resist a few manipulative "boo" moments. (A ginger cat jumps out of nowhere; the alien's hand reaches from the wall to grab Ripley.) But the staying power of Alien lies in the way it dredges up primal fears. Scott's long shots emphasize the vastness of space, the sense of being marooned in a hostile environment. The spaceship interiors were designed for maximum claustrophobia. And the alien itself, created by the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, is not completely foreign. It's a corruption of nature—an intelligent insect—both comprehensible and terrifyingly unknown. Then there's the way many scenes play like a sophomore biology-lab experiment gone awry: Ian Holm poking at the glistening organs of the alien body or Skerritt cutting one of its fingerlike appendages with a laser saw, releasing a spring of acid blood. And the queasiness is intensified by the old-fashioned, analog look of the effects: The alien that leaps onto John Hurt's space helmet, for example, is a mass of sheep's intestines, steam-cleaned to be white.

The scene in which the alien chews its way out of Hurt's stomach remains the pièce de résistance. When the movie was first released, there was speculation that Scott had cut in some subliminal images of graphic sex to heighten the shock effect. It's one of the handful of movie moments that once seen can never be unseen, as much as you'd like to erase it from memory. We may not be brutalized by it in the same way that audiences were in 1979, but it's not a tantalizing image or a grotesque glimpse into some dark side of human nature. It's a pure pop moment: leading nowhere and full of sensation. It's something for celebrities to talk about on VH1. You saw it, and you felt something.

Thankfully, Scott has resisted the urge to refurbish the movie with a digital airbrush. (I'm still smarting from what happened to poor E.T.) The soundtrack has been enhanced, and the new scenes are ones Alien fans have already seen on DVD and laserdisc, the most famous being the "cocoon" sequence where Weaver discovers Skerritt trapped by the alien but still partially alive. This director's cut, like a lot of these efforts, acts as a promotional campaign for a soon-to-be-released DVD. So what? The movie is on the big screen again. After all these years, Alien is still our bad dream about the future.



Swan Song
What might School of Rock tell us about the state of rock 'n' roll?
By Alex Abramovich
Posted Thursday, Oct. 16, 2003, at 1:51 PM PT

How much can rock 'n' roll movies tell us about the state of rock itself? Take the 1979 Ramones' classic, Rock 'n' Roll High School, and compare it to the current Jack Black juggernaut, School of Rock. A quarter-century ago the Ramones told us the Man "tried to stop their music, but the kids got wrecked and rocked the school!" Today, Black goes out of his way to explain that rock isn't about "scoring chicks" or "getting wasted," and the theme song culminates in a cry of "get me to school on time!" Well, as Joey Ramone quipped 25 years ago, "things sure have changed since we got kicked out of high school."

Traditionally, confluences of rock and film stock tended to fall into one of two categories: In twentysomething films like High Fidelity, the heroes held rock to be so real, and so very vital, that life itself seemed pale in comparison. Such films told us, time and again, that aesthetic judgments, rather than actions, defined our characters. In teen epics like Footloose, rock 'n' roll was elevated to the status of an emerging and embattled value system. The kids in these films felt about music the way that early Christians felt about Christ. Town elders stood in for Roman centurions, and the music served double-duty as cri de coeur and secret language. Bob Dylan summed both forms up nearly 40 years ago: "The word is not international phenomenon," he said. "The word is parental nightmare."

But School of Rock was written with a new breed of adults in mind—and their driving fear isn't that the youth of tomorrow will fall prey to what Frank Sinatra once described as "the martial marching music of every side-burned delinquent." It's that the kids might never get their rocks off in the first place. When Black first meets his school kids, who are young enough to be Dylan's grandkids, Led Zeppelin takes a backseat to Latin, and rock 'n' roll is as sexy and redemptive, in their eyes, as a square dance at a retirement home. Which might explain why Stephen Holden's New York Times review mentioned in passing that hip-hop has usurped rock's place in the public imagination; if he's right, it makes sense that the substitute teacher played by Jack Black should have to introduce his charges to the pleasures of rocking out rather than the other way around. It also makes sense that, like the subtext in your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, School of Rock's music serves mainly to keep the grown-ups engaged.

In this, as in other things, the film succeeds brilliantly. Director Richard Linklater dates his artistic awakening to a 1984 Dead Kennedys show. His first, DIY film, Slacker, did as much as any other to define the contemporary indie aesthetic. And, for all its references to Zeppelin, Sabbath, and AC/DC, his latest has impeccable indie credentials: The cast was coached by Jim O'Rourke, the avant-rocker who produced Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and now plays with Sonic Youth. The title track was co-written with New York garage-rockers the Mooney Suzuki. Craig Wedren, who used to sing with the Washington, D.C., art-punk band Shudder To Think, ghostwrote the faux-Creed anthem you hear in the film's Battle of the Bands sequence. And if Jack Black's character leans heavily toward metal and riff-rock, the film itself makes less-obvious choices—songs by bands like the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers keep seeping through cracks in the dialogue.

Given such a pedigree, it's odd that School of Rock should invert High Fidelity's highbrow aesthetic entirely and—aside from a quick, cursory dis of Christina Aguilera, Puff Daddy, and MTV—strive to avoid value judgments altogether. Still that's what Linklater's team seems to be doing through much of the film. Consider the sequences in which Black's kids rock out to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and the Ramones' "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)." Setting Zeppelin's Wagnerian pretensions against a punk song about Ronald Reagan's trip to a certain German cemetery might, in fact, be the point, but the Ramones themselves would have objected—for them, Jimmy Page's taste wasn't much of an improvement over Reagan's. ("We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard," Joey Ramone explained once. "Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin … overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be.") Here, and elsewhere, School of Rock's implication isn't so much that such musical turf battles have sorted themselves out with time—it's that they've simply ceased to matter.

This isn't to say that I was unhappy to hear songs by the Ramones and the Modern Lovers in a movie that held the No. 1 box-office spot, or that I think bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC are worthless in comparison, but that the tensions between such bands help keep rock off life support in the first place. The music's preservation depends, in part, on their immanence. Like Slate's David Edelstein, I was charmed by School of Rock, but I left the theater thinking not of the rock films I grew up with but of more recent efforts to place broad swaths of American music in a museum: Ken Burns' Jazz or Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues also put up brave facades. And they, too, left me feeling that the sight of our elders being afraid for our music, rather than of it, was a sure sign of something amiss.

If School of Rock gives us any indication of what rock might look like in another 50 years—and of what it's beginning to look like today—it's this: Wholly absorbed into the nation's bloodstream, rock continues to be played and appreciated by certain segments of the population, works its way into the American curriculum, and loses its sense of engagement with the culture at large. This makes Linklater's film something like the cinematic equivalent of an Irish wake or a New Orleans funeral—a good enough time is had by all that the corpse itself is soon forgotten.



Assessment: Pixar
The geniuses behind Finding Nemo are the next Disney. Uh-oh.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 11:23 AM PT

Even if Pixar survives for 100 years and produces a library of films to rival Walt Disney's, the makers of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo will never experience another weekend like the last one. Sure, they'll probably someday break the $70 million opening-weekend record that Nemo set for an animated film—in fact, next year's The Incredibles will more than likely do just that—but you can only cement yourself as a cultural phenomenon once.

Finding Nemo is Pixar's 500^th home run, its 3,000^th hit, its third consecutive championship: a triumph that's more important for its relationship to an entire body of work than for its solitary pleasures. It's also a moment that has led critics to evaluate and admire that body of work. After five consecutive hits—Pixar's other two movies are the inspired Toy Story 2 and the middling A Bug's Life—the animation studio must now be considered "the most reliable creative force in Hollywood," wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. (Move to the back of the line, Spielberg.) "Perhaps not since Preston Sturges made seven classic comedies in a row between 1940 and 1944 has one name been such a consistent indicator of audience and critical pleasure." The "next Disney" comparisons that have long been lavished upon Pixar and its creative head, John Lasseter, have become more emphatic: Now Pixar and Lasseter are compared not just to Disney, but to Disney during its "golden age some 60 years ago," as the Los Angeles Daily News put it.

But in becoming the next Disney, can Pixar avoid becoming the next Disney? Being the Mouse, after all, involves more than simply delivering high-quality, family-friendly entertainment that lasts for the ages. There's a flip side to success on that scale: A certain minority will loathe you for your tyrannical omnipresence and your ravenous cultural imperialism. (Has anyone seen those Nemo Happy Meals?) "Disney is so good at being good that it manifests evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. Imagine promoting a universe in which raw Nature doesn't fit because it doesn't measure up," Carl Hiaasen wrote in Team Rodent: How Disneyland Devours the World. Critics like Hiaasen view Disney as the creators of a real-world Matrix, an inauthentic world that's dangerous because it's more seductive and appealing than the real one. "Disney has colonized our pleasures so thoroughly, we no longer recognize them as produced, manipulated, and constructed by Disney," Elizabeth Bell, a Florida communications professor, once told the Baltimore Sun.

So far, even though Disney distributes and markets Pixar's films, the New Disney has avoided being tarred as an agent of the Evil that is the Old Disney. Only the tiniest hint of a Pixar backlash has surfaced: The Los Angeles Times' Turan knocked the studio's "weakness for whiny characters," the New Yorker's Anthony Lane feared "oversophistication" in bits "designed to flit over the head of younger kids and keep their parents happy, regardless of whether it has any logical place in the movie," and a handful of critics detected a whiff of formula in Finding Nemo. But whatever formula put together Nemo and the rest of the Pixar movies, it's a welcome alternative to the one that assembled Herbie Goes Bananas. And if Pixar does employ a blueprint, it's one that's proven difficult to duplicate. If it were easy to package an entertaining blend of celebrity voices, pop-culture references, and an evil kid who threatens our lovable characters, all set to a Randy Newman song, Disney wouldn't be putting out garbage like Treasure Planet.

Disney's inability to replicate the Pixar magic, and its lackluster critical and box-office record since the overrated The Lion King, is why Disney chairman Michael Eisner predicted this week that the Pixar-Disney partnership will continue, despite rumors to the contrary. The two companies need each other. Disney needs Pixar's content: Of the great animated movies put out since The Lion King, not one has been an in-house Disney production. (The non-Pixar movies on the list would be DreamWorks' Shrek and Chicken Run, and Warner Bros.' The Iron Giant—and the director of that one, Brad Bird, now works for Pixar.)

And Pixar, despite what its fans might want to believe, needs Disney. For one thing, Disney owns the rights to derivative works made from the first seven Pixar movies (including the forthcoming The Incredibles and Cars). By remaining in a partnership with Disney, Pixar can control the legacy that it has created—Pixar creatives must shudder at the thought of hack straight-to-video Toy Story sequels, which Eisner has basically threatened to create if Pixar walks. More important, however, Pixar needs Disney because that's how it outsources its Evil: The partnership enables Pixar to reap the rewards of its great movies, while Disney gets blamed for the Stepford theme parks filled with Woodys and Buzzes, the merchandising tie-ins at McDonald's and elsewhere, and the rapacious defenses of their shared intellectual property. Sticking with Disney is the best way for Pixar to ensure that the Lamp won't become as scorned as the Mouse.



Cinema of the 'Stans
Making movies after the death of the U.S.S.R.
By Ed Finn
Posted Monday, May 26, 2003, at 6:01 AM PT

The screenings at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater this month show a world so alien from our own it might as well be Mars. "Films From Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema" highlights cinematic work from the 1940s to the present. The films in the series run the gamut from pre-glasnost Soviet-approved productions to modern existential shorts with shoestring budgets and first-time actors. Set in the bleak landscapes of five countries in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—they display a mind-boggling range of styles and languages (not to mention inadequate subtitling). But nearly all the films, even the most recent ones, share a common thread: a striking mistrust of capitalism.

Take, for example, Jamshed Usmonov's first feature, The Flight of the Bee (1998), about a poor village schoolteacher struggling to make ends meet in the new Tajikistan. Usmonov's trenchant critique of the country's fitful transition to capitalism is most apparent in a scene at a livestock market in which the teacher goes to sell two recalcitrant sheep, his last valuable possessions. The poor man is surrounded by a crowd of shouting merchants, one of whom grabs the teacher's hand and wrenches his arm in frenzied bargaining until the hapless scholar is bullied into accepting an unfair bargain. The happy resolution to Usmonov's modern fable is not the triumph of the schoolteacher's hard work or business acumen but a stroke of luck, and Usmonov leaves us with the feeling that in the tumultuous new Tajikistan, luck is all you can count on.

The directors' suspicion of capitalism may seem strange, especially in the work of the youngest among them. Wouldn't you expect these artists to be embracing their newfound creative freedom? Perhaps, but it's important to understand just what Central Asia is going through as it blunders toward democracy. After 70 years of Soviet rule and 10 years on their own, the countries in the region continue to struggle with moribund industries, corrupt officials (often the same ones who used to run the local Soviet Party branches), and tensions stemming from the Russian imperial policy of splitting ethnic groups among artificially drawn Soviet states. (In many cases, the leaders of newly independent countries were unable to speak their own ethnic languages.) When the empire collapsed in 1991, generations of Central Asians used to taking orders from Moscow were ill-prepared to turn rusting factories into competitive businesses. Chaos ensued as millions of people experienced the freedoms and pitfalls of capitalism for the first time. It turns out that for many of the directors, a lack of money seems a bigger problem than a lack of artistic freedom ever was. Censorship was something they could work around, but poverty is stifling.

At a symposium during the first weekend of the festival, several of the directors spoke about their experiences with the business side of directing under post-Soviet regimes. Each speaker, after making a point of thanking the program's sponsors, unveiled their deep unhappiness with the new difficulties of financing their films. As Uzbek director Ali Khamraev lamented, "The investors want to give you the money in the morning, sleep with the actresses in the afternoon, and get a 100 percent profit by the evening." One after another, the directors noted that in the Soviet era, they could produce a film every year or two, whereas now five or 10 years might pass between projects. And in many of these countries, there is no market for art house productions, which means that the filmmakers are recognized in Paris and New York before they are (if they ever are) recognized at home.

This is not to say that Central Asian cinematographers are pining for communism or for a return to the censorship of that era. (The directors are, after all, in New York promoting their work.) In spite of the painful transition to democracy—and in some cases, perhaps even because of it—they have produced some breathtaking works of cinema. Ardak Amirkulov's Fall of Otrar (1990), probably the most acclaimed film on the bill, is a gory historical epic about Genghis Khan's conquest of an opulent trading city. The story of Otrar, teetering on the fringe of the Khan empire, reminds us of the balancing act Central Asia's emerging democracies perform among China, Russia, and the United States. And more than any of the festival's films, Fall of Otrar explains that first metaphor of Central Asia, the Silk Road. These ancient overland trade routes, collectively known as the Silk Road, linked Europe and Asia and provided a conduit for goods, ideas, languages, and armies. The metaphor is apt: The age-old capitalism of the Silk Road, like the capitalism of these economically fragile post-Soviet countries, was one of long hauls and intense personal energy.

All the films in the "Silk Road" series wrestle with the pressures of an uncertain future. We get the impression that the people of Central Asia live with a sense of displacement, as if their lives on the fringe of the Soviet empire have ended but life on the fringe continues. These are films about cultural nomads who have seen ideologies come and go along the Silk Road while their everyday existence remains almost unchanged. But there is hope, too, and some of these films document efforts to pull together new societies from the ruins of Soviet ideology and the first elements of democracy. At its finest, "Silk Road" captures the beauty of starting from scratch, of battling the poverty of the steppe with a kind of fierce, personal richness. Even while Central Asia weathers the winter of its free-market discontent, these filmmakers capture the simpler economies of fear and hope, set out against a landscape that has always demanded mighty deeds of self-expression.



Slain, at Last
The late, great Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
By Hillary Frey
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 11:11 AM PT

Tuesday night marked the end of an era. After seven years on prime time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was vanquished once and for all, like a demon impaled with a wooden stake. For those who've loved Buffy through romance and war, through hideously fringed jackets and ridiculously sleek up-dos, through life, death, and not one but two resurrections, the series finale was a dark hour. We said goodbye to a weekly dose of girl power; so long to Buffy-centric e-mail lists; farewell to ritualistic Tuesday night gatherings. But we also breathed a sigh of relief.

This season of Buffy, well, sucked, and I, for one, am glad it's over. The show should have ended a year ago, when Buffy's witch-sidekick Willow, overcome by grief when her girlfriend was killed by a bullet meant for Buffy, nearly destroyed the whole world—an appropriately High Romantic ending to a series that revolved, dizzyingly, around the dangers of wielding power. (Willow's friend Xander, the erstwhile buffoon, managed to talk her out of it at the 25^th hour.) Now we're forever stuck with memories of this last season—a Buffy-verse cluttered with too many new characters, inadequately explained plot twists, and endless, boring chatter. The series finale—an anti-climactic trip to "the Hell-Mouth," from which Buffy and most of her gang emerged intact—was a one-hour throwaway as poorly scripted as the worst of this season.

In its early days, Buffy was wittier than your average show because it took the premise of every teen drama—life is a living hell—and turned it into allegory. Joss Whedon, the series creator, transformed insensitive jocks and nightmarish roommates into actual demons for Buffy to take down. As Buffy grew up, Whedon's social critiques grew riskier and more ambitious. In Season 4, Buffy became entangled with The Initiative, a government research project on demons, and the show provided a shrewd commentary on genetic engineering. All along, Buffy sparred with demons of the real-world variety, too—personal trials far more difficult to handle than any evil god or Übervamp. There were the doomed relationships—like many young women, she was drawn to the wrong men—first Angel, a hunky vampire as forbidden to Buffy as Romeo was to Juliet, and then Riley, a pawn of The Initiative. Then there was her mother's excruciatingly drawn-out death; later, her decision to sacrifice herself (literally) to save her sister.

Of course Buffy was a feminist, too, and her superpowers ensured that she'd always stand up for herself and call the shots. But Buffy's vulnerability—a quality lacking in other iconic small-screen sirens like, say, Xena the Warrior Princess, or even Wonder Woman—helped the show become a cross-generational hit. When Buffy felt dead inside (after dying the second time), she sought out sex with Spike (one of the undead) in an attempt to feel alive. She regularly shut her friends out—especially in this last season—when she felt they couldn't understand her. (Not surprisingly, they turned on her.) Blending fantasy with social realism, Whedon made the least-condescending show about young adults to run on prime time in recent memory.

But in Season 7, as Buffy took on The First—as in the first and most evil being ever—the complexity that once differentiated Buffy from Mutant X and other supernatural schlock vanished. A simplistic, apocalyptic, weirdly religious good-versus-evil narrative took over; subplots, aside from those concerning the urgent desire among the supporting characters to have pre-end-of-the-world sex, slipped away. For most of the season, Willow, arguably the show's best character, was stripped of her impressive powers (lest she attempt to destroy the world again). Buffy, instead of kicking ass, spent long minutes of nearly every episode preparing a gang of young, annoying, potential slayers for battle, with pious sermons about war and leadership that would barely have been tolerable coming from President Bartlet on The West Wing. With the exception of one or two episodes (most notably "Conversations with Dead People") this season of Buffy was leaden, slow, and overwrought.

And yet like the declining Roman Empire, Buffy's influence on Western (well, American) civilization as we know it has only grown more ubiquitous in the show's final days. (The New York Times published an editorial today about the end of the show.) At one end of the pop spectrum, the show is a darling of the cultural studies crowd: Buffy's interrogation of the ethics of power, violence, and gender (that eternally beloved triad) is explored on Slayage: The On-Line International Journal of Buffy Studies and in more than one essay collection—including, most recently, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy. At the other end, in the bathrooms of young men across America, Buffy has finally been appreciated for, well, its dazzling supply of eye candy; this month, FHM features "The Girls of Buffy" on its cover, focusing not on Buffy's metaphysical underpinnings but on a more important question: What is Willow's preferred form of bikini wax?

But Buffy's legacy will endure beyond the groves of academe or the pages of men's magazines: The show's influence can be felt on scores of shows, from ABC's hit Alias to the canceled Dark Angel and Birds of Prey and the mysteriously enduring Charmed. Before Buffy, the only women who kicked ass on television did so metaphorically, in the courtrooms or in the ER. The show may have died last night, but its spirit, like its protagonist, will undoubtedly resurrect itself again. Luckily, like the vampires Buffy had yet to slay, the show crawled into its coffin just in time to stay alive in our memory.



Clueless
What do the new reality dating shows have in common with 19^th-century literature?
By Patricia Cohen
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003, at 8:01 AM PT

Will Lisa Shannon find love and fortune? On tonight's finale of Cupid, CBS's latest reality dating show, fans will find out which suitor has been chosen to propose to the series's lovely 25-year-old heroine from among the remaining would-be romantics. If Shannon accepts the proposal, the couple will be married right then and there. And if they stay married for a year, they will receive a $1 million check.

To many critics, Cupid and other matchmaking shows that mix money and real-life marital machinations represent a cynical and tasteless new genre that is yet another sign of America's moral decline. But there's something familiar about the fortune hunters, the status seekers, the thwarted loves, the meddling friends, the public displays, the comic manners, and the sharp competitiveness—all find their counterparts in Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. Only now, three-minute get-to-know-you tryouts in a TV studio substitute for three-minute waltzes at a ball. Traditional family values, it turns out, are back on television after all.

Lisa Shannon may lack the wit, depth, and cleverness of an Austen heroine, but like many of Austen's women, she has put herself in the hands of others (in this case her friends and the TV audience), trusting that they will choose the right match. Even the idea that Shannon, at 25, feels the need to go to such lengths to find a husband suggests a troubling 19^th-century ethos: A woman who is not married by her late 20s is doomed to be an Old Maid.

Undoubtedly, the hundreds of suitors who joined the pursuit are as attracted to the $1 million dowry as to Shannon. But money played a large (and openly discussed) role in the Victorian and Edwardian contract as well. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, we learn that "Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien—and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance of his having ten thousand a year." And in Emma, Mr. Knightly scolds the novel's eponymous heroine for imagining a match between Mr. Elton and her friend Harriet, without understanding he is more interested in money than in love: "I have heard him speak with great animation of a large family of young ladies that his sisters are intimate with, who have all twenty thousand pounds apiece."

On Cupid, Lisa's friends Laura and Kimberly are there to protect her from such gold diggers. They helped Lisa screen the men who answered a coast-to-coast open call (which produced more candidates than did the California primary). After the three whittled down the list of hopefuls to 10, the final selection was turned over to TV viewers, who called in every week to vote for their favorite.

Like the secondary characters in Austen and Wharton, Shannon's companions are clearly there to provide piquant social commentary, deliciously wicked judgments, and intrigue, sabotaging some suitors and championing others. "Freak," "boring," "awful," shrieks Laura, Lisa's confidante, as she ridicules suitors' looks, accents, clothing, schooling, and pronunciation.

Of course, nothing but superficial snap judgments can be made in the few minutes that each man is initially given to impress the three women. But the snap judgments aren't necessarily unanimous, and Laura and Kimberly's debating of the various virtues and flaws (is he "an arrogant jerk" or a dependable lawyer?) are a prosaic version of Mr. Knightly's and Emma's spirited sparring over the lovesick Robert Martin:

"A respectable, intelligent gentleman-farmer," says Mr. Knightly.

"His appearance is so much against him, and his manner so bad," Emma responds.

Likewise, the hopeful bachelors on Cupid understand what goes into a suitable match. Corey, a rocket scientist with the Air Force, acknowledged up front, "I know you have your friends here because I have to fit in." One contestant, Rob, went so far as to boast, "I come from good stock, too. I have good hair and teeth," as if he were a racehorse, waiting for her to check his gums.

Even Richard Kaye, an English professor and the author of The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, confesses to being a "guilty watcher" of the new matchmaking shows, finding the parallels spookily similar. But inevitably, these series—The Bachelorette, Meet My Folks, Married by America, and For Love or Money (where a woman can keep the man or the million but not both)—have all been scorned for debasing the sanctity of marriage and for their shallow, indecorous exhibitionism.

But the shows also betray dissatisfaction with the individualistic, go-it-alone ethic of modern courtship. The Victorians and Edwardians organized balls, dinners, afternoon teas, country walks, and the like to help their younger members find mates. Today, without such formal social arrangements, singles are pretty much left to their own devices to suss out partners. And while the elaborate courtship rituals and codes may now seem curiously antique, they did serve to cushion the brutally competitive marriage market. "I've been looking for Mr. Right and I've just not been able to find him," Lisa confesses. "Based on my track record, I obviously need help." She has discovered what Lily Bart in Wharton's The House of Mirth learned after losing a sought-after bachelor. Upon hearing of the wealthy match that Grace Van Osburgh expertly concocted for her daughter, Bart concludes: "The cleverest girl may miscalculate where her own interests are concerned, may yield too much at one moment and withdraw too far at the next."

In the end, the American public will choose Lisa's potential spouse in what could be seen simply as a more democratic version of those literary heroes and heroines who gave themselves wholly over to society and allowed their extended family to pick an appropriate mate. And why not? The idea that a good husband is hard to find has become a cultural watchword. Meanwhile, the high divorce rate is evidence that love, American style, hasn't necessarily produced happier unions. Nor should anyone forget that Lisa, too, stands to gain the million only through an advantageous marriage. And if it doesn't work out after a year, she at least has one of the modern conveniences not available to Austen's or Wharton's protagonists: a no-fault divorce.



Assessment: The Simpsons
Who turned America's best TV show into a cartoon?
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2003, at 4:16 PM PT

At some point during its 14-year run, The Simpsons turned into one of the best sitcoms on television—and that's not a compliment. At one time, to call The Simpsons the best show on Fox would have been a vast understatement; to say it was the best sitcom on television would have been inadequate; and to describe it as the greatest TV show in history would (and still does) minimize its importance by limiting its cultural impact to the small screen. Who knows when it happened—maybe it was when Homer visited the leprechaun jockeys in Season 11, or when he was raped by a panda in Season 12—but for several years, watching The Simpsons chase Ozzie & Harriet's record for the longest-running sitcom has been like watching the late-career Pete Rose: There's still greatness there, and you get to see a home run now and then, but mostly it's a halo of reflected glory.

The hype surrounding this Sunday's 300^th Simpsons episode (actually the 302^nd because Fox isn't counting two holiday "specials") has underscored the show's decline. To celebrate the milestone, Entertainment Weekly picked the top 25 episodes in Simpsons history: Twenty-four of them come from 1997 or before, meaning that only one comes from the past five seasons (which, not coincidentally, is the time period from which EW selected its "Worst Episode Ever"). Similarly, USA Today published a top-10 list written by the fan who runs the best Simpsons site on the Web. He picked nine shows from 1993 and before, and the other was from 1997. The newspaper also asked Simpsons staff members to select their 15 favorite moments and episodes, and only one person (Al Jean, the show's executive producer) chose something that happened within the past five years. Even as fans, critics, and staff members rejoice in the show's amazing longevity, they all agree: The past five or six seasons just haven't been up to snuff.

Who's to blame for this state of events? Some of the die-hard fans who populate the news group alt.tv.simpsons have settled on a "lone gunman" theory—that one man single-handedly brought down TV's Camelot. One problem: They don't agree on who's hiding in the book depository. Many fans finger Mike Scully, who served as executive producer for Seasons 9 through 12 (generally considered the show's nadir). Others target writer Ian Maxtone-Graham. Scully and Maxtone-Graham, both of whom joined the show after it had already been on the air for several seasons, are cited as evidence that The Simpsons lost touch with what made it popular in the beginning—Matt Groening's and James L. Brooks' conception of an animated TV family that was more realistic than the live-action Huxtables and Keatons and Seavers who populated 1980s television. Unlike other TV families, for example, the Simpsons would go to church, have money problems, and watch television.

But under Scully's tenure, The Simpsons became, well, a cartoon. In A.O. Scott's Slate "Assessment" of Matt Groening, he wrote that Groening is "committed to using cartoons as a way of addressing reality." But in recent years, The Simpsons has become an inversion of this. The show now uses reality as a way of addressing itself, a cartoon. This past Sunday's episode featured funny references to Spongebob Squarepants, the WNBA, Ken Burns, Tony Soprano, and Fox programming, but the Simpsons themselves, and the rest of the Springfield populace, have become empty vessels for one-liners and sight gags, just like the characters who inhabit other sitcoms. (Think Chandler Bing.)

The Simpsons no longer marks the elevation of the sitcom formula to its highest form. These days it's closer to It's Garry Shandling's Show—a very good, self-conscious parody of a sitcom (and itself). Episodes that once would have ended with Homer and Marge bicycling into the sunset (perhaps while Bart gagged in the background) now end with Homer blowing a tranquilizer dart into Marge's neck. The show's still funny, but it hasn't been touching in years. Writer Mike Reiss admitted as much to the New York Times Magazine, conceding that "much of the humanity has leached out of the show over the years. … It hurts to watch it, even if I helped do it."

But can you blame one person for it? It would be nice to finger Maxtone-Graham, who gave a jaw-dropping interview to London's Independent in 1998. In it, he admitted to hardly ever watching The Simpsons before he joined the staff in 1995, to brazenly flouting Groening's rules for the show (including saying he "loved" an episode that Groening had his name removed from), and to open disdain for fans, saying, "Go figure! That's why they're on the Internet and we're writing the show." But just because Maxtone-Graham is a jerk (or at the very least, shows colossally bad judgment in front of an interviewer) doesn't mean he's a bad writer. On top of that, a show like The Simpsons is the product of so many creative individuals that it's difficult to blame one person—even Scully, the onetime executive producer—for anything.

So, instead, there are a few conspiracy theories for the show's not-quite demise. Perhaps the problem is too many cooks, as staff legend George Meyer implied to MSNBC.com: "We have more writers now," Meyer said. "In the early days, I think, more of the show, more of the episode was already in the first draft of the script. Now there's more room-writing that goes on, and so I think there's been a kind of homogenization of the scripts. … Certainly, the shows are more jokey than they used to be. But I think they also lack the individual flavor that they had in the early years." Another theory lays the blame on the show's many celebrity guest stars, which have made the show resemble those old Scooby Doo episodes where Sandy Duncan, or Tim Conway and Don Knotts, would show up just for the heck of it. Still others think the problem is the show's brain drain: Long-absent individuals include creators Groening and Brooks, actor Phil Hartman, and writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss (who both left briefly to do The Critic), Greg Daniels (still doing King of the Hill), and Conan O'Brien (who has been linked to the show's decline so many times that Groening once called the theory "one of the most annoying nut posts" on the Internet).

But maybe no one, not even a group of people, can be held responsible. Simpsons determinists lay the blame on unstoppable, abstract forces like time. The show's writers and producers often subscribe to this line when they publicly abase themselves for not living up to the show's high standards. Maxtone-Graham told the Independent, "I think we should pack it in soon and I think we will—we're running out of ideas," and Meyer admitted to MSNBC.com, "We're starting to see some glimmers of the end. … It's certainly getting harder to come up with stories, no question."

An incredible anxiety of influence hovers over Simpsons writers, who realize that they are judged not by the standards of network television, but by the standards of their own show's golden age. By the end of his tenure as executive producer, Scully was making nervous statements to the press like, "Basically, my goal is just not to wreck the show" and, "Yeah, we don't want to be the guys that, you know, sank the ship." Maybe The Simpsons is killing The Simpsons by setting expectations too high. After all, even while you're wincing or groaning at a particularly lame gag, you're hoping that the show will stay on the air longer than Gunsmoke. It's hard to imagine television without The Simpsons. If it sticks around for another 300 episodes, maybe, someday, the wound of the past few seasons will be remembered like the one Maggie administered to Mr. Burns: an accident, and not a fatal one.



OutKast Is Good
America's greatest rock band thinks hard about virtue.
By Sasha Frere-Jones
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2003, at 8:52 AM PT

Look hard at the universe of hip-hop since 1978 and you won't find a lot of records that say "I'm sorry." So, when OutKast released the 2000 hit "Ms. Jackson"—in which they apologized to Everymama for making her daughter cry—it was as unexpected as John Grisham spinning on his head. Even nice MCs brag and boast most of the time. (Listen to De La Soul again.) The longer it hung around, the more questions "Ms. Jackson" birthed: Did hip-hop have more to apologize for than other genres? Was "Ms. Jackson" a strike against the misogynist jerks that hip-hop built its reputation on? That pop music built its house on?

Stankonia, "Ms. Jackson" 's home, has sold almost 4 million copies to date, twice the number for the previous OutKast album, Aquemini. The new OutKast double CD, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, offers one disc by each member: Antwan "Big Boi" Patton provides OutKast-style hip-hop as we already know it on Speakerboxxx; André Benjamin does anything but on The Love Below. Peak of career, working on tracks separately, huge anticipation = The White Album. The CD will have sold 500,000 copies by the time you read this, making it one of the few quick platinum arrivals in a soggy business year. (The RIAA counts one sale of a two-disc set as two sales, so 500,000 sales of SB/TLB become 1 million, making the title platinum instead of gold.) A friend went to the Virgin Megastore in New York's Union Square over the weekend and asked how the album was selling. "We have to keep re-stocking the end-caps [racks near the entrance] every 90 minutes or so," he was told. Whether it continues to sell through Christmas is another story. Is SB/TLB worth buying? Hell, it's OutKast. It's better than anything else on your desk. Is it too long? It's two CDs, so you already knew it was too long. Those are the easy questions.

SB/TLB pivots on the much harder question of "good behavior" proposed by "Ms. Jackson." African-American culture has a lot of voltage running through this cable. Thanks to hip-hop, the idea of blackness is now inseparable for many people from an idea of realness that equals cynicism, criminal fantasies, and enthused capitalism. The number of Hummers in the video and the gallons of blood in the rhymes are still metrics of credibility.

The African-American community has a specific cross to bear when confronting this "realness," but everybody has a problem being good. It's boring. We've known this at least since the 19^th century, when the Rev. Rowland Hill of Surrey Chapel in London delivered the line often attributed to Martin Luther: "The devil should not have all the best tunes." Who has the best record collection? Your saintly friend who jogs 10 miles a day and does pro bono work or your annoying slacker friend who tends bar?

OutKast is in a better position than most to bridge what's virtuous and what's fun because their hip-hop has always been a vernacular blend. Hip-hop beats have become oddly jingoistic, rejecting sounds and samples that refer to anything outside hip-hop itself. But listen to Stankonia's "Bombs Over Baghdad." Is it hip-hop just because it has rapping? The drum beat and the guitar-playing read like rock at 30 paces. And there's that gospel choir singing the coda. You call it.

André's work on The Love Below skips the blend mode and goes straight to crush, puree, and vaporize. Fans of crunk, the Southern flavor of hip-hop OutKast helped midwife, will find the ecstatic pop of "Hey Ya!" sacrilegious. Fans of easy-riding anthems like "So Fresh, So Clean" will find position papers like "Happy Valentine's Day" corny: "When cupid knocks at your door/ you can't ignore me." The pop fans who liked "Ms. Jackson" and André's peacock style will be freaked out by his discussion with God, who is a woman. (Like everyone, André wants to know if God knows any single girls.)

André knows the cultural buttons he's pushing, so he lays out the dichotomies before anyone else can. On the back cover, he's a gangsta holding a smoking handgun—but it's pink. Tough, but tweaked. For the front cover, he poses in front of the Eiffel Tower wearing a red plaid suit and yellow tie, daring you to call him names. (Can the fragrance called Andrégenous be far behind?) The first song, "Love Hater," capitalizes the sentence: "Everybody needs a glass of water today, to chase the hate away/ You know you've got company comin' over/ So you scrub extra-hard/ And everybody needs somebody to love/ Before it's too late/ It's too laaaaaaateee oh/ Don't nobody wanna grow old alone!" And then he shows his hand: "And everybody need to quit actin' hard and shit/ Before you get your ass whooped (I'll slap the fuck out ya!)." See? We can trust André to be good but not a goody-goody.

André's similarity to Prince has been widely noted. ("She Lives in My Lap" is basically a remake of "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" from Sign 'O' the Times). But after Prince became his own boss and retreated deep into Paisley Park, he lost his sense of humor. André's has never been stronger. The Love Below is one of the only hip-hop albums where the skits are actually worth listening to. The laughs mean he can engage moral questions without making you want to hit him with a wet sock. The video for "Hey Ya!" (which you can watch here) is more witty than hilarious, but it's spectacularly welcome in an era where rock stars truck in more self-pity than panache. André appears on a mythical English TV show with himself, digitally edited together, playing his own live band. A multiracial crowd, leaning toward white, screams like it's 1964 while he tears the scorecard to bits. His acting is pitch perfect: shirtless, stoic drummer; cowboy cool bass player; shy, friendly bandleader. André twists and shouts and wears green, exposing the upper body TV was made for. Think of it as the one thing Queer Eye for the Straight Guy could not improve.

There are few gigs less appealing to the ego than standing next to André. Big Boi has been playing George and Ringo to André's John and Paul since the second OutKast album, ATLiens, made it clear André was a gifted child. This is unfair, because Big Boi is one of the best MCs working. He is, at the very least, hip-hop's fiercest enunciator. If somebody tries that "rapping isn't music" nonsense with you (it still happens), hand them any of Big Boi's verses from Stankonia and ask them to map out the accents, references, and feet. Give them several days and lots of graph paper. (You might want to mention the quality of something is rarely correlated to complexity, but that stuff tends to impress ignoramae.) OutKast's overtorqued physical impact, the sense that their records are more there than anyone else's, comes in large part from Big Boi. The essence of Southern rap, the bounce, is all there in Big Boi's voice and beats. Just listen to the first two minutes of "Knowing," one of Speakerboxxx's most propulsive tracks. It's like watching someone tap-dance on a moving sidewalk while carrying three glasses of champagne. Blindfolded.

Speakerboxxx is not a solo disc in the sense The Love Below is, where André produces all his own tracks. Big Boi only produces some of Speakerboxxx, leaving the rest to Mr. DJ, Carl Mo, and André 3000 himself. "Ghetto Musick" is André's production and is OutKast's most formally twisted song yet. It is, literally, three songs jump-cut together. But Big Boi's productions hold their own, and as a series of songs, Speakerboxxx gains in consistency what little it loses in familiarity. The slinky crunk rehaul of "Tomb of the Boom" and the Parliament sound-alike "Bowtie" are sprung things. Apparently there are people in this country who would not dance in their chairs when "Bowtie" comes on. This is why we need national health care now, because that is not right.

The distinction isn't as simple as André the omnivorous genius and Big Boi the genre-bound floor filler. André and Antwan both think about being good and being hip-hop, through different filters: "What about repenting?/ What about committing the same sin over again and again?" Big Boi asks on "Church." On "Flip-Flop Rock," Big Boi addresses someone who's worried about being a "goody-two-shoes." If there's a gangsta script Big Boi believes in, he still knows it's a script. Big Boi's friends, though, are not as worried about the implications of their genre—just check the guest verses on "Tomb of the Boom" to see what it's like to be a B-list thinker on an A-list album. (The exception is Ludacris, whose typically excellent verse makes good use of "pistachios" and "cuticles.")

A quick scan of the current interviews tells even the pie-eyed fan that there won't be a lot more OutKast records, though there will be records from both André and Antwan. That's good enough news. But if America's greatest rock group breaks up, it'll still be a shame.



Hasten Down the Wind
Warren Zevon's sad, sweet final album.
By Bill Barol
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2003, at 7:58 AM PT

Samuel Johnson, in one of the most overexposed aphorisms to come out of the 18^th century, said there's nothing like the prospect of hanging to concentrate the mind. If that's true, the fates have paid back Warren Zevon's fondness for dark jokes with one of their own: Zevon, who recorded his new CD while living with terminal cancer, is one songwriter whose mind has never needed concentrating. Dagger-sharp and dry as dust, he's turned his eye on characters from junkies to mercenaries, spooks to lovers, with a wit that none of his peers from the '70s singer-songwriter boom have been able to touch. But unlike some of the writers to whom he's been compared—not lyricists most often, but prose stylists like Hunter S. Thompson—Zevon has a dirty little secret: There's a leavening note of compassion to his best work, a beating heart behind the skeletal grin. For every "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," there's a "Hasten Down the Wind."

It's not surprising that this part of Zevon's sensibility is front and center on The Wind (Artemis Records), or that the project carries with it a valedictory air. It's a mantle the record wears gracefully, though, in ways both small (the keening crunch of David Lindley's lap steel guitar, a sound so recognizable to anyone who was there in the '70s that it's sure to induce a small shock of sense memory) and big: The familiar outlaw-on-the-run motif of "Dirty Life & Times" holds an unmistakable sense of the clock running down. Even funny and very Zevonesque tropes like "I'm sprawled across the davenport of despair" are mounted in a setting of creeping decay ("Disorder in the House," with a raging guitar lead by Bruce Springsteen). Other old friends and co-conspirators are in the mix: longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, plus Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmit, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Emmylou Harris—a Murderer's Row of singer-songwriter talent. It'd feel like a gimmick if the guest stars weren't so well-used—Cooder's plangent guitar on "Dirty Life & Times," Henley and Schmit's sympathetic vocal backing on "She's Too Good for Me," Walsh reprising the gutbucket pleasures of "Rocky Mountain Way" in "Rub Me Raw."

It's possible to look at the guest cast as an auxiliary, helping an ailing Zevon shoulder the job. But the whole assemblage feels more like a goodbye party, with old friends in from out of town. That note gets struck most forcefully in the goofy frat-house stomp of "The Rest of the Night," with Petty bleating harmony. The song's a throwaway, though, and one of the two tracks on The Wind that feel inessential. The other, oddly enough, is Zevon's down-the-middle cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." It's the record's most overt nod to Zevon's illness, but lyrics like "That long black cloud is comin' down/ I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door" fall with a clang here. Zevon has always been slipperier than this, more allusive, and Dylan's self-consciously mythic take on impending doom seems downright ham-handed in comparison.

Even Zevon's record label seems to grasp that this is a moment to keep it simple. "July 2003: Warren is still alive," the official bio says, and that's that. He lived to finish the record and to see his grandchildren born. A PR person for Artemis says, "Some days are better than others for him. He's hanging in there. Unfortunately, his prognosis is the same." It doesn't seem likely that Zevon will be appearing in public again. In two ballads co-written with Jorge Calderón, though, he found the voice for a songwriter's farewell. "Keep Me in Your Heart," finished at his home studio in April after he was no longer able to travel, bids a cleareyed goodbye to an old love, and the language couldn't be much homelier: "Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house/ Maybe you'll think of me and smile/ You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse/ Keep me in your heart for awhile." It's the modesty of that qualifying "maybe," and the shrugging "for awhile," that make the sentiment hard to shake off. And in the spare, heartbreaking "El Amor de mi Vida," Zevon leaves the listener with an unforgettable image: a man looking out at a world that, somewhere, holds the woman who used to love him: "I look outside, I know you're there/ And you've found a brand new life somewhere/ I only wish it had been us/ But I'm happy for your happiness." It's a lovely sending-off, with forgiveness and an open heart—the way we'd all want to be sent off, to a new lover, a new place, or whatever fresh mysteries lie beyond the life we know.



The Beethoven Mystery
Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?
By Jan Swafford
Posted Monday, June 30, 2003, at 2:58 PM PT

This summer, as every summer, the end of the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood season will be marked by another round of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The world over, the Ninth has become an indispensable adornment for socio/musical hooplas. Chances are, it will be played soon by an orchestra near you. If you know Western classical music, you know this one. Probably half of humanity can hum the little ditty that serves as the theme of the choral finale—a setting of Schiller's revolutionary-era drinking song, "Ode to Joy."

Which is all to say, the Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens to gut any artwork. Think Mona Lisa. Still, as with Lisa, when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons.

One reason is its mystery. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth. But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets. In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of the epic and the slippery.

First movement: loud, big, heroic, no? No. Big and loud all right, also wildly unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren't. The formal outline, on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder, etc.) At the end there's a funeral march over a slithering bass. Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the "Eroica" Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But who died in the first movement of the Ninth?

Next comes the scherzo, Beethoven's trademark skittering, ebullient movement. Here it's those things ratcheted up to a Dionysian whirlwind, manically contrapuntal, punctuated with timpani crashes. Strange choice, to follow a funeral march. Even stranger: For all the apparent over-the-top gaiety, the movement is in D minor. Gaiety generally means major keys, but not here.

Given its surroundings, the third movement is peculiar mainly in its cloudless tranquility. It's one of those singing, time-stopping adagios that mark Beethoven's last period. Two themes alternate, and nothing much happens but the themes acquiring delicate filigree and little dance turns in a dreamlike atmosphere of uncanny beauty.

The famous finale is weirdest of all. Scholars have never quite agreed on its formal model, though it clearly involves a series of variations on the "Joy" theme. But why does this celebration of joy open with a dissonant shriek that Richard Wagner dubbed the "terror fanfare"? Then the basses start playing stuff that is unmistakably a recitative, the familiar prose patter between arias in opera and oratorio. Here, a recitative with no words. And for the supreme oddity: One at a time, themes from the earlier movements are introduced only to be rebuffed by the basses—opening of the first movement, nope, too grim; second movement, too light; third movement … nice, the basses sigh nostalgically, but no, too sweet.

This, then: The Joy theme is unveiled by the basses unaccompanied, sounding for all the world like somebody (say, the composer) quietly humming to himself. (In fact, Beethoven sketched the Joy theme early on and aimed the whole symphony to be a revelation of it.) The theme begins to vary, picking up lovely flowing accompaniments. Then, out of nowhere, back to the terror fanfare. And now up steps a real singer, singing a real recitative: "Oh friends, not these tones! Rather let's strike up something more agreeable and joyful."

Soon the chorus is crying, "Joy! Joy!" and the piece is off, praising joy as the universal solvent, under whose influence love will flourish, humanity unite. Schiller's ode is a stylized drinking song, meant literally or figuratively to be declaimed by comrades with glasses raised. And what a tipsy course Beethoven's setting follows: At one point a mystical evocation of the godhead is followed by a grunting military march in a style the Viennese called "Turkish," which resolves into a learned and majestic fugue.

Nobody has figured out what Beethoven meant by all this. The result has been that every age and ideology has simply claimed the music for its own. Communists, Catholics, lefties, and reactionaries have joined in the chorus. A 1999 book by Esteban Buch, recently available in English, traces the course of the Ninth through history. It's been attached to European disunity in the form of nationalism, it got sucked into the Nazi cult of blood and race, and finally it became, with the Joy theme's adoption as the anthem of the European Union, a symbol of togetherness. Others have seen the Ninth as a universal human anthem. Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the international celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what else would do the job?

For the composer's part, it's a good bet that Beethoven didn't intend for the Ninth to be precisely figured out. As with the Mona Lisa, maybe its very ambiguity is part of its success. Paint it any color you like, and it remains its exalted and inexplicable self. If you want universality in a work of art, here you are. One could argue that the best way of keeping the Ninth alive and fresh is not to pin it down but to embrace its mystery.

What can be said about the Ninth with reasonable certainty? One is that its position in the world is probably about what Beethoven wanted it to be. In an unprecedented way for a composer, he deliberately stepped into history with a great ceremonial work that doesn't just preach freedom and the unity of peoples but attempts however strangely to foster them. Another thing to note is that most late Beethoven pieces take surprising courses. His earlier works tend to have a tone (which sometimes he names for us, as in the "Pathetique" and "Eroica") that propels a dramatic unfolding: We hear what happens to the pathos and the heroism. In his late works Beethoven turned away from such clear dramatic curves to more elusive and evocative trains of ideas whose effect he and his time called poetic. And in keeping with the turn from drama to poetry, he left the heroics behind.

I'll add one more surmise. Famously, the Ninth first emerges from a whispering mist to towering, fateful proclamations. The finale's Joy theme is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. The Ninth is music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? "This kiss for all the world!" runs the telling line in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of epic scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.

The Ninth, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, ending with a cry of jubilation, is itself his kiss for all the world, from east to west, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller. It's the composer talking to everybody, to history. That's what's so moving about those words. There Beethoven greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.



Steely Dan Is Getting Old
And that's a good thing.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 9:31 AM PT

It's been 30 years since Steely Dan came out with the first of nine albums that infused pop music with new layers of knotty harmonies, insouciant irony, and a cryptic poetry that Dylan might have conjured had he pored over Burroughs instead of Guthrie. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the former school chums from Bard who created Steely Dan (a name taken from the steam-powered dildos in Burroughs' Naked Lunch), are now 55 and 53, respectively; their output of late has been less than prodigious (three records in the past two decades); their basic sound is as distinctively slick—detractors would say soullessly repetitive—as that of any act in rock history.

So, why, at least for their fans of long standing, do they still delight, compel, sometimes—as on the best tracks of Everything Must Go, their new CD—even startle? It's not just the retro doo-wop backup singers, the Blue Note horn charts, the slam-dunk backbeat, or the skylark guitar riffs, though these things do help break down resistances. Above all, it's the Fagen-Becker songs: literary sparklers with oddball narratives, usually about loss, illusion, or unfulfilled dreams, sung by a narrator who's either blithely clueless or self-loathingly aware of his slim prospects.

Then there's the narrator, played by Fagen, who sings nearly all the Steely Dan songs. Can Fagen properly be called a singer? He strikes attitudes more than notes; his vocal cords strain when they exceed their half-octave range. Yet without his harsh knife-edge cri de coeur, the polished instrumental arrangements can slack perilously close to smooth-jazz fusion. This is why letting Becker sing "Slang of Ages" was a bad move; the tune comes off as a middling blues. When Fagen's at the mike, a tension brews between the voice and the musical mix. (For a more elaborate theory of Fagen's role, click here.) He's a troubadour for our times, just as Dylan, that other great nasal whiner, was for his: Dylan's persona, the rebel-protester who storms off Maggie's farm; Fagen's, the world-weary Sybarite who sees "the blood orange sky" above the freeway but feels too beat for rage, and so takes refuge in "the long sad Sunday of the early resigned" (to quote from two of the new songs, "The Last Mall" and "Blues Beach").

Everything Must Go sports some of Steely Dan's catchiest hooks and grimmest lyrics. The disc's first song is about the closing of a mall, the final song about the end of a corporation. But the grand theme of the whole album is the merciless meltdown of all sure bets. Truly everything must go, including the ultimate man upstairs. "Godwhacker," the album's destined classic, might have inspired mass disc-burnings had Fagen sung the words more clearly. ("In the beginning/ We could hang with the dude/ But it's been too much of nothing/ Of that stank attitude/ Now they curse your name/ And there's a bounty on your face/ It's your own fault daddy/ Godwhacker's on the case.") Some early reviewers have interpreted the song as a portrait of terrorists or an attack on Bush. Nonsense. It's a pitch for Götterdämmerung, the cool ravings of a modern Job turned nihilist, Nietzsche crossed with Shaft.

So, we've come full circle from The Nightfly, Fagen's 1982 solo masterpiece, which wistfully evoked the bright-eyed early '60s, the New Frontier of Cold War vigor and limitless possibilities: when Fagen was a restless teen in the Jersey suburbs, dreaming of the day that he and his girl, Maxine, could "move up to Manhattan/ and fill the place with friends/ drive to the coast and drive right back again"; and when the future was imagined as a "streamlined world" run by "a just machine that makes big decisions/ programmed by fellas with compassion and vision."

Now the millennium has arrived, and not even the bomb shelter Dad built can provide protection from the fallout. On "Blues Beach," the narrator talks to "my hypothetical friend." Real life and sexual desire have merged with computer games, programmed by very different sorts of fellas, as in "Green Book" ("The torso rocks and the eyes are keepers/ Now where'd we sample those legs?/ I'm thinking Marilyn 4.0 in the Green Book"). The long-unnerving Steely Dan fetish for vapid underage girls ("Hey, Nineteen" on Gaucho, "Janie Runaway" and "Cousin Dupree" on Two Against Nature) is supplanted by swoons for "Pixeleen," the teeny-bop heroine of an anime spy-thriller ("Pixeleen/ Rave on, my sleek and soulful cyberqueen").

That name, Pixeleen—could it be a VR recombinant of The Nightfly's Maxine ("pixel" + "ine")? There's an intriguing reverie in the middle verse, lasting just a couple of lines, where the melody segues into a Leiber and Stoller-style lilt, similar to that long-ago song "Maxine," and Fagen reminisces, "Flashback to cool summer nights … in the room above your garage"—before the pixel-pixie lures him back to Matrix-land. It's the one moment of unmasked elegy on Everything Must Go, when the flippant irony dissolves and lays bare the heartbreak of what's been lost.

Fagen said in a recent New York Times interview that he regards all Steely Dan albums as "comedy records to some degree," and of course he's right. Fagen and Becker are not Lou Reed; they have no urge to wallow in the miasma. Take the album's finale, the title song, which, after a long, wistful, party's-over tenor-sax solo, begins: "It's high time for a walk on the real side/ Let's admit the bastards beat us/ I move to dissolve the corporation/ in a pool of margaritas/ So let's switch off all the lights/ and light up the Luckies/ crankin' up the afterglow …"

This isn't mere whistling-in-the-dark denial. The Dan know, and well capture, the subversive sexual thrill of letting it all go up in flames. But there is also a deep, sweet sorrow in the final lines:

Talk about the famous road not taken
In the end we never took it
And if somewhere on the way
We got a few good licks in
No one's ever gonna know
'Cause we're goin' out of business
Everything must go.

And you can dance to it.

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 Here's another way to read this contrast between Fagen's vocals and the music: A Steely Dan album is a trip through the warped mind of our unreliable narrator (as played by Fagen), and the ultra-polished instrumentals reflect the idealized soundtrack that he hears in his head as the stories and fantasies unspool. (Don't we all, at certain times, to some degree, amble through life with a soundtrack playing in our heads, lending rhythmic drama to the random humdrum?)

As evidence for this interpretation, I direct you to The Nightfly, Fagen's 1982 solo album, not just one of the great pop albums but one of the great pop album covers (which you can see here). The front cover shows Fagen as a disc jockey at 4:09 a.m., chain-smoking Chesterfields, a Sonny Rollins LP on the turntable. The back cover shows a suburban house, one of a row of identical houses, except in this one, a light glistens through an upstairs window. The sky shows the hint of dawn. By inference, it's 4:09 a.m., and the kid upstairs—the only person awake in the neighborhood—is listening to the disc jockey. Fagen's liner notes suggest that The Nightfly is autobiographical. It's about the adolescent Fagen listening in the wee hours to cool jazz on the radio—while also imagining that he's the DJ, "Lester the Nightfly" of "WJAZ," as the album's title song calls him, spinning "sweet music/ … till the sun comes through the skylight." Or maybe it's about Lester, spinning records while reminiscing about the all-night listening sessions of his youth. Either way, the covers (both in gleaming black-and-white) present an image of music as the perpetual soundtrack and the creative fount of an imaginative life.

I would also cite the technical credits (clearly written by Fagen, Becker, or both) on Steely Dan's 1975 album, Katy Lied: "Steely Dan uses a specially constructed 24-channel tape recorder, a 'State-of-the-Art' 36-input computerized-mixdown console … some very expensive German microphones … a Neumann VMS 70 computerized lathe equipped with a variable pitch, variable depth helium cooled head." There's a deliberate stratagem to these gushings. They convey the clear impression (even to a reader who doesn't know what they're talking about) that the boys of Steely Dan get to play with dream-fantasy gear in a dream-fantasy studio: the hi-fi geek's equivalent of driving an Audi TT, lounging in a comfy Eames chair, or dating a girl like Tuesday Weld—to name a few dream-fantasies mentioned by the narrator in some Steely Dan songs. It all reinforces the sense, if only subconsciously, that this record you're listening to is a dream-fantasy, the inner soundtrack to an ordinary guy's secret story, for else how could a voice like Donald Fagen's—in other words, like yours or mine—get backup from a band that sounds so damned impeccable?



Moscow in the Meantime
Bering Strait is a country band from Russia, but you wouldn't know it from their album.
By John Morthland
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 7:20 AM PT

Right now, after five-plus years in the music biz, Bering Strait is still a full-fledged media event. As a musical event, though, the Russian country band remains a question mark. For that they can thank mainstream Nashville, which has cannibalized itself so fully that producers and artists there seem to be incapable of creating something that doesn't sound just like everything else; artists and producers blame this on radio, for having such restrictive playlists, while radio blames you and me, for having such bad taste. One upshot of this is that the best way to break a fledgling act is not with new, different, and interesting music but with a new, different, and interesting story. And that, Bering Strait has. Perhaps you've already heard it on NPR or 60 Minutes. Here's the short version, as detailed in The Ballad of Bering Strait, the recently released feature-length documentary film.

Now between the ages of 22 and 29, the original six classically trained members were all still teenagers when a music teacher assembled them into a bluegrass band in Obninsk, a town of nuclear scientists two hours from Moscow. In 1998, after being spotted in a Moscow Mexican restaurant by an American art dealer who knew somebody who knew Nashville executive Tim DuBois, the band moved to Music City. Glasnost followed quickly. They jettisoned their Russian music-teacher manager for a Nashville veteran, hooked up with producer Brent Maher (best known for his '80s work with the Judds), and signed with DuBois at Arista in 1999. Then, Bering Strait got the business. DuBois promptly lost his label in a power struggle, and the band floundered until their patron was named to run the new label Gaylord. But that company never got off the ground, and DuBois resigned after five months. Though the musicians had been recording with Maher all this time, they couldn't legally hold other jobs due to visa restrictions, and all were living in a one-bathroom ranch house with their manager and his wife, who were going broke. The bass player got canned. Two weeks after some Straits were finally able to lease an apartment in town, it burned to the ground. Finally, DuBois and Tony Brown, another done-it-all Nashville exec, formed a new label, Universal South, under the aegis of the powerhouse Universal Music Group. The movie ends with the band signing its deal and then busing off to D.C. for its first American concert.

The documentary is curiously flat, blunting most of the story's drama even as it shows the principals clearly near the end of their financial and emotional ropes. But that just makes it an appropriate companion to their CD, which, despite the rich musical and cultural background of the musicians, is little more than generic Nashville. With the most countrified instruments downplayed in Maher's production, you'd never guess this band once picked and sang the kind of acoustic mountain music repopularized just three years ago by O Brother Where Art Thou?; instead, the fetching but anonymous-sounding voices of lead singer Natasha Borzilova (who also plays acoustic guitar) and backup vocalist Lydia Salnikova (keyboards) are emphasized. Natasha does hit all the notes just right but with no distinguishing style, though in fairness to her, it would take an unusually daring singer to make much out of a lyric like, "I still wear a locket/ With a picture of you and me by the river/ Was it that long ago" (from "I'm Not Missing You"). Such songs, by the kind of Nashville pros who get most of their life experience sitting in cubicles and writing rooms trying to come up with something that sounds like whatever's at the top of the charts that week, could use a little Russian darkness in pondering love's ups and downs; only "I Could Be Persuaded," thanks to a meaty melody, is catchy enough to work as a single (if the label were to release one, which it won't—more about that later). The exceptions are the Grammy-nominated "Bearing Straight," a twangy, band-written instrumental romp featuring lead guitarist/banjoist Ilya Toshinsky, and the traditional "Porushka-Paranya," which evolves into a Russo-American hyper-hoedown.

The members of Bering Strait are cheerful assimilationists, their classical training and middle-class backgrounds likely easing their transition into America's musical and social mainstream. Certainly that's how they come across on their album—and how they're portrayed, presumably with their approval, in the movie. Though subject to homesickness and longings for Russian food, they take readily to Sex and the City and pancake-house breakfasts. Though drummer Alexander Arzamatsev speaks only Russian in the film, the other men speak good English, and the two women are virtually accent-free. If these well-scrubbed kids have any thoughts about the USA in general beyond the fact that it's where the music business is, they keep it to themselves. Only Natasha shows anything resembling a rebellious streak; halfway through the movie, she gives herself a punk buzz cut (then sheepishly dons a wig to hide it in public). In one of the movie's most telling segments, an old-school DJ who insists that fans won't accept a Russian country group is proved wrong when listener after listener concludes that Bering Strait's music sounds like the real deal (though one caller denounces them as sounding like Yankees, who clearly are worse than foreigners). The album rode saturation media coverage into the country Top 20, though Universal declined to release a single because it didn't want to pigeonhole the band as country.

And that seems to portend what's happening next. Bering Strait is already hinting that the album represents the malleable kids who came to America five years ago, not the adversity-seasoned young adults they are today. They're supposedly writing their own more pop-oriented material for the second album, due early next year and probably under a new producer; they just switched booking agencies in an attempt to break free of the mainstream country circuit. Given the plainness of their music thus far, it's a good move, assuming they can deliver; a fusion of tradition-based Russian and American sounds along the lines of "Porushka-Paranya" would definitely be an improvement. Then they'll just have to keep their fingers crossed that after failing to live up to their press the first time around, there'll still be an audience paying attention.



Needles and Pens
The sportswriter's obsession with steroid scandals.
By Charles P. Pierce
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003, at 1:39 PM PT

Len Bias would have been 40 years old in November had he not celebrated by putting the Cali Cartel up his nose on the very night in 1986 that he'd been drafted by the defending champion Boston Celtics. The tragedy was put to immediate use by a bipartisan passel of opportunistic hysterics led by then-Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, who demanded a tough new law to placate the angry and mournful Celtics fans among his constituents. (You think I made that part up? Dan Baum limns the whoopin' and hollerin' splendidly in his history of the drug wars, Smoke and Mirrors.) That October, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was sort of the drug war's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and which visited upon ourselves a whole number of really fine ideas, including the mandatory minimum sentences so beloved these days by so many judges. Of course, we learned almost nothing from the whole Bias saga and certainly nothing about the perils of making policy by letting the hottest heads prevail.

I mention all of this because there is one sentence you should remember as the Steroid Hysteria now raging in the sports pages runs its course. This is the sentence: THG, the substance produced by the BALCO Laboratories in California and allegedly consumed by dozens of athletes, was neither illegal nor specifically banned by any professional sports league. Period, as I just typed.

You should remember this every time you read another sports columnist's explosion of angry moral outrage at The Cheaters. You should remember it every time you read another expression of earnest concern for The Children. No professional athlete who took this stuff broke any law and no professional athlete who took this stuff broke any rule. (And, as far as any definitive scientific evidence is concerned, nobody endangered his health with the stuff, either.) In other words, the scandal that is preoccupying your sports pages these days involves people doing something perfectly legal with their own bodies. Period, as I just typed again.

Nevertheless, the old rhetoric's heating up again and it's a sign that the rhetoric is starting to float loose of planet Earth. This time around, the part of Ronald Reagan is being played by the hilariously monikered Dick Pound, who developed his fine moral sense by working with the international bagmen and titled unemployables that make up the International Olympic Committee. The part of William Bennett is being played by a guy named Dr. Gary Wadler, who's a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency. "We can't let these seminal events just pass by," Wadler told Ian O'Connor of USA Today. Of course not, not while there's authoritarian hysteria to be whipped up.

In fact, O'Connor is one of the finest sports columnists in America, so when he writes something like, "This doesn't have to be a fair fight, not with the stakes this high," as he did on Nov. 18, it's an indication that the conversation about sports and drugs is coming unhinged again, the way it did back in 1986. Seriously, what are the stakes here, so serious that we have to engage in another round of the kind of self-destruction that has failed us for almost 20 years? The integrity of the baseball record book? The integrity of Dick Pound's lucrative quadrennial track meet? (Now, there's a concept.) The integrity of the illusions of sportswriters who think they're still 10 years old?

I don't care if every record book in every sport reads like the Physicians' Desk Reference, and I couldn't care less at this point what happens to the Olympic Games. Given a choice between a non-drug-aided home run record and functioning Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, I will side with little Jemmy Madison and not, as Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News apparently would have me do, with Reggie Jackson. Jackson whined to Lupica, "This crap is all about your muscles. Well, guess what the biggest muscle in your body is? Your heart."

I realize that with sports we are talking about the private, and not the public, sphere, but we have allowed the job of abridging our rights to be subcontracted in so many directions these days that the government hardly has to bother itself with doing so any more, and a lot of that has its roots in the days after Len Bias died. Consider, for example, Pottawatomie County v. Earls, in which the Supreme Court decided last year, by the predictable 5-to-4 margin, that high-school students could be tested for drugs if they decided to participate in virtually any extracurricular activity.

The case concerned a girl named Lindsay Earls, who'd refused a school-mandated drug test. Lindsay Earls wanted to join the choir.

Now, a society that truly valued its civil liberties would have laughed the Supreme Court majority that promulgated this foolishness right off the bench. But that was not, alas, the case. Now there's a new steroid and a new push to erect another new infrastructure of unworkable and draconian rules. That will last until another cagey scientist invents another steroid that the drug warriors haven't heard of, and then the whole process will start all over again, and we discover that we learned nothing from the tragic passing of Len Bias except how to be idiots with each other.



Baseball and the Bird
The national pastime's legacy of obscenity.
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2003, at 10:45 AM PT

After vanquishing the Oakland A's on a called third strike last week, Red Sox pitcher Derek Lowe spun toward the opposing dugout, dropped his hands to his waist, and indulged in a celebratory groin chop. "I did the same crazy things I always do when I win," Lowe later explained, as he was being bathed in champagne. But several members of the losing side weren't so dismissive. "I saw it. It was completely classless," said A's first baseman Scott Hatteberg. "He's going to get paid back for that," promised shortstop Miguel Tejada.

While the A's may have been outraged, they shouldn't have been surprised. The obscene gesture—the crotch chop, and the crotch grab, and the extended middle finger—is as a much a part of baseball as, well, spitting and scratching. Digital articulation can be found, Zelig-style, at almost every important time, place, and event in baseball history. In fact, just two games prior to Lowe's outburst, the Sox watched teammate Byung-Hyun Kim flip off the Fenway faithful after getting booed during pre-game introductions.

Hall of Fame pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn, a 19^th-century ironman who won a record 59 games in 1884, is reputed to be one of the ancestors of baseball bird-flipping. (Though in this photo, it's hard to tell exactly what he's doing.) As photography widened the finger's reach, so did television bring it to the masses. In 1953, Dodgers pitcher Russ Meyer was caught making obscene gestures on television, leading to a three-day suspension and Commissioner Ford Frick's opposition to close-ups in the dugout.

When baseball's color line was shattered, the finger was there. Jackie Robinson may be famous for turning the other cheek, but other black players weren't always stoic when faced with fan abuse. In the early 1950s, Danville first baseman Bill White—a future president of the National League and one of the first African-Americans to play in the Carolina League—flipped off a vicious group of hecklers in Burlington, N.C. After the game, White's teammates had to brandish bats on the walk to the team bus.

A St. Louis groin grab changed the course of baseball history. If shortstop Garry Templeton hadn't crotched off to fans in 1981, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch probably wouldn't have demanded the testy shortstop be shipped away. A trade that winter swapped Templeton for Ozzie Smith; the Wizard of Oz immediately began building his Hall of Fame résumé, leading the Cardinals to the 1982 World Series title. For Smith's old team, the San Diego Padres, obscene gestures are a crucial part of franchise lore. Despite two World Series appearances, are there any more indelible Padres memories than Roseanne's crotch grab, following her lustily booed rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and general manager Chub Feeney's ouster for shooting the bird at a pair of rooters on Fan Appreciation Day? And luckily for the Royals, this year's playoff run wiped away reminiscences of the organization's finger-borne moment in the spotlight. When that shirtless father and son attacked first-base coach Tom Gamboa last year, the father contended that Gamboa started it by flipping them off.

Of course, not all gestures are created equal. An obscenity can connote anything from perceived sexual dominion, to disgust, to hedonism. (Expos second baseman Jose Vidro apologized when a devil-may-care, two-handed, two-fingered salute he gave on the bus was caught on tape earlier this year.) The bird can even indicate admiration. Earlier this year, Barry Bonds told ESPN the Magazine that he loves hitting against John Smoltz because he's the only pitcher who's willing to mouth off to him. How does the home-run king salute the closer's brio? By surreptitiously flipping him off from the dugout. (As Billy Martin could attest, there's nothing more puckish than a covert bird).

Why is baseball in particular so blessed with a legacy of digital obscenity? Among team sports, baseball gives fans the most opportunities to filter indignation onto a specific player. Because each athlete stands in the field, in a discrete spot, for minutes at a time, it's easy for vitriolic fans to localize their anger—and for some of baseball's most notoriously hotheaded players to absorb it.

Ted Williams never acknowledged the home fans with a tip of his cap during his playing career. But he did once greet them, after being booed for a poor fielding performance in a doubleheader, by performing what he later called "insulting gestures." Albert Belle performed a one-armed salute for fans who threw coins at him when the former Indian returned to Jacobs Field as a member of the White Sox; he later greeted an unappreciative Orioles home crowd with crotch grabs and bird flips. Among his many noteworthy feats of provocation, John Rocker flipped off Shea Stadium. And Carl Everett, who always does his own thing, has focused his ire on authority figures: He has both flipped off an umpire and directed a post-home-run crotch grab at elderly pitcher Jamie Moyer.

Pro football has produced some excellent practitioners of the art of obscene gesturing—linebacker Bryan Cox springs to mind—but in recent years, the NFL has limited aggression with mandatory penalties and fines. In baseball, where there are no codified penalties for gesturing, severity of punishment correlates with whom you're pointing at. The Padres' Phil Nevin simply apologized for flipping off a heckler, while Pudge Rodriguez was suspended for a game for showing his finger to an umpire. Jose Paniagua faced the most serious consequences: When the White Sox reliever shot the bird at home-plate ump Mark Carlson on Sept. 9, the team promptly released him.

Of course, Nevin and Rodriguez are former All Stars, while at the time of his exile Paniagua had an ERA of 108.00. In baseball, it seems the indiscretions of the middle finger are tolerated only when the other four are pulling their weight.



Whither the Fridge?
The evolution of the NFL fatso.
By Josh Levin
Updated Friday, Sept. 19, 2003, at 2:47 PM PT

There's no greater joy in sports than watching a fat man run back an interception. In the first week of this NFL season, mammoth Bills defensive tackle Sam Adams leaped a few inches and engulfed a short pass from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Then he took off, darting diagonally toward the near sideline. At the last instant, when it appeared the 335-pound tackle's ample momentum would cause him to tip like an overstuffed wheelbarrow, Adams nimbly cut the corner and sashayed into the end zone, arms flapping and shoulders bobbing.

Adams' spectacular return typifies the heady mixture of stout play and high comedy that fat tackles have brandished throughout NFL history. It's often said that pro football came of age when Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to a 23-17 overtime victory over the Giants in the 1958 NFL championship game. But Johnny U's teammate, Hall of Fame defensive lineman Art Donovan, exerted influence on the sport just as significant as that of the Colts' vertical passing game. The self-deprecating Donovan, who answered to the nickname Fatso, is responsible for inaugurating the most lasting of pro football stock characters: the lovable, fat defensive tackle.

The ample carriage shared by Donovan and the fattest of the football fat meshes perfectly with populist folk herodom. In a game where the player's faces are obscured by helmets, hefty defensive linemen have a physical attribute that no piece of equipment can cover up: a sloppy, floppy gut. They are the only players who might reasonably be mistaken for the guys wearing their replica jerseys.

In recent years, no player filled the role of the cartoonishly larger-than-life gridder better than William "The Refrigerator" Perry. In his rookie season of 1985, the Fridge's toughness against the run helped the Bears to the Super Bowl. And though not nearly the team's best player, the Fridge was probably the most popular Bear, owing to his comic forays into the offensive backfield and the winning gap-toothed smile he flashed in the classically awkward "Super Bowl Shuffle" video. In the early '90s, 340-pound Green Bay Packers tackle Gilbert Brown stepped into the Fridge's tradition of genial gianthood. While, like the Fridge, Brown contributed to the Pack's Super Bowl run, he was also known for toting sacks of hamburgers around the team's practice facility. At the peak of his popularity in 1997, "The Gravedigger" was given a fitting homage when a Green Bay Burger King franchise honored him by christening the double-stuffed Gilbertburger (hold the pickles).

Wide loads like Fatso, the Fridge, and the Gravedigger were often credited with solid play, but most fan and media attention focused on their impressive bulk. The unlikely player who brought about a sea change in fat tackle perception was the wisecracking, mulleted Tony Siragusa. While linebacker Ray Lewis scooped up the MVP award in Super Bowl XXXV, Siragusa and his comrade-in-thighs, then-Raven Sam Adams, were credited with clogging up the opposition's interior line. Instantly, fat linemen went from garish roster-filler to coveted accessory.

More than the other major pro sports leagues, the NFL excels at plagiarism. When one team wins with the West Coast offense, ten teams install it the following fall. And when a fat linemen tandem wins the Super Bowl, fat linemen became "run stuffers." In 2001, in the immediate afterglow of the Ravens' title, five of the first 19 players selected in the NFL Draft were 300-pound-plus defensive tackles—this after one of the first 24, one of the first 23, and zero of the first 32 picks went for tackles the prior three drafts. That same offseason, the Bears brought in stuffers Keith Traylor (340 pounds) and Ted Washington (365 pounds), who helped take the team to the 2001 playoffs with a 13-3 record. In 2002, one year after cult hero Norman "Heavy Lunch" Hand proved instrumental in the Saints' playoff drive, Grady Jackson, Martin Chase, and Hand came together like a fat Voltron to form New Orleans' half-ton "Heavy Lunch Bunch."

The problem with the fat lineman is that his productivity is often difficult to evaluate: There's a very fine line between actively tying up blockers and slouching around doing next to nothing. Since the run stuffer's supposed contributions don't show up in boldface on the stat sheet—in the Packers' 1997 Super Bowl season, Gilbert Brown had only 16 solo tackles—it's easy to assume that when the defense plays well, so does the stuffer. And when the stuffing's not up to snuff? Well, it's easy to blame the fat guy. I bet the big lug didn't even participate in the team's offseason conditioning program!

A recent New York Times article posited that the fat tackle's days are next to numbered. Now, the argument goes, every team prefers a Warren Sapp type—a defensive tackle with ample gut but quicker feet. In the 2003 NFL Draft, five of the first 13 players selected were defensive tackles in excess of 300 pounds—and all can supposedly rush the passer. Dewayne Robertson, the human landform the Jets selected fourth overall this April, typifies this new breed: His combination of size, quickness, and stamina would seem to augur ill for one-dimensional fatsos in the mold of the Fridge.

But in a league where the average career lasts less than just four seasons, fatsos have enjoyed surprising longevity. The Fridge played for 10 years, Siragusa for 12. Of the present crop of fat linemen, Hand is entering his ninth year, Dan "Big Daddy" Wilkinson and Brown their 10^th,* Traylor and Chester McGlockton their 12^th, and Washington his 13^th. Often, that hardiness stems from adaptability: McGlockton and Wilkinson collected sacks in their slimmer days, and Traylor was a linebacker. Now they've ballooned into beefy run-stuffers. So, while it's possible that Robertson and his nimble cohorts will put today's fatsos out of a job, it seems just as likely that they'll grow into the position themselves.



Presumed Innocent
The bogus nostalgia for the lost days of Little League.
By Jeremy Derfner
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2003, at 11:37 AM PT

As far as anyone knows, none of the ballplayers at the Little League World Series is actually a hot-dogging high-school ringer on 'roids. This year's boring tournament is a Danny Almonte hangover. But the relative tranquility hasn't kept the sportswriters from fuming about the decline and fall of baseball boyhood. Yesterday's New York Times, for example, reported ominously "Little League Innocence Fades in TV Glare."

With ABC and ESPN spending more than $7 million for the broadcast rights to the series, the Times complained, the sensitive little tykes now spend their time giving interviews instead of taking batting practice or, better yet, making new friends. They can't even cry off-camera anymore! Back in the good old days, "there weren't five satellite television trucks" camped out behind the ballpark and "[e]leven- and 12-year-olds were not considered major box office draws."

But Little League's innocence, if such a thing ever existed, faded a long time ago. In 1948, the United States Rubber Co. (maker of Keds and Uniroyal tires) bought the sponsorship rights to what was then a small rec program in Pennsylvania, and the league has been a PR juggernaut ever since. That year, the World Series was called the Keds' National Little League Tournament, and the players wore jerseys with the words "U.S. Keds" and "U.S. Royals" stamped on the chest. The boys, it turns out, have been boffo from the beginning.

Take the story of Joey Cardamone, star catcher of the 1948 champions, the Lock Haven All-Stars. Joey became a Little League folk hero because he graciously shook hands with two St. Petersburg, Fla., players as they crossed the plate after hitting home runs in the tournament final. A charming display of youthful innocence? Absolutely, and that's why the sponsor put it on film. An estimated 80 million Americans saw footage of the handshakes in a movie trailer (brought to you by U.S. Rubber) about Little League. The newsreel was even translated into Japanese and showed in Japan.

ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 will show more games (35) this year than ever before, but the difference is only one of degree. This kind of media attention is a Little League tradition. Throughout the 1950s, boys' baseball was standard radio fare. Local stations aired regular-season games, and network affiliates across the country carried the postseason action. Little Leaguers appeared in countless newsreels. The annual awards ceremony sometimes happened twice, once for real and once—in better light—for the cameras. ABC started televising the championship game way back in 1960. The intensity of ESPN's coverage reflects the glut of air time in the age of cable, not a new willingness "to make unpaid, unwitting commercial endorsers out of schoolchildren who still have a bedtime."

If media-made youth sports dates back 50 years, so does all the hand-wringing about it. Change the details and the Times lament sounds a lot like the host of exposés that appeared in the 1950s, culminating in a 1957 Sports Illustrated two-parter about "the epic war over the league's merits." Back then, reports of Almonte-esque impropriety abounded. A coach in Allentown paid his best players with fancy jackets and a free trip to New York. Overbearing parents encouraged their sons to break the rules. Spectators in Utica were betting on Little League games. Surely, this is not an experience we wish we could recapture.

Like U.S. Rubber in the 1950s, ABC and ESPN drown the kids in attention because cute sells. Little League World Series games don't draw better ratings than your average Brewers-Padres game because the quality of play is better. They draw well because watching young ballplayers emulating their favorite major leaguers tugs at the heart strings. And because people are suckers for crying kids.

"It's about the experience and the competition," a producer working on the series told the Times. "It's pure. It's almost innocent." Little League's PR people have been trying to get this message across since the Truman administration. The bogus nostalgia for innocence proves just how well the tactic has worked.



The Anti-Ichiro
Why Hideki Matsui will make a perfect Yankee.
By David Shields
Posted Monday, March 31, 2003, at 12:48 PM PT

Hideki Matsui, the new Yankee outfielder, is the anti-Ichiro: tall and muscular, not small and wiry; home runs instead of singles; earnest rather than witty. Where Ichiro is a dizzying mix of contrary and contradictory attitudes toward Japanese society, Matsui embodies its most traditional aspects. During the U.S. stars' tour of Japan during the fall of 2002, Ichiro, asked a question by a Japanese reporter, answered in Japanese. The Yankees' Jason Giambi interrupted him: "Hey, you've got to speak English now. You're a big-leaguer." Ichiro said, "Shut up, dude." When Matsui lost a home-run hitting contest to Barry Bonds during the same tour, Matsui said, "Today became a memorable day for me. I really admire his power and he sure is the No. 1 hitter in the world." Asked recently if he thought Matsui would achieve success in the major leagues, Ichiro characteristically deconstructed the question: " 'Success' is such a vague word. The records, numbers, and opinions of other people are secondary. I never set personal statistical goals." At his debut press conference in New York, Matsui, asked if he thought he could duplicate his 2002 year with Japan's Yomiuri Giants (50 home runs, 107 RBI, .337 batting average) this coming year in the major leagues, said, "It's probably going to be a little difficult, but I will try really hard to see if I can get results close to what I had last year. My strongest point is that I can hit home runs, and I hope I can produce the same result in America."

Matsui and the Yankees are a perfect fit. They're clean-cut, pleasant, old-school, and bromide-bound. They're inevitably described as "classy" or a "class act." And like the Yankee stars (with the conspicuous exception of David Wells), Matsui has configured a public persona so bland and all-encompassing that anything remotely real rarely penetrates or escapes the heat shields he has erected.

Born in 1974 in northern Japan, Matsui grew up in rural Kanazawa City, Ishikawa. As a boy, he hit the ball so far right-handed that his older brother forced him to hit left-handed in pickup games. (He still bats left but throws right.) He became a national legend when, in the Koshien High School tournament, he was intentionally walked five times; while fans booed and yelled and even threw garbage on the field (virtually unheard of in Japan), he quietly dropped his helmet and ran to first base each time without complaining. Until leaving for the United States in February for spring training (followed by 150 members of the Japanese media, who chartered their own flight to New York), he lived in an exclusive Tokyo apartment tower. He keeps to himself and is single—"the cost of being so focused," one publication speculated.

Matsui acquired his nickname "Godzilla" in high school, according to Ken Maranta, a writer at Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper: "At the Koshien tournament, Matsui would grit his teeth as he was swinging. One reporter said he looked like Godzilla because his teeth were all in line." In characteristic self-erasure, Matsui claims to "like the nickname a lot. Godzilla is a very strong creature but also has a good heart, and my face looks kind of like Godzilla. My face is scary."

When Matsui held a press conference to announce that he was leaving Japanese baseball, he wrote his talking points in pen on his hand, and he had tears in his eyes. Matsui says, "For the past year, I played with the Giants, and that meant I couldn't share my dream with my teammates or the fans. I had to avoid thinking about it by making every effort to place a lid on my selfishness." Matsui "agonized over it to the end. I tried to tell myself I needed to stay here for the prosperity of Japanese baseball, but my personal desire to go over there and play didn't go away. In the end I decided to go with what my gut said. This is the first time I've ever been faithful to myself. My greatest regret is what the fans will think. Some might call me a traitor. Once over there, I will do my best, as if my life were on the line, so the fans will be glad I went. The only thing I can say is 'I am sorry.' "

Asked, at the beginning of his first MLB season, if he had any regrets leaving Japan to play in the United States, Ichiro said, "I have no regrets following my dream to play in the major leagues. In fact, my only regret would have been if I didn't follow my dream." Upon arriving in the United States, Ichiro said, "Hey, Seattle, wassup?"

Ichiro says, "I don't play baseball for other people; I play baseball for myself." When asked if he had any special feelings after playing his first spring-training game with the Mariners, Ichiro said, "Today was just another game to me. I know it has some importance to the media, but not to me. Even being the first game, I was excited, not anxious." Matsui, on the other hand, tends to tighten up under pressure, because baseball is everything to him. In the U.S. All-Stars' tour of Japan in November—which Japanese fans hoped would showcase Matsui's home-run prowess; every time he came to bat, the public-address system played "We Are the Champions"—he hit no home runs and went 5-for-31 in the seven-game series. With each failure, his shoulders slumped lower, and he gripped the bat handle more tightly. In the bottom of the ninth inning of the tie-breaking seventh game, with Japan behind 4-2 and the bases loaded, Matsui, with a chance to redeem himself, weakly grounded out to end the game and the series. During his home-run duel with Barry Bonds before one of the games, he was so anxious that Bonds came over and massaged his shoulders, trying to get him to relax a little.

Matsui said, "During this series, I found out there are a lot of things I need to work on. I just have to accept the result and try hard when I get to America so I can show what I can do. I want to put the lessons I learned in this season to good use next year. I have to show the fans a bigger Matsui. Otherwise, there's no point in my going over there." More so than most players, certainly in the United States and even those in Japan, Matsui is aware of fans' fantasies of him, and he badly wants to live up to these fantasies—which makes him seem quite likable but also enormously vulnerable and somewhat naive. It's difficult to imagine him not struggling mightily his first year in New York.

At the press conference introducing him as a Yankee, Matsui, sounding as if he were reading from a TelePrompTer, said, over and over, "I'll try my best. I'll work hard. I'll do my best." He also said: "I'm really honored to be able to come to this beautiful city. … Today has been one of the happiest days of my life. … I'd like to try as hard as possible to become one of the team members of the New York Yankees and to be accepted in the city. … I can't wait to stand in the batter's box at Yankee Stadium, where honorable and very famous players have stepped. The ideal ballplayer is Babe Ruth. I want to be that kind of ballplayer, to give back to the baseball fans. I want to stand in the same batter's box where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig stood. I'll try really hard to bring a World Series championship to this city."

George Steinbrenner—who recently said, "I used to be an isolationist, but now I see the benefits of reaching out worldwide"—said about Matsui at the end of the media session, "What a nice young man." Yankee triumphalism had another willing convert.



The Nightmares of NASCAR
Why I'm too scared to go the Daytona 500.
By Mike Shropshire
Posted Friday, Feb. 14, 2003, at 10:36 AM PT

If the Daytona 500 isn't the largest all-Anglo assembly this side of Liverpool, it is certainly the drunkest. It's an around-the-clock intox-a-thon. Retribution weekend. For racing fans, the opening of the NASCAR Winston Cup season represents emancipation from pissant micromanagers, HMO rip-off professionals, PalmPilots, child-support collection pests, and mothers-in-laws who lurk in the shadows like Hannibal Lecter. And while you're at it, pass me another one of them room-temperature cans of Old Milwaukee.

Oh, I'll be watching the televised race on Fox, clinging to color announcer Darrell Waltrip's every syllable. I am hip to NASCAR, and with the new season unfolding I'm wondering how the Joe Gibbs racing team will fare now that it's switched from Pontiac to Chevrolet. Can Jeff Gordon regain his focus in the aftermath of his acrimony-spattered divorce? Can NASCAR maintain its ass-kicker panache after it allows somebody with one of those Formula-One-sounding names like Christian Fittipaldi into the mix?

See, I know all about this stuff. But I cannot muster the words to adequately describe how delighted I am that I will not be there in person to experience Daytona. Why? I've been around these guys, and frankly, they scare the crap out of me.

My first on-site exposure to the astounding phenomenon of Winston Cup racing happened in 1997, when they opened the Texas Motor Speedway here in my own bailiwick. NASCAR was big, a culture unto itself, and I felt compelled to go out there and experience the enchantment, the allure.

I was little like Casy, the preacher, when he hitched a ride out to California with the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. The preacher said, "Somethin's happening. I got to go where the folks is goin'. Gonna cuss 'n swear 'n hear the poetry of folks talking." Yeah, and once the preacher made it to California, he got his head opened up with an ax handle. But I went ahead and got a coveted press credential that offers access to the garage, pit areas, and media center, where Winston reps hand out free cartons of cigarettes.

You practically have to provide dental charts and DNA samples to land NASCAR media credentials. A press guy told me that a couple of journalists had the temerity to give (or perhaps sell) their credentials to some unauthorized rubes. He claimed that the reporters have been blacklisted, eternally banished from future events, and that NASCAR had fined their publications because of this unspeakable ethical lapse. "NASCAR can actually fine a newspaper?" I said. The NASCAR guy offered me a thin and rather chilly smile. With that, I entered the kingdom of modern big-league stock-car racing. This is no place for sissies.

The race teams—the drivers and crew chiefs and gas guys and tire changers and the whole entourage—still sport a number of psycho-rural types who have experienced the sensation of being whopped in the back of the head with a 2-by-4. Now, these folks should be fun to interview, but in order to get to them one must circumvent a gantlet of corporate shills with their characteristic high-viscosity personalities. "Oh, there are still some of the down-home types of fellas racing," Cale Yarbrough, who won his first Daytona in 1968, told me. "But they're getting harder and harder to find. The successful drivers are the ones with the financing. When I was doing it, the winner of the race was the driver who was the bravest one out there at the end of the day."

In the media center, a reporter tried to approach Bruton Smith Jr., a car-racing big-hoss who had built the new track in Texas. Smith has the darting eyes of an Enron exec and mean little teeth. Squirrel's teeth. "Bruton, I just talked to Dale Earnhardt, and he said he doesn't like the track," the reporter told Smith. "He said that Turn 3 is a disaster waiting to happen and that …"

Smith's entire head took on the helium-inflated look of a float in the Mardi Gras parade. "Bullshit! Dale didn't say that! That's a big, fat lie!" Smith responded. "Where you from, anyway?"

"Philadelphia," said the reporter.

"Well, then, that explains it," said Smith, who huffed away to the buffet, joining the line of baby elephants that constitute the NASCAR press corps.

About those NASCAR writers: A few of them go a quarter-ton, at least. The food-line fare, courtesy of the Lowe's home-improvement people, was gut-measurement appropriate. The writers carried off massive servings of synthetic cholesterol, coated with Ragu pasta sauce, and were soon back for seconds and thirds. During the course of the afternoon, I asked one of them to describe the benefits of covering the sport full-time, as opposed to say, ACC hoops. "No night games, no nigras, and no goddam coaches," he cheerfully explained.

Trent Lott could not have put it more eloquently. When they start the engines on Sunday, I'll be watching. Fifteen hundred miles seems a safe enough distance.



Chuck Those Woods
High-end golf clubs might boost Tiger's game, but they won't help yours.
By Nick Schulz
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003, at 1:37 PM PT

After last year's British Open disaster, Tiger Woods set golf junkies buzzing when he changed his irons to those made by his sponsor Nike. Hackers like me wondered: If the greatest in the game thought his performance might improve with new clubs, maybe mine would, too. No more shanked long-iron approach shots from 185 yards, no more punch and roll on the par threes. New irons. New technology. New game.

Not quite. While pricey clubs might add a few yards to Tiger's drives, they offer little solace to muni-course hacks like you and me. The idea that high-end clubs will significantly improve a hack's game is lucrative fiction. If anything, buying top-of-the-line woods and irons will probably add more strokes to your game than they'll take away.

The problem with high-end golf equipment is that new "innovations" are designed specifically to combat minor flaws in a PGA tour professional's game. If you're Phil Mickelson—spinning balls intentionally, slicing them precisely, or hooking 'em smartly—top-end clubs might help you get over the hump and win your first major. But if you're a weekend player, with serious flaws in your swing and far less ball control, you're better off with less-advanced woods and irons. The highest of high-end clubs are just a waste of money.

Take the Callaway Golf Forged Wedges, a beautiful new set of clubs designed by golf maestro Roger Cleveland and hawked by pros Annika Sorenstam and Charles Howell III. (A sand and pitching wedge will run you about $200.) Cleveland shrank the club heads of the Callaways, while retaining the density and weight distribution pro golfers need for smooth, consistent shots and a true "feel." The smaller head will undoubtedly help pros like Sorenstam hit balls cleanly out of crummy lies while still allowing them to feel exactly what they did with a shot in terms of loft, spin, and power. But for the hack golfer, smaller club heads aren't helpful. The average golfer is more concerned with "forgiveness"—essentially, that poorly struck and errant shots will not stray too wildly and get a golfer into much trouble. Smaller clubs are much less forgiving of tiny mistakes than larger, blunter heads, which means they'll probably just send your balls whizzing from one sand trap to another.

Or consider the design leap at the other end of the spectrum, the oversized club head. The new Redline Driver from Adams Golf features tungsten perimeter weighting and the highest possible "coefficient of restitution" (that's golf geek speak meaning it will generate the greatest possible velocity). The company says the clubs will give you "maximum distance, maximum accuracy, and maximum ease." Sounds promising, no?

But there's a tradeoff, and it's one a lot of golfers don't realize they are making. As Dick Rugge, senior technical director for the USGA, and others have pointed out, oversized clubs encourage people to swing a lot harder. With a bigger club head, you are psychologically less worried about hitting a bad shot. So, you overswing. Who wants to pull that huge No. 1 out of his bag in the tee box in front of his friends, only to lay off the backswing and follow through? It's true that a bigger club head is more forgiving. But it's also encouraging people to think they can swing like Tiger and get away with it. Bigger cuts actually mean less control and bigger misses. And that results in some truly awful golf shots.

Even high-end golf balls are suspect. The new HX balls (pronounced "Hex") go for $45 for a box of 12, about two to three times the cost of standard balls. The innovation? They replace the circular dimples found on normal balls with hexagonal dimples, designed to give your drives an aerodynamic boost. And whereas traditional balls have about three-fourths of the ball surface covered by dimples, the new HX balls have dimples on almost 100 percent of the surface, which should reduce wind drag. The manufacturer claims HX balls will likely add yards to your tee shot.

The problem for casual players is that HX balls can magnify your mistakes as much as they minimize your distance to the green. And that can be a big problem. For the weekend player, catastrophic mistakes are what make a golf game disgraceful. (There's a reason golfers say "the woods are full of long drivers"—referring to people, not clubs.) And HX balls mean that while it's now likely that a perfect tee shot might sail an extra 10 or 20 yards, it's just as likely that an errant shot into the high rough will become an errant shot into another fairway.

Why do golfers keep buying this stuff? Well, for one thing, they tend to have a lot of disposable income. For another, they tend to confuse equipment changes in golf with those in other sports, like tennis. (Indeed, since they are both club sports, racket and golf equipment are often sold in the same specialty stores.) Whereas a graphite tennis racket allows the average player to hit the ball much harder than the wooden paddle Bjorn Borg used, new golf technology hasn't really changed the fundamental nature of the game—even for the pros.

Bob Haines, a mechanical engineer who outfits well-to-do golf clients in the Washington, D.C., area, says there's a reason "scoring averages are the same as they were 50 years ago." Tiger and Annika Sorenstam might be hitting a little longer today than they would using clubs made 30 years ago—but that has as much to do with athletic conditioning and course upkeep as it does their clubs. As Haines told me, "An old Wilson-made Sam Snead set is basically the same design as the top-of-the-line Nike clubs Tiger uses today. … They may use new names—beta titanium vs. regular titanium—but, look, I can tell you all these fancy names don't make much difference. If your swing isn't good, your game won't be either."

I, too, can testify because I'm one of the dupes. After upgrading to a $1,500 custom-made set of clubs several years ago, I was hopeful a new era of sub-90 rounds was imminent. Nope—my scores still exceeded my IQ. Despite longer steel shafts and elliptical back-weighted heads (whatever the hell those are), my rounds collapsed in a John Daly-esque fit of blown shots at the 13^th and bourbon shots at the 19^th. New gear won't do anything to reduce a hack golfer's high scores. For that, there's a cheaper albeit less sexy alternative: practice.



Romancing the Microbe
Cheese fervor in a time of germ anxiety.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2003, at 9:58 AM PT

"It's a little like Best in Show" joked California cheese-maker Sue Conley, whose washed-rind triple-crème beauty, Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk, had just won the American Cheese Society's top prize.* The annual competition, held last month in San Francisco, was indeed a celebration of the same kind of arcane, all-consuming passion on display in Christopher Guest's dog show mock-u-mentary.

The contest was part of the American Cheese Society's 20^th annual conference; the organization, dedicated to the promotion of traditionally made cheeses, is riding high right now. American cheese has come into its own, if not fully casting off the shadow of European classics like Roquefort, brie, and Parmigiano Reggiano, then at least finding a place alongside the imports at influential restaurants and cheese shops. Even Daily Candy, the effervescent online fashion and shopping newsletter, provided a link to the Manhattan restaurant/cheese shop Artisanal. There's something kind of funny about the thought of women in Sigerson Morrison flip flops dishing over the latest stinky soft-rind cheese. But just as peasant blouses made it big a couple of years back, so are peasant cheeses.

Certainly, the quality and availability of American artisan cheeses have steadily improved over the past two decades. Small-scale cheese-makers have tried hard to define themselves against the blandness of plastic-wrapped "commodity" cheese, and specialty-food retailers such as Whole Foods have spread across the country. But the improved inventory doesn't entirely explain the current popularity of cheese. The Atkins diet, with its validation of high-fat foods, surely has something to do with it. The program has thoroughly undermined the low-fat imperative in American nutrition, even for those who don't adhere to it. And reports in trades like the Cheese Reporter have suggested that specialty foods like cheese seem to be recession-proof. People may be staying home from restaurants, but when they entertain at home, they still seek status in rustic-chic comestibles like cheese, bread, and wine.

Many cheese consumers have also bought into a certain agrarian romanticism, the sense that farming may be, as Benjamin Franklin asserted, "the only honest way" to make a living. Dairy farming, which implies the care—not the killing—of animals (vegan objections notwithstanding), comes off as especially wholesome. Organizations like Slow Food and publications like Saveur have helped promulgate this notion, profiling traditional food-makers and elevating them to the status of folk heroes. Most Americans aren't looking to start their own farm, but purchasing a lovely farmstead cheddar makes it possible to nibble on someone else's salt-of-the-earth nobility.

To convey this sense of agrarian craftsmanship, the food press and retailers have popularized the word "artisan" (as in the French adjective "artisanal") as a catch-all for food products made in a low-tech, highly skilled manner—crusty breads, homemade jams, small-batch olive oils, and cheeses. Retailers have used the term, often conflating it with the organic label, to coax high prices from conscientious food consumers. But there are no rules comparable to organic standards that allow a product to be called artisanal, which means that big food corporations are already beginning to use the term to describe decidedly uncraftsmanlike products. At the convention, cheese-makers voiced growing concern that the wholesome appeal of craft cheeses might soon be co-opted by the likes of Kraft.

What's slightly ironic, of course, is that when it comes to cheese, not all of the work is controlled by human hands. Like beer, wine, and sourdough bread, good cheese derives its complexity from the action of microbes—bacteria, yeast, and mold—on milk. One technique and set of cultures will result in a sharp, long-aged cheddar while another will result in a white-rinded, oozy cheese that ripens from the outside in (think camembert and brie). The microbes are usually purchased from "culture houses" that isolate and grow microbes in a laboratory environment, but if you're really bold and low-tech, you can try to work with microbes already present in the room where the cheese is being made. I'm told that some American cheese-makers, looking to France as the gold standard in cheese-making, have smeared classic French cheeses on the wall of their plants in an effort to introduce the Gallic molds into their operations.

In addition to choosing the microbes, there are a thousand other judgments involved in making good cheese; chief among them is the kind of milk to use. Sheep, goat, or cow? Farmstead or outsourced? Organic or not? Pasture-fed or silage-fed? And, most controversially, pasteurized or raw? Milk must be heated to be pasteurized, and heat unravels proteins, which in turn affects the flavor of the cheese. Cheese made with raw milk is consistently described by cheese aficionados as more "alive" than its pasteurized cousin: The flavor of milk, and thus the cheese, the argument goes, is full of the fragrance of the herd's food and also full of microflora specific to the farmland. Pasteurizing milk, to make a bad pun, homogenizes its flavor. (There is also the as-yet unproven argument that consuming microflora in raw milk products helps habituate human bodies to microbes and thus boosts immunity.) But the options for selling raw-milk cheeses in this country are limited. By law, unpasteurized cheeses on the market in the United States must have been aged at least 60 days (aging cheese changes its chemistry and makes it less friendly to pathogens). Farmers who make younger cheeses often try to pasteurize their milk in a slower, lower-heat manner in order to disturb its proteins as little as possible. It's worth noting that a lot of good cheeses are made with pasteurized milk, including the prizewinning Red Hawk.

At the conference, the raw-milk issue was not as pressing as it had been three years ago, when the FDA seemed poised to require all commercial dairy products, even aged ones, to be pasteurized in an effort to prevent food-poisoning outbreaks. Today, there is still a general sense that the right to work with raw milk may be threatened, but serious scientific studies are also being done—at the University of Vermont, for example—that suggest that aged raw-milk cheeses are not inherently more dangerous than pasteurized. The few outbreaks of listeria in aged raw-milk cheeses can be traced to poor handling of cheeses after they left the cheese-maker's hands.

So, let's ask the obvious question: Why on earth would fermented foods like cheese be enjoying such a wave of popularity at a time when microbial anxiety is running so high? The threat of bioterrorism lingers in the back of our minds, new diseases like West Nile virus and SARS freak us out, and antibiotics that have kept us healthy for years seem to be losing their efficacy. Perhaps the thought of microbial cultivation, a sort of micro-agriculture, is comforting. Cultivating microbes confers an idea of control: It reassures us that we've lived with microbes for a long time and always found a way to manage them.

In a presentation at the cheese conference, Sister Noëlla Marcellino, a cheese-making nun with a doctorate in microbiology, explained how bacteria and fungi in her abbey's raw-milk cheeses helped not only to develop the flavor of the cheese but also to inhibit the growth of pathogens. Her PowerPoint presentation was delivered with scientific objectivity, and yet I imagined good microbes duking it out with listeria in a microscopic struggle for the soul of the cheese. As long as good cheese is available, it's a battle that's won at cocktail parties every day.



Grape Deceptions
Why most wine collectors are also compulsive liars.
By Mike Steinberger
Posted Friday, May 23, 2003, at 8:21 AM PT

One of the wine world's dirty little secrets is the apparently vast number of wine lovers who harbor dirty little secrets. The amount of time and money wine collecting consumes can be hell on a relationship. Determined not to see their hobby cause friction at home, many oenophiles keep the peace not by limiting their buying (an impossibility), but by going to enormous lengths to conceal it. To get the vino, sometimes you have to sacrifice the veritas.

Presumably, most serial sneaks would prefer to be honest about their profligacy, but coming clean is simply not feasible—not when their spouses insist on treating wine like a mere beverage and believe that spending hundreds of dollars a month on fermented grape juice is irresponsible and asinine, possibly even immoral. This is the regrettable attitude many wine buffs confront.

Making matters worse, the partner not besotted with wine is often the one in charge of household finances. (Stockpiling huge quantities of wine requires a certain impracticality and insouciance, attributes that do not readily lend themselves to mundane tasks like balancing a checkbook.) This is a problem. Prices for Bordeaux, Burgundies, Rhones, Napa Valley cabernets, and other blue-chip wines have soared in the last decade as more Americans and, to a lesser extent, Asians, have become serious oenophiles.

At the same time, the market has been saturated with stellar vintages. The Southern Rhone in 1998. The Northern Rhone in '99. Bordeaux in 2000. Germany in 2001 … and on and on. (Only now is this glut, combined with the sour economy, beginning to weigh on prices; expect some steals in the months ahead.) There is just no end to the must-haves these days. For all but the most affluent buyers, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a respectable cellar and placate their parsimonious spouses. Something has to give, and it is their significant others who are doing the giving. They just don't know it.

Hiding the extent of one's habit can take a variety of forms, off-balance-sheet transactions being the most common. These are usually done in cash, but many wine nuts establish separate credit card accounts and have the bills sent either to the office or to a postal box. But paying for the wine is one thing; smuggling it into the house is another. Some don't even try, opting instead to rent space in wine warehouses. Others take delivery at the workplace and keep the bottles there until it is safe to sneak them home and into the basement.

To get a sense of how prevalent these shenanigans are, I rang a friend—let's call him Johnny—who owns a popular Manhattan wine shop. He agreed to cough up some stories, but only if I wouldn't print his name (and discretion is exactly what you want in an enabler). "Lying is rampant," he told me, "I see it all the time." He spoke of one regular who comes in several nights a week and inevitably walks out with two bottles: an inexpensive, quotidian wine and a gem. The former is paid for with plastic and goes into a store bag; the latter he buys with cash and buries in his briefcase, presumably to be squirreled away somewhere later that evening.

With some clients, Johnny takes an active role in the deception. In fact, he recently helped pull off one of the great snookerings of his career: A customer who frequently makes purchases behind his wife's back came into the store, spouse in tow; with just a few signaling winks and nods, Johnny and his client managed to execute a costly sale while keeping the wife completely in the dark.

Another retailer shared with me his most cherished tale of deception. He had a client with deep pockets and a passion for Burgundies (a passion that requires deep pockets). According to the merchant, this customer never purchased a wine under $100 a bottle. To mask his extravagant buying, he obtained a debit card and began storing wine in an empty office down the hall. Over five years he accumulated some 300 cases, all of which he stashed in the spare office. (There are 12 bottles in a case; if every bottle was $100, the total works out to $360,000. Given that many of the wines were far costlier, the price tag was probably well above $500,000.) The long-running ruse came to an abrupt end when his wife paid a visit to the office and opened the wrong door. For some time thereafter, the marriage was evidently on the rocks. However, the couple eventually worked out their differences—so successfully, in fact, that she was next seen helping him organize his wines.

Not all wine-hiding tales end so happily. Jeff Zacharia, owner of Zachy's, the great wine emporium in Scarsdale, N.Y., told me of one former customer (former because he isn't allowed to buy wine anymore) who amassed a collection worth around $20,000 without his wife's knowledge. She eventually found him out, and Zacharia's client was given a choice: Sell the wine or see me in court. He sold.

There is, of course, a common thread here: It is men—husbands, usually—who are doing the lying. When it comes to wine collecting and concealing, there is indeed a gender gap. Preferring to open bottles, not cans of worms, I won't speculate as to why this is so, and in any case, the gap seems to be narrowing. At a recent dinner, I found myself discussing cellar strategies with a female executive from Los Angeles who ruefully admitted that because her husband is a penny-pinching beer drinker, she does her buying on the sly. I was of two minds about her. I was glad to learn that wine is capable of driving women to deceit, but I was also glad she wasn't my wife. As far as I'm concerned, there's only room in a relationship for one wine cheat.

As you may have suspected, I do have some experience in these matters. Wine has caused pain in my marriage. My wife, an editor at a food and wine magazine, has more than a passing interest in chardonnays and Vouvrays, but for her, wine is not an obsession. She thinks of wine collecting chiefly in terms of opportunity cost, while I think of it chiefly in terms of opportunity lost—if I don't buy a particular bottle, I might come to regret it. (That said, I've got a very modest cellar—150 bottles, give or take 200.) As a result, we have endured our share of long evenings and near-divorce experiences on account of credit card charges and receipts I neglected to burn.

Our most recent wine spat was two years ago, when I was hit with an unexpected $300 excess-baggage fee for several cases I was carrying back from France. On the flight home, I finally decided to put myself on a budget. (It is a modified budget, in that only wines meant for cellaring count against it; wines for immediate consumption are paid for out of my wallet.) I have done a fairly good job of adhering to my self-imposed limits. Since my son's birth in 2001, most of my purchases have revolved around his needs. To mark his 10^th birthday, for instance, he'll need something better than a Bud Light, so I recently preordered a bottle of 2001 Haut-Brion, the least expensive of the Bordeaux First Growths but also the best (the wine hasn't reached stores yet; it is now being sold on a pre-arrival basis).

And obviously, he'll have to go to college; I can no longer count on the stock market to fund his education, so, as a form of insurance, I am now accumulating wines that are likely to have significant resale value. Will I resell them? Not a chance, but it is good to have the option and useful, too, to have a more convincing explanation for any displeasing items on the Amex bill. Actually, wine can be a stellar investment: The 1982 Chateau Petrus, to give just one example, has delivered substantially higher returns than the S&P 500 over the past two decades. Among spendthrift oenophiles, pointing out wine's investment potential is a popular means of deflecting irate spouses. It's much better than the lesser-evil argument (marital infidelity being the most frequently cited alternative) because not only does it not sound defensive; it sounds downright prudent. In a bear market, who can dispute the need for appreciating liquid assets?



The Marvelous Michelin Man
Don't blame the top restaurant guide for a French chef's suicide.
By Mike Steinberger
Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 1:20 PM PT

Reacting to the suicide last Monday of fellow culinary kingpin Bernard Loiseau, Paul Bocuse and other top French chefs skipped the shock and went straight for the scapegoating, blaming his death on merciless, mercurial critics. They claimed Loiseau's recent demotion by GaultMillau, a popular restaurant guide, led him to make a date with the business end of his rifle. But the principal object of their ire was the all-powerful Michelin Guide, whose coveted stars can make or break a restaurant (the loss of a star will generally cut a restaurant's turnover by at least 25 percent). They said the pressure of trying to perennially please Michelin drove Loiseau, one of just 25 three-star recipients in France (Bocuse is another), to the brink. They also blame Michelin for making haute cuisine an impossibly difficult business. Talk about biting the hand …

Michelin exercises the influence it does because restaurants matter in France and because the guide, with its army of anonymous inspectors, has proven itself over the years to be a rigorous, honest, and generally excellent judge of them. The "Red Bible," as it is known, is a symbol of French culinary achievement and a guarantor of French culinary standards. It has long been a springboard to fame and riches for chefs, and the importance they attach to Michelin stars has only magnified the guide's importance to restaurant-goers. Nowadays, when top-flight cooking is increasingly homogenized and the French no longer boast a monopoly on gastronomic genius, what mystique French fare and French chefs retain is chiefly attributable to Michelin.

It's not a little ironic that Bocuse has been doing most of the finger-pointing during the past week, since no one has prospered more than he from Michelin's imprimatur. Initially awarded three stars in 1965, he was the first chef to use the guide's stamp of approval as a ticket to universal celebrity, becoming a globe-trotting icon with lucrative consulting and endorsement deals. The fact that Bocuse is now 77 years old and some three decades removed from his last big flash of inspiration at the stove—he was one of the godfathers of nouvelle cuisine—yet still holds three stars and is still the world's most famous chef is emblematic of Michelin's ability to catapult chefs to stardom and keep them there.

Loiseau's life ambition was to mimic the success Bocuse has enjoyed. He once said he wanted to be to gastronomy what Pelé was to soccer. When his obsessive pursuit of a third star—the subject of a superb book by American journalist William Echikson titled Burgundy Stars (Loiseau's restaurant, La Côte d'Or, is located in Saulieu, a somniferous town at the northern tip of Burgundy)—finally bore fruit, Loiseau used the critical acclaim to assemble a mini-empire. There were TV shows, cookbooks, a line of frozen foods, a boutique, a handful of bistros in Paris, even a listing on the Paris stock market. Some of the postmortems have suggested that Loiseau did all this moonlighting out of necessity—to keep La Côte d'Or afloat. In fact, he did it chiefly because he craved the spotlight.

True, operating the restaurant was a huge and growing financial burden, and at the time of his death Loiseau was sinking into debt. Bocuse and other Michelin-bashers have blamed his money woes, and those of other three-star chefs, on the guide, which they contend requires budget-busting levels of opulence.

Michelin does have high expectations, but so do its readers. When you go to a three-star, you generally expect an obscenely lavish, memorable meal—pristine ingredients, flawless execution, impeccable service, baronial surroundings. Putting on that kind of show requires a serious investment these days, and not just because foie gras and caviar don't come cheap. French labor laws—relatively high wages, generous benefits, the 35-hour work week—have pushed operating expenses for three-star establishments into the stratosphere.

The restaurants now find themselves caught in a vicious cycle: They pass on the added costs by raising prices—the going rate for lunch or dinner at a three-star is around $200 a head these days (20 percent of the tab is thanks to that other business-deflating institution, the value-added tax)—and as the prices increase, so do the expectations.

Several marquee chefs, including Alain Ducasse, are now working out of hotels because they have concluded that running a top-notch stand-alone establishment is no longer feasible or desirable. The biggest culinary star in France at the moment, Marc Veyrat, nearly went bankrupt several years ago; a little mercy from his bankers kept the lights on.

Loiseau had those same financial difficulties, but unlike most of his peers, it seems he had no outside backing (save for the investors in his stock). Moreover, three-stars now cater largely to foreigners, and Saulieu is not exactly a hot destination. Had La Côte d'Or been in, say, Dijon, things might have turned out differently.

But Loiseau wanted Michelin's approbation and all the perks it conferred, and he wanted these things entirely on his terms. While his death is both a personal tragedy and a cultural one, Michelin didn't kill him; he killed himself.

If anything, Michelin appears to have cut him some slack in recent years. It is common knowledge that the guide is slow to demote underperforming three-stars. Loiseau's contribution to the French canon was cuisine a l'eau, in which sauces are fashioned from water, natural juices, and oils, with less emphasis on butter and cream. But he coined this approach ages ago. The first and only time I ate at La Côte d'Or, three years ago, the food was tired and so was he. This was the prevailing view at the time. Nonetheless, it was apparently only recently that Loiseau was warned by Michelin that he was in danger of a downgrade.

Given the kind of power that the guide wields, its reluctance to act in haste is generally a good thing. So, too, its unwillingness to succumb to the neophilia that afflicts most restaurant critics. Obviously, if Michelin was consistently rewarding mediocrity and ignoring culinary innovators, it wouldn't have the influence it does. In fact, though, it seems to strike a superb balance between the old and the new, keeping haute cuisine firmly rooted in the past while also rewarding progress. Gastronomic temples like Taillevent receive three stars, but so do postmodern virtuosos like Veyrat (among other things, Veyrat has introduced heroin chic to the Gallic dining room: Part of his shtick is having waiters inject sauces into dishes via syringes).

Loiseau's suicide and the controversy surrounding it have led some commentators here to conclude that the American restaurant scene is infinitely better off for not being subjected to Michelin's scrutiny. (Michelin publishes restaurant guides to 17 European countries besides France but has never had a U.S. edition.) That's like saying American athletes would be better off if they didn't compete in the Olympics. Top American chefs have always measured themselves against the three-stars, and it has become an article of faith in recent years among cooks and critics alike that restaurants like French Laundry, Daniel, Le Bernardin, and Charlie Trotter's are now just as good as the choicest tables in Europe. It would be great if Michelin put that proposition to the test by publishing an American guide.

If a U.S. restaurant were awarded three stars, the effect would be electrifying. As gastronomy goes, it would truly mark the emergence of a new world order (not only that: half the put-downs in the typical Frenchman's repertoire of anti-Americanisms would instantly be rendered invalid). If, on the other hand, expectations were dashed and no American restaurant received the ultimate accolade, it would be a good reality check and a source of motivation. The rigorous scrutiny would certainly be a change of pace: Chefs here have generally had it a pretty easy with the critics and have come to expect softball coverage (witness the bellyaching when William Grimes became restaurant critic of the New York Times and tried to toughen its grading). Michelin would thrust our top chefs into competition with the likes of Veyrat. It would be edifying and not a little entertaining to see if they could take the heat.



The Liberace of Chocolate
Very good chocolate in very bad taste.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Thursday, Feb. 13, 2003, at 7:57 AM PT

If pastry chef Jacques Torres were ever imprisoned by an evil mastermind, I have no doubt that within 24 hours, he would escape with a hand-wrought, fully articulated chocolate gun. It would fire delicious but deadly cacao nib bullets, and, knowing Torres, it would boast decorative "pearl" handles crafted from white chocolate.

Torres has become an accumulating presence on the Food Network, with one current series, Passion for Dessert; another, Chocolate With Jacques Torres, in heavy rerun rotation; and a special, Passion for Chocolate, that aired this week. While the stagy setting and the slow pace of his shows cannot compete with the flash and fire of Iron Chef's kitchen stadium, Torres' how-to projects are as absurd and dazzling as those of the feuding Japanese chefs.

"I am feeling very passionate about chocolate today," says Torres during his chocolate special, affably if not passionately. Unlike several of his Food Network compatriots, Torres' zeal shows in his craft, not his patter. In the chocolate special, he does not discuss how to choose good chocolate, how to chop it, or how to melt it carefully. Instead, Torres puts his energies into insane feats of chocolate engineering. He coats a balloon with drizzles of chocolate, then deflates the balloon, leaving a chocolate cage "like a spider's nest." He's a shade tentative as he deflates the balloon, warning that if it should burst suddenly, the chocolate will fly onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. Torres also uses balloons to make white-chocolate flowers, which are then painted with gaudy food-color paints. Affixed to the chocolate balloon, the result is extraordinary in its fragile grandeur and in its ugliness.

Torres used to be the pastry chef at Sirio Maccioni's society restaurant Le Cirque and its avatar, Le Cirque 2000, where he established himself as a master of a certain spectacular, yet wholly edible whimsy. There were hats and clown faces, ladybugs, and, most famously, a chocolate stove complete with tiny sauce-filled pots. The waiter would open the oven door to reveal a slice of Opera cake, a gilded chocolate pastry once considered spectacular of its own accord. These days, in the real world, Torres has toned down his act a little: He makes bonbons and hot cocoa for the downtown set at his Brooklyn factory, where he also serves up a few impeccable pastries from the French canon.

But on television, he sticks to the razzle-dazzle. Torres has the confectioner's version of the Midas touch. There is nothing in our ordinary world he cannot recraft in sugar or chocolate. Molten sugar is shaped into a moon and flowers. He casts an ornate chocolate frame and fills it with a painted white-chocolate canvas. He inverts the concept of a Jell-O mold and uses Knox gelatin to make a flexible cast of a champagne bottle. He later silk-screens the bottle's label, using chocolate as ink.

While Torres reveals some great pastry tricks, his shows have little pretense of how-to. Equipment requirements are extensive: The chocolate special alone called for florist's acetate, a blowtorch, a mason's trowel, four fat metal rulers, a dozen or so balloons, and an extendable five-bladed pizza roller. One has to refer to the Food TV Web site for Torres' guidance on tempering chocolate, the tricky but essential process of heating and cooling chocolate so that it is hard and glossy when it solidifies. And naturally, the show modestly cuts to commercial during every critical moment of assembly, leaving no ungraceful moments, except for one brief shot of Torres' grubby, chocolate-coated hands.

His shows do reveal the great irony of the sweet kitchen: It takes the most deliberate kind of precision to create the most frivolous of foods. Unlike chefs, who work spontaneously in the heat of the kitchen line, the pastry chef must work early in the day, when the kitchen is cool and fickle ingredients like chocolate, butter, and sugar can be tamed. Most of the pastry chef's components are made hours or days ahead and then layered together on the plate. This difference in process often makes pastry chefs outsiders in restaurant kitchens. Indeed, Torres is one of the few pastry chefs to rise to name-brand stardom (Francois Payard and Claudia Fleming also come to mind).

In an effort to flag down a little attention, and perhaps because desserts are always an up-sell, some pastry chefs indulge in garnishes, embellishments, and other bits of drama. Thrilled with the plasticity and strength of their raw materials, Torres and his compatriots push the boundaries of their media. Cue the blown sugar, the foams, and representational pastry. These desserts are rarely constrained by good taste: I once decided not to attend a cooking academy after watching one of the advanced pastry students craft a tepee and squatting Indians out of marzipan. On another recent Food Network special, an international competition judged by Torres, one of France's top pâtissiers solemnly airbrushed a clown's face onto a sugar plaque. Torres' own sweet creations often ignore a century of modernist art and design. (Although he and Jeff Koons might find something to talk about.)

Torres' valiant commitment to complex frivolity makes him the spiritual brother of another cable how-to hero, master hot-rodder Jesse James of the Discovery Channel's Monster Garage. James and his crew make cars as pliant as chocolate, converting ordinary limousines, buses, and Austin Minis into firetrucks, boats, and snowmobiles. Both Torres and James are masters of vernacular engineering, both are problem solvers of uncanny cleverness, and both show a weakness for shiny surfaces. I can only hope that Torres and James will get together sometime soon and produce a lowrider made out of cocoa beans and fondant.



"I Say the Hell With It!"
School lunches are making kids fat—but collard greens aren't the solution.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003, at 10:43 AM PT

Congress is preparing to review the $10 billion annual federal school nutrition program this spring, responding to a widespread sense of crisis. The proportion of severely overweight children and adolescents has tripled over the last 30 years, to 15 percent. Health problems have multiplied; Type 2 diabetes, which used to be called "adult onset diabetes," has now encroached on childhood.

But as America's battle with an epidemic of childhood obesity enters the schools, it's worth being on guard against severely inflated expectations. As if the goal of getting kids to consume moderately healthier lunches weren't daunting enough, some reformers seem to envision wholesale re-education of students' palates. Count on Californians to be out in front of the gastronomic crusade. "Kids don't like Shakespeare, but it's good for them. It's the same with food," insisted a champion of Berkeley High School's recent quest to convert students to "nutritious, fresh, tasty, locally grown food that reflects Berkeley's cultural diversity."

Given the dismal quality of school food—from canned government-surplus staples in the lunchroom to Coke-and-junk-stocked vending machines in the halls, with no trace of vitamin-rich roughage in sight—a pendulum swing to hyper-wholesomeness is hardly surprising. Dietary issues have always tended to inspire zealotry in this country, where "the perfect diet," "the total health makeover," the "revolutionary weight control program" exert great allure. But when it comes to adults telling children what to eat, the contest of wills is rarely just about controlling appetite—it's also about kids resisting adult control. In other words, the real problem isn't providing children with healthier lunch options; it's figuring out how to make them actually eat what's served up.

Take what happened at Berkeley High. The public school's healthy alternative to "the airline food model" included organic pork tacos with fresh tortillas—a specialty of the Berkeley queen of cuisine, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. There were also such delicacies as pesticide-free salads and stir-fried tofu. But even (or especially?) kids reared with a fresh-is-best ethos turned up their noses at the offerings, the New York Times reported. They bought sweets and sodas instead or hurried to nearby fast-food outlets. The program closed down this fall, with the director of nutrition services for the district still vowing that "we are committed to re-establishing healthy food."

Advocates of super-nutritious lunches may point to the success of a program in Opelika, Ala.—an initiative that was also touted lately in the Times. Opelika's menu is down-home by comparison to Berkeley's Chez-Panisse-style approach, yet just as high-minded. Courtesy of local farmers, students in the rural district of Opelika are served fresh lima beans, butter cream peas, black-eyed peas, collard and turnip greens. And they actually eat the stuff—but that's only because they aren't allowed off school property and vending machines aren't allowed on it. Opelika is unusual in other ways, too: Its school kitchens, unlike most American schools, are equipped to cook food, not just heat it up, and parents and school officials have been happy to fork over extra funds. In short, this wholesome food model (like Berkeley's) is not readily replicable.

Even if it were, the collard-and-turnip-greens ideal shouldn't set the standard for lunch reform. Public schools have their plates full without taking on the (hopeless) task of turning junk-food enthusiasts into eager veggie-eaters. ("I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it": The complaint dates back three-quarters of a century.) A more feasible—and more useful—aim would be to help kids become wiser fast-food consumers. After all, their lunch hours are rushed. (As one poor Berkeley student remarked, "no one can appreciate cuisine" when there's barely time to sit down.) And they're going to be eating on the run for years to come.

There is a model out there: Subway, the sub sandwich enterprise founded in 1965 and first franchised in 1974, which last year surpassed McDonald's with more than 13,000 outlets across the United States. Subway doesn't require a perfect or revolutionary dietary regimen (much less an elaborate kitchen: Its franchises are cheap and often cramped, with a set-up most schools could probably match). It markets ordinary cold cuts (which even kids like) as a shortcut to wholesomeness (which is what everybody really wants, not least parents and schools faced with picky eaters). And its company history is itself evidence that eating better need not entail a total health makeover—just some tactical maneuvers.

Remember the Subway of the early 1970s? It was known for the BMT—the "biggest, meatiest, tastiest" sub, stuffed with salami, pepperoni, ham, and bologna, hardly an example of organic wholesomeness. But the Subway of the late 1990s carved out a hugely expanded niche with an aroma of baking bread and a pitch for smaller, fresher sandwiches featuring "seven under 6 grams of fat." It has stuck to the same basic ingredients through thick and thin, and it packages healthier options as small choices rather big sacrifices: pile on the peppers and pickles, hold the mayo, vary the bread. Unlike McDonald's and Taco Bell—which abandoned the McLean Deluxe burger and the Border Lights menu in the early '90s—Subway successfully taught us that we could like healthy fast food.

Subway's menu does not promise organic salvation—the closest it has ever come to fruit is the Fruizle smoothie; for dessert, there are cookies rather than, say, apples—but for the most part the sub menu adds up to many fewer calories and a fraction of the fat of the burger-and-fries alternative. And by not requiring a lifestyle transformation, the scaled-down hero can encourage even the least health-food minded to take steps in the right direction, with unexpected results—as evidenced by twentysomething Jared Fogel, a former 425-pound fatso, who, in 2000, became the franchise's poster boy. After a year of eating only Subway's lowest-fat sandwiches instead of his usual mega-Mac diet, Fogel had lost 245 pounds—and it had felt "a little like feasting," he said, "rather than totally depriving myself."

Nutrition activists, understandably enough, may be alarmed by the spread of corporate logos in public schools (according to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, the American School Food Service Association estimates that nearly a third of public high schools serve "branded fast food," from Taco Bell to Pizza Hut). But schools don't have to buy the Subway trademark to learn from the Subway strategy. With 28 franchises actually on school grounds so far, and a thousand delivery contracts, Subway has proved a big hit with administrators desperate, as Schlosser reports, to have "kids ... think school lunch is a cool thing, the cafeteria a cool place, that we're 'with it,' that we're not institutional." In the Northwest Independent School District near Fort Worth, Texas, the new Subway franchise whips ups batches of three different subs before each of three lunch periods—there's no time for custom-made fare. And the students flock to it. Without much trouble, the lunch ladies who now dish up soggy greens and mystery meat could be handing out fresh baked bread, recognizable cold cuts, and veggie toppings that plenty of teens—even the trendsetters—would happily eat. After all, Saturday Night Live and Letterman have already made Jared "the Subway guy" a nebishy celebrity for an age of irony—a pragmatist rather than a purist in the realm of appetite, the kind of proselytizer a kid can stomach.



diary
By Rahul Chandran
Rahul Chandran is a development worker in Afghanistan.

Subject: Entry 1
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, at 11:07 AM PT

From the airplane window heading into Kabul, you see three hours of sand, interrupted occasionally by squat, ugly rocks. There are no settlements and no roads; no evidence of life. I missed my UN flight a day earlier, so I sat, belted into my bright orange seat on Ariana Afghan Airlines, staring at the desolation.

Kabul itself is in a valley surrounded by stunning snow-caps. The plane lurches violently toward the airfield (someone has claimed the lurching is related to iron ore in the mountains, but we don't trust him), and as you descend, shapes slowly congeal from the mud, becoming houses, houses, and more houses. There is no visible industry, no smoke-stacks, no gas-tanks, no chemical domes—none of the furniture that surrounds other cities.

The airport itself is simple but leaps and bounds ahead of where it was four months ago, when I first arrived in Kabul to work for the U.N. A stretch of unemployment, conveniently coinciding with the World Cup, had led to me to tell a friend that I'd like to work in a failed state setting, doing some hands-on development. He took me literally, and I'm returning to Kabul after a brief and surreal holiday in the lands of hot water and power showers.

In the airport there are windows now and semi-organized queues (although, in a sign of the international presence, half of the two booths are reserved for diplomatic passport holders). Still no heat, though I did see a new heaterlike object wrapped in cardboard lurking menacingly in a corner. There is only one luggage-hauling truck, so it took two solid hours for our baggage to arrive.

As you leave the airport you pass by an airline graveyard—727 bodies and noses, assorted helicopter fragments, and several charred lumps of metal. It's almost an encouraging sight when you arrive—you feel great that your plane has made it over the mountains. As people prepare to leave, however, a sudden religious urge seems to come over many as they contemplate how many planes lie here in peace.

As we left the airport there was a minor demonstration going on against the ministry with which I will spend much of my time working over the next six months. I should have taken this as a sign of the return to chaos.

After the airport, I went straight to my new house—a place I've rented with four friends in order to get away from the U.N. accommodation. I walked in the door to see two men tinkering with an engine, which proved to be from a Toyota truck. They assured me that this was on the instructions of my roommate and that somehow it would produce electricity. Outside, I found a guy digging a hole in the garden, which he explained was for our new football pitch. At least that's what I think he said.

We are required by U.N. security to have blast glass on our windows. So, we asked the blast-glass window people to do just that. When I looked at the windows I realized that the curious half-tint wasn't a wonderful way of protecting us from shrapnel while maintaining our view; they'd just done the top half of the windows.

Since home wasn't working so well, I figured I should go to the office. The next sign that I was back in disorder was when they told me that my office had been moved to the roof. Then, my computer had vanished; my mobile-phone had been lost; my radio assigned to someone else; and my files purloined. Also there was no heat, but that's more normal.

Being useless without a computer, I sat in on a meeting to try and figure out mechanisms for supporting this ministry. There's a tension between capacity development and output delivery—helping the ministry build itself up and develop the skills it needs versus needing to satisfy the protesting proletariat with real services. Getting the balance right is the most rewarding part of the job—you help people in a tangible way while building something sustainable. Getting it wrong is perfectly frustrating.

The meeting went on for a few hours. When I got back to my new penthouse suite, I discovered that someone had cleaned out my desk drawers. Actually, they'd just taken the $500 I'd left in there for a few hours so I could run to my meeting but had courteously left some old candy wrappers.

Subject: Entry 2
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at 10:15 AM PT

I got up on the wrong side of bed this morning, and I guess it showed as I walked in. One of our senior engineers decided to cheer me up by way of a joke: "There were three men stranded at sea on a lifeboat, a Japanese man, a U.N. worker, and an Afghan. After a whole day at sea, the Japanese man suddenly picked up the radio and threw it overboard. When confronted by the other two, he explained, 'In my country, we have thousands of radios—when we get home I will get another.' Not to be outdone, the U.N. worker promptly threw his satellite phone overboard. A similar explanation followed. The Afghan sat for a while, his pride wounded, for he had nothing to throw. Then he grabbed the U.N. worker and threw him overboard. Before the Japanese man had time to respond he said, 'Oh don't worry, we have thousands more where I come from.' "

It seems that the level of resentment against the international community is rising. The frequency of security incidents has crept up, but more worrying, the stories people tell when they come back from the field all have an edge. I was nervous about returning, and perhaps this is just because we're worried about Iraq, but my internal anxiet-o-meter is running high. To some degree it's understandable in Kabul—we ride around in our Landcruisers and live in gated compounds, with power and water (most of the time)—which is a far cry from local conditions, but most of the services we deliver, such as schools and roads, are built in the provinces.

It was another big meeting day—again with concern about the ministry and the riots. There is a lot of pressure building for us to deliver quick-impact projects, which will help with short-term stability and address (real and substantial) needs. At the same time, the ministry sees a need for more substantial, long-term programs that will help transform disability from a charity-based to a rights-based approach.

As we sit and brainstorm, I can feel myself being drawn to short-term plans, both because I think the situation is serious, and the ministry needs to establish credibility, but also because I know that I am only here for six more months. I tell myself that I want to do something substantial because I want to ensure that I am useful to the Afghan people, but there's a strong element of wanting to leave something tangible behind other than a mountain of paper. The guilt associated with the absolute luxury of our living conditions, especially when you go beyond Kabul and see the villages, also plays a part. I feel an urge to justify my wages, which is always a dangerous thing.

There was some fun today; I spent the late afternoon showing off the photographs I had developed in New York. Buzkashi has re-emerged post-Taliban, and our staff are fanatics—some of our drivers have pooled together to buy horses. Before I left, they took me to a match where their horses were on the Panjshir team and asked me to take pictures.

For the uninitiated, Buzkashi is described as calf-carcass polo; the spectators define the playing field—there is a chalk circle at one end and a flag opposite. To score points, a team has to drag the carcass around the flag and then down to the other end, dropping it into the circle without letting the opposition gain control. Whipping, kicking, and everything else is allowed, which leads to unbelievable displays of horsemanship where riders hang on to their horses at 45 degree angles while clutching carcasses and being soundly thrashed. It is considered unsportsmanlike to stab or shoot your opponent, but it is permitted. After leafing through the photographs, we had a long discussion about my holiday in the United States and my family. The driver who speaks the best English paused carefully, then told me that I "need to get married and have children." In response to my startled "why?" he pointed out that all my photos were of children and I was clearly lonely because I kept jumping from city to city, without a family to keep me somewhere.

I went back into the office slightly perturbed and complained to our office assistant, who promptly ran outside and explained, "All the men are ugly with big hairy beards, so he only takes photos of the children."

Subject: Entry 3
Posted Thursday, Jan. 16, 2003, at 12:21 PM PT

I arrived at work this morning to be presented with a small camel. It's stuffed, but it's a camel nonetheless. To explain, the Afghan ritual greeting goes, slowly, like this:

Greeter: Salaam Aleikum
Respondent: Walaikum Salaam
G: Chitour Hastain? (Are you well?)
R: Chitour Asteem, Khoob Hastain? (I am fine, are you fine?)
G: Khoob Asteem, Sihat-e-shuma Chitour ast? (Yes, I'm fine, Everything is really fine with you?)
R: Tashakur, Shuma Khoobastan (Thanks, Really well)
G: Khana Kairat Ast? (And is your family/house well?)
R: Kho, Tashakur (Yes, Thank you)

At which point, the respondent repeats the last two questions. Then, after this is conducted at breathtaking pace for Afghanistan (about three solid minutes), the interrogator will ask again, "Shuma Khoobastan?" which in this case means, "Now that we're through with the ritual, is everything really all right?" At this point, but not before, you can confess to serious illness, death, and other such news.

Unfortunately, during my first three months, I would say "Shatoorasten," which means "You are a camel," instead of "Chitour Asteem."

Last night I trickled out of work at around 9:30 and wandered over to the U.N. guesthouse to meet my housemates for a little libation. We sat around the fireplace and chatted about the mechanics of setting up our new house ("Curtains? You were getting the curtains! I had to buy the carpets!") but also about returning and life here in general.

Quite a few people have chosen not to come back. It's somewhat crippling for our various programs, because figuring out how to get things done in Afghanistan takes a few months. There's also the body of knowledge, the contacts, and the relationships that you lose. There's no real resentment though—contrary to the picture painted in the New York Times a while back, life here isn't a picnic, and everyone has regular moments of "What the hell am I doing here?" (I must admit to feeling slightly betrayed by Mr. Ignatieff, as I was hoping for a land full of frolicking young people, and I'm still looking hard for the frolics or the young people. …)

We expend a lot of emotional effort trying to replicate our lives at home in small ways. There's a degree of alienation here that, even though the people are warm and welcoming, is hard to overcome—the physical, linguistic, and cultural environment is completely different. One of the most charming of these efforts was before the holidays when the Swedish ISAF held a Santa Lucia festival. Santa Lucia normally involves small children dressed in white and wreathed in candles singing Christmas carols in a small parade around an office. The Afghan version had burly blonde ISAF soldiers in white kurtas singing in deep bass voices—almost comical, but more touching. Most of the Swedish diplomatic staffers were teary.

Our former accommodation felt more like a barracks and less like a home, and I can't wait to move in to our new house and throw dinner parties. I know it sounds slightly ridiculous—but to cook, have wine, get politely drunk, and just have a place to hang out with people without always being on-stage will be a huge stress relief. Whenever you're in public there are always eyes on you, and you have to act as a "representative of the international community," which is exhausting.

Work today was mostly meetings, but a little troublemaking. There are significant constraints, normally, on what I can do and say as an employee of the United Nations. In the coming months, however, I will be working at a ministry—as a result, I have spent most of the morning drafting terse and critical letters to people with whom I'd normally not be allowed to speak.

Most of what I am working on nowadays falls under the nebulous heading "capacity building." Everyone has heard how Afghanistan has been decimated by 20 years of war, but most people don't realize how this extends beyond physical destruction. It is rare that you would crave a bureaucracy, but that's exactly what a lot of what my work over the next six months will be built around—helping a Ministry to develop the procedures and processes required to create policy and function as a ministry. The challenge and the fear for me is, again, making sure that this will be sustainable. It's easy enough for me to sit and draft letters requesting or demanding greater cooperation; it's much harder to make sure that I am working with counterpart staff closely so that this will happen after we leave. I need to ensure that I devote time to training, but there's a lot of work and only so many hours in a day.

Thursday is technically a half-day here, so I managed to sneak out in the afternoon and play a little street football with neighborhood kids a few blocks from the office. The two sports of choice here are kite wars, which involves cutting down your opponent's kite by way of the ground glass attached to your kite string, and football. I was graciously allowed to kite-fly once but lost the battle in about 30 seconds, resulting in hastily concealed disappointment and reclamation of the kite. They do, however, let us play football, and we like to think that this isn't just because we sometimes buy them Cokes. As we played, we were watched by a group of girls who were working in the stalls nearby. They were all between 6 and 10 and seemed quite fascinated by the game but kept a healthy distance. When I walked back past this area an hour or so later, I happened to see into a courtyard through an open door and saw the same girls playing their own game inside.

Subject: Entry 4
Posted Friday, Jan. 17, 2003, at 10:23 AM PT

Friday is the day of rest in most Islamic states. Unfortunately, this does not include rest for the muezzin. This may be blasphemous, but I think the muezzin near our house is fresh out of training school. Unlike the sweet, holy melodies from the great mosques of the Middle East that draw you out of your sleep and inspire devotion, his voice quavers and wavers, perhaps suggesting a more querulous relationship with the divine. It's not my favorite way to wake up, but at least it's regular and it doesn't need electricity.

It being a holiday, I crawled in to work a little late (around 8:30) only to find that the computer that I am using was locked behind an iron grille. Since no one else was in yet, I sat around and stared for a while, perhaps hoping that someone would turn up and explain the grille, or even better unlock it. When this didn't happen I opted for breakfast.

The staple foodstuff here is naan—the Indian flat-baked bread. The words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner translate as "morning naan," "afternoon naan," and "evening naan." Now, while fresh naan is great, after you eat it for every meal the allure fades. An office-mate of ours, who shall forever be hallowed, discovered that Nutella was being imported and invented "naan au chocolat," one of the rare and wonderful delights of Kabul.

After breakfast some friends summoned me for shopping. We're uncertain if we're allowed in the bazaar because of the grenade incidents with the American soldiers a month back, and tensions are running high because of some rumors flying around of assassination attempts. (Most of our Internet connections have been down for the last few days, and so our flaky awareness of events is worse than normal. Afghanistan has also vanished from the major media map, so you really have to dig for information.)

I love the bazaar. It's easy to get depressed as we sit in our offices reading worst-case scenarios and/or the media coverage of how the United Nations and the "International Community" have failed Afghanistan completely. The bazaar is a riot of people and colors; the shops are selling everything, from fridges and DVD players to carpets and curtains, and everywhere there's the hustle and bustle of business. These may be everyday goods for the rest of the world, but they are a sign of normality here and great to see. The only sight that I'm less keen about, as a vegetarian, is the freshly slaughtered cows and sheep, dripping from great big hooks.

My two favorite portions of the bazaar are the fruit stalls and the children. The fruits here are amazingly fresh (they would probably be sold as "organic" in the States at a huge premium) and tasty. Perhaps more important to me, the colors are strikingly vivid against the backdrop of mud, mud, and mud.

Since the international community arrived, more than a few shopkeepers have realized that we're all soft. As a result, a large number of the stalls are manned by small, cute children, who are far sharper than we are and make us overpay horrendously for everything we buy. We try to persuade ourselves that we're getting good deals when we haggle—and we do try to bargain on everything as a matter of pride—but there's no question that the kids are taking us for a ride.

The young gentleman pictured, by the name of Abdullah, managed to persuade me that $20 was a fair price to pay for a blanket. When we went a little farther down and spoke to a charming old man, who invited us in for tea and cakes, he inspected our blankets and offered us more of the same for $6 apiece. This photo was snapped by a friend, it and captured the man's attempt to conceal his horror and disbelief at the price we paid.

It's been a fairly quiet first week. There is a definite period of readjustment—a colleague calls the recent returnees "Puddleglums," which seems appropriate. It's particularly hard on the people who have young children at home, all of whom get regular sniffly phone calls that begin with "Daad, when are you coming back?" and that end much the same. I don't have kids to call, but I've come to realize that while e-mail keeps you in touch, it also lets you know exactly what (and who) you're missing.

That said, it is good to be back, and I'm excited about the next few months. I have become very wary of the claim that development jobs have any inherent moral benefit—they're jobs like any other, where satisfaction comes from completing your tasks. All in all, though, it is a lot of fun and a real privilege to be here. Sometimes it's a little far from home, sometimes a bit dramatic and occasionally simply strange—after all, how often do you get to watch men on horseback fight over a calf-carcass and find yourself cheering them on?



diary
By Bev Clark
Bev Clark is an information activist. She was born in Zimbabwe and currently manages Zimbabwe's civic and human rights Web site.

Subject: Entry 1
Posted Monday, Aug. 4, 2003, at 2:28 PM PT

These days, in the early morning while lying in bed, I do a reality check.

Q. Where am I?
A. Harare, Zimbabwe.

Q. Who am I?
A. Bev Clark, activist.

Q. What am I going to do to?
A. Anything to bring Robert Mugabe down.

With that squared away, I haul my body out of bed and take an icy plunge in the pool. The water is still freezing as it is the tail end of winter. I last only a few minutes and come out gasping. The guy next door often pretends to pick avocados to get a view of me taking my naked dip. My neighbors are an eclectic bunch. On the right is Malcom. He's got a bushy black beard that almost reaches his knees. And apparently, he has seven guns. Not that I've actually seen his hidden weapons, but in a city engulfed in a wave of rising crime, having him next door makes me feel a bit better. The avocado fraudster is the gardener for a family of farmers that recently moved in. For some months their front lawn has been piled high with farming equipment from their seized farm, snuck off with while Mugabe's militia were looking the other way. In the space of a week they've put up a wall, razor wire, and an electric fence. Not long after they moved in I could hear the plaintive wails of a goat. Then silence. Either it got the chop or it was sold.

I've spent most of this morning writing a story line for a 90-second film. My office is a converted garage in my back garden. One whole wall is made up of air bricks. They're great in summer when the temperature creeps upward but in the winter grass mats struggle to keep the wind out. The film is part of a competition called the Vision Awards, and the theme is "Building a Commonwealth of Freedom." I've taken the approach that there can't be any freedom without greater common wealth. My story follows Tendai, a young Zimbabwean fleeing fear and famine who goes to England to make some "real money." The exchange rate is Z$4,000 to 1 British pound, so he manages to keep his family fed back home. It's the story of thousands of young Zimbabweans all desperate to escape Mugabe's madness.

Lunchtime, and I run with my dog Frank. I have a refrain going round in my head: "Mad dog's an Englishwoman … ." I love the heat and the sweat of the hottest time of the day.

In the afternoon, I meet with a couple of fellow activists. We've just got some funding for an exciting project that combines art, technology, and activism. Unfortunately our funding period is short: only 4 months. We're hurrying to work out schedules and staff and strategies for street-level action that will both inspire and motivate Zimbabweans to reclaim their voice and their position in civil society.

Later on, I go up to the shops to buy some wine because my friend Oliver is coming round for an early evening drink. In the cafe I chat with a woman while we're waiting to pay. She asks me what I think of Bush's trip to Africa. I say that I think it couldn't have come at a worse time. The great-white-hunter politician and his flying visit to dispense advice and money. His trip clashes with the African Union meeting, and this immediately raises questions about his sensitivities and his agenda. And then he wants to lecture African leaders about Mugabe's dubious re-election while his own election is shadowed by so much suspicion. But on Zimbabwean streets there are whispers of U.S. intervention and excitement about the effects of Bush's influence on Thabo Mbeki. Pro-Bush graffiti has begun to appear.

Oliver is an interesting guy; he's here to teach during the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. His subject is sexuality. We go back a long way. Oliver agreed to be a sperm donor for my partner, Brenda, some years back. He totally appealed to me in his bohemian, handsome way. I tried to persuade him to get rid of his tight green corduroys, believing that they weren't helping his fertility much. Neither were the drugs and the wine. But we had a good time. In the end, there was no baby for us from Oliver, but back in London, where he's made his home, he's the proud father of a daughter named Rachel.

Subject: Entry 2
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003, at 9:51 AM PT

Last night I sat nursing a brown bottle of Castle in a little restaurant called the Tam Tam in central Harare. As I was paying my bill, I jokingly said to the waiter that I was in a hurry, that I had to get to the airport. He looked at me enviously and said that he wished he were, too. I asked him where he'd go if could leave right then and there. He replied: "Anywhere but here."

He's trapped in this nightmare place along with countless other Zimbabweans reeling under the weight of poverty, hopelessness, and simmering anger. Earlier that day, I'd tried to get my car tires pumped up. Most of the service stations have stopped operating since they no longer have any fuel. No fuel means no oil. And no air, either. I asked an idle petrol attendant where I could get some air. Pointing across the road, he said, "Try those guys under the tree." I looked and saw a group of men sitting on concrete blocks fixing tires under a sprawling jacaranda tree. I turned to the petrol attendant and asked whether they charged for air. "Of course," he said, "but you must just negotiate." In Mugabe's Zimbabwe, even air comes at a price.

Chatting with a friend at the bar, I asked her what she would pay for air. She said she reckoned she'd be damned if she'd pay anything at all. That works for her; she's got a bicycle and a pump. But with my front tire sagging, I'm going to have to pay. Over our beer we got to talking about what we can't buy in regular shops, what we're forced to buy on the burgeoning black market, and what we're buying out of guilt. Instead of lining the shelves in supermarkets, sugar, salt, and cooking oil are stacked up in the dust on the side of the road. As you drive by, roadside entrepreneurs whistle and shout pointing their fingers vigorously at their stashes. The black market can satisfy all your needs—at a price, of course. Meanwhile, thousands of Zimbabweans continue to try to survive honestly and with dignity. Vendors crowd the streets selling tomatoes, prickly pears, magnificent bunches of green leafy rape; plastic pouches filled with multicolored cool drinks sit in neat piles on rickety old wooden planks that straddle piles of bricks. Earning a living in Zimbabwe is desperately difficult these days.

At shopping centers, my guilt at having more than others forces me to come up with new and different ways of avoiding the increasing number of beggars, street kids, car guards, and People Who Sell Everything. There's this really old guy who must be over 90. He's got one yellow tooth left in his slack mouth, and his hair is a knot of shocking white. He sells spoons. Wooden cooking spoons ideal for stirring sadza—a starchy porridge that is the staple food for Zimbabweans—until it's perfectly cooked. And the other day I came face to face with a vendor who told me his name was Steven. He was peddling painted plates. Beautifully illustrated and carefully crafted. When I declined, shaking my head in a weary "no," his face fell. But he pressed on saying that his daughter had a head the size of a pumpkin. She needed to have an operation the following day. To make her right. And beautiful again.

I need money. Please buy a plate.

The ruses that are used to bring in a few dollars a day are becoming more and more creative and elaborate. Only minutes before, I had fielded a request from a boy who looked about 9 at best. He trolls the shopping center with clipboard and sponsor form in hand asking for money for a rugby tour. Meanwhile, plain old ugly hunger looks like its winning the game with him.

I eventually found a service station that was open and still had an air pump. I pulled in and a young guy walked over to give me a hand. "You're lucky," he said, "your tire's nearly flat." We talked awhile about whether he'd have a job next month because of the fuel shortage, which means that's it's likely that his place of work will close down.

"Go well, go Shell," he said smiling cynically as I drove off.

Subject: Entry 3
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

In Zimbabwe, it's not that hard to get a reputation. Even writing letters to the newspaper is considered dangerous, especially if you use your real name. And that's just the small stuff.

I'd call myself a government overthrower. And I've got Mugabe in my sights. I've had him there ever since he said, in a speech at the opening of the 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair, that I don't have "any rights at all" and that I'm "worse than a pig or a dog." Whatever that means. I've been involved in political activism in Zimbabwe for the last 10 years or so. At one stage, I had a truckload of police louts descend on my office with a search warrant for "ponography" [sic]. Of course they didn't find anything salacious, but not wanting to go away empty-handed, they left with a directory listing bisexual groups around the world. Then the bunch of them push-started their truck and drove away.

This invasion of my private space was back in 1995. Ever since, I've been waiting for a midnight raid, either on account of my being queer or for being an outspoken critic of the Mugabe regime. So, not wanting to give the men in dark glasses any more of an excuse than they already had to drag me down to central police headquarters, I recently decided to ditch my dildos. Am I overreacting? Some might think so. But when your government has banned The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories, it's quite possible that being found in possession of a fake penis will land you in the back of a police Land Rover before you can say, "Let me see your search warrant."

Welcome to Zimbabwe, where you have no rights at all. And don't you forget it.

Some time ago, I was lying in bed, flipping through a sex-toy catalog. I had decided that I'd like to get a dildo. The selection was most impressive. I circled The One and asked my man Richard in England to go shopping for me. (Richard is a Zimbabwean now living in England who generously sends many different papers, books, videos, etc. to the gay community in Zimbabwe in a personal commitment to easing our isolation.) He didn't turn a hair (as my mother would've said, although she would've gone bald at the thought) and set out to find "Dave" in a sex shop in Cambridge. Outrageous that the dildos are prenamed, but what can a girl do from a distance? In a month or two, Dave was delivered disguised as a bookend and tightly wrapped in The Pink Paper, which was formerly England's premier gay and lesbian newspaper. My package was strung with string, all very neat and tidy and far too inaccessible for a not-so-diligent Zimbabwean postal worker to investigate further.

Let me say now that for the most part, I don't give a crap if the whole world knows that I have a dildo in the drawer. I mean, big deal. But, like I said, having lived a lot of my life in anticipation of a raid in the middle of the night, the thought of the conservative creeps from central police headquarters ferreting through my stuff just wasn't appealing. So my sex toy(s)—Dave got a friend, Roger—have never been very close at hand.

For a long time, Dave lived in a motorcycle helmet in the top cupboard in the bedroom. Then he was moved to the right pocket of my girlfriend's furry white terry-cloth robe. Then he was stuffed at the bottom of our voluminous sock basket. After that, he was moved to a vase in our kitchen. And finally, he ended up under a bougainvillea in the garden—the purple one by our neighbor Malcolm's wall.

Luckily, my dog Frank never got hold of Dave. What then?

Finally, I thought: This is ridiculous; let me stop forgetting where I've left Dave (and Roger) and give them the boot. I decided to toss them into a storm drain. On the way to dinner at my girlfriend's parents' house, I got ready but couldn't find a drain in the dark. When we drove into her parents' driveway, I saw that their rubbish bag hadn't been emptied. It was innocently waiting there for more items to be added for the next day's removal. But, as you can imagine, this suggestion didn't go down too well with my girlfriend, especially because Zimbabwe is in the grip of a fuel shortage and waste removal is therefore an erratic affair. It was likely that my in-laws would be saddled with Dave and Roger longer than was decent. So Dave and Roger stayed in the car while we had dinner.

On the way home, I noticed how many rubbish bags were lining the roadside hopeful of a truck with fuel in the morning. In the end, perhaps it was the unsuspecting Mr. and Mrs. Flemming living at No. 3 Ardmore Close that finally took ownership of Dave and Roger. Or perhaps their groundsman smiled to himself when the rubbish wasn't taken the next day.

Who knows?

Subject: Entry 4
Posted Thursday, Aug. 7, 2003, at 11:02 AM PT

This morning, I found a handwritten note in my post box: a few scribbled words on brown newsprint from a woman I've never met. The message asked me to be at a certain place, at a certain time. Just like in the movies. The letter writer wants to get together to discuss media tactics, but she's ultra-cautious. Or maybe paranoid. It's hard to tell the difference here these days.

My mother always said I was a troublemaker. She'd turn in her grave if she knew what I'm up to at the moment. My siblings and I joke that our parents did it only three times, and we were the result. My mother was born in Fort Beaufort: a dusty, one-horse South African town. My father immigrated to South Africa because he was looking to leave behind the hopelessness and certain poverty that Scotland offered him. He was a dreamer and a fly-by-night. I was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, which is situated in mining territory, because my father was in his "gold mining phase." (I actually lived in a caravan on the gold mine with my father for awhile.) He had many phases, including one where he dressed up in women's clothes.

In many ways I think I do what I do today—work for justice—because of my mother. She instilled in me some of life's essentials: tolerance, respect, fair play, and a sense of humor. Whenever I was down in the dumps, my mother would flip out her false teeth and roll her eyes. We'd fall over laughing, my dark mood broken. (When my mother was about 22 years old, she and two girlfriends decided to have all their teeth taken out. Apparently it was the fashionable thing in those days. I can imagine them, arm in arm, laughing while they made their way to the dental surgeon on Eloff Street, where they would emerge as "new women.")

Today I had lunch with a friend. We spoke about many different issues, including the fact that one of our mutual friends, whose father owns a chain of cinemas, is selling cash. It reminded me how far gone we all are in Zimbabwe. No one can point a finger at anyone else because everyone is trying to make a fast buck. Talk about unproductive—selling your cash for a 10 percent commission. So now we have a parallel banking system. Outside every bank, queues wind around the block. Thousands of people wait endlessly in the hope of getting the equivalent of $2 in the United States (the bank's limit on cash withdrawals) while others hoard cash and "make money for jam." It makes me want to puke.

Last month, I was drinking coffee in a cafe in a suburb called Newlands. Suddenly, I heard the thud of marching men coming closer and closer. Voices grunted "uh, uh" in a rhythm synchronized to the beat of stomping boots. Across the street, a group of about 70 policemen waving their AKs in the air left shoppers scurrying in their wake. It was a show of strength from Mugabe's urban militia. The cafe patrons around me carried on drinking their coffee. All froth and no bother. Those drinking $900 cups of coffee (in Zimbabwean dollars) live the good life and carry on as if everything is normal.

At the moment I'm reading some interviews with Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell. A lot of what she says resembles the current situation in Zimbabwe. We don't have enough upstanders here, only legions of bystanders willing to look on while a few screamers rage against the power-hungry clique that controls this country.

I was in Bulawayo last week to run training workshops in electronic activism. This is a phrase I've coined to describe using e-mail and the Internet to advocate and mobilize. During my visit, I also conducted some interviews with political activists. One woman had been put in solitary confinement for 15 days, naked except for a blanket. She told me that the Zimbabwean prison authorities can no longer afford to give female prisoners adequate sanitary ware. Sometimes a woman gets one cotton pad cut in half—or nothing at all. Again, life's inequities hit me in the face. Some privileged women wear panty liners simply to keep their discharge off their underwear while in a Zimbabwean hellhole of a prison cell, women bleed down their legs.

I've been giving Brenda (my partner) another ear-bashing, saying that in Zimbabwe—not to mention the world over—we need a fleet of aggressive peacemakers. Where are our Robin Hoods? We need to make some of our fairy tales come true.

Subject: Entry 5
Posted Friday, Aug. 8, 2003, at 10:19 AM PT

A couple of Canadians came to Harare last month to interview me about the Web site that I manage. This morning, I watched some of the footage. Talk about shocked! I hadn't realized that I blink so much. I look like Barbie on speed.

Actually, my nephew Devin, who's about 11 years old, keeps on commenting on what I look like. The last time I saw him he asked me why I have such a big forehead. Then he was concerned about my double eyelids. (Whatever that means.) He's an eccentric little bloke, and heaven only knows what it'll be next. In March, I went to visit my family in Australia. On the fridge in their kitchen, I discovered a little piece of paper with about nine black ballpoint pen marks scratched on it. I asked my sister what it meant; she said that Devin fines the rest of the family if he finds any hairs on the soap when he takes a shower. To amuse ourselves, we planted some "evidence," and sure enough, Devin strode furiously through to the kitchen to record his displeasure.

For a couple of hours this morning, I played tour guide for a visiting friend. I drove him through downtown Harare—hold your breath and hang on tight!—where, just as there's no rule of law, there aren't any rules of the road either. It's every driver for herself.

Part of our tour included going to the Harare Magistrates Court. Both the court and Zanu PF Headquarters are situated on a street called Rotten Row. How appropriate, I've always thought. Over the past couple of years, the Magistrates Court has processed a steady stream of political activists, often arrested on spurious grounds. Some activists enter the court having suffered ill treatment or torture at the hands of the police. In January, I spent an entire day waiting for my friend Michael, a Harare City Councilor, to be released. By the time 5 p.m. arrived, I was known as Mrs. Mike.

The boredom of my long wait that day was eased by the goings-on around the court. There's this small blue-and-white caravan that rents out wedding gowns to women tying the knot in civil marriages. Sometimes manacled prisoners are led up the front steps of the court building side by side with blushing brides.

Right next door to Harare Magistrates Court there's a major building development. Interpol is establishing its subregional headquarters in Harare. I'm outraged by lots of things in Zimbabwe, but this particular issue takes the (wedding) cake. Interpol's hierarchy has feted the commissioner of police, Augustine Chihuri, for many years. Zimbabwe is a country wracked by violence, a compromised judiciary, and the disintegration of the rule of law. Meanwhile, Interpol decides to build its headquarters next to the building into which activists limp, having been beaten to within an inch of their lives.

On the way home, we drive past the University of Zimbabwe, where students frequently protest the poor conditions on campus. Apparently there are only 15 computers in the computer lab for 12,000 students. Just outside the entrance there's a sign saying that fishing worms are on sale. I tell my passenger that it's rumored that worm-sellers double as mbjange (marijuana) dealers.

I make sure to fit my run in at lunchtime. Running keeps me sane and balanced (although Brenda might not agree with this). Frank and I were puffing our way up a quiet road when I noticed two smartly dressed people pushing their car. They'd run out of petrol. So, I offered to give them a hand to the next intersection. My mother always said that I had thighs that could kick-start a jumbo jet, so I figured pushing a Mazda 323 would be easy.

In the afternoon, I had a coffee with Brian, a co-activist from as far back as 1990. We met in the well-known Meikles Hotel, which is where all the journalists and media people hole up whenever anything's going down in Harare. As I skipped up the steps, I noticed a Mugabe portrait in the foyer. I've long wanted to start an organization called PAPP—People Against Presidential Portraits. There's no law that requires people to put them up, but many of our citizens believe that if they comply, they'll get a degree of protection. So, the dictator responsible for the collapse of our once vibrant tourism sector gazes benignly on as a few tourists trickle in and out of the hotel. In the lounge, where Z$4000 cream teas are served, an old guy plays sentimental songs on a piano.

When I get back to my office, I'm told by Leah, who organizes my press advertisements, that the state-controlled press in Harare, Bulawayo, and Mutare have rejected my latest round of advertisements. I recently came across a beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney, about justice and freedom, so I put together an inspirational advertisement that carried his words:

So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.

This isn't the first time that my material has been rejected. And it won't be the last. But I'm going to keep on trying.



Why You Can't Keep Up
23,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information were created last year.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2003, at 4:50 PM PT

The publication of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, has sent Chatterbox into a quantifying frenzy. According to Murray, there have been 14 cognitive breakthroughs since 800 B.C. Murray calls them "meta-inventions," but a simpler term for them would be "Great Ideas." They are:

Artistic realism; Linear perspective; Artistic abstraction; Polyphony; Drama; the Novel; Meditation; Logic; Ethics; Arabic numerals; the Mathematical proof; the Calibration of uncertainty; the Secular observation of nature; and the Scientific method.

Mortimer Adler, who half a century ago oversaw Encyclopedia Britannica's publication of the "Great Books," added a supplement, titled the Syntopicon ("collection of topics"), that listed civilization's Great Ideas. Adler's hit parade had 89 more Great Ideas than Murray's:

Angel; Animal; Aristocracy; Art; Astronomy; Beauty; Being; Cause; Chance; Change; Citizen; Constitution; Courage; Custom and Convention; Definition; Democracy; Desire; Dialectic; Duty; Education; Element; Emotion; Eternity; Evolution; Experience; Family; Fate; Form; God; Good and Evil; Government; Habit; Happiness; History; Honor; Hypothesis; Idea; Immortality; Induction; Infinity; Judgment; Justice; Knowledge; Labor; Language; Law; Liberty; Life and Death; Logic; Love; Man; Mathematics; Matter; Mechanics; Medicine; Memory and Imagination; Metaphysics; Mind; Monarchy; Nature; Necessity and Contingency; Oligarchy; One and Many; Opinion; Opposition; Philosophy; Physics; Pleasure and Pain; Poetry; Principle; Progress; Prophecy; Prudence; Punishment; Quality; Quantity; Reasoning; Relation; Religion; Revolution; Rhetoric; Same and Other; Science; Sense; Sign and Symbol; Sin; Slavery; Soul; Space; State; Temperance; Theology; Time; Truth; Tyranny; Universal and Particular; Virtue and Vice; War and Peace; Wealth; Will; Wisdom; World.

Even though Adler's list is much longer than Murray's, Adler managed to miss most of Murray's topics. For example, Adler didn't bother to separate "Arabic numerals" from "the Mathematical proof." To Adler, they were both just "Mathematics." Adler also skipped "Drama" and "the Novel," presumably because he thought they fell under "Poetry" or "Memory and Imagination." (Having just edited the Great Books, you'd think Adler would have remembered to create a Great Idea category called "Literature.") The arbitrary nature of this selection process drove Adler's most withering critic, Dwight Macdonald, absolutely batty, so you can just imagine what he would have said about Murray's much shorter list. Indeed, the further you allow yourself to be drawn into any exercise of this type, the more inadequate any given list of Great Ideas seems. Eventually, the quest for completeness descends into madness. Where's Contraception? Where's Revolving Credit? Where's Valet Parking?

In the interest of preserving his sanity—Murray would no doubt call it cowardice—Chatterbox resolved to forego all standards. Forget Great Ideas. Forget Ideas, period. How much information is out there?

Quantifying all the information ever created is probably an impossible task, but Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems have thoughtfully compiled estimates of the amount of information stored on paper, on film, and on magnetic and optical media for the past three years. To this, they've added estimates of the amount of information that's flowed through electronic channels—telephone, radio, television, and the Internet—during the same period. In essence, they have calculated the amount of information communicated every possible way except orally, from one person to one or many other people, without the aid of technology (except, perhaps, a megaphone or amplifier).

For simplicity's sake, let's focus on 2002, the most recent year for which Lyman and Varian have data. (Before doing so, full disclosure: Lyman and Varian's work was partially funded by Microsoft, which has an obvious commercial interest in quantifying information, particularly the kind stored on computers. Microsoft is Slate's corporate parent. Chatterbox was entirely unaware of the Microsoft link until he was well into researching this column, which grew out of an e-mail discussion Chatterbox had with a reader who has no ties to Microsoft.)

Lyman and Varian measured information in bytes, i.e., the amount of space the information would take up on a computer. A single typewritten page would take up 2 kilobytes (i.e., 2,000 bytes). A novella would take up 1 megabyte (i.e., 1 million bytes). The collected works of William Shakespeare would take up 5 megabytes. All the Chatterbox columns posted on Slate in 2002 occupy 9.9 megabytes. (As you can see, quantity isn't everything.) All the editorial copy posted on Slate in 2002 occupies 328 megabytes. The number of books needed to fill a pickup truck would occupy one gigabyte (i.e., 1 billion bytes). The number of books in the Library of Congress' print collections would occupy 10 terabytes (i.e., 10 trillion bytes).

OK, ready? The total volume of information saved in 2002—most of it on hard disks—is 5 exabytes (i.e., 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). Per capita, that's 800 megabytes saved—imagine a stack of books 30 feet high—for every person in the world.

But that's peanuts compared to the 18 exabytes of information communicated electronically—most of it by telephone—during the same period. All told, then, we can account for at least 23 exabytes of information communicated one way or another in 2003.

Of course, nearly all of it was worthless. But it's comforting to imagine that somewhere in those 23 exabytes lies a Great Idea.

[Clarification, Nov. 6: Many readers have written in to say that it just isn't possible that Chatterbox produced more copy in 2002 than William Shakespeare produced in his entire lifetime. It turns out they're right. Chatterbox's 9.9 megabytes include html and xml coding, which, Chatterbox has learned, eat up around three-quarters of the total. If you just count text, Chatterbox's megabyte count is probably somewhere between 2 and 3 megabytes as compared to Shakespeare's 5. Chatterbox's 9.9 megabytes do not include whatever advertising accompanies the columns.]



Digging for Googleholes
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
By Steven Johnson
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 8:39 AM PT

The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results.

But the oracle—recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.

Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.

The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.

I suspect this emphasis is due to the convention of linking to an online store when mentioning a product, whether it's a book, CD, or outdoor grill. In addition, a number of sites—such as DealTime—track the latest prices and availability of thousands of items at online stores, which creates even more product links in Google's database. Because PageRank assumes that pages that attract a lot of links are more relevant than pages without links, these most-linked-to product pages bubble up to the top.

Google is replicating one of the problems experienced by some of the big portals—sites like Lycos and Infoseek—during the boom years. They sold so much real estate on their pages to online stores and other advertisers that their results became less reliable, which gave Google its opening in the first place. Now the same thing is happening again, only it's happening organically, without Google manipulating the integrity of its search engine.

Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer—and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?

At this stage in the Web's development, people who create a lot of links—most notably the blogging community—tend to be more technologically inclined than the general population, and thus more likely to link to Apple Computer than something like the Washington State Apple Growers Association. (This process is sometimes known as "googlewashing," where one group of prolific linkers can alter the online associations with a given word or phrase.) But there's another factor here, which is that categories that don't have central, well-known sites devoted to them will fare poorly when they share a keyword with other categories. Maybe there are thousands of pages that deal with apples, but only one Apple Computer or Fiona Apple home page. People interested in growing or eating apples will distribute those links more widely across those thousands of pages, while Mac or Fiona fans will consolidate around fewer pages, driving them higher in Google's rankings.

Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

There's a parallel development in Google's treatment of Web sites that restrict access to their archives. The New York Times may be an authority in the world of opinion, but its closed archives mean that its articles rarely rank highly in Google results, if they appear at all. Search for "Augusta National," Howell Raines' pet obsession from this year, and not a single page from the Times site appears in the top 50 results. Uber-blogger Dave Winer bet the CEO of the New York Times Digital last year that in 2007 bloggers will rank higher than the Times in Google searches. As Winer now puts it: "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web."

You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.

We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page—filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion—than an encyclopedia. It's still the connected world's most dazzling place to visit, a perfect condensation of the Web's wider anarchy. Just don't call it an oracle.



Have You Flown a Ford Lately?
Flying cars already exist. So why can't you drive one?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 9:39 PM PT

Admit it: You're a tad disappointed that, three years into the 21^st century, our automobiles are still earthbound. Flying cars always seemed like sci-fi's most attainable vision, much more so than lunar colonies or robotic paramours. Living in the exurbs wouldn't be such a hassle if an airborne, 150-mph commute were possible.

But mass-market air cars are far less feasible than The Jetsons and Blade Runner made them seem. Engineering hurdles aren't what's keeping commuters out of the skies. Flying cars are already here: Way back in the 1940s, a man named Robert Fulton (often said to be a distant relative of that Robert Fulton, though the claim has never been verified) produced the Airphibian, the first "roadable aircraft" to earn federal certification for highway and aerial use. The current Great Flying Hope is the Skycar, which Canadian-born Paul Moller has been developing for more than 40 years. Those who enjoy a brisk breeze as they commute may prefer Trek Aerospace's SoloTrek, which resembles a latter-day jet pack cross-pollinated with a Harrier jet.

So, what's keeping your car tethered to the two-dimensional confines of streets and highways? True believers argue that these designs have yet to flourish due to overregulation, poor timing, and automaker myopia. They like to share how, in the early 1970s, a young Ford executive named Lee Iacocca took a keen interest in something called the Aerocar, until the oil crisis and the proliferation of Toyotas diverted his attention. That's about as close as the nascent roadable aircraft industry has ever gotten to mass production. The news of late has been somber, as SoloTrek recently "cut all payroll costs"—that is, fired everyone—and a Skycar prototype failed to sell in a February eBay auction. (Moller has somehow coaxed more than 100 people to pre-order Skycars—as well as plunk down $5,000 deposits per nonexistent vehicle.)

What the flying-car faithful tend to ignore are the concept's mundane flaws. Start with what may sound like a minor concern—noise. Until some yet-to-be-born genius figures out how to harness the power of superconductors, flying-car designers are stuck with VTOL (vertical takeoff/landing) technology, which relies on whirring rotors. As anyone who has stood near a helicopter knows, this isn't exactly the quietest approach to locomotion. It seems unlikely that suburban America, where the background noise rarely rises above 70 decibels, would put up with the rush-hour roar as commuters rev their engines.

Moller has proposed a network of neighborhood "vertiports," shielded from the surrounding homes. Maybe, but that's adding an enormous amount of pricey infrastructure to the situation—I can already hear the "NIMBY!" cries. Plus, imagine the long lines as flying cars became more and more ubiquitous. And you thought tollbooths were a hassle.

Even if the roadabale aircraft folks come up with some near-magical noise-canceling technology, getting the Federal Aviation Administration's seal of approval will be a tough slog. The FAA is lenient with experimental aircraft but far less so with models meant for mass production. The Airphibian and the Aerocar are the only two roadable aircraft to ever receive the federal OK for the assembly line, and that was back in Uncle Sam's more easygoing days. The FAA's safety bar is even higher now, meaning that millions must be spent on prototypes and testing before the go-ahead is given. (The FAA is fond of the "grandmother test," which translates as: "Would we feel comfortable putting our 91-year-old grandmother in the back seat?")

All an FAA nod really means, though, is that the vehicle can be operated by licensed pilots, of which there are less than 1 million in the United States. The trick, then, is getting blanket FAA approval for anyone to sit the behind the wheel—er, flight stick—a sweeping decision that would obviously be a first. The agency would have to consider this frightening question: How much death from above will the nation tolerate in the name of realizing a Jetsons future? Adding a third dimension to automobile travel introduces a whole new set of handling problems, from yaw to pitch as turns are made or altitude is adjusted. As any pilot will tell you, weird things can happen when the winds shift or an errant pigeon gets in the way. At least when a fatal highway crash occurs, the fatalities are limited to those unfortunate souls in the vehicles. Casualties would soar if wreckage were to crash into homes and unsuspecting pedestrians.

Air-car advocates claim the answer is automated navigation—in effect, taking the control out of the hands of the driver-cum-pilot. Merely input the coordinates upon entry, and the vehicle will take care of the rest, courtesy of GPS satellites. Collision-avoidance systems, similar to those already installed on commercial airplanes, would prevent midair catastrophes. If pilotless cockpits will become standard in the next 30 to 50 years, as the Economist recently predicted, why can't that technology be lifted into flying cars?

That's a deeply flawed apples-to-oranges comparison. The number of commercial flights per day is infinitesimal compared the number of auto trips—picture a 12-plane lineup at your local airport versus the 8:30 a.m. logjam on your local interstate. Moreover, an air car's computerized "brain" would be bombarded with threats every second, as other commuters approached from above or below at upward of 300 mph (the Skycar's top speed). That's likely too many threats for any processor that would be cheap enough to be installed in a mass-market vehicle.

None of this is to suggest that flying cars are entirely useless. The military has certainly taken an interest—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a SoloTrek sponsor—as has the Border Patrol. And as hobbies go, it's a pretty cool one to have. (The curious are advised to join the flying-car mailing list by e-mailing the message "subscribe flying-car" to majordomo@mystery.com.) But as far as actually being the transportation of the future, air cars belong in the same retro has-been file as jet-propelled paddle steamers. Your 2020 Hyundai may run on hydrogen, corn syrup, or cold fusion, but it'll still have all four wheels on the ground.



Iraq: The Computer Game
What "virtual world" games can teach the real world about reconstructing Iraq.
By David Plotz
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 2:05 PM PT

The United States sent 250,000 soldiers across the world to rebuild a society. You can do the same thing from your living room. One peculiar development of the last decade has been the astonishing popularity of online "virtual world" role-playing games like EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, and Lineage. At every minute of the day, hundreds of thousands of people are gathering online to build digital civilizations. As this Slate piece described, players erect cities, open businesses, form governments, muster armies, commit crimes, take jobs, earn decent wages, make friends, marry, and die. The virtual money they earn has real value: They can trade it for U.S. dollars at online auction sites. Thousands of players consider themselves citizens of their virtual world, and some spend more time there than in ours.

It's obviously frivolous to mention computer games in the same sentence as Iraq. Iraqis need running water and electricity: What does that have to do with a 57^th-level wizard who wants to swap his "barbed dragonscale pauldrons" for a "book of Obulus"? But during the past year, the Defense Department has been sniffing around the online gaming community: The Army just hired gaming firm There Inc. to develop a virtual world that can be used for anti-terrorist training, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has signed at least one online gaming expert as a consultant. There's good reason for the U.S. government to be interested in these virtual worlds now. These games—in which societies are built from nothing—may offer useful lessons for rebuilding broken nations in the real world. The games, as well as cruder simulations, can be a living experiment, testing ideas without actual risks and consequences.

Some of the real-world uses of games and simulations are common-sensical. Some are pie-in-the-sky. Here are four applications, moving from more to less realistic.

1. SENSE. The Defense Department has already written a game that could help the Iraq reconstruction, but it seems to have forgotten about it. Three years ago, then-NATO Commander Gen. Wesley Clark prodded the Institute for Defense Analyses—a government-funded think tank in Virginia—to invent a game to help in the reconstruction of Bosnia. Clark wanted a crash course that would teach government officials in a wrecked nation how to build a successful market economy. The game that resulted—drearily and inaccurately named "Synthetic Estimates of National Security Environment (SENSE)"—is an interactive simulation of the Bosnian economy. Compared to fancy commercial games like EverQuest, SENSE is Pong, with rudimentary charts, no cool visuals, and no character interactions.

SENSE is a game for about 50 players, each of whom plays an important figure in the economy: a minister, a legislator, a multinational corporation, a foreign-aid donor, a central banker, a local businessman, etc. They sit at computers that show them spreadsheets and graphs detailing the economic condition of "Akrona"—essentially Bosnia after the '90s war. When the game starts, the players representing government officials start deciding the level of taxation, the tariffs to levy on foreign goods, and how they should privatize state enterprises. The other players react to the government decisions. The multinational corporation may or may not buy up state enterprises. The local businessman may move his investment from textiles to auto manufacturing. The foreign-aid donor may extend loans or deny them. Each turn, which represents one month, lasts two to five minutes. Between turns the players negotiate—the banker checks monetary policy with the foreign donors, the private sector complains to the legislature about taxes. Sometimes the game supervisors instruct players to change places, so that the banker learns what it's like to run a private business. Every so often the game breaks for seminars where organizers replay what happened and discuss the economic implications. One simulation of 12 "years" can last up to five days. As the game unfolds, the players come to realize that a free-market economy leads to happier results than a protectionist, command economy.

The Institute for Defense Analyses ran SENSE twice in Sarajevo, once with midlevel Bosnian bureaucrats and private-sector figures, and once with Bosnia's president, top ministers, leading businesspeople, central bankers, and foreign aid officials. It also ran SENSE for the governments of Georgia and Montenegro. The games are intense and competitive, says Dayton Maxwell, who consulted for IDA on SENSE. The Georgian game got so heated that one participant had to go on national television later to explain why he had performed so poorly as "president."

Maxwell says SENSE builds social relationships among officials who need to work together because it puts all the relevant players in an economic reconstruction in a single room, perhaps for the first time. The new nation may be so chaotic that the key figures have never even met each other. SENSE also helps leaders understand the pressures that the others face: The legislator, for example, sees the impact of taxation on the entrepreneur.

More important, says Maxwell, SENSE instills the principles of market economics in a way nothing else can. "Until they experience the actual dynamics of making the decisions under stress, they can't internalize what they learned from textbooks," he says. SENSE offers participants experience without the possibility of a shrinking GDP.

Some who have worked with SENSE hope to refit it for economic decision-makers in Iraq (converting the economic data from "Akrona" to "Nineva"). But so far SENSE is non-SENSE. The Defense Department abandoned SENSE after Clark retired, and no other American agency has yet stepped forward to sponsor it for Baghdad.

2. Lessons from Lord British. Richard Garriott is the Thomas Edison of the virtual world. He founded Origin Systems, the company that developed Ultima Online, the first successful virtual-world game. He ruled Ultima Online as "Lord British"—the absolute monarch, umpire, lawgiver of that virtual community. (He now helps run the U.S. arm of NCsoft, the Korean company that has the world's biggest game, Lineage.) Garriott believes that creation of a virtual world like Ultima Online is a powerful experimental model for the rebuilding of a devastated country.

In the startup of a virtual world, Garriott says, the players—like Iraqis—face anarchy, confusion, and unclear rules. They are poor, they are at the mercy of brutal spoilers (players who rob and kill other players for kicks), and they are subject to a whimsical, alien overlord (the programmers). Of course players don't actually risk their lives, but they are passionate about constructing a successful society, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.

Virtual worlds with thousands of players may not offer much useful economic insight for Iraq or help anyone understand Iraqi social structure. But, says Garriott, the games do clarify the essential rules for stabilizing a chaotic society. Virtual worlds teach that there are really only two of those rules, one obvious, one surprising.

The first is the urgent need to protect lives and property. Ultima was plagued by murder and theft from its earliest days, as players exploited software loopholes to wreak havoc and get rich. As a result, other players quit the game or simply become villains themselves. Garriott says they had to fix the code and evict the anti-social players who were ruining the civilization for everyone else. Ultima didn't take off until the caretakers established security and law. Neither can Iraq.

The second requirement is an idea that hasn't gotten much attention from the U.S. occupation. It is that the ruler must let the people know he has heard their complaints. In a virtual-world startup, thousands of players gripe about the same thing (there's not enough money, my character keeps getting robbed …). It's incredibly important, Garriott says, that the ruler acknowledge he has heard the complaints. Not acknowledging complaints makes people nervous: It destabilizes and enrages them. Even if you have a plan to deal with a problem, you still have to let participants know they have been heard. Otherwise they panic or turn to some rival power that does admit their complaint. Broadcasting the acknowledgement to the whole community—"yes, we know you don't have enough running water"—is as essential as actually fixing the problem. Only once you have publicly recognized the problem, Garriott says, do you present your plan to remedy it.

3. The Kingmaker. Edward Castronova, an economics professor at California State University, Fullerton, is perhaps the most creative thinker about the real-world applications of virtual worlds. (Castronova's article on the economy of the game EverQuest is by far the most popular article in the leading online economics research archive. You can download it here.) Castronova has lectured at defense industry seminars on the real-world utility of online games. Last winter, before the Iraq war started, Defense Department officials asked him if he had any suggestions for how to use games in rebuilding what they called "a Southwest Asian country." Castronova recommended that DoD consider updating the 1970s game Kingmaker.

Kingmaker is an English board game based on the War of the Roses. It is now available as a computer game. Players, representing factions of English nobility, try to accumulate enough power to get their candidate crowned king of England. They have to seek the support of the church and Parliament, conquer castles and towns, and form alliances with other factions. "It's an accurate dynamic for a situation like Iraq—a country balkanized and regionalized, with an emerging democratic process," Castronova says. "People have different kinds of power, some military, some religious, some economic. Whoever is going to win is going to have to cobble together different kinds of resources."

In Castronova's ideal world, Defense and State would put their heads together and redesign the game to reflect the social and political realities of Iraq. It would be much more complicated than the original: It would need to estimate the possible strength of various Shiite and Kurdish factions, the influence of the Turks, the potential oil wealth, the ill-defined role of exiles, the extent of this mullah's power versus that one's, etc. Once they refitted the game, Castronova says, they would have a computer run the game a million times and see what kind of outcomes they get. The result of any particular game wouldn't tell much about Iraq, but taken as a whole, the results might indicate the probability of certain outcomes—for example, one-third of the time, the Kurds secede despite promising not to. In addition to handicapping the policy odds, the repetition would turn up results that planners might not have expected, the scary outliers: Perhaps you'd find that 1 percent of the time, Shiite radicals commit genocide against Sunnis.

The game would remind policy-makers not to get locked into a favorite theory. Even if some outcome seems most likely, there is still a possibility that, say, a Baathist guerrilla movement takes hold or Iran invades. A modified Kingmaker would be a cheap, fast way to get American leaders thinking about a wide range of possible outcomes, not just the few that seem likely.

Castronova, however, says he never heard back from DoD.

4. NorthKorea.com. Policy analysts are usually wrong for the same reason stock analysts are usually wrong. One person sitting at a desk at the State Department, even one person with the best information the CIA can buy, is trapped by bias and ignorance.

Wall Street solves the problem of individual bias with mass. Individual stock-pickers rarely beat the market over time because the collective intelligence of the market—millions of individual decisions—is always better than any one person's repeated guesses. In a fantasy future, online games could harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people to develop better policy.

Jack Thorpe, a retired Air Force colonel who has long advised the military on simulations, speculates that the United States could use massively multiplayer online games to handle future geopolitical problems. (It's too late to help Iraq.) The U.S. government could hire gaming companies to develop virtual-world games based on geopolitical hot spots. (A game would cost $5-$15 million to develop, a pittance in Pentagonia.) A North Korea game, for example, would allow players to play the roles of North Koreans, South Koreans, Japanese, and Americans. The North Korean characters would be weak and poor, but they would excel at collective action, be fiercely loyal, and have powerful arms to deter attacks. The programmers would need to make the worlds so sophisticated and cool that people would actually want to play them.

The game-maker would open play to anyone, and policy-makers could watch the world unfold. They would create certain conditions—North Korea faces a drought—and see what happens. They could change the rules and learn how that modified the result: What if you assume North Koreans were more willing to experiment with capitalism? The game would be played repeatedly, modified repeatedly till policy-makers got a sense of what policies seemed most promising. The collective play of thousands of entertainment-seekers might produce more creative policies than a few desk jockeys could dream up. Who knows—the results might even cause North Korea to change its behavior, if it saw that alternative policies improved its standing. Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is certainly eccentric enough to go for this kind of thing.



My So-Called Universe
Our cozy world is probably much bigger—and stranger—than we know.
By Jim Holt
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2003, at 11:21 AM PT

One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as "frivolous fantasies." If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion?

Before getting to why you should or should not believe in multiple universes, there's a semantic point we ought to deal with. If the universe is, as the dictionary has it, "all existing things ... regarded as a whole," then isn't it true by definition that there is only one such thing? (After all, uni- is built right into the word itself.) Well, yes. But when physicists and philosophers talk about different space-time domains being "two universes," what they generally mean is that those regions are 1) very, very large; 2) "causally isolated" from each other (meaning that an event in one cannot have an effect in another); and hence 3) mutually unknowable by direct observation (since observing something means causally interacting with it). The case for saying the two domains are separate universes is further strengthened if 4) they have very different characters: if, say, one of them has three spatial dimensions (like ours), whereas the other has 17 dimensions. Finally—and here is the existentially titillating possibility—two domains might be called separate universes if 5) they are "parallel," meaning that they contain somewhat different versions of the same entities, like your own alter ego.

Thinkers who entertain the possibility that there are lots of universes have invented a new term for the entire ensemble: "the multiverse." Why believe in the multiverse? The "pro" camp has essentially two kinds of arguments.

One—the good kind—is that the existence of other universes is logically implied by the theories that best explain features of our own universe. For instance, measurements of the cosmic background radiation (the echo left over from the big bang) indicate that the space we live in is infinite and that matter is spread randomly throughout it. Therefore, all possible arrangements of matter must exist out there somewhere—including exact and inexact replicas of our own world and the beings in it. The idea is a bit like that of monkeys in front of typewriters eventually typing out all of Shakespeare: Quantum theory says that nature is discrete, so the visible universe we inhabit is characterized by a finite amount of information; if space is infinite, this informational pattern is bound to repeat at vast enough distances. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there should be an exact copy of you around 10 to the 10 to the 28^th light-years away.

A more extravagant kind of multiverse is entailed by the theory of "chaotic inflation." Proposed by Andrei Linde to explain why our universe looks the way it does—big, uniform, and flat—inflation theory also predicts that big bangs should be a fairly routine occurrence, giving rise to an eternal network of universes tied together by impassable "wormholes." These universes, according to the theory, would have different physical characteristics. This kind of multiverse has become the bane of natural theologians.

Here's why. One reason for believing in God is that our own universe seems improbably fine-tuned for life. It's as though a cosmic designer had carefully adjusted the physical laws to ensure that beings like us would eventually shimmer onto the scene. But if our universe is one among a vast ensemble of universes with randomly varying physical constants, then it is only to be expected that a few of these universes should be life-fostering. Add to this the fact that if we exist at all, we are bound to find ourselves in a universe that is congenial to us—the so-called "anthropic principle"—and the presumed fine-tuning of our universe seems wholly unremarkable. No need to invoke the God hypothesis to answer the question, why are we here?

But some thinkers want to turn this reasoning around. They insist that other universes must exist precisely to make certain conceptual mysteries go away. This is the second kind of argument for the multiverse—the bad kind, since it has nothing to do with empirical observation.

One version of this argument derives from attempts to make sense of quantum theory. Take the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat—the unfortunate feline, who, because of the quantum superposition of possibilities, is simultaneously alive and dead. According to the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, Schrödinger's experiment splits the universe into two parallel copies, one with a live cat, the other with a dead one (and each with a version of you). Physicists who buy into this interpretation—and many distinguished ones do—claim that each universe splits into something like 10 to the 100^th copies every second, all of them equally real. Yet, since quantum theory forbids these parallel worlds from interacting, there is no experimental way to confirm their reality.

Another version of this backward argument for multiple universes was championed by the late Princeton philosopher David K. Lewis. Lewis believed (or at least pretended to) that all logically possible universes are as real as the one we call the "actual" one. Why? Because their existence would neatly solve a wide range of philosophical problems. Take the problem of counterfactuals. What does it mean to say, "If JFK hadn't gone to Dallas, the Vietnam War would have ended earlier"? According to Lewis, the counterfactual statement is true only if there is an alternative universe in which JFK didn't go to Dallas and the Vietnam War did end earlier. His "modal realism" entails that there is even a universe containing the Greek gods and is primarily a linguistic philosophical argument rather than a scientific one.

As for the arguments against the multiverse, they boil down to these three.

1) It's not science. Both Paul Davies and Martin Gardner claim that the proposition "the multiverse exists" has no empirical content and hence amounts to empty metaphysics. But the hypotheses that imply it do lead to testable predictions, some of which jibe with the evidence collected so far. In the next decade, as Max Tegmark points out, improved measurements of the microwave background radiation and of the large-scale distribution of matter may fortify or knock down two pillars of the multiverse: the infinitude of space and the theory of chaotic inflation.

2) Alternative universes should be shaved away by Occam's Razor. Both Davies and Gardner complain that the multiverse notion is too extravagant. "Surely the conjecture that there is just one universe and its Creator is infinitely simpler and easier to believe than that there are countless billions upon billions of worlds," Gardner writes. Is it? Our universe came into being with the big bang, and (as the Canadian philosopher John Leslie has observed) it would be exceedingly odd if the mechanism behind this event bore the label "THIS MECHANISM OPERATED ONLY ONCE." A computer program that prints out the entire sequence of numbers is much simpler than one that prints out only a single number of any length. And besides, why should simple theories be more probable than extravagant ones?

3) The multiverse, if real, would reduce our own world to a Matrix-like simulation. This objection, voiced by Davies, is surely the most bizarre of the lot. If there really were myriad universes, Davies argues, then some would contain advanced technological civilizations that could use computers to simulate consciousness and create endless virtual worlds. So, he continues, taking the multiverse theory at face value means "there is no reason to expect our world—the one in which you are reading this right now—to be real as opposed to a simulation." This is a terrible argument for at least two reasons. If it were valid, it would rule out technologically advanced civilizations in this universe since they, too, would presumably create such simulations. And the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation itself has no empirical content. We cannot even talk about it coherently, as Hilary Putnam has pointed out, since our words could refer only to things "inside" the alleged simulation.

How seriously should you take multiple universes? That depends on how scrupulous you are about your ontological commitments. I know people who still regard atoms as theoretical fictions. I have friends who claim to doubt the reality of the past, of the future, of other minds. I have heard of academics—though I cannot believe they actually exist—who think that the cosmos is a social construction. But I am a robust scientific realist. If an empirically sound theory entails that unobservable entities exist, then I take them at face value. After all, reality has over and over again turned out to be much more inclusive than we've given it credit for being. Just a century ago, our puny Milky Way was thought to comprise the entire cosmos.

If the choices we make in our everyday lives seem a little absurd from the viewpoint of a single vast and eternal universe, then, from the viewpoint of an infinite ensemble of universes containing infinite copies of ourselves, all making every possible choice, they are absolutely absurd. Thankfully, in our own little world, those choices remain terribly meaningful and important.



What Fuel Does Voyager 1 Use?
Plus, why it will run out in 2020.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Updated Thursday, Nov. 6, 2003, at 12:49 PM PT

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has reached the edge of the solar system, 8.4 billion miles from the sun. NASA says the spacecraft and its trailing twin, Voyager 2, have enough fuel left to keep operating until 2020. What sort of fuel are the Voyagers running on?

The spacecraft actually carry two types of fuel—one to power the thrusters, the other to keep the electricity humming. The propellant is hydrazine, a simple concoction of nitrogen and hydrogen that smells like weak ammonia. It was chosen—and remains favored today—because it's cheap and has a very low freezing point. The Voyagers' jets are used to orient the vessels; the geek term for the hydrazine is "attitude control propellant." (There's no need for constant propulsion, of course, because space is gravity-free, so the initial boost went a long way; the spacecraft additionally took advantage of the outer planets' gravitational fields, which act like slingshots to increase speed.) NASA estimates that the Voyagers' fuel efficiency is upwards of 30,000 miles per gallon of hydrazine.

Voyager 1 has enough hydrazine to keep going until 2040, while Voyager 2's juice can keep it hurtling along until 2034. (Though the spacecraft are identical, Voyager 2 has had to expend more hydrazine visiting Uranus and Neptune.) The real limiting factor is the other fuel, plutonium-238 dioxide. This is what powers the Voyagers' scientific instruments and communications equipment. The plutonium is converted into electricity by onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which feed off the heat generated by the radioactive fuel's decay. The fuel spheres are encased in a special iridium alloy, to prevent contamination in the unlikely event that the Voyagers crashed shortly after takeoff in 1977.

The plutonium's radioactive decay means that the fuel is generating less and less heat as the years go by, and consequently the RTGs are producing less and less power. At launch, the RTGs were cranking out 470 watts worth of electricity; now it's more like 315 watts. NASA is trying to combat the problem by shutting down non-critical systems, and alternating which instruments are on and off. But come 2020 or so, there won't be enough plutonium left to keep the heaters working, and everything of value will shut down.



Geomagnetic Storms
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Friday, Oct. 24, 2003, at 11:24 AM PT

A strong geomagnetic storm is slated to hit Earth today, and experts warn that power grids and satellites could suffer. What's a geomagnetic storm?

Think of it as an electrical kick in the pants, courtesy of the sun. Geomagnetic storms like today's begin with an event called a coronal mass ejection, a geyser of solar gas. A CME can spout billions of tons of this ionized gas, also known as plasma, traveling at upwards of 3 million miles per hour. That discharge is carried the 93 million miles toward Earth by the solar wind, a constant stream of particles emitted by the sun.

Normally, when solar particles reach the Earth, they're deflected by the magnetosphere, the magnetic field produced by the planet. But in the wake of a major CME, the solar wind carries far too many ionized particles for the magnetosphere to handle. Charged particles slip through the defenses, so to speak, causing the magnetosphere to fluctuate. This produces an intensified ring current, an electrical current trapped within the magnetosphere. The intensity is so strong, in fact, that it can create electrical current in voltage transformers and other power-grid hardware. That's bad news for whomever manages those grids, as the resulting power surge can knock out service to millions of customers. Geomagnetic-storm watchers warily mention March 13, 1989, when 6 million customers of Hydro-Québec lost power for an extended time.

The good news is that geomagnetic storms can also produce brilliant light shows akin to the aurora borealis, or "northern lights." (Or, in the southern hemisphere, the aurora australis.) These lights are caused by milder, more common versions of today's storm and are visible in areas relatively close to the two magnetic poles. The abundance of charged particles that will be pounding the magnetosphere today should make for some great skywatching, at least for those lucky enough to live near the roof or the basement of the globe. However, the intensity of this particular storm may mean that people farther south may get a peek, too; the infamous 1989 storm was reportedly visible in Mexico.

Bonus Explainer: A few fringe scientists have speculated that there's a link between geomagnetic activity and mental health, arguing that psychiatric admissions increase during heavy storms. The mainstream dismisses this correlation as no more substantiated than reports that the full moon causes people to act strangely.



Why Don't Hurricanes Hit L.A.?
By Andy Bowers
Posted Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003, at 11:59 AM PT

East Coast residents bracing for Hurricane Isabel today are old hands at fending off violent storms—an average of two make landfall each year. Why is the Eastern Seaboard consistently plagued by hurricanes, while the U.S. West Coast almost never suffers a direct hit?

Two reasons, really. The first is that hurricanes form in the tropics, where (thanks to the Earth's rotation) winds tend to blow from east to west. That means tropical cyclones—including hurricanes—in the waters near the United States almost always move toward the west-northwest. So when they form in the Atlantic region, they head straight for the American mainland. But in the Pacific, they head farther out to sea. However, that path does take cyclones over Mexico and Hawaii from time to time. And of course, their westward movement also takes them toward land masses in Asia.

The other reason hurricanes almost never hit California, Oregon, or Washington is that cyclones feed on warm sea water—preferably over 80 degrees. But the ocean temperature in the northern Pacific is usually under 75. In fact, there's no record of a tropical hurricane ever hitting the West Coast.

By the way, the words hurricane and typhoon both refer to the same thing—a severe tropical cyclone. The difference is that hurricane is used for storms in the northeastern Pacific, on the American side of the International Date Line, and typhoon is used on the western—or Asian—side.

Bonus Explainer: What's the origin of those interesting proper names given to hurricanes? Most people know that each hurricane season, tropical cyclones are named in alphabetical order to help scientists tell them apart. This year's storms in the Atlantic have ranged so far from Ana to Isabel. The practice began in earnest in the '40s and '50s with all female names. Male monikers were added in the late '70s. But according to the book Atlantic Hurricanes, it was an Australian forecaster in the early 20^th century who first used proper names for cyclones. The names he chose belonged to politicians he disliked.



Trick or Treatment
Teen drug programs turn curious teens into crackheads.
By Maia Szalavitz
Posted Friday, Jan. 3, 2003, at 10:38 AM PT

America loves its quick fixes. Think your child might be on drugs? Test him. Think your child's school is full of addicts? Test them all. Institute a policy of zero tolerance: One strike and it's off to a drug treatment program. Get those rotten apples out and clean them up before they can poison the whole batch. Last year's Supreme Court decision in Board of Education v. Earls allowed for a massive expansion of drug testing in schools. And increases in drug testing increase the numbers of offenders. As a result, schools and juvenile courts are increasingly turning to both "zero tolerance" and "treatment, not punishment" as a remedy.

The number of teenagers in drug treatment as a result of court coercion and school diversion increased by nearly 50 percent between 1993 and 1998 according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the number of teen admissions to treatment programs in general rose from 95,000 in 1993 to 135,000 in 1999. But what if drug "treatment" doesn't work for teens? What if, rather than decreasing drug use, teen treatment actually encourages it by labeling experimenting kids as lifelong addicts? What if it creates the worst sorts of peer groups by mixing kids with mild problems with serious drug users who are ready and willing to teach them to be junkies? What if suggestible kids respond poorly to the philosophies that have made Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous successful for many adults? Then we'd be using "treatment" to turn ordinary adolescents into problem drug abusers.

That's precisely what we're doing. A 1998 study of nearly 150 teenagers treated in dozens of centers across the country found that there was 202 percent more crack abuse following treatment and a 13 percent increase in alcohol abuse. In other words, recent research suggests that parents and schools may be sending binge-drinking/social marijuana smokers off to treatment and getting back crackheads in their stead.

Michael's case illustrates some of the dangers inherent in shipping youngsters off to treatment programs. An 18-year-old marijuana smoker and cocaine user I interviewed regarding drug treatment, Michael was recently sent by his parents for drug treatment at the respected Caron Foundation. But his $11,000 one-month treatment program degenerated into a fruitless debate when his counselor wanted him to admit that he was "powerless" over drugs. Michael, who didn't use daily, wouldn't accept that. What teenager would admit to being "powerless" over anything? Michael used again within four hours of leaving treatment.

Michael's reaction may be the rule for teenagers, not the exception. For an adult who has lost his wife, his job, his health, and his home, admitting to a loss of control might help him recognize that quitting drugs is the only way to solve his problems. But a teenager may not be "in denial" when he says he can control his intake. Most teenagers can. Conversely, forcing a teen to assert that they have no control may do more harm than good, if they have only been experimenting with drugs but are convinced, via treatment, that they are serious addicts. If a teenager has been persuaded that she's powerless and has a 90 percent chance of relapse, she's far less likely to exercise self-control when confronted with a drink or drugs. In fact, a 1996 study published by Bill Miller, professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, found that those adults who most accepted the idea of personal powerlessness had the most severe and dangerous relapses. Since teenage identities are fluid anyway, encouraging them to view themselves as powerless addicts may cement an anti-social identity that a teen was just trying on for size.

The core problem with teen treatment programs is that most teen drug or alcohol users are just not out-of-control addicts. More than one teen in six who's forced into treatment does not even fit the criteria for a "substance abuse disorder" (the less serious diagnosis for an abuser), and most also don't have substance dependence (the psychiatric term for addiction) at all, according to SAMHSA. More troubling, SAMHSA statistics also show that about three-quarters of the U.S. teens now being sent to treatment programs are diverted there by courts or schools, rather than being referred by professionals. In other words, many have problems no more serious than those of their friends who've escaped detection.

In addition to labeling kids as addicts, drug programs may also surround them with the worst possible influences. Studies show that teens are more subject to peer pressure than adults—and more influenced by the people around them. Teen treatment programs remove teens from a healthy peer group and surround them with other problem kids, virtually guaranteeing that their role models will be negative. Group therapy during such treatment invariably involves discussions of their drug experiences—which only makes the hard-drug users seem "cooler" because their stories are so much more exciting. Worse, aside from providing a way for relatively inexperienced kids to learn about different ways of getting high and obtaining drugs, these programs frequently offer kids new connections. One 17-year-old girl from Florida told me that she hadn't used cocaine until after treatment—her new best friend from rehab scored it for her.

There are treatments for teens that don't reinforce the labeling or peer problems inherent in most drug programs. Research presented at a spring conference held by the National Institute on Drug Abuse compared teens who'd been sent to traditional group sessions with peers to teens who received family therapy, with a third group who had both kinds of care combined. The kids in the peer-group sessions used 50 percent more marijuana after treatment, while the kids in the combined treatment used 11 percent more pot. The teenagers treated with their parents, however, decreased their marijuana use by 71 percent.

The greatest irony in the current well-intentioned treatment efforts is that they ignore the few things we do know to be effective in helping teens stop getting high, and chief among them is finishing their education. The better educated someone is, the less likely he is to become an addict or to have a lengthy course of addiction if he does. So removing kids from school and placing them with a more deviant peer group in an unproven therapy is madness—and not much smarter than simply expelling them and tossing them on the street. Not only is the education provided in treatment programs often inferior to that in ordinary school, but having a drug-related disciplinary record diminishes the chances of admission to a decent college.

Ultimately, it's clear that the vast majority of teenagers (even those with the very worst problems) simply "mature out" of drug use. This natural recovery process is seen in statistics from the annual federal household survey of drug use, which, for example, find that while 18.4 percent of the population ages 18-24 in 2001 qualified for a diagnosis of alcohol or other drug abuse or dependence, only 5.4 percent of those over 26 meet these criteria. Since less than 2 percent of the total population annually receives treatment (including self-help), most of these young people are clearly recovering on their own.

Why, then, do we insist on herding teenagers into inappropriate treatment programs when allowing them to finish school works better? Do parents really want their pot-smoking, experimenting binge-drinkers (who are actually typically more moderate than their own parents were at their age) tossed into "therapy" with heroin injectors and told that they are powerless to resist?

Studies show that family therapy and behavioral one-on-one counseling work better for teens than programs modeled on adult addicts. Even for kids with genuine drug addictions, these sorts of treatments may be more helpful, and it's long past time that such programs were implemented in communities rather than debated in the academy. For kids with minor drugs problems or—as is more often the case—for kids who are just being kids, the philosophy must be: First, do no harm. Although we may hate the idea, leaving kids alone and letting them grow out of their habits makes far more sense than testing, punishing, and "curing" them—by making them worse.



Estrogen Uncovered
Have women been the unwitting victims of the medical establishment's experiment with hormones?
By Eliza McCarthy
Updated Friday, Aug. 22, 2003, at 1:43 PM PT

Hyperion Books recently published The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth, by Barbara Seaman. Generally speaking, a new volume on estrogen would hardly merit a mention. After all, such books are a dime a dozen. On Amazon.com, for example, there are 448 books listed under "Women's Health, Menopause," and 95 under "Contraceptives, Oral."

But a book by Barbara Seaman on the topic is something special. Published in 1969, her first book, The Doctors' Case Against the Pill, caused an anti-estrogen sensation. At that time, the Food and Drug Administration had received reports of blood clots, strokes, and other less serious side effects, such as nausea, associated with the birth-control pill, but most doctors failed to mention these risks to their patients. Seaman's book, containing chapters such as "The Silence That Could Kill You," changed all that: After its publication, congressional hearings were called to discuss the then high-dose Pill; pharmaceutical companies subsequently lowered the Pill's concentrations of estrogen and its oft-ignored hormonal cousin, progestin; the FDA also required that companies include those now-ubiquitous patient-information inserts listing a drug's potential risks.

All these years later, after writing several more books and co-founding the National Women's Health Network, a feminist activist group, Seaman is back to estrogen. It is a tumultuous time in the public life of the hormone: Last summer (in case you were hibernating or are a man) the government announced that it was halting a portion of its Women's Health Initiative, a 15-year study, in part devoted to investigating hormone use, of more than 100,000 postmenopausal women. In the WHI, it turned out, postmenopausal women taking hormone therapy containing both estrogen and progestin ran a 24 percent increased risk for heart disease, even though hormones had been thought to protect the heart. The study also confirmed that combination therapy increases the risk for breast cancer by 24 percent; surprisingly, the hormones also doubled the risk for dementia, when they had been hypothesized to prevent cognitive decline. (Interestingly, no such risks have been discerned among women taking only estrogen; these women are still being tracked, with many doctors predicting the results will turn out to be similarly disappointing.)

As a result of the WHI findings and of the writings of estrogen skeptics like Seaman and Dr. Susan Love, the conventional wisdom on estrogen, particularly on postmenopausal hormone use, has recently been transformed: Whereas the hormones were once presented as potential lifesavers, they are now looked upon with intense suspicion. News anchor Ann Curry's reaction on a recent episode of Today is representative of the shift: "What accounts for this … immoral positioning, immoral development?" she asked Seaman. "I think many of us are angry about what has transpired."

Seaman is angry, too. In her book, Seaman places the blame for what she calls the "dirty secrets" of estrogen's history on drug manufacturers and doctors who recommended hormone products for what they "hope or believe they can do, not for what they know the products can do," the marketers who sold the drugs with extravagant claims, and what she sees as the wimpy media that failed to adequately report data on negative side effects. As for the millions of women who've taken estrogen over the years, Seaman believes they were used as "lab animals."

The not so subtext of all these arguments is clear: The drug companies are reckless and greedy; the media are complicit; the patients are dupes. These are familiar tropes of health-care activism. But do these claims, in the case of estrogen, hold up?

As a skeptical health writer, I was ripe for proselytization. And Seaman's book does raise lots of good, if familiar, questions about the influence of money on estrogen-research and marketing. Still, Seaman's book did not convince me that all women should swear off estrogen products entirely. (Seaman says her goal isn't to inspire estrogen aversion, but with chapter titles like "Poison by Prescription" one has to wonder.) Nor did the book convince me that the medical establishment is incapable of improving its hormonal record. On the contrary, Seaman, perhaps unwittingly, tells the story of a medical establishment that has—admittedly with prodding from advocates like her—learned to look more critically at the question of estrogen. We've come a long way from the early days of the Pill, when women were told, essentially, not to worry their pretty little heads about it, to the huge gold-standard clinical trial that is the WHI.

The book does include loads of fascinating research, particularly on the shoot-first-ask-questions-later development of hormonal drugs. Seaman writes of grisly hormone experiments done on prisoners at Auschwitz (according to Seaman's source, the prisoners' "rutabaga soup" was likely laced with estrogen); the development of the synthetic estrogen DES in England (DES was used by millions in the United States to "prevent miscarriage," when, horribly, it didn't—and exposed both the pregnant women and their children to serious health problems later in life); and the creation of the birth-control pill after tests conducted on what Seaman portrays as helplessly vulnerable Puerto Rican slum dwellers.

But Seaman's fixation on estrogenic details to the exclusion of other health data does her cause a weird kind of disservice. In using the word "experiment," Seaman implies that the many forms of estrogen—from the Pill to postmenopausal hormone therapy—have been foisted on women despite inadequate or even nonexistent evidence. In using the word "greatest," she suggests that this is the largest and worst of such "experiments" ever done unto women. But Seaman provides little context for these claims. Nowhere is there a comparison with other medical experiments like, say, the government's 40-year "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," in which researchers withheld known cures from sick men simply to observe the ailment's natural progression. OK, so the study was done on men, but it's a pretty good yardstick with which to measure nasty portions of medical history. Nor does she ever compare estrogen's safety profile with that of other drugs. While it's frightening that postmenopausal hormones could cause up to 6,000 more cases of breast cancer a year, let's put this number in perspective. One hundred thousand people may die annually in the hospital from adverse drug reactions. (And the truth is, postmenopausal hormones only raise an individual woman's yearly breast cancer risk—yours, mine—by one-tenth of 1 percent.)

Seaman also writes with an odd kind of childish faith that finding absolute Scientific Truth should be a piece of cake, and risk-free to boot. Yet before the 1960s, when government agencies enacted more stringent controls over drug experiments, some researchers—not just those working with hormones—experimented with a derring-do that would make us queasy today. For example: In 1941, after testing penicillin on a measly eight mice, English researchers tried it out on a man sick with septicemia. (After a brief rally, the man died.) A mere two years later, the drug was being mass-produced. Estrogen is clearly not the only drug that was put on the market before its benefits and dangers were known to an absolute certainty.

So what do we know for certain about estrogen-containing drugs?

We know that today's lower-dose contraceptive pills, patches, and injections are not as dangerous as the earlier version of the Pill. They do slightly increase the risk for blood clots and strokes—according to recent studies, an extra 1 to 3 women per 10,000 annually will develop a blood clot while on the Pill, and an extra 1 to 4 per 100,000 women will suffer a stroke, with smokers at particular risk. On breast cancer, some research, though not definitive, suggests that women on the Pill (particularly those who start the Pill before the age of 20) may have an increased risk of breast cancer, one that dissipates after they stop taking the drug. Yet women who take the Pill actually develop fewer ovarian and endometrial cancers. Besides, today's Pill is nearly 100 percent effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy, if taken faithfully.

As for postmenopausal hormones, Seaman's right that the hormones have only a very few clear-cut benefits: They do reliably quash menopausal hot flashes and may also alleviate vaginal dryness. But no one's studied a "safe" length of time to take the drug for these symptoms. Furthermore, the WHI found that despite hot-flash relief, women on hormones reported no better quality of life than women taking a dummy pill.

In light of this shaky rationale for hormone therapy, researchers are looking to other drugs to do some of what hormones were supposed to: It seems that the cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may fit the bill—some clinical trials show that they reduce the risk of death from heart disease (even among people with normal cholesterol levels); they also may somehow reduce fracture risk, researchers speculate; and, at least in a test-tube, they keep breast-cancer cells from proliferating. But let's not get ahead of the data—if there's one message to glean from the estrogen saga, it's this.



Wake Up, Little Susie
Can we sleep less?
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, March 7, 2003, at 2:08 PM PT

On most days, my accumulated sleep deficit and post-lunch stupor gang up on me around 2 p.m., and I begin my slow fade. My eyes droop. Saliva dribbles onto my sweater. If I were trying to write this sentence at 2 p.m. on a normal day, it would read something like: "If I were tryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy … "

But today, I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a chatty Kathy with my officemates, eager to spend all afternoon banging on the keyboard. (I normally prefer chewing my fingers off to writing.) I am not exactly wired, but I'm more alert, more focused, more Plotz-like. Today I am my own Superman, dosed on 100 milligrams of modafinil.

Every year, we need the same amount of sleep, and every year we get less. Since the invention of artificial illumination, sleep has been a bear market. There are many reasons we catch fewer Z's: Round-the-clock workplaces, longer commutes, brighter lights, 24-hour Krispy Kreme stores, the Home Shopping Network—the list goes on. According to University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology David Dinges, Americans probably sleep about six and a half to seven hours per night, compared to the more than eight hours our bodies want.

We have learned to cope with a regular sleep deficit, but we pay a price (and not just $4.05 for the venti latte). Studies by Dinges and military scientists have proved that performance deteriorates when you sleep less than eight hours. People who rest seven or six or five hours a night may not feel tired, but their thinking and dexterity are suffering. We medicate ourselves with caffeine, a drug that raises alertness but at a cost of jitteriness, irregular heartbeat, and addiction. Folks who really need to stay awake dope themselves with amphetamines—stimulants that can ward off sleep for days but cause terrible crashes when they wear off. (And we don't know what long-term damage they cause.)

The military is enthralled with the possibility of doing away with shut-eye. The supersecret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investigating drugs that would keep soldiers awake for a week. The Air Force prescribes "go pills"—small doses of the amphetamine Dexedrine—to pep up long-haul pilots. (But hopped-up pilots may be dangerous: The American pilots who accidentally bombed and killed Canadian soldiers last spring were taking go pills.)

Avoiding sleep for a week might be necessary in an extreme situation like war, but the run-of-the-mill, office-working, wannabe Superman requires something different. We don't want a pill that will keep us Exceling and Power Pointing for three days straight. We just want something that makes us feel alert through an entire normal day—a drug that makes us feel as lively for the 18-hour-day we have to live as for the 16-hour-day we ought to live.

Hence my rendezvous with modafinil. The drug, made by Cephalon, is marketed under the creepy, pharma-Orwellian name Provigil. The FDA approved it in 1998 to treat narcolepsy, but it is starting to have a underground life as a pick-me-up for the routinely sleep-deprived. The military has tested it heavily, particularly on pilots.

The way modafinil works is not understood. It seems to slow the release of GABA, a sleep promoter in the brain. It also may act on the histamine system, which is connected to sleep regulation. What is clear is that modafinil differs from most other pick-me-ups, which tend to be indiscriminate in their function. Amphetamines like Dexedrine, for example, promote wakefulness by interfering with uptake of the neurotransmitter dopamine, causing dopamine to flood the brain. Dopamine, says Joyce Walsleben, director of the NYU Sleep Disorders Center, is a "broad hitter" that sets the heart racing, causes twitchiness, and makes you feel high. When the effect of such stimulants wears off, the crash is nasty. Caffeine affects a different pathway, involving adenosine, but that, too, spills over the brain's flood wall, making coffee drinkers jittery.

But modafinil tiptoes around dopamine, confining its activity to the particular neurological processes connected to wakefulness. It doesn't seem to act as a broad stimulant. (This is one reason, Walsleben says, that modafinil has not become a street drug. Unlike cocaine or amphetamines, modafinil doesn't make you feel high, and it acts very slowly, taking a couple of hours or more to kick in.) Narcoleptics seem to love modafinil. (By boosting alertness throughout the day, modafinil reduces the narcoleptic's compulsion to nod off.) Now doctors are getting barraged by requests from regular folks who want to use it to cut down on sleep.

The seduction of modafinil is that you can feel as peppy after six hours sleep as you would after nine. (It may also have a more drastic effect.) Doctors see modafinil as an occasional pick-me-up. They doubt you could take the drug everyday without consequences: Most sleep researchers agree that the longer sleep is necessary for hormonal regulation, among other essential bodily functions. (Drugs aren't the only way we may steal less sleep. Click here to read about how we may enlist gene therapy to help us stay awake.)

Tired of merely writing about enhancement (and tired, period), I decided to conduct my own unscientific trial of modafinil. As the father of a 2-year-old, I live in a constant haze of sleep deprivation. I vowed to take modafinil for a week and see what happened. Could it transform a lazy, exhausted hack into a brilliant Jeffrey Goldberg? Or recast a grouchy father into Superdad? I persuaded my doctor—and no, you can't have his number—to prescribe me a week's supply of Provigil, seven 200-milligram pills.

Here is the diary I kept.

Day 1, Monday
6:45 a.m.: Woken up by my daughter after the usual six and a half hours.

7 a.m.: I open the bottle. The pills are monstrous. I start to chicken out. I've never smoked pot, much less taken cocaine or amphetamines. I decide to halve the dosage. When I cut the first pill with my pocketknife, half of it shoots off my bureau, slides across the floor, and disappears under a dresser, no doubt to be discovered and eaten by my daughter someday in the near future. I pop the other 100-milligram half.

10 a.m.: At the office. I've felt no rush, but alertness has snuck up on me. I am incredibly attentive, but not on edge. I really, really feel like working, a rare sensation.

12 p.m.: I reach for my usual lunchtime Coca-Cola, then think better of it. Caffeine plus this sprightliness and I will be ping-ponging off the walls.

2 p.m.: This is when I usually fold. Today I am the picture of vivacity. I am working about twice as fast as usual. I have a desperate urge to write, to make reporting calls, to finish my expense account—activities I religiously avoid. I find myself talking very loudly and quickly. A colleague says I am grinning like a "feral chipmunk."

6 p.m.: Annoyed to have to leave the office when there is all this lovely work to do.

9 p.m.: Home. After dinner, I race upstairs to start working again. This is totally out of character, especially on a Monday Night Football evening.

12 a.m.: I want the day to keep going but force myself to go to bed. I fall asleep easily enough, but it's a weird night. I have lots of dreams, which is unusual. All are about Getting Things Done.

Day 2, Tuesday
6:30 a.m.: I wake up feeling good, cut another pill in two, and pop a half.

9 a.m.-7 p.m.: I work like a fiend again. These have been the two most productive days I've had in years. Idea for new Provigil ad slogan: "Bosses' Little Helper."

1 a.m.: Again I'm alert through the late evening—so alert that I infuriate my wife by chattering at her long past her bedtime. This time, when I do conk out, I sleep deeply.

Day 3, Wednesday
7 a.m.: My one-man clinical trial starts to fall apart. Everyone says modafinil is not addictive, but I wake up worried about how long my supply will last. I count the pills and realize I have only five and a half left. That's just an 11-day supply. I remember that I offered a sample to a friend yesterday. I am annoyed—one day less for me. I start to cut up the remaining pills, wondering if I can divide them into thirds instead of halves.

I realize that maybe I can find a different supplier. I log onto the Internet to see if I can get modafinil on the sly. I find it cheap at the Discount Mexican Pharmacy. I feel delighted and relieved. Then I feel terrified that I am delighted and relieved. "Discount Mexican Pharmacy"?!

7:30 a.m.: I end my experiment after two days. I am acting like a lunatic. I stash the remaining pills in a distant corner of the medicine cabinet. I calm myself with the reminder that I have 11 more great days to look forward to.

So is modafinil a drug for future superpeople? Maybe. There are good reasons for doubt, though. The drug is approved only for treating narcolepsy, and doctors are not going to prescribe it like aspirin anytime soon. Though patients don't seem to get addicted to modafinil or to build a tolerance, according to Walsleben, the drug has been in use for only 10 years, and no one knows for certain that it's safe over the long term. (Cephalon and other drug companies, incidentally, are working on even more powerful wakefulness drugs, but none is on the market yet.)

I loved taking modafinil for two days. I worked supernaturally hard and well. But I'd be afraid to make it a habit. I'll use it again for a special occasion—when I am late for a deadline, perhaps. In the meantime, I'll just yawn my way through the midafternoon.


sidebar

 Modafinil may allow you to skip huge chunks of sleep. One study suggested that modafinil could help you stay up for 40 hours without impairment and without accumulating a sleep deficit. But more recent trials have not been able to confirm that finding, according to the NYU Sleep Center's Walsleben.

sidebar

 There's another, more sci-fi way we may be able to sleep less. Lots of people claim to be "short-sleepers" who function perfectly well on six or even four hours of shut-eye. CEOs and politicians (see Bill Clinton) love to brag about how little rest they need. In fact, says Penn's David Dinges, almost nobody is a true short-sleeper. Some who purport to need only four hours sack time cheat by napping frequently. Others are very sleep-deprived and just don't realize it. Dinges has measured actual performance of self-described short-sleepers, and their lousy performances prove that they're wiped.

But a rare few—1 in a 1,000, Dinges estimates—need very little sleep and function just as well after six hours as after eight. This group is very hard to study (since it takes enormous effort just to weed out the many ersatz short-sleepers from the real ones).

Short-sleeping probably has genetic roots. Scientists are now starting to hunt the human genome for the genes connected to sleep regulation. If they find a short-sleeping gene, it would be a glorious target for gene enhancement. For now, no one has found such a gene or even knows if it exists. If it is found, scientists will need to determine if its presence exacts other physiological costs. (If you sleep less, do you die sooner, for example?) And even if there aren't any costs, researchers face the technical challenge of modifying DNA in a remote area of the brain—a task well beyond current gene therapy, which tends to focus on small genes in accessible corners of the body.



Did I Violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban?
A doctor ponders a new era of prosecution
By Warren M. Hern
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003, at 4:17 PM PT

As the misleadingly titled "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban" makes its way to the president's desk, anti-abortion groups are celebrating their public relations victory. But beneath the hoopla, the bill's medical consequences remain murky. Exactly which procedures will be banned, and which doctors prosecuted? Will the anti-abortion lobby be happier with the alternative methods to which doctors will resort? If not, which methods and doctors will be targeted next? Will this ban have a chilling effect on related procedures? If so, will it prevent abortions—or births?

I ask these questions because I am a potential target of this legislation. Almost exactly 30 years ago, shortly after Roe v. Wade, I started performing abortions on a full-time basis in Boulder, Colo., at the state's first free-standing nonprofit abortion clinic, where I was the founding medical director. In my private practice, I perform many abortions as late as the 26^th week of pregnancy, and some as late as the 34^th week.

I don't know the answers to the questions I've posed above, and neither does Congress. No physician expert on late abortion has ever testified in person before a congressional committee. No peer-reviewed articles or case reports have ever been published describing anything such as "partial-birth" abortion, "Intact D&E" (for "dilation and extraction"), or any of its synonyms. There have been no descriptions of its complication rates and no published studies comparing its complication rates with those of any other method of late abortion.

What I do know is that the political exploitation of this issue is confusing and frightening my patients. Recently, I received a call from a woman whose physician had discovered catastrophic genetic and developmental defects in the fetus she is carrying. The pregnancy was profoundly desired, and the diagnosis was devastating for her and her husband. She called me with great anxiety to find out whether passage of the "partial-birth" ban by the Senate would mean that she could not come to my office for help because my work would be illegal. She was also horrified by the images that she had seen and the terminology she had heard in the congressional debates.

I reassured her that I do not perform the "partial-birth" procedure and that there is no likelihood that the ban's passage would close my office and keep me from seeing her. The fetus cannot be delivered "alive" in my procedure—as the ban stipulates in defining prohibited procedures—because I begin by giving the fetus an injection that stops its heart immediately. I treat the woman's cervix to cause it to open during the next two days. On the third day, under anesthesia, the membranes are ruptured, allowing the amniotic fluid to escape. Medicine is given to make the uterus contract, and the dead fetus is delivered or removed with forceps. Many variations of this sequence are possible, depending on the woman's medical condition and surgical indications.

On the same day I got that call, I received a call from another woman who hoped to become pregnant but wanted to be reassured that, in spite of passage of the "partial-birth" ban, she would still be able to terminate the pregnancy if a serious genetic defect were discovered at, say, 20 weeks of pregnancy. Because of her history, she has an especially high risk of such a scenario. Without reassurance, she would avoid pregnancy entirely. Again, I reassured her that I would be here for her if she needs me.

But what if the people enforcing the "partial-birth" ban decide for some reason—because they doubt that my injection worked, for example—that it covers what I do? Or what if other doctors decide to follow the same procedure of causing fetal death by injection some time—even a day or two—before the extraction is performed? If the intact delivery of the living fetus (the "birth" imagery) is what bothers lawmakers, will they ban this method as well? Depending on the doctor, the alternative to intact extraction could be dismemberment of the fetus in the uterus, which may be more dangerous for the woman and no less troubling to look at. Is that what Congress wants? Who gets to decide what is safer for the woman: the expert physician or Congress?

Earlier this year, I began an abortion on a young woman who was 17 weeks pregnant. Because of the two days of prior treatment, the amniotic membranes were visible and bulging. I ruptured the membranes and released the fluid to reduce the risk of amniotic fluid embolism. Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact. With the next pass of the forceps, I grasped the placenta, and it came out in one piece. Within a few seconds, I had completed my routine exploration of the uterus and sharp curettage. The blood loss would just fill a tablespoon. The patient, who was awake, hardly felt the operation. She was relieved, grateful, and safe. She wants to have children in the future.

Did I do a "partial-birth" abortion? Will John Ashcroft prosecute me? Stay tuned.



It Oughtta Be the Shoes
What's wrong with Adbusters' new anti-Nike campaign?
By Rob Walker
Posted Monday, Nov. 17, 2003, at 8:58 AM PT

The Nike swoosh is a symbol with enormous power. And not just for the brand's fans and customers: No logo is more reviled by ideological opponents of the culture of marketing, those who see the incursion of the brand idea into all aspects of our everyday lives as both obnoxious and oppressive. The magazine Adbusters is one such opponent, so it's no great surprise that this antimarketing bastion's latest project is a fresh assault on fortress Nike. What's more surprising is that the weapon of choice is a marketing campaign for an Adbusters sneaker.

The idea is to counter Nike by selling a kind of delogoed shoe called the Black Spot sneaker—an "unswoosher," as Adbusters calls it. The sneaker would be manufactured in determinedly nonsweatshop conditions, would sell for $65, and would be emblazoned not with a stylized brand mark but with a big black dot. A planned print ad (see it here) says little about the product, stressing instead how the shoe will take on Nike and its head honcho, Phil Knight. The Black Spot, it says, is "Plain. Simple. Cheap. Fair. And designed for only one thing: Kicking Phil's ass."

It's always fun to throw rocks at big nasties like Nike, and generally speaking I'm a fan of Adbusters' caustic and provocative rhetoric. But this particular unswooshing plan has puzzled some even some antibranders, for an obvious reason: That black spot may symbolize a blotted-out logo, but it is also, unavoidably, a logo itself.

So far the skeptics' critique pretty much ends right there, but I don't think it's quite right to say that the black spot and the logo are essentially the same thing, and thus the whole exercise is a fraud. The campaign would still be sound if it really aimed to sell an alternative shoe that happened to sport an antilogo. The problem is that Adbusters is trying to sell an antilogo that happens to have a shoe attached to it. In other words, the spot and its supposed meaning aren't a byproduct of the campaign—they are the whole thing. But one of the most legitimate criticisms of blind logo loyalty is that it trivializes the logoed item itself: Don't worry about what we're selling, just buy the symbol we've stamped on it.

A rendering of the shoe looks a lot like a classic Converse low top, but at $65 it's much more expensive. (The last pair of Converse shoes I bought, about a year ago, cost around $35.) Why is that, exactly? Is the Black Spot sneaker particularly well-made? Will it last longer than a big-name shoe? Is it a great value? The planned campaign doesn't seem to address those utilitarian matters. And apart from including the word "fair" (which will mean little to consumers who aren't already fair-trade buffs), the ad doesn't even make a selling point of the socially responsible aspects of its product. So is the sales pitch based on the shoe's merits, or does it just suggest that wearing Black Spots will broadcast a facile message about how anticorporate (and therefore cool) you are? And if it's the latter, then isn't that precisely as vacuous as the ideology of the swoosh, which assumes that there is no better way to express ourselves than through the logos we choose (or reject)?

The Black Spot idea comes along at an interesting moment in the story of marketing, when many advertisers feel that direct pitches don't work anymore. Adbusters is in some ways right in tune with this, and is at its most entertaining when it uses commercial tropes to expose commercial hypocrisy. It's interesting to imagine this approach taken to a new level with an actual product competing in the real marketplace, sold on the basis of its real attributes—not its image. But rather than challenge the rules of the advertising game, Adbusters, this time around, is simply playing along. As a result, the plan for the Black Spot does not feel like a triumph for the forces of antimarketing—it feels like a capitulation. This campaign doesn't slow the momentum of the culture of branding; it's merely along for the ride.



The Economics of Suicide
Why trying to kill yourself may be a smart business decision.
By Charles Duhigg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003, at 8:15 AM PT

When Kirk Jones jumped over the guardrail at Niagara Falls last week and fell 180 feet alongside 150,000 gallons per second of rushing water, traditional explanations for his leap were plentiful. Jones' parents said he had lost his job and was depressed. A suicide expert pointed out the appeal of dramatic farewells. And everyone called the jump suicidal: Jones is the first person to survive a Niagara fall without safety gear.

But when it later came out that Jones had boasted to a friend, "If I go over and I live, I am going to make some money," it was time to call in the economists.

Jones is now negotiating with tabloids to sell his story for thousands of dollars. His case, however, will complicate a debate that is roiling suicidology, one that pits economists against psychiatrists over a basic question: Is suicide a rational decision?

This controversy began in 1974 when two Princeton economists created a model to forecast suicidal decisions. Admittedly, the economists wrote, some suicidal behavior is purely irrational. But evidence suggests that economic theory explains some suicides. The economists proposed that the value of a life might be calculated the same way we value companies: Measure all the happiness a life might contain, discount it by the cost of achieving that happiness, and if the net present joie de vivre is less than zero, suicide is a viable option.

The economics of suicide were largely ignored in the ensuing decades. But last year Dave Marcotte, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, pushed the field forward when he wondered what happens to people like Jones who attempt, but do not achieve, suicide.* There are about 20 attempts for every successful suicide. (Approximately 2.9 percent of the U.S. population has attempted suicide—1,760 attempts per day.)

Previous studies had demonstrated that as personal incomes rise, the propensity for suicide falls (presumably, money does buy some happiness). Marcotte's insight was that individuals contemplating suicide do not just choose between life and death. Rather, they choose between three alternatives: life, death, and the gray area of unsuccessful suicide, which may be negative (expensive injury and permanent disability) or positive (a "cry for help" that elicits attention).

The resulting formula contains a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: Attempting suicide can be a rational choice, but only if there is a high likelihood it will cause the attempter's life to significantly improve.

Marcotte couldn't test the relative "life improvement" of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte's study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—"hard-suicide" attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don't seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become "cheaper" after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you.

Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.

The suicide-prevention movement of the 1960s was founded upon the idea of "suicide crisis moments"—relatively brief periods when "psychological pain and mental illness causes irrational thoughts, which are treatable and temporary," explained Dr. David Rudd, president of the American Association of Suicidology. This idea is the basis of suicide hotlines, which studies prove are effective in saving lives. Suicidology suggests that most failed suicide attempts are not caused by permanent mental illness. Rather, they are the products of momentary lapses in reason. Once the crisis moment is resolved through intervention and care, suicidal instincts pass and would-be attempters go on to fruitful and healthy lives. (Many economists and suicidologists agree that multiple suicide attempts and successful suicides are often products of longstanding mental illnesses.)

Constructing suicide as a momentary loss of reason is vitally important to the suicide-prevention movement because it suggests that men and women who have attempted self-murder should be allowed to shrug off social stigmas. If suicidal instincts are just momentary delusions, they are easily explained and dismissed. The suicide-prevention movement fears that if suicide is deemed the rational product of someone's mind, we may feel justified in suspecting that mind forever.

But by objecting to rational explanations of suicide, the suicidology community may be undermining its own cause. Although suicide attempts cost the nation more than $3 billion per year, and suicides claim more American lives than homicides, suicide prevention is hampered by scarce resources. Ultimately, say mental health advocates, legislators don't like to fund suicide prevention because they believe that suicidal people must be crazy, and crazy people don't really want help. Perhaps if suicide were considered a rational and combatable disease, like skin cancer or high cholesterol, we might see well funded educational campaigns similar to those for more socially acceptable ailments.



Lies, Damn Lies, and Focus Groups
Why don't consumers tell the truth about what they want?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 3:29 PM PT

Here's a paradox: Fifty million Americans have registered for the national Do Not Call list, suggesting they don't want to be bothered by telemarketers and won't buy if they are. Yet telemarketers want to keep calling them. Why? Because the marketers realize that what consumers say they want and what they actually do are not the same: Those who don't want to be called actually buy from telemarketers when they are called. This evidence of consumer untrustworthiness got Moneybox thinking about focus groups. If consumers lie, what good are focus groups?

Evidence suggests focus group participants often lie. "The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative," writes Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman in his influential book How Customers Think. After all, he notes, 80 percent of new products or services fail within six months when they've been vetted through focus groups. Hollywood films and TV pilots—virtually all of which are screened by focus groups—routinely fail in the marketplace.

Focus groups have become a requirement of everything from product launches to political campaigns. But even though few in the industry question their value, a huge gap yawns between customer intentions expressed in focus groups and behavior in the marketplace.

There are several reasons for this. Start with the participants. Sure, they're all volunteers and presumably well-disposed to the process. But psychological reasons exist that could lead them to say one thing in the confines of a windowless conference room and do another thing at the mall. Moneybox has participated in a few focus groups—and has talked to several people who conduct them. And it seems clear that the motivations of those who show up are varied. Some come because they need the cash, not because they have a deep desire to express their consumer preferences. Others come for the cookies and punch or for the opportunity to interact with other humans. Still others—including Moneybox—spend a lot of time trying to suss out precisely who is doing the testing.

A small percentage of focus group participants may indeed lie maliciously—although it takes a particularly devious criminal mind to go to such lengths to mislead marketers. More participants are simply eager to please. They're getting paid and fed or might have a crush on the moderator. So, they might tell her—and the marketing types behind the one-way mirror—what they think they want to hear, rather than what they really think.

What's more, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a worse environment for eliciting heartfelt and brutally honest opinions. Getting paid to get together with a bunch of strangers, and being led in a discussion by another stranger, is unnatural. In their book Qualitative Interviewing, Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin note that focus group leaders don't have time to build trust, which is a precondition for eliciting the true feelings of participants. If the discussion turns to controversial issue—like race or women's role in the workplace—many might feel a powerful impulse to self-censor or give politically correct rather than completely honest answers.

Another conceptual flaw: Focus groups frequently ask people to make snap judgments about products they haven't seen or used. "When you ask somebody a question, they'll have an opinion," said Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist and managing partner of the Context-Based Research Group. "And they may know absolutely nothing about it, or have never experienced it. It's abstracted from their reality." (Rather than conduct focus groups, Context focuses on fieldwork. Brinkoff and his colleagues watch people using products in their natural habitats. Think Margaret Mead in New Rochelle, not New Guinea.)

Gerald Zaltman agrees. Because focus groups don't reflect experience but rather hypothetical choices, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, they are not effective when developing and evaluating new product ideas, testing ads, or evaluating brand images."

But he goes a step further. The real reason people may seem to "lie" to focus groups is that they simply don't know what they want. Nor can they readily conceive what they want. "Standard questioning can sometimes reveal consumers' thinking about familiar goods and services if those thoughts and feelings are readily accessible and easily articulated," Zaltman writes. But that's a huge "if." "Most of the thoughts and feelings that influence consumers' and managers' behavior occur in the unconscious mind." Not irrational, but unconscious.

"Unconscious thoughts are the most accurate predictors of what people will actually do," Zaltman said in an interview. "In the space of 5 or 10 minutes in a focus group, which is the average airtime per person, you can't possibly get at one person's unconscious thinking."

So, why do focus groups remain so popular? They are time-honored mechanisms with clearly defined costs and that produce data in a specific time frame. Perhaps most important, they can be used to validate initiatives or concepts that the people commissioning the focus groups have already invested vast resources and time in. Typically, Hollywood focus-groups endings of films or completed pilots—not screenplays and development pitches. Ad agencies tend to focus-group a few ideas they have brainstormed and then report to the client which one scored best. The primary function of focus groups is often to validate the sellers' own beliefs about their product. Focus groups, which are supposed to explore the psychological needs of consumers, may serve as much to fulfill the psychological needs of sellers.



You're Not Rich, but Now You Can Fake It
How Starbucks coffee, BMW cars, and Godiva chocolates have become luxuries for the masses.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2003, at 3:26 PM PT

Everywhere you look, brands that once catered to the rich are now targeting the rest of us. Costco is the biggest retailer of Bordeaux wines. Wolfgang Puck has a restaurant at O'Hare Airport. Starbucks has outlets in Meijer, the Midwestern grocery chain.

The new book Trading Up: The New American Luxury, by Michael Silverstein of Boston Consulting Group and Neil Fiske, formerly of BCG and now chief executive officer of Bath & Body Works, explains how American companies have invented the oxymoronic business of mass elitism.

Old Luxury goods are high-margin, low-volume products priced so only the wealthiest can afford them. You can get rich selling Old Luxury. New Luxury goods, by contrast, are not quite cheap, high-volume goods aimed at the 47 million middle-market households that make more than $50,000—Williams-Sonoma dishes, Samuel Adams beer, Victoria's Secret lingerie, Bath & Body Works Sandlewood Rose Relaxing Body Wash. You can get really rich selling New Luxury.

The consultants have divined that everyone is willing to pay more for something. It could be bread, lipstick, wine, golf clubs, underwear, chocolate, dolls, or pet food, so long as it speaks to a longing in the soul. Silverstein and Fiske write that consumers are moving up to "a new level of goods and services that cost more than conventional products—sometimes a lot more—but seemed to deliver a lot more value, particularly emotional value, to them."

This is the Shopping of Meaning. "The American consumer is in a state of heightened emotionalism." After surveying 2,300 consumers, the authors concluded that "many Americans feel overworked, isolated, lonely, worried, and unhappy." But it turns out the cure is shopping for premium-priced products. Don't have time to walk your poodle? Prove you love him by buying expensive dog food. Feeling down? A 5-cent Hershey's Kiss may provide a jolt of sugar, but a $2 Godiva truffle will perk you up more.

Some of the arguments they put forth in support of a happy, shallow, harmless materialism are tendentious. "For its apostles—and there are many—a visit to the Cheesecake Factory is mostly about Connecting and Questing." (It's hard to see what Quest there is involved in eating at the Cheesecake Factory, except: Can I possibly finish the 6 pounds of Caesar salad they piled on my plate?) And, perhaps this is a result of spending too much time in New York, but it seems to Moneybox that the authors have a strange idea of what constitutes "luxury." Panera Bread? Kendall-Jackson wines? Carnival Cruises?

The book does not focus on how New Luxury products may, in fact, be dragging down their manufacturers. There's a fine line between "masstige" and cheapening your brand. Once you've bought a Polo shirt at Costco for $20, you might not pay $50 for the same shirt on Madison Avenue.

Part of the allure of luxury goods was that other people couldn't easily afford them. By contrast, New Luxury goods are supposed to be inclusive. "New Luxury goods also provide a way for consumers to align themselves with people whose values and interest they share—to join the club." But what club precisely are people who buy the new $27,800 BMW 3-Series joining? The club of people who can afford to pay $27,800 for a cheap BMW but can't afford a "real" one?

As much as customers may be trading up, the companies are trading down, because the demands of the market force them to. Virtually all the New Luxury titans are publicly held. And many went public in the 1990s. To meet investors' expectations, a company must show sustained growth, whether it's Tiffany or Wal-Mart. Of course, companies that sell premium-priced products tend to reach the limits of their natural markets more quickly than discounters do. And so New Luxury companies are likely to expand into areas where their natural customers are scarce, in order to get huge. Restoration Hardware tried and failed to do this. Callaway Golf lost tens of millions of dollars trying to sell fancy golf balls when the market for its high-end clubs softened. Cosi, the sandwich chain, has been a disaster since it went public. Indeed, the stock charts of many New Luxury purveyors don't look so hot.

Almost as an afterthought, the authors append a discourse about luxury in Western Civ., starting with the Greeks and touching briefly on all the biggies: Calvin, Marx—"It would be hard to make the case that Marx was an advocate of trading up or that New Luxury signals the end of capitalism"—Thorsten Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Reisman. Amazingly, they left out Christopher Lasch. His devastating 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, looms over their entire project. The American narcissist, Lasch wrote, "does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire." The impulse driving the New Luxury isn't so new.



Make Money Fast!!!!
If you owned your inbox, spammers would pay to get inside.
By Jonathan Rauch
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2003, at 12:56 PM PT

If you e-mail me in response to this article, chances are you won't hear back. This is not because I'm too lazy to reply. Well, I'm not always too lazy to reply. Mainly it's because I get so much spam these days that survival means fast-deleting anything that looks like junk, which sometimes includes reader e-mail. Like a lot of people, I have passed a threshold in the last year or so: Spam has gone from one of life's little nuisances to a threat to the usefulness of e-mail.

Technologically, no quick fix is in sight. But it's helpful to think about what sort of fix the technologists should be hunting for. The answer, I think, is this: I should have property rights to my e-mail inbox, and I should be able to charge you for admission.

The spam problem is a new instance of a very old and familiar dilemma, which economists call the tragedy of the commons. When any resource is both valuable and freely available, people will tend to overuse it. Moreover, everyone anticipates that everyone else will overuse it, so everyone tries all the harder to get while the getting is good. The result is a run on the resource. The tragedy is that everyone's least-favored outcome—the depletion or exhaustion of the resource—is assured.

Centuries of theory and practice have discovered two effective remedies. One is to appoint a conservator with the unique power to mete out the resource: say, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The other is to create property rights to the resource and allow a market to develop. What people own, they conserve.

In the case of e-mail, the valuable resource at issue is my attention, and the problem is that access to it is essentially free. People who really want to talk to me need to make no more effort than people who merely want to waste my time. The result is a run on my attention. My inbox becomes less like a mailbox and more like a Dumpster, through which I must sift to find items of interest.

Some people have proposed that the market-based solution to spam is to levy a public fee or tax for sending e-mail. In effect, the government would become postmaster general of cyberspace. But Webheads are understandably reluctant to make the government the conservator of e-mail. Government oversight could open the Internet to all kinds of regulation and tempt politicians to milk it for revenues. A bigger objection is that the government is notoriously bad at setting prices. Just imagine the equivalent of a Postal Rate Commission for e-mail. In fact, by definition no one-size-fits-all price could possibly be right, because we all place a different value on our attention. Some people like spam.

Suppose instead that we gave me legally enforceable conservatorship of my mailbox. Then I could sue you for trespassing if you sent e-mails after I told you to stay out. This is not as farfetched as it may sound: Courts and legal scholars are already developing a nascent concept of cyber-trespass. Suing, however, would be massively inefficient, best left as a remedy of last resort. As for the remedy of first resort, I would charge you. Are you a stranger who wants to get into my e-mail inbox? Pay me.

But isn't the great benefit of e-mail that it's free? Not exactly: Spam filters, missed messages, clogged mailboxes, and server overload, to say nothing of odious come-ons, are existing costs for using e-mail, and fast-rising ones. The whole problem is that e-mail is expensive, and the wrong people are paying for it.

The solution is to make spammers pay their targets, instead of forcing the targets to pay for spam. Everyone could charge a different entrance fee for access to his or her inbox. If I like hearing about cheap Viagra, I could charge nothing or almost nothing. The higher my price per e-mail, the less spam I would receive—and a larger portion of the spam that I did get would be targeted, rather than random, so it might actually be interesting. If I set a very high price, I would receive no spam at all. By experimenting, I could find a price that suited me, and I could always adjust it to suit my needs. (Try that with the post office.) Friends and listservs and other "whitelisted" designees, of course, wouldn't have to pay me at all.

Moreover, the system could be self-financing. Some portion of what I charge per incoming e-mail could be siphoned off to pay administrative costs. Furthermore, most people, and probably even most reputable companies, send and receive e-mail in roughly equal quantities. So, after administrative expenses, the costs would net out—except for people who do a lot of sending but not much receiving, namely spammers.

I vetted this idea with a number of cyber-law specialists, and they raised some thorny technical issues, such as who would pay for bounce-backs. There is also the question of how to conduct billions of transactions without gumming up the system. One possible answer is proposed by an economist named David Friedman: reusable cyber-stamps. When I receive e-mail, I would collect the required cyber-postage—assuming, of course, you had attached enough. Unlike conventional stamps, however, these would be reusable. I would turn around and send them out again with my own e-mail.

The pay-me approach is not actually as novel as it may sound. It's a variant of the so-called "digital handshake," but it replaces the handshake with a digital negotiation. In the handshake concept, unsolicited e-mail is answered with a request for a specific response. Only if the right answer is given is the mail delivered. The pay-me approach essentially replaces the question, "Who are you to deserve my attention?" with the question, "How much will you pay for my attention?" My software could be programmed to ask strangers for, say, 1 cent. Your software could be programmed to offer a maximum of, say, half a cent, or 1 cent, or 5 cents. If my demand was under your limit, you would pay and your mail would be delivered. If not, no deal.

If all that sounds hairy, remember that the U.S. financial system settles hundreds of millions of transactions worth something like $3 trillion—more than a quarter of the annual GDP—every day, and no one thinks a thing of it. Once high-volume transactions become routine, the expense of processing them drops to near-triviality. Remember, also, that today's system is anything but free. You are already paying for it, and the costs are going only one way.

So if you want to e-mail me, pay up. That, I guarantee, will get my attention.



The Great Rebate Scam
They owe you a $50 rebate. Here's how they will try to delay, trick, and bully you out of collecting it.
By Carol Vinzant
Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 12:27 PM PT

I was recently lured into a Verizon Wireless store by a Web ad for a fancy Audiovox cellphone—only $50 after a $100 rebate. I really only needed a junky $50 phone to replace one I'd put through the wash, but for the same price, why not get the Audiovox with color screen and Ghostbusters-themed ringer? The Web site said the rebate offer lasted three months, and the only catch seemed to be that I had to send them my old phone.

I sat down the next day with the rebate forms, pleased with my own consumer diligence. I felt I'd skirted a major obstacle when I saw that the form had to be returned within two weeks, not three months. Then I realized I'd made a rookie mistake: I'd thrown out the box with the UPC code. I called up the store and started to explain my predicament. The clerk cut me off: "You threw out your box, didn't you?" Apparently they'd seen my kind before.

I was out of luck—even though they knew for sure I had the phone, since it was on their service. That, however, wasn't the point of the rebate. They were trying to thin out the rebate pool; they succeeded.

Over the last five years, rebate volume has been skyrocketing. The actual volume is hard to pin down because it is only tracked by guesstimaters in the industry. One of those guesstimaters, Michael Leonard, vice president of marketing at Continental Promotions Group, says the volume of rebates is about $4 billion today. Back in 1999 it was reported at just $1 billion.

Rebates are surging not because of manufacturers but because of retailers. You only have to visit an electronics store or leaf through a Sunday newspaper insert to see how far rebate-mania has gone. In a recent Best Buy ad, about one-third of the merchandise came with rebates.

When a manufacturer offers a rebate, you needn't be too suspicious. The manufacturer wants to lower the price temporarily (to move an old product or combat a competitor's new low price), but doesn't have faith that the retailer will pass on the savings. But if it's a retail store that is offering the rebate, ask yourself a simple question: Why isn't it just on sale? The store doesn't have any good reason to offer a rebate, since it could just as easily have a sale—if it in fact wanted you to have the product at a lower price. It doesn't, and that's the point. When you see that a store is offering you a rebate, remember that back at HQ some executive is betting against you, rooting for you to slip up, calculating the odds that you will lose the receipt, go on vacation, write in a wrong number.

A store offering a rebate must pay a fulfillment center anywhere from 40 cents to $1.75 to process each claimed rebate. When you figure in that extra cost and hassle for the store—not to mention the shopper's inconvenience and irritation—how can rebates be worth it? Economically, they make sense only if stores can count on not actually giving the rebate to a large portion of consumers. "They can get all the benefits of advertising a lower price without necessarily having to deliver on that price to everybody," explains David Aron, assistant professor of marketing at DePaul University.

Even with the most attractive rebates, 10 percent of consumers fail to get their act together to turn in the form. Often the failure rate tops 90 percent. Women are better at closing the rebate deal than men. The success rate goes up as the rebate gets more valuable.

Stores use secret actuarial calculations to figure out what kind of rebate they can offer. And, increasingly, they employ brutal tricks to prevent shoppers from cashing in. It's fair enough for retailers sit back and hope consumers trip themselves up. But stores are erecting ever-more-elaborate obstacles to screw consumers out of their discounts.

Many rebates, such as my Verizon one, lure people in with the claim that the rebate offer will last a leisurely several months. Only if they read the fine print do consumers realize that they have only days after the transaction to send the forms in. (For another recent rebate, the store delayed sending me the right forms for so long that I only had one day to get them postmarked in time.) Some rebates require you to cash the check almost the minute you get it.

Other stores offering rebates don't manage to send the check at all, perhaps relying on the forgetfulness of the customer. If you do remember that the check hasn't come, and you contact the store, it will often respond that it has no record of your rebate application. You're thinking, "Here comes that tip to be cautious and keep copies." Well, no, because often the rebater specifies it won't accept copies. (The super-aware who return their rebate forms by certified letter or Fed Ex are often out of luck, because many companies won't accept those deliveries.)

Many rebates demand multiple kinds of documentation (forms, receipts, UPCs) or require you to complete elaborate forms for each component (printer, monitor, desktop). Sometimes you have to circle a date or price to get your cash back. Many rebaters refuse to give the discount to more than one person in the same household. Some insist on access to your credit record before they'll give you the discount.

Perhaps the most notorious consumer rebate was one offered by Microsoft last year for people upgrading to Visual Studio or Visual Basic. [Note: Slate is published by Microsoft.] To get the $300 rebate, customers had to send in part of the box—from the original program bought years before. One small rebate company ran a program for stores that required the consumer to send in forms by registered mail every six months for three years, an exercise they call a "memory test." After complaints, they now only demand a form at the beginning and end of three years.

I have become so alert to these practices that I have become a paranoid rebate shopper. When I bought some software from Staples recently, I was so girded for battle with the rebating authorities that I filled out the rebate form even before I loaded the software on my computer.

All of this hoop-jumping fuss—the paperwork, the postmarking, the sales slips—is quite unnecessary, says Leonard. Fulfillment centers can now do it all online—whether or not the purchase was online, with a credit card, or with cash. They don't need the UPCs or the old phones or any such nonsense. The sales receipt could contain a unique code number that the consumer could enter into a Web site. Think of that the next time you are dissecting a box to get a lousy UPC code.



Fantasy Economics
Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games.
By Robert Shapiro
Updated Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2003, at 11:26 AM PT

The most popular article in the leading economics Web archive doesn't concern tax policy, international trade, or the theory of the firm. It's about an online fantasy game.

During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics. The article, which you can download here, not only outpaces the online works of every Nobel laureate, it is also the fourth-most popular article on the entire Social Science Research Network, which contains more than 75,000 professional articles and abstracts in range of social sciences.

For cybergaming naifs—most males over age 30 (me included) and almost all women—virtual worlds are elaborate, multiplayer, role-playing online environments in which each player's actions can affect many others. At any given moment, 50,000 or more people from more than 120 countries are online at EverQuest, moving their personal "avatars"—wizards, trolls, amazonlike women, and a dozen other types—through the fanciful landscapes of Norrath. These dramas unfold on more than 40 dedicated Sony servers, each accommodating up to 2,000 players interacting with the program and each other. (EverQuest is only one of several popular MMORPGs—"massively multiplayer online role-playing games." The oldest, Ultima Online, has 225,000 players; and the largest, Lineage, has more than 4 million subscribers, mostly in Korea.)

What intrigues Castronova and other economists about EverQuest—beyond the fact that more than 500,000 people pay Sony $13 a month to participate—is that something resembling a nascent economy has emerged in Norrath. Inadvertently, EverQuest has become a virtual experiment in some of the fundamental questions in economics: What are the necessary conditions for markets; how much government does capitalism require; and how do equality and inequality affect economic development?

According to Castronova's account of it, EverQuest has something to gratify economists of all political stripes. For natural-law types, Norrath suggests that the conditions for vibrant markets to develop are pretty minimal. Libertarians can delight that "government," in the form of rules restricting a player's activity, is also limited in Norrath. And liberals can take heart that Norrath's market and society rest on initial conditions of radical equality.

The most basic condition for market activity built into EverQuest is that resources in Norrath are limited. In particular, a player chooses his avatar's initial traits, but a character with the power to heal wounds, for example, will lack agility; and another smart enough to decipher codes will be physically weak. Unlike real life, therefore, everyone in Norrath starts out with roughly equal resources.

The second basic condition of self-regulating economic life in this virtual world, as in our own, is that nothing is free. An avatar's initial assets aren't enough to make much headway in the game, so players intent on navigating Norrath's challenges have to work at either developing new skills or earning new assets.

The intriguing part is that most MMORPG players expand their assets and abilities not through violence or chicanery, the modus operandi of a typical single-player computer game, but through virtual market transactions. Hundreds of thousands of EverQuest players spend most of their time in Norrath trading or cooperating with other avatars, buying goods from creatures ("bots") built into the program, or using auction sites inside the game. To facilitate this, EverQuest adopted two other key conditions from real economic life: A currency called "platinum pieces," or PP, can be earned by completing various tasks, and there are rudimentary rules for buying, selling, and bartering.

These few conditions are apparently all it takes to precipitate capitalism in cyberspace. As in a real economy, virtual market conditions change in response to how players behave. For example, shrewd players who know Norrath's nooks and crannies will purchase goods in a game zone where they've become abundant and then sell them in another where they're in greater demand.

The kicker for economists is that these virtual economic relationships have broken into the real U.S. economy. When players found EverQuest's bartering rules inadequate, they started exchanging the armor, spells, and other Norrathian objects of value at real-world auction sites. These transactions are conducted not in Norrathian PP but in U.S. dollars and then completed between avatars inside the game. (You pay in dollars at a real-world site, then the seller's avatar gives your avatar the goods in Norrath.) You can even buy another player's avatar, complete with its accumulated skills and assets. Sony tried to stop all these transactions and persuaded eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to bar them on the grounds that they involve Sony's intellectual property. But this kind of protectionism is hard to enforce whether the goods are real or virtual: Trade in Norrathian goods and services simply migrated to other sites.

The exchange of goods and services in Norrathian PP, inside the game, and U.S dollars, outside, creates an exchange-rate relationship between the two currencies. Based on surveys of these market exchanges, Castronova calculated that one unit of PP was worth a little more than one U.S. penny. That technically makes Norrathian PP a "stronger" currency than the Japanese yen or Italian lira, albeit a thinner and less liquid one. (But Sony apparently could use lessons in central banking: As in real-world Japan, price deflation has hit the market for Norrathian goods.)

The economic dynamics of EverQuest also allow Castranova to calculate wage levels in Norrath. Take the PP value of an average avatar's skills and assets, divide it by the average number of hours required to accumulate those holdings, and an average avatar "earns" 319 PP/hour, or $3.42/hour at the prevailing exchange rate. (This doesn't sound like much, but Norrath's deflation means that "real" wages are actually rising.) Castronova estimates that Norrath's per capita GNP is higher than India's or China's.

The similarities to real-world market behavior certainly owe much to the fact that EverQuest players know how real markets work and probably believe in markets. In this respect, Norrath resembles the more successful transitional economies of Central Europe, whose citizens had a history of capitalism to draw on when their communist regimes crumbled. (Russia, by contrast, had no history of market capitalism and has struggled to make the transition to free markets.)

EverQuest liberates its players from some of the dismal restrictions of real economic life. Norrath is a truer meritocracy than our own, with no one hindered or helped by personal history or family background. The game also offers the ultimate safety hatch (a superenhanced version of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection): Fail at one of Norrath's deadly challenges, and you can start over with a new avatar and new identity.

What may be most striking about Norrath is that the virtual market doesn't require a powerful government. Norrathian economic life, conducted in PP or dollars, proceeds without laws stipulating the terms of exchanges, regulations dictating who can participate in various activities, or authorities enforcing contracts. There are no monetary or fiscal policies to manage demand and prices, and no safety net.

In this virtual world, a powerful government appears only briefly at the start, in the iron rule that everyone starts out with roughly equal assets. Then it retreats and lets economic nature take its course. In Norrath, more equality permits freer markets. This may provide the most important lesson of all from the EverQuest experiment: Real equality can obviate much of a democratic government's intervention in a modern economy. Many of our own government's current policies—progressive taxation, securities regulation, social insurance—are aimed at offsetting some form of inequality. If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government.



Tween-Age Wasteland
Are we paying too much attention to the woes of preadolescence?
By Ann Hulbert
Updated Friday, Aug. 29, 2003, at 11:27 AM PT

After a flare-up with my daughter at some point in sixth grade—when and about what, I can't remember, except that it was very minor—I found her huddled on her bed reading a little black brochure with "H.E.L.P." in bold red letters on the cover. It was a handout her teacher had distributed earlier in the year to parents. I'd at first mistaken it for an anti-drug advisory, but it was actually a preadolescent advisory—the acronym stood for How to Enjoy Living with a Preadolescent—and my daughter was not impressed. Red-eyed, she looked up and said, "I hate this pamphlet." Then she murmured to me, "I don't know why I got so mad."

As she had just learned from Page 9 of the National Middle School Association's publication for "parents and guardians of children 10-15," hers was a classic preadolescent symptom: "Even they don't know why they are suddenly irritable. They don't know where that negative tone comes from." But one thing my daughter knew was that having her moodiness met with diagnostic solicitude only irritated her further. I don't think it helped that on Page 10 her age group was compared to toddlers: "Two-year-olds say, 'No,' middle schoolers say, 'So????' "

For more than a decade now, it hasn't been just savvy marketers who have trained their sights on "tweens." Professionals and parents have grown increasingly obsessed with what was once dismissed as the "no man's land" of the middle school stage; a Carnegie Commission report in 1995 called "Great Transitions," which reported the latest research on rapid bodily and brain change, roused a new sense of concern and helped put the early adolescent phase on the map. This stage, experts began warning, is when children are either launched—educationally, socially, and emotionally—or get lost and left behind. Yet here, amid the stirrings of sexuality and the pressures of group conformity, is where parents first have to contend with peers as they try to retain any influence. So do teachers: Calls for more self-directed, "hands-on" learning in the "academic wasteland" of middle school alternate with exasperated sighs about terminally distracted students.

The current pedagogically correct question to ask is whether middle schoolers themselves might have some insights to offer, if adults would only "stand by and be good listeners" (as H.E.L.P. urges on Page 13). Actually, they do, to judge by recent journalistic and cinematic dispatches from the early adolescent front. But the message from middle schoolers is not what you might think or quite what their grown-up emissaries hear. Empathetic listening and therapeutic understanding, the kids suggest, can be overrated: What they really need are adults who can help them look and think beyond the often narcissistic travails of middle school, not prod them to obsess more explicitly about every personal problem. "Don't treat me like your patients," teenage Anna shrieks at her therapist-mother in Freaky Friday, a comedy in which the pair swap bodies for a day. "Mom, stop shrinking me!"

A similar impatience surfaces in two vérité ventures into middle school that could hardly be more different: Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein's Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers and the recently released film Thirteen. Not Much Just Chillin', an account of a year in Maryland's Wilde Lake Middle School, traffics in early teen experiences that are as banal as Tracy and Evie's exploits in Thirteen are sensational. But for the kids involved in each, the problem isn't so much that grown-ups won't or can't begin to imagine teenage turmoil; it's that more than a few of their elders are parasitically invested in adolescent identity confusion themselves.

At Wilde, well-meaning administrators desperate to "connect" with the kids unwittingly reinforce an ethos of shallow self-absorption. Amid a test-driven curriculum heavily dependent on dry work sheets, health class—where discussion actually occurs!—is a focal point for the kids. But even there, the teacher skirts all but the most superficial questions about sex and relationships. A sexual harassment education effort inspires more mockery than clarity, as boys keep on grabbing their classmates' butts and boobs. (What lies behind such boorish, throwback behavior—and all the suck-my-dick talk, and occasional action, that goes along with it—seems to have professionals as stumped as parents; MTV culture, I've noticed, is everybody's catch-all culprit.)

As for efforts to probe preadolescent psyches more deeply, the kids at Wilde can't help wondering, "What's the point?" Perlstein finds. "The touchy-feely goal-setting and 'What I Have Learned' crap just feels ... like a fat waste of time" to a drifty eighth-grader named Eric Ellis. Seventh-grade achiever Elizabeth Ginsburg fumes that she's "sick of ... her parents ... talking about her in the third person and figuring out the symbolism in her every move and finding interesting ways to discuss her inner struggles." Even 15-year-old Nikki Reed, whom director Catherine Hardwicke helped rescue from an eighth-grade plummet into bad-girldom by helping her turn her saga into the harrowing script of Thirteen, shows signs of balking now that her mentor is flacking the film as "cinematherapy" for "kids and moms." The poster girl for preadolescent angst protests, "I didn't want to be a spokesperson for troubled girls."

You can see her point. It's as hard to ferret out profound wisdom from the lurid corruption of Tracy, the Nikki character in Thirteen, as from the "chillin' " Perlstein so assiduously documents at Wilde. What is obvious from both accounts is that family breakdown and haplessly immature parents can be awful for kids—hardly news by now. Beyond that, Perlstein's and Hardwicke's fast-cutting evocations of the "flitting passions," rebellions, betrayals, and even horrors of preadolescence are a peculiar mimetic achievement: They succeed in conveying just how weightless, even tedious, and how resistant to anything but clichéd analysis, the early teen roller-coaster ride is. That's the restless kids' own refrain in their barrage of instant messages about everything and nothing—about the teacher who's "sooooooooooo annoying"; the geek who's "A LOOSER … A FAGGET … SO FUCKING GAY"; the girl who considers herself "chic yet humorus, sophisticated yet sexy"; the latest crushes and favorite phrases ("Bonermobile," "chillin shit!" "poo fuck!"). They keep saying they're "so bored," and you know what they mean. Even wild Tracy is biding her time, spinning her wheels, waiting for something.

In narratives that refuse to build and characters who are a blur of motion and confused motives, Perlstein and Thirteen remind us that early adolescence is above all about transience. The experiments in romance and social alliances—and even in angry defiance—that dominate these accounts tend to seem either trivial or brutal but, mercifully, mostly fickle. From the outside looking in, we can see that this is a period that is not so much formative as transformative, or so we can hope. But if what kids see when they dart desperate, astute glances our way is adults fearfully transfixed by all the flux, they're likely to have a harder time marshalling that dizzying energy of theirs to move on. They can make that "So????" sound very derisive, yet not far from the surface they're still deeply inquisitive. But if all we do is reflect their unhappiness back at them, where will they get any answers?



Abolish Marriage
Let's really get the government out of our bedrooms.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 8:25 AM PT

Critics and enthusiasts of Lawrence v. Texas, last week's Supreme Court decision invalidating state anti-sodomy laws, agree on one thing: The next argument is going to be about gay marriage. As Justice Scalia noted in his tart dissent, it follows from the logic of Lawrence. Mutually consenting sex with the person of your choice in the privacy of your own home is now a basic right of American citizenship under the Constitution. This does not mean that the government must supply it or guarantee it. But the government cannot forbid it, and the government also should not discriminate against you for choosing to exercise a basic right of citizenship. Offering an institution as important as marriage to male-female couples only is exactly this kind of discrimination. Or so the gay rights movement will now argue. Persuasively, I think.

Opponents of gay rights will resist mightily, although they have been in retreat for a couple of decades. General anti-gay sentiments are now considered a serious breach of civic etiquette, even in anti-gay circles. The current line of defense, which probably won't hold either, is between social toleration of homosexuals and social approval of homosexuality. Or between accepting the reality that people are gay, even accepting that gays are people, and endorsing something called "the gay agenda." Gay marriage, the opponents will argue, would cross this line. It would make homosexuality respectable and, worse, normal. Gays are welcome to exist all they want, and to do their inexplicable thing if they must, but they shouldn't expect a government stamp of approval.

It's going to get ugly. And then it's going to get boring. So, we have two options here. We can add gay marriage to the short list of controversies—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty—that are so frozen and ritualistic that debates about them are more like Kabuki performances than intellectual exercises. Or we can think outside the box. There is a solution that ought to satisfy both camps and may not be a bad idea even apart from the gay-marriage controversy.

That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let 'em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care?

In fact, there is nothing to stop any of this from happening now. And a lot of it does happen. But only certain marriages get certified by the government. So, in the United States we are about to find ourselves in a strange situation where the principal demand of a liberation movement is to be included in the red tape of a government bureaucracy. Having just gotten state governments out of their bedrooms, gays now want these governments back in. Meanwhile, social-conservative anti-gays, many of them Southerners, are calling on the government in Washington to trample states' rights and nationalize the rules of marriage, if necessary, to prevent gays from getting what they want. The Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, responded to the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision by endorsing a constitutional amendment, no less, against gay marriage.

If marriage were an entirely private affair, all the disputes over gay marriage would become irrelevant. Gay marriage would not have the official sanction of government, but neither would straight marriage. There would be official equality between the two, which is the essence of what gays want and are entitled to. And if the other side is sincere in saying that its concern is not what people do in private, but government endorsement of a gay "lifestyle" or "agenda," that problem goes away, too.

Yes, yes, marriage is about more than sleeping arrangements. There are children, there are finances, there are spousal job benefits like health insurance and pensions. In all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring. It would be possible to write rules that measure the real factors at stake and leave marriage out of the matter. Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do. None of this would be easy. Marriage functions as what lawyers call a "bright line," which saves the trouble of trying to measure a lot of amorphous factors. You're either married or you're not. Once marriage itself becomes amorphous, who-gets-the-kids and who-gets-health-care become trickier questions.

So, sure, there are some legitimate objections to the idea of privatizing marriage. But they don't add up to a fatal objection. Especially when you consider that the alternative is arguing about gay marriage until death do us part.



Holy Matrimony
What's really undermining the sanctity of marriage?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, at 3:29 PM PT

Within nanoseconds of the Massachusetts Supreme Court's declaration that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution came predictions of the end of life as we know it: The president, speaking from London, warned: "Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle."

"The time is now. If you don't do something about this, then you cannot in 20 years—when you see the American public disintegrating and you see our enemies overtaking us because we have no moral will—you remember that you did nothing," said Sandy Rios, president of the Concerned Women for America, to her 1 million radio listeners. "We must amend the Constitution if we are to stop a tyrannical judiciary from redefining marriage to the point of extinction," Focus on the Family urged in a statement on Tuesday.

Extinction, no less. The institution of marriage—the one that survived Henry VIII, Lorena Bobbitt, Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson—is suddenly going to become extinct?

Do you want to know what's destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we'd get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: "Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I'm at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep."

It just doesn't get much more sacred than that.

Here's my modest request: If you're going to be a crusader for the sanctity of marriage—if you really believe gay marriage will have some vast corrosive, viral impact on marriage as a whole—here's a brief list of other laws and policies far more dangerous to the institution. Go after these first, then pass your constitutional amendment.

1. Divorce
Somewhere between 43 percent and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. If you believe gay marriage is single-handedly eroding a sacred and ancient institution, you cannot possibly be pro-divorce. That means any legislation passed in recent decades making divorce more readily available—from no-fault statutes to the decline of adultery prosecutions—should also be subject to bans, popular referendum, and constitutional amendment.

2. Circus Circus
In general, if there is blood in your body and you are over 18, you can get married, so long as you're not in love with your cousin. (Although even that's OK in some states). You can be married to someone you met at the breakfast buffet. Knowing her last name is optional. And you can be married by someone who was McOrdained on the Internet. So before you lobby to ban gay marriage, you might want to work to enact laws limiting the sheer frivolousness of straight marriage. You should be lobbying for an increase in minimum-age requirements, for mandatory counseling pre-marriage, and for statutory waiting periods before marriages (and divorces) can be permitted.

3. Birth Control
The dissenters in the Massachusetts decision are of the opinion that the only purpose of marriage is procreation. They urge that a sound reason for discriminating against gay couples is that there is a legitimate state purpose in ensuring, promoting, and supporting an "optimal social structure for the bearing and raising of children." If you're going to take the position that marriage exists solely to encourage begetting, you need to oppose childlessness by choice, birth control, living together, and marriage for the post-menopausal. In fact, if you're really looking for "optimal" social structures for childrearing, you need to legislate against single parents, poor parents, two-career parents, alcoholic or sick parents, and parents who (like myself) are afraid of the Baby Einstein videos.

4. Misc.
Here's what's really undermining the sacredness of modern marriage: soap operas, wedding planning, longer work days, cuter secretaries, fights over money, reality TV, low-rise pants, mothers-in-law, boredom, Victoria's Secret catalogs, going to bed mad, the billable hour, that stubborn 7 pounds, the Wiggles, Internet chat rooms, and selfishness. In fact we should start amending the Constitution to deal with the Wiggles immediately.

Here's why marriage will likely survive last week's crushing decision out of Massachusetts: Because despite all the horrors of Section 4, above, human beings want and deserve a soul mate; someone to grow old with, someone who thinks our dopey entry in the New Yorker cartoon competition is hilarious, and someone to help carry the shopping bags. Gay couples have asked the state to explain why such privileges should be denied them and have yet to receive an answer that is credible.

The decision to make a marriage "sacred" does not belong to the state—if the state were in charge of mandating sacredness in matrimony, we'd have to pave over both Nevada and Jessica Simpson. We make marriage sacred by choosing to treat it that way, one couple at a time. We make marriage a joke by treating it like a two-week jungle safari. There is no evidence that gay couples are any more inclined toward that latter course than supermodels, rock stars, or that poor spineless bald man on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? There's good evidence that most of them will take the commitment very seriously, as do the rest of us. There will be more "sanctity" in marriage when we recognize that people of all orientations can make sacred choices. Good for Massachusetts for recognizing that truth.



Canine-11
Why Americans are obsessed with "rescuing" dogs.
By Jon Katz
Posted Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 7:46 AM PT

I was walking in a nearby park recently when an enormous mutt—a Lab/shepherd mix, from the looks of it—came bounding down the wooded path, plowed into my belly, and knocked me down, touching off a spirited tiff with my two border collies.

As I clambered to my feet, a middle-aged man came chugging up, agitated and out-of-breath. He began belatedly scolding the genial and oblivious dog, whose name was Bear, explaining that Bear was a rescued dog, "probably abused." So the guy—who introduced himself as Stan—didn't want to train him to come, sit, or stop ricocheting into people, not yet; Bear had been through so much heartache already. He did lecture Bear—"no," "bad dog," "why don't you listen to me?"—long after the fact and well beyond the point of usefulness.

Finding Bear was no cinch, it turned out. Stan told me he had combed animal shelters for months but found that in the Northeast, at least, the number of abandoned and adoptable dogs has fallen in recent years; new leash laws had resulted in fewer lost and straying dogs, and a sharp rise in neutering and spaying meant fewer dogs running around period. Stan didn't want to simply buy some fancy purebred pet, he explained, not when there were so many creatures in need. He preferred to save one from misery, possibly even death.

So Stan went online and located Bear not in New Jersey, where we lived, but in a "foster home" in Alabama, via a rescue site listed on Petfinder.com. The demand for "rescued" dogs is so great that groups often have to scour faraway rural areas these days to find abused dogs for people to adopt.

Bear was transported north, by volunteer "transporters" located via mailing lists on the Net, and delivered to a local New Jersey "fosterer" for evaluation. "Screeners" check possible homes and new owners. Stan and his home and family were thoroughly evaluated before he was permitted to bring Bear home. "Believe me," he said with some pride, "it was easier for me to buy a house than to get this dog." The screeners returned more than once and let him know they would be back periodically. He signed a document promising to care for the dog and to never let the dog walk off-leash.

Now he was crazy about the dog, he confessed. It seemed to me that at least part of that feeling stemmed from his pride in having spared the animal a grim fate.

How did he know that Bear had been abused? I asked. "You can just tell," Stan assured me. "It's obvious. If you come near him with a leash or collar or stick, he looks terrified."

I'd heard such stories countless times. It needs to be said that there are innumerable and well documented stories of horrific abuse inflicted on dogs. At a Brooklyn shelter I visited a few months ago, I saw dogs that had been burned almost to death, abandoned, starved, poisoned, nearly drowned, beaten, and horribly mauled after being used as training fodder for fighting dogs. Rescue volunteers go to extraordinary lengths to save and care for these dogs.

But many professional trainers and dog lovers have become wary. They often roll their eyes when people explain that their dogs have been abused, seeing that as an excuse for obnoxious or aggressive behavior and as a way to avoid the effort of training. Many also sense a need for some dog owners to see their pets as suffering victims, rather than animals.

Pet behaviorists will tell you that it's usually impossible to know what dogs have actually been through, since they can't tell us. Dogs who are simply adjusting to new homes or poor training frequently show the same behaviors as ill-treated dogs: cowering, trembling, eliminating, shying away from the unfamiliar.

But dogs, like so many other things, are a mirror of the society we—and they—live in. And a growing number of Americans not only need to rescue a creature, but to perceive those creatures as having been mistreated. Somehow, our dogs have joined us in our culture of victimization. Since we can only guess what has happened to them, they are blank canvases on which we can paint anything we wish. Add to this the fact that millions of dogs are indeed abandoned or maltreated and do need homes, and it becomes clearer why animal rescue is a booming social phenomenon.

The dog rescue movement is relatively new. A generation ago, a person in need of a pet went to a breeder or to a local dog pound. There, he or she "adopted" rather than "rescued" a dog. There was and is no numerical shortage of abandoned dogs: The Humane Society of the United States estimates that between 8 million and 10 million enter the U.S. animal shelter system each year, with about 5 million unable to find homes and euthanized. It's worth noting that nobody really has any idea how many of these are actually abused.

But this hardly matters. Rescue workers have become the special forces of the dog world: dedicated, fearless, driven, intensely organized, wily, and resourceful.

The Internet has propelled and shaped this movement. Type "dog rescue" into Google, and more than 700,000 references pop up. Rescue groups have formed for almost every breed in almost every city and state, some with scores of members, fund-raising campaigns, sometimes their own vans, plus badges, caps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. Through this national network of sites and lists, dogs can be rescued, re-rescued ("re-homed" is the preferred term), and transported all over America. Thanks to sites like the online clearinghouse Petfinder, any dog in need of a home can be eyeballed by anybody in the country with a computer. Last week, Petfinder had nearly 100,000 "adoptable pets" on its Web site, with sophisticated software that permits potential adopters to search databases for the pet: What breed? What age? What color? Housebroken? Deaf, blind, or injured?

Rescue fantasies are familiar to therapists, who see them particularly in people who were themselves mistreated or ached for escape from loneliness and alienation.

Some rescue workers have encountered people they call "hoarders" or "compulsives"—that is, rescuers with a dozen or more dogs. Hoarders are especially drawn to hopeless cases, dogs that are severely injured or especially aggressive. They are often confident that they can "flip" the dog around. And sometimes, they simply can't say no.

Rescues can also provide an outlet for thwarted political inclinations. Social problems seem overwhelming, government remote. People can't easily stop a war or even get a stop sign installed on their blocks. But as a neighbor of mine explained, "I can't seem to do much for people these days, so the least I can do is rescue a dog." In sophisticated cities and their suburbs—New York, Washington, San Francisco—where everything makes a political statement and children are always being taught "values," it means something to have rescued a dog as opposed to having simply bought one.

Something buried in the psyches of certain dog-owners needs to alter animals' fates and leads them to see those animals as having suffered. Owners of rescued dogs I have talked to tend to have holes of one sort or another in their lives: "Saving" an "abused" dog can sometimes fill that hole. It makes the owner a hero: a literal savior. It makes the owner necessary: This poor abused creature can't possibly live without the person who saved it from misery and death. And it gives the owner a willing, and ever grateful, target of endless love.

But while the lavish and forgiving affection showered on rescued dogs may be psychologically satisfying for the pet owner, it isn't always good for the animal. Seeing a dog as a victim in need of rescue, too traumatized to be confined or to learn simple commands and behaviors, actually impedes proper care. It undermines a dog's ability to be well-socialized, to live happily in a home, and to coexist with humans in general. Dogs like to be trained. It calms them, gives them a sense of order. When we respond to them in terms of our own needs, rather than theirs, we do them no favors.



Love by the Numbers
Can a few differential equations describe the course of a marriage?
By Jordan Ellenberg
Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 11:28 AM PT

I have always believed in numbers, in the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits I ask, "What truly is logic?" … It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found.
—Russell Crowe playing mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind

It's a nice thought—that some things, like love, are beyond the reach of mathematical techniques, or even, as this speech suggests, that mathematical truth is in the end subservient to the truths that love tells.

On the other hand, there's John Gottman. Gottman, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, is probably best-known for the so-called "Love Lab." Here, couples get strapped into a bundle of physiological sensors, settle down in front of a one-way mirror, and have themselves a fight, while Gottman's researchers record their every criticism, apology, eye twitch, and pulse spike. By watching a couple for 15 minutes, Gottman says, he can predict success or failure of a marriage with 85 percent accuracy. And in a new book, The Mathematics of Marriage, his research group—which includes mathematician James Murray—argues that a marriage can, in fact, be modeled by a surprisingly simple ensemble of equations.

Can the speech from A Beautiful Mind be so wrong? Is the difference between endless love and a quick divorce no more than a numbers game?

Not quite. Just because marriage is amenable to mathematical analysis doesn't make it completely predictable, let alone logical. After all, the weather is subject to mathematical rules, too. And on the April day I'm writing this, there are 3 inches of snow on the ground. What kind of math allows such wild results?

To get some ideas, switch to a simpler problem. Suppose you put a marble down on a lumpy surface. What happens? It depends where you put the marble. If the marble is on a slope, it'll roll in whatever direction offers the steepest descent. But if you balance the marble at the top of a hill or place it at the bottom of a valley, it stays put. The progress of the marble is governed by a differential equation, which means, more or less, that the change in the marble's position is predictably determined by the marble's position at the moment.

[And now, the two-paragraph summary of a semester's course in differential equations. I ask my technically minded readers to forgive the many oversimplifications and omissions here, which are meant to get us quickly to the point of the exercise.]

Differential equations describe all kinds of natural phenomena, from epidemics (the change in the number of infected people depends on the number of currently infected people) to the orbits of the planets (the motion of a planet depends on the gravitational force on it, which in turn depends on the location of other planets, which in turn depends on the original planet's position, and so on). Some differential equations, like the ones governing the marble, yield predictable and regular results. Others, like those for the weather, are more chaotic. As another popular movie once put it, paraphrasing Edward Lorenz, a butterfly flapping its wings in Taiwan can set off a hurricane in Houston. More prosaically: Small changes in the state of the system can make for drastic, unforeseeable changes in the system's long-term behavior. Now things are starting to sound like marriage!

The first question we ask about any differential equation we meet is: What are the states of the system in which the system does not change? Such a state is called an equilibrium. For an epidemic, an equilibrium might be a low but stable incidence of the disease. The equilibria of the marble are the bottoms of valleys and the tops of hills.

The example of the marble brings home the fact that not all equilibria are alike. Put a marble at the bottom of a bowl, and it's likely to stay there. But balance it atop a hill, and any perturbation, however slight, will send it rolling down. The first kind of equilibrium is called stable, the second unstable. Stable equilibria are important because they're the places where the system "likes" to end up. Drop a bucket of marbles in a landscape; after a while, you'll find a lot at the bottoms of valleys, few if any balanced on peaks.

Gottman and his collaborators believe that the development of a marriage is governed—or at least can be described—by a differential equation. On the face of it, this makes sense: The amount of negative emotional expression a husband directs at his wife undoubtedly contributes to changes in her reciprocal feelings. But is this change entirely determined by the current state of the marriage? That seems hard to swallow; but The Mathematics of Marriage argues that just such an assumption yields results that match well with Gottman's decades of clinical data on couples.

The idea that marriages obey differential equations might not be so scary; after all, this only seems to say that the course of a marriage is as regular, in the long term, as weather.

But Gottman is quite specific about the differential equations he has in mind. And according to these equations, marriage isn't like the weather. It's like the marble.

Marriages, Gottman's group says, have equilibria. Where they are and what they're like depend on the characteristics of the individuals and of the marriage. Some couples may have all their stable equilibria in states where the marriage is desperately unhappy; luckier couples may have all their equilibria in agreeable states. And some couples—the most interesting ones, from the point of view of marital therapy—have both happy and unhappy equilibria.

This model has one flaw that should be obvious. The marble, once it's at a stable equilibrium, doesn't move. But a marriage, as we know, can shift in an instant from blissful to miserable and vice versa. If the cold equations are the whole story, how can this be?

The answer to this question is the most interesting idea in The Mathematics of Marriage. The key idea is that the differential equations describing the marriage can change with time. The results are easiest to envision in marble world. Imagine a landscape with two equilibria—one ("happy marriage") in the bowl of a volcano, and the other ("screaming-and-throwing-plates marriage") in a deep valley. Both are stable equilibria for the marble; where the marble ends up depends on its starting position ("wedding day"). Suppose the marble ends up in the volcano. And suppose that, with time, the bowl begins to fill in with dirt, growing shallower and shallower. Now the center of the bowl remains an equilibrium, and the marble stays put, until a certain critical moment is reached—the dirt piles higher than the bowl's rim, and the peak of the volcano switches from concave to convex. At that moment, the equilibrium ceases to be stable, and the marble rolls down to the unhappy valley. Likewise, a marriage, under the pressure of quite gradual changes in circumstance, can suddenly collapse. What's more, returning the circumstances to their prior state should not be expected to repair the marriage; digging a new hole in the volcano won't make the marble jump out of the valley!

The mathematical formalism addressing such phenomena, catastrophe theory, was extremely faddish not so long ago; as a result, attempts to apply catastrophe theory are often met with automatic skepticism. But the Gottman group's appeal to catastrophe in the marriage model seems to me quite reasonable, at least in principle. And, as honest theoreticians must, they offer empirical predictions, which can be confirmed or rejected by experiment—for instance, that a marriage is less likely to succeed when the spouses are individually more prone toward negative emotional expression.

The theory's attractiveness is hard to deny. It neatly presents marriage as a process both mathematical and unpredictable, both stable and prone to catastrophe. Even the John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind would have to agree—love is like that.



Oh, No: It's a Girl!
Do daughters cause divorce?
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003, at 6:29 AM PT

If you want to stay married, three of the most ominous words you'll ever hear are "It's a girl." All over the world, boys hold marriages together, and girls break them up.

In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys. In Mexico and Colombia the gap is wider; in Kenya it's wider still. In Vietnam, it's huge: Parents of a girl are 25 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy.

Ever since the economists Gordon Dahl (at the University of Rochester) and Enrico Moretti (at UCLA) established these facts a few months ago, they and their colleagues (and not a few of their colleagues' friends and families) have been spinning hypotheses about what's behind the numbers.

Children of divorce usually stay with the mother, so the question comes down to this: Why do fathers stick around for sons when they won't stick around for daughters? (Or alternatively, why do mothers stay married so their sons can have a father when they won't do the same for their daughters?) Do fathers prefer the company of sons? Do parents think a boy needs a male role model? Do they worry that boys cope less successfully with the emotional consequences of divorce? Or do they believe that an emotionally devastated daughter is somehow less of a tragedy than an emotionally devastated son?

Dahl and Moretti make the extremely helpful observation that all theories fall into one of two categories: Either sons improve the quality of married life (say by being more available for an evening game of catch) or sons exacerbate the pain of divorce (say by falling apart emotionally when the father leaves). Theories of the first sort suggest that a boy child is a blessing; theories of the second sort suggest that the same boy child is a curse—or at least has the potential to become a curse if the marriage starts to crumble.

So, before we decide which theory to believe, we should look for external evidence on the demand for sons versus the demand for daughters. Do most parents prefer boys or girls?

Of course we all know the answer in China, with its ongoing history of female infanticide. But what about the United States? Dahl and Moretti offer several reasons to believe that American parents also have a strong preference—though not as strong as the Chinese preference—for boys over girls.

Here's some of their evidence: First, divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys, suggesting that daughters are a liability in the market for a husband. Not only do daughters lower the probability of remarriage; they also lower the probability that a second marriage, if it does occur, will succeed.

Next, parents of girls are quite a bit more likely to try for another child than parents of boys, which suggests that there are more parents hoping for sons than for daughters.

Once again, the effect is strong in the United States but even stronger elsewhere. In the United States, Colombia, or Kenya, a couple with three girls is about 4 percent more likely to try for another child than a couple with three boys; in Mexico it's closer to 9 percent, and in Vietnam it's 18 percent. In China, before the one-child policy was imposed in 1982, the number was an astounding 90 percent!

One of Dahl and Moretti's most striking bits of evidence comes from shotgun marriages. Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child and have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child's sex. It turns out that such couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy. Apparently, for unmarried fathers, the prospect of living with a wife and a son is more alluring than the prospect of living with a wife and a daughter.

So, what's the bottom line? Dahl and Moretti are quick to acknowledge that they've found no smoking guns; if you're sufficiently clever you can probably concoct alternative explanations for everything they've observed. But the most natural way to interpret their data is that parents, on average, prefer boys to girls. The preference is stronger elsewhere in the world, but it's plenty strong in the United States too.

That seems to answer one question: Boys preserve marriages by making marriages better, not by making divorces worse. But it also raises a new question: What's so great about a boy? Why do parents prefer boys to girls?

Maybe boys grow up to be better economic providers for their parents' old age. (This would explain why the preference for boys is stronger in countries where men hold more economic power.) Maybe boys are just more fun to have around. Maybe parents want a child who can carry on the family name. Or maybe there's something deep in our psyches that tells us a family just isn't a family without a son. Which is it?

Dahl and Moretti wisely decline to speculate, and I will follow their example. I don't know any evidence that could settle this question. All we know is that for some reason, parents prefer boys—by enough that boys hold a lot of shaky marriages together.

Years ago on the schoolyard, we used to chant that girls are good but boys are better. It looks like our parents agreed with us.



Tokyo on One Cliché a Day
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2003, at 11:37 AM PT

Japan Cliché No. 1: Wacky Food

If you visit Japan, you will no doubt come home with your own wacky food stories. Here's mine:

I ate whale today. Wacky!

To answer your questions one at a time: Yes, whale is delicious. Yes, it is reasonably priced. Yes, it could use a little salt. No, I was not aware you are in a militant animal-rights group. No, I will not give you my home address once you've finished wiring that letter bomb.

I acknowledge that some of you may have minor moral qualms with eating whale. But honestly, I find it wholly defensible. Anyone who's eaten a burger has eaten mammal. Is there a difference between land mammal and sea mammal? To wit: Are whales cuter than cows? Perhaps, but this is a judgment call, and I vote cow. Of course, I still eat cow, too.

I invite you: Come with me to a hip little whale joint in the center of Shibuya, one of Tokyo's neon-est nightspots. Tucked between boutiques selling thigh-high boots to 10-year-old schoolgirls, this small storefront looks like any other downtown restaurant … until you examine the plastic food on display in the window. Next to a tasty looking plate of bite-sized meats, there is an artfully placed whale figurine. This is the tip-off.

Inside, an elderly Japanese woman at the counter gets a bit edgy as gaijin (foreigners) walk through the door. Clearly, there have been misunderstandings in the past. No one likes to eat whale meat by accident. So her first words are slow and enunciated: "This is whale meat restaurant." She looks into my eyes for signs of recognition and acceptance and then hands across a menu in English. Fried whale meat. Boiled whale meat. Smoked whale meat. Whale meat sashimi. Whale meat sukiyaki. Baked whale meat with curry. Whale meat miso soup. Whale meat cutlet with cheese.

This is a lot of whale meat options. Also, there is no other meat here but whale.

We take seats at a bar overlooking the kitchen. At most Japanese restaurants, there are aquariums allowing you to observe and pick out the seafood you are about to eat. So I wonder for a moment if there is a giant, glass-walled tank somewhere in the back. The playful whales frolic, surface, spray water from blowholes, and then are scooped into massive nets as customers point with hungry smiles. But this seems not to actually exist.

On the walls are many beautiful paintings of whales. Oil paintings, lithographs, impressionistic watercolors. I suppose this is the equivalent of giant plastic cows at steakhouses. But far more elegant. There are also several identical posters hanging above the tables, each with a graphic of the Earth cut in half, with fish pouring out of this Earth into the open mouth of a giant cartoon whale. I am unable to explain this image. I would guess it advocates whale-eating, though.

Along with a couple of draft Sapporos, our whale dishes at last arrive. Dig in! Don't let your whale get cold! The whale steak is delicious. It tastes exactly like regular steak, except with the barest hint of a fishy aftertaste. I could eat whale steak every day. But the fried whale is less appetizing. Chewy. Fishy and chewy. Not enough breading and grease. But I'm thinking chicken-fried whale could be quite good.

OK, this is the point where you're wiring the letter bomb. But let's break it down. As I say, most of us already eat mammal, and I find it difficult to rank whales and cows in a hierarchy of edibleness. Hindus would likely chow whale first. So, if we stipulate—and this is under heavy argument—that these whales are not endangered (the Japanese say the minke whale population is, in fact, rising) and that the kill technique is no less humane (exploding harpoon to head versus iron bolt to head), then I don't think there's anything more wrong with eating Willy than eating Bessie. And look at the other tables in here—happy Japanese families bantering while they gnaw. Japanese children laughing as whale juice drips from their cherubic chins. It's hard to see how this could be evil. Remember, whale as food has a cultural history in Japan. After World War II, when protein was scarce, whale meat fed a generation of Japanese kids. One baby boomer friend here says whale meat was a treat in her Tokyo youth. "I love the whales," she said encouragingly when I told her I would be eating them.

But OK, I won't lie. Although morally I find this entirely justifiable, a few hours after my whale meal I'm feeling some remorse. And a little bit of nausea. I can feel the whale meat inside me. I looked online at some pictures of minke whales in the wild, and they were really cute. I bet they were smart, too, and loved to frolic, right up until a harpoon exploded in their skull. Oh God, stop it, I'm going to puke up my whale!

But enough about whale. By far the most diabolical dish I've heard tale of here in Tokyo has nothing at all to do with whales. It seems that in some restaurants, they will put live baby eels in a large bowl of water with a big block of tofu at the bottom. The bowl is heated, and as they become uncomfortably hot, the baby eels burrow down into the cooler tofu. There they are cooked alive, and served like an olive loaf. Any discussion of evil cuisine begins and ends with this recipe.

Also, if you're still hung up on the whale, you should know that you can get horse sashimi here. I have not eaten horse sashimi, but if I do, I am planning this exchange:

I take a bite of horse, cough, clear throat, cough

Companion: "Something wrong with your throat?"

Me: "Just a little horse."

One final note on food: McDonald's has rolled out its new worldwide slogan here, "I'm Lovin' It!" Good slogan, but not perfect for the Japanese marketplace, as it often comes out, "I'm Rubbin' It!"

Japan Cliché No. 2: Manga

Today is all about animated porn. And by animated, I don't mean the chicks are really into it. I mean the chicks are ink.

Of all Japan's cultural proclivities, the ubiquity of manga (comic books) perhaps puzzles me most. Japan's tightrope formality, its crushing conformity, its really teeny consumer electronics—these all make sense in geo-historical context. But I have yet to see an adequate explanation for why a nation with one of the world's highest literacy rates would become so obsessed with cartoons. Men and women of all ages can be seen on the subway, in coffee shops, or at racks in convenience stores, poring over thick, bound comic books. And Japanese TV is filled with anime shows. Can't get enough of 'em. Besides CNN and CNBC, the only U.S. channel I get on cable here is the Cartoon Network.

And it's not just the shows and books. Animation pervades the entire society. Buy a subway pass from the machine and a little onscreen animated lady bows deeply in humble thanks, showing you the top of her carefully animated head. Real estate ads will show pictures of apartments, and in the upper corner of each attractively lit room will be, for no fathomable reason, a floating alien creature with cute little antennae and bright orange fur. On the seatbacks in the express train to the airport, there is a three-panel cartoon strip. In Panel 1, a frog is reading a book to a tiny, humanoid hot dog. In Panel 2, the frog is driving a truck. In Panel 3, the frog is sitting on a suitcase, crying, while the hot dog looks on in dismay. What does this mean? I'm not sure. (This is a great thing about Japan. At least once a day you see something, or someone does something, and you cannot for the life of you figure out the purpose or meaning. It's refreshing, at times, to have no idea what's going on.)

I do very much enjoy the high value placed on cuteness here. My favorite pop culture character (please, Hello Kitty is over) is Sirotan. Sirotan is a plush stuffed seal, which is cute in itself, but the killer app is that Sirotan dresses up as other animals. After you buy Sirotan, you can buy all his different costumes. He dresses up as sharks, turtles, lobsters, and sundry other aquatic creatures. I still can't figure out why Sirotan disguises himself like this. Maybe he's playing with our conceptions of the seal paradigm. Maybe it's just for yuks. Either way, damned cute, and that's the important thing. Wackiness level: yellow, or "elevated."

Also cute is a giant robot panda character, of which many toys and T-shirts have been made. This is, as you might expect, a giant robot panda, which I guess might do battle with other robots or something. The beauty part is that when you lift the top of the robot panda's head, it reveals a control room, from which the robot panda is operated, and sitting in a chair in the control room, pushing buttons and pulling levers, is a real, non-robot panda—presumably one gifted with superb mechanical skills and a deep understanding of robotics. I take strange glee in imagining this clever panda constructing himself a giant robot panda with which to dominate other robots. Wackiness level: red. Severe!

Less cute, though equally wacky, is the cartoon porn. I began to notice, walking around town, all sorts of little storefronts with crowds of young, Japanese men out front, closely examining the backs of DVD boxes. Further reporting revealed that these stores sell anime pornography. This was intriguing from a sociological standpoint. I felt this could be a unique window into the unfettered Japanese id. Entirely unburdened by reality, what do horny Japanese guys really want to see? Think of the possibilities: laws of physics suspended, human anatomy not just amplified but wholly re-imagined!

I felt duty-bound to rent several anime porn DVDs. And so to my local video store in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Getting a rental membership at this place was a challenge as no one spoke much English, so we had to communicate the membership agreement terms with hand gestures. Every time I rent a DVD, there is great effort made to tell me when it's due back, but little success in having me understand. It's a struggle. But now that I've decided to rent porn, the language barrier is my friend. Less embarrassing when the nice young woman at the counter rings up my rentals. Hey, maybe I just didn't quite gather that this was porn. My mistake! Won't I be surprised when I get home!

I wish I could tell you the titles of the DVDs I rented, but they were all in Japanese. Instead, I will tell you the titles of the porn films available through pay-per-view at one hotel I stayed in here: Raw Mouth Secretary, Burst Boobs 3, Panty Hose Mania, The Wives Who Torture Very Well, Tits Petting, and Be Smeared With Semen. Sadly, I did not watch any of these. As for the animated porn I did watch in hopes of gleaning some insight into the Japanese id? I have this to say: Go away, Japanese id! You are scary! I am scared of you!

The first cartoon featured a schoolgirl being raped by giant alien wolf creatures. Then she masturbated and this somehow summoned evil aliens who raped all her schoolgirl friends with thick, slimy tentacles. Then there was a cute, talking bat on the schoolgirl's shoulder, and then it morphed into a giant bat that killed a wolf creature that was trying to rape her. Later she was tied up naked and raped by regular wolves who lapped at her crotch.

The second cartoon was more of the same.

In the third cartoon, once again a schoolgirl is repeatedly raped. But this time, it is by her middle-school teacher. Nice. In one scene she is suspended naked from the ceiling by thick ropes, sodomized with a test tube from the classroom, and then forced to urinate on herself. Dirty, dirty cartoons. In all honesty, this made me feel really gross. It has also made me look at every Japanese man I know with suspicion that underneath that pleasant, placid exterior is a dude who likes watching schoolgirls get raped.

Even in the regular, non-cartoon soft-core that shows up on Tokyo cable at night (think Cinemax), there is a whole lot of non-consensual sex going on. Highly non-consensual. Much female flailing, kicking, and high-pitched shrieking, all to no avail. The default situation is a man subjecting a woman to treatment she does not want or like, while the man remains utterly calm and appears not even to derive any pleasure from the act. Seems like some power/control issues going on. Especially when you consider the dream girl is always tied up, a very young schoolgirl, animated, or often all three. Icky.

Still love that robot panda, though. Damned, damned cute.

Japan Cliché No. 3: Inane Protocol

This is how I will remember Tokyo: I am about to be late for an appointment. It is scorching hot and humid as I come up out of the subway. There is wincing glare off glass skyscrapers on every side. Instantly, sweat begins to blot through my shirt in widening circles that will soon meet.

I am terrified of offending the person I'm about to meet, as it has become clear to me that "on time" here 1) means 10 minutes early; and 2) is a religion. Well then, you say, I really should have planned ahead. Yes, but can I explain to you how fricking hard it is to find anything here? This is the place where, quite literally, the streets have no name. I'm not sure why they still haven't bothered to name them, but they haven't. Seems not to be a priority. Consequently, people don't give you addresses here to find things (because there are no addresses). They give you schematics.

(Note to self: Develop proposal for Japanese government, whereby I become minister of street naming. Endeavor to name all streets. Move beyond hackneyed tree and president themes. In first effort, name one neighborhood entirely for teeth. Bicuspid Street, Wisdom Avenue, Molar Boulevard. Receive mixed reviews. Improve greatly with subsequent efforts. Win over Japanese. Fame, fortune ensue.)

I'm supposed to meet my friend Professor Ikei at the Meiji Jingu baseball stadium. Keio University, where he teaches, is playing Rikkio University in a college baseball game. I am already six minutes late, because I walked the wrong way coming out of the subway and had to double back. Luckily, Professor Ikei is a wonderful, laid-back guy who seems willing to forgive my idiocy. When I finally meet him outside the gate, he is all smiles, and we head right in to our seats on the first base line. Soon we are chatting about baseball in Japan, trying to make ourselves heard above the din of the university bands and the shrieking male cheerleaders urging on the crowd. Professor Ikei has this great conversational habit that I really want to start emulating. It happens when I ask him a complex, open-ended question, like, "Do you think baseball in Japan has become so popular due to its one-on-one, pitcher vs. batter, samurailike confrontations and the way it lends itself to becoming almost a martial art, or do you think it is more simply a matter of the decadelong U.S. occupation foisting the game upon the Japanese?" In response to this sort of query, Ikei-san will launch into a deep, sustained belly laugh. AHHHHH HAH HAH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Then the laughter abruptly stops, and he'll nod once, slowly, with a blank look on his face, and say, "Maybe." I love that. I'm already practicing my own version.

Of course, not all my moments of social un-grace are tolerated so kindly and so smoothly dismissed. The last time I came to Japan, on assignment reporting a story, I had recently started freelance writing and hadn't yet gotten around to making up business cards. And I'd forgotten how important they are here. At my first meeting with several corporate executives, they lined up to hand me their cards, and I sheepishly said that I had none to give them in return. This caused much quick, sharp, audible inhaling, which is Japanese for "you are such a hopeless moron that I am embarrassed for you and for your family." There was murmuring, and then they asked me for my contact information and wrote it down. A young lackey disappeared from the room. Ten minutes later, he returned and handed me a stack of newly printed cards, literally still hot off the press or the printer or whatever, and emblazoned in two colors with my name, number, and e-mail address. I, in turn, handed these new cards immediately back to the executives. And, at my first private moment, smacked myself in the forehead.

Just a few days ago, I ran up against another protocol incident. I was trying to interview executives from the front office of the Yokohama Baystars baseball team. My friend Sonoda-san felt he had a good connection to set me up with these interviews, going through a friend of his who has connections with the Baystars' ownership group. But then the schedule for the interviews came back, and it showed only one interview. Lasting 10 minutes. With a 22-year-old public relations flack who had no decision-making role with the team.

OK, first of all, any 10-minute interview is pretty much worthless. Not enough time for real conversation. Add on that this particular interview will necessitate an interpreter, which means that with translation time it turns into a five-minute interview. Factor in the reality that there is nothing this nice young man can tell me that will be of any interest. And then realize that to get to Yokohama will take an hour, and so will getting back, both times accompanied by an interpreter being paid by the hour, and all of this for a worthless 10-minute interview. Sounds like a recipe for canceling the interview, yes? I said as much. But Sonoda-san politely informed me this was not possible. Apparently, me canceling the interview would be so socially inappropriate, and cause such ripples of unrest, that it could threaten the relationship between the Baystars' ownership and the Baystars, between Sonoda-san's friend and the ownership, and even between Sonoda-san and his friend. And so I trudged out to Yokohama and conducted the interview—even though neither the PR flack nor I wanted to be there—and trudged back home. Nobody's fault. Just the way things are here. But believe me, as I think about the societal norms that prompted this, in my head I am sharply and audibly inhaling.

Sonoda-san's a great guy, and I love my e-mail exchanges with him. It's already tough to imply tone over e-mail, and with the cultural barrier it's even tougher, so I've resorted to adding a few superfluous exclamation points in my e-mails, like "Thanks!" and "I'd be glad to go out to Yokohama for that 10-minute interview!" Sonoda-san has responded by upping the ante, often appending two or even three exclamation points to statements like, "Seth-san, thank you for your kind understanding about the interview with the Baystars!!!" Recently, I have jacked it up to four exclamation points, as in "The interview was not bad!!!!" It's like a war of exclamation points. Pretty soon, if we don't put 12 exclamation points after "Hello," it will seem rude and aloof.

Do I think this awkward pas de deux says something about the difficult nature of negotiating Japanese societal protocol, and the extent of my vain hopes not to offend within this context? AHHH HAH HAH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Maybe.

Japan Cliché No. 4: Capsule Hotels

Tonight, for no real reason at all, I'm sleeping in a capsule hotel.

No doubt you've read about these—rabbit warrens for salarymen to stay in when they've missed the last train home. Capsule hotels are a staple of "Those Wacky Japanese" reporting, but I wondered what it would be like to actually stay in one for the night.

My taxi cruises into Akasaka at a little past midnight on a Saturday. Gangs of sake-fueled office workers wobble through the streets. As I step off the sidewalk and into the hotel lobby, the first thing I see is a cartoon drawing of a bellboy pushing away a shirtless man. Does this sign mean No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service? Closer inspection reveals elaborate tattoos on the shirtless man's back. This is a No Tattoo hotel.

You'll see this at lots of places—most hotel pools and most public onsen (baths) will have strict no-tattoo rules. I used to think it was some misguided theory that tattoos spread disease through water, but I've since been told that it's a yakuza thing. The yakuza (Japanese mafia) are known for full-body tattoos, and apparently these no-tattoo rules are the best way to deny them service. Why it's such a big deal to keep yakuza out of your hotel, I'm not quite sure. I'd sort of like to meet some yakuza. Ever see that Ridley Scott movie Black Rain? Those yakuza were cool.

Since I am not a yakuza and have no tattoos, I proceed to the check-in desk. I then turn around and walk right back out, because the clerk is frantically pointing at my shoes, which I'm still wearing. I forgot to take them off before I came in. I do this a lot.

Now shoeless, I am allowed to check in. It's 4,500 yen for the night (around $40). The clerk hands me a thick, bright yellow plastic bracelet, which has my capsule number written on it, and a key to my clothes locker attached. Clearly, most people who check in here are so stinking, stumbling drunk that it's imperative to put all this stuff in bracelet form. I imagine they often find passed-out guests sprawled across the restroom tiles, at which point the bracelet comes in handy.

Sadly, I'm not that drunk. Four sober stories up by elevator, I open a door and enter a maze of capsules. Tiptoeing through the rows, I find my number. The only sound I hear is fitful snoring. It feels like a beehive.

Ah, this one's mine. Home sweet capsule. And actually not so bad. First of all, it's clean, which was my biggest concern coming in. I'd feared vomit-and-who-knows-what-else-stained mattresses and perhaps an unsettling stench. But my fears are misplaced. The capsule is spotless and quite cozy.

Inside are a mattress, a blanket, a 7-inch television, and a side panel with alarm clock, radio, and TV controls. Set into the ceiling is a tiny reading lamp. How high is this ceiling you may wonder. High enough, I say. I can sit all the way up and still have ample head room. So, despite minor claustrophobia, I am comfortable here. It's not a coffin.

Nothing's on TV (the scrambled channels are no doubt porn, but it's not clear how I'd unscramble them if I wanted to), and I'm sleepy, so I try to nod off. Not happening. The bed is fine, though I just barely fit lengthwise (if you're 6-foot-1 or taller, don't even try it). The problem is all those drunk salarymen wandering in, laughing as they drunkenly locate their capsules. This is the exceedingly rare moment where the Japanese are too damn noisy. Also, there's the snoring. And the guy in the capsule above me is making a weird, percussive sound. If I had to guess, I'd say he's brought a steel mallet and is hammering violently at the walls of his capsule with it. But this seems purposeless and unlikely.

At 6:15 in the morning the first alarm goes off. Every 10 minutes thereafter another alarm goes off. Each alarm is followed by grunting flatulence and the loud self-extrication of a hungover man from a narrow tube.

These glassy-eyed, unshaven fellows slowly gather in a downstairs lounge, wearing the green paper, hospital-style robes that the hotel provides. Rows of reclining chairs face a big-screen TV, which plays a sports highlight show. There's a sort of bad-boy camaraderie in the lounge—you likely wouldn't be here unless last night was a real doozy.

A friend tried out the women's side of the hotel (there is strict separation) and said she loved it. Seems it's a very different vibe from the guys' side. Since Tokyo apartments are too tiny, Japanese girls use the capsule hotels to throw big slumber parties. Many pink pajamas. The women's side has a spa, too, so in the morning, instead of sports TV, it's hanging out in a hot bath.

I very much doubt I'd stay in a capsule again, at least not by choice. But should I ever miss the last train—and stink of sake—I'll know what to do.

Returning my yellow bracelet to the desk and retrieving my shoes, I stroll out into the glare of Sunday morning in Akasaka. It's time to go home. I really need some sleep.

Japan Cliché No. 5: Earthquakes

I had my first earthquake a few weeks ago. It measured 5.0. A little bit fun, a little bit frightening. I'd always imagined earthquakes were a slow, rolling undulation. Turns out they're more of a sharp, violent jerking.

When it hit us, all the gaijin in my building stumbled into the hallway looking nervous. Emergency fire walls had slammed shut on every side. I tried to remember if doorway arches were the absolute best place to stand, or the absolute worst place to stand, or neither. Then one gaijin suggested we go to the lobby, so we formed a single-file line and marched swiftly down the stairs.

When we got to the ground floor, I expected to be met by rescue workers with reflective space blankets. Instead, we saw Japanese people chatting calmly, reading magazines, and seeming not to have noticed the recent, demonic upheaval of the very earth they stood on. Absolutely no acknowledgement of the earthquake. No joke, there were children playing Twister in the lobby, completely unfazed.

What's the ruling when you're in a precarious Twister position, and then suddenly an earthquake hits and you topple? Do you lose? Or is there an act-of-God provision in the fine print of the Twister rule book?

Japan Cliché No. 6: Confusing, Incestuous Politics

The ruling party here is the Liberal Democratic Party. There are two major opposition parties: the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party. If I'm reading the newspapers right, these two opposition parties will soon merge. I don't envy the voters here.

Japan Cliché No. 7: Xenophobia

OK, not the most welcoming society for outsiders. And less diverse than a Division III college in Maine. But nearly everyone I've met here has been extremely enlightened and progressive and tolerant and stuff. With two exceptions:

1) At a party, I met a Japanese man who is a retired sixtysomething former VIP. We got to discussing geopolitical history. At one point in the conversation, he leaned close and, in hushed tones, said, "The Koreans, North and South, are a people entirely without scruples."

2) There is a famous military shrine here at which Class A war criminals, like Tojo, are buried. The Japanese prime minister is impelled each year, by public sentiment, to visit this shrine and genuflect and such. Not a fantastic thing, in my view, but perhaps understandable.

Next to this shrine is a military museum. Of all the museums I have visited in Japan, including the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima, this was clearly and easily the best-funded. It expresses a vision of Japanese military history that differs, in certain crucial ways, from our own.

For instance, I was not aware that the United States had somehow tricked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor as part of a complex scheme we had been brewing up for years. Also, I was not aware that the Rape of Nanking never happened.

Interesting thing about this museum: Every World War II battle is extensively examined, mapped, and explained with both graphics and text. Right up until the Battle of Midway. At this point, the displays quickly peter out, and the text boils down to "mistakes were made."

Outside the museum, ultra-right-wing groups have stationed fleets of big black vans with blaring megaphones. I'm told what they are shouting translates as "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian." On their roofs, the vans have big plastic replica missiles with the rising sun flag painted on the fins.

Japan Cliché No. 8: The Land of Cute

Of course there are all the cute characters like Astro Boy and Hello Kitty and Sirotan and the robot panda. But do you realize how cute the idioms and conversational interjections are? For instance, Japanese people answer the phone by saying "Moshi Moshi!" This is the most fun thing to say ever. I could say this all day. Moshi Moshi!

Also, when you say something that Japanese people perhaps did not know, but now believe to be true, they will often respond by saying "Ahhh, so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so." Say the sos as fast as you possibly can, and you will approximate this sound. I can't get enough of it.

Japan Cliché No. 9: Extreme Harmony

Despite its 14 million people, Tokyo is the quietest city I have ever lived in. In two months, not once have I heard a horn honked in anger or frustration. I'm convinced this is the most culturally foreign aspect of Japanese society. When is the last time you went four minutes in New York without hearing some aggressive honking?

Only once did I hear a Japanese person raise his voice in the heat of conflict, and this immediately occasioned profuse and deep bowing from everyone around him, embarrassed by his loss of control.

Japan Cliché No. 10: Incomparable Arcade Games

I have become addicted to an arcade game here. I'm not sure if it's come to the States yet, but if not, I hope it comes soon. This game consists of a display screen, two large kettle drums, and two pairs of tethered drumsticks. A song plays through speakers, and complex instructions flash on the screen, directing you to play specific beats in time to the song. Sometimes you hit one stick at a time, sometimes you hit both at once, and sometimes you need to hit a rimshot. Sometimes there are drum rolls. Sometimes the song is "Y.M.C.A.," by the Village People. And sometimes, when you play the two-player version, the game offsets your beats so you and your opponent form polyphonic rhythms—beautiful teamwork amid cutthroat competition.

I am incredibly good at this game. If it didn't cost 200 yen a pop, I would play all day every day, because I am so good that it is a waste of my gift not to play.

After the first few times I played, a strange new screen began to flash after nearly every game. I could not figure out what this screen was at first, because it was in Japanese. Then I realized: It was the high-score screen. I was setting new high scores every time I played. You could tell because it was asking me to select three kanji characters, and then these would display next to my score at the top of a list. This was deeply satisfying, because it demonstrated how beautiful was my gift. It was also deeply frustrating, however, because I don't know how to write "ASS" in kanji characters.



Mime Is Money
My dreadful career as a street performer.
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003, at 5:32 AM PT

As I put the final touches on my makeup for my debut as a Washington, D.C., street performer, the loving words of my husband echoed in my head: "You look like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" He had a point. The combination of pigtails, crow's-feet, and rouged cheeks was so disturbing that I wondered if I could actually go through with standing on a downtown corner and doing my act. I desperately wanted a combination of Xanax for my anxiety and Zantac for my stomach acid. Now, there was drug I could use: Xanzan—the pill for the talentless street performer.

Becoming a street performer was a challenge posed by a particularly cruel reader of previous installments of Human Guinea Pig—the column in which I explore odd, intriguing, but mostly odd corners of life. The challenge was compounded by the fact that I possess none of the skills that normally persuade passersby to put money in a hat. I play no instruments, and my singing has been compared to the death throes of a moose. So, I decided to go for a more conceptual approach. I would dress up like a mechanical doll and tinkle various toy instruments; enchanted Washingtonians would throw money at my feet.

Washington isn't a great city for street performers. Checking out the scene with my husband the week before I started, we saw only two entertainers: a man singing Joni Mitchell songs and strumming guitar and another playing, "Someone To Watch Over Me" on the saxophone. "My people!" I remarked.

"They're not your people," my husband replied. "They're good."

Undeterred, I went to a costume store and bought a powder-blue princess outfit, made of polyester and lint, complete with puffy sleeves, petticoat, and peplum. When I previewed it for my family, the response was not encouraging.

"This is catastrophic," said my husband, who literally shielded his eyes from the sight. "I am going to get a call from the day room at St. Elizabeth's saying I have to come sign you out."

"It's OK, Dad," said my 7-year-old daughter as she inspected me. "You can see she shaves her underarms. That means people will know she's not crazy."

I suggested that I could vastly increase the lucrativeness of this venture if I attached a large cardboard key to my back, then brought my daughter along and had her pretend to wind me up.

"You are keeping our daughter out of this," said my husband slowly. Violating this decree, I could see, would result in him starting a file labeled "custody battle."

I decided to make my first appearance at the downtown corner where Slate has its offices. For moral support, and protection in case the crowds became unruly, my editor David Plotz acted as my manager, standing a discreet distance away. He also conducted interviews about my work with the lawyers, lobbyists, regulators, and clerical workers who make up a D.C. lunchtime crowd.

The hardest part was making my entrance from the Slate building onto the street. This must be how people who want gender reassignment must feel the first time they go out in public as a member of the opposite sex, I thought. Not making eye contact, I walked to the corner of 18^th and M Streets and put down a straw hat—seeded with $1.35 borrowed from David. I laid my props next to me: tambourine, maracas, plastic pan flute, and a bag of beads with smiley faces embossed on them I planned to give as gifts to anyone who dropped money in my hat. I put a frozen smile on my face, picked up the maracas, and stiffly started shaking them.

Washingtonians are not easily enchanted. These are people who are grimly important; the lanyards around their necks holding their IDs announce just how important they are. They were determined to ignore me. About a quarter walked by without acknowledgment. The other three-quarters lost a visible struggle with their facial muscles and smiled. But even the smilers refused to stop at the beckoning of my maracas and throw some coins into my hat.

David, meanwhile was conducting his interviews. The reaction, I later heard on the tape, fell into two schools. My fans: "It's silly and fantastic." "D.C.'s not that wacky and this is nice and wacky." "This is very interesting. Is she a mechanical doll?" And my detractors: "Is she on something?" "She's stiff. She's got no dance, no performance." "I keep looking back at her to try to say something good, but sorry." "I thought she was possibly a little loony." Sure, everyone's a critic. These are the people who would have told the young Meryl Streep to forget that acting nonsense and go to law school.

Hoping to loosen people's wallets with a change of instruments, I switched from my maracas to a plastic pan flute. But playing it turned out to be exhausting and dangerous. After a few minutes of hard blowing, David came over to remark, "Do you know your nose is bleeding?" But I wasn't about to let something like a possible aneurysm stop me, although I realized the trickle of blood was probably depressing the crowd and my income. I made a sad clown face and mopped myself up.

Gratifyingly, at one point a high-school classmate of mine, whom I had seen two nights before at an event at the school both our children attend, walked right past me without recognition. I had David bring him over, but when he finally realized who I was, even after I explained what I was doing, he seemed deeply disturbed and scurried away. (The next day, when we were picking up our kids at school, his wife said, "I understand you're now working downtown as a mime.")

My biggest financial score came from a man who watched me from his parked car for a few minutes then beckoned me over. He asked me if I could speak, hear, and write, but I just smiled and shook my maracas. He took out a business card,wrote his home phone number on it, and handed it to me with $2. Either he thought I had promise or he was into demented chicks.

As I was about to pack up after 90 minutes of entertaining (total take: $4.15), a homeless man started to approach. I was worried he was going to steal my money. I watched as he moved in, then stepped away, then moved closer. I caught his eye, smiled, and shook my maracas. He smiled back at me and winked. "No lanyards for us," our looks said.

Having not even made the equivalent of the minimum wage, I was determined to find a more congenial crowd. A couple of days later, I decided to take the Metro downtown and perform in front of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Again my husband expressed deep misgivings.

"You can't ride the Metro in that outfit," he said. "You're going to be arrested." I assured him that though Washington was a town of stiffs, it was not yet run by Mullah Omar.

I set up in front of the museum next to one of the concrete barriers. Immediately two security guards walked by me. I suddenly wondered, is it legal to perform as a mechanical doll on federal property? I smiled, blew my flute, and saluted them frenetically. They returned the salute and walked on. Older tourists gave me a wide berth, obviously having been warned not to make contact with any of D.C.'s depraved citizens. But the kids loved me, dropping coins in my hat as they stared in disbelief. One toddler was so taken with me that he tried to steal my act by scooping up all my instruments and running off with them. A couple of young women deposited a dollar, then one put her arm around me while the other snapped our picture.

I felt looser and more in command of my act. To people talking on cell phones, I would make a yackety-yak motion with my hand. For a woman with magenta hair, I pointed at her head and gave her a thumbs up. I ran after a girl with a smiley-face sweatshirt and handed her one of my smiley-face beads. In 45 minutes I made $6.50.

Then a huge bus slowly pulled up in front of the museum. I got so excited—I could harass each tourist into dropping money into my hat as they disembarked. I started jumping up and down and waving wildly at the bus. It stopped in front of me, the doors opened, and the bus driver gave me a long look. Then she leaned toward me and said, with a note of panic in her voice, "Are you our tour guide?"

I sadly shook my head. I realized at that moment that I was not a true performer. A true performer would have nodded yes and led the crowd into the museum. Now, that would have been art.



Hello, Moon
Has America's low-rise obsession gone too far?
By Amanda Fortini
Updated Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

America is in the throes of a crack epidemic. Sitting in a booth with a friend at an excruciatingly hip restaurant in downtown Manhattan a few weeks ago, I glanced up to see a fleshy forest of crevices and multiple folds of skin and G-strings that three women in their late 20s were displaying for the world. It was then that I knew: This low-rider style has gone too far.

On the street, on television, even in the office, women of all ages and sizes are wearing tight, low-slung, butt-hugging jeans and pants that hit at, or often far below, the hip. The trend isn't new—it began around '95 or so—but what is new are the unlovely depths to which the pants have now, as it were, sunk. The crotch-to-waist measurement, or rise, on a standard pair of jeans (the sort we haven't seen much of since the early '90s) is somewhere between 10 and 12 inches. Early low-riders had a rise of about 7 inches. Over the past couple of years, the rise has dipped as low as 3 or 4 inches. Low-rise, it seems, has become synonymous with no-rise. Gasoline, a Brazilian company, has even created Down2There jeans, which feature a bungee cord that allows the wearer to lower her pants as she sees fit, as though adjusting a set of Venetian blinds.

Usually paired with midriff-baring shirts—even tops that aren't cropped can't cover the exposed expanse of abdominal flesh—the jeans have redefined our collective understanding of cleavage. Then there's the oft-visible G-string that, like a bra strap, creates strange fleshy bulges as it strains against the body. But there are worse bulges yet. These are the love handles that materialize on even the thinnest women—models and anorexics excepted—because the jeans hit a woman's body at its fleshiest point, below the hips, just above the buttocks. Of course, the feminist in me wants to applaud the insouciance with which women of all shapes now flaunt their imperfections, but the aesthete in me objects. This is a style that suits only 12-year-olds and celebrities who have the luxury of devoting entire afternoons to sculpting their obliques. For the rest of us, wearing these jeans is like putting our hips and buttocks in some humiliating reality show.

Yet the real problem with extremely low-riding pants is that they're impractical. Sitting is difficult: If you can't find a chair with a closed back, you have to tie a shirt around your waist—always highly attractive—or risk scandalizing the room. If you drop something, or need to tie your shoe, abandon all hope; bending over with dignity is next to impossible. You must perfect the art of squatting, back straight, head up, as though preparing to curtsy. Low-riders also tend to slide down, requiring the wearer to hitch them up repeatedly. In their way, low-rider jeans bear a creepy similarity to Chinese foot-binding—they constrict a woman's action, rendering her ornamental. And like foot-binding, the jeans can have deleterious medical consequences. In 2001, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a doctor's report stating that low-rise jeans can cause a condition called meralgia paresthetica, characterized by numbness or tingling in the thighs, by pinching a nerve located at the hip. Left untreated, the numbness can become permanent. Forget the question of style: This is a human rights issue.

So, how did we go so low? In America, the first low-rise jeans, called hip-huggers, became popular during the late '60s, with the ascendance of the hippie counterculture and rock 'n' roll. Icons of rock like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison helped to popularize the style. In the '70s, the pants went mainstream and became a staple of disco culture—people danced "The Hustle" in their Wrangler hip-huggers. In the late '70s and early '80s, waistlines moved higher as the culture, and fashion, grew increasingly conservative. Throughout the '80s and into the '90s, as more women entered the corporate workforce, the high waist continued to reign. Even Madonna, who arguably is responsible for today's exposed abdomens, didn't wear low-rise. In pictures of her from that decade, her hip bones are always covered by the waistband of her pants.

Then, around 1992, Alexander McQueen sent models down the runway in his shockingly low-slung "Bumsters." In 1995, Tom Ford's first (and wildly popular) collection for Gucci included his now-famous velvet hip-hugger suit, worn by Madonna, among other celebrities. By the mid-'90s, hip-huggers had infiltrated popular culture: Juliette Lewis wore a red pair in Natural Born Killers and Mark Wahlberg memorably peeled his off in Boogie Nights. But it took Britney, Christina, and Jennifer Lopez to bring the style, riding lower than ever, back into the mainstream over the past five years.

By the time a trend hits malls across America, high fashion is already calling it déclassé. Vogue declared low-rise pants over in May 2002, and that spring Tom Ford himself showed a trouser with a higher waist, wider legs, and dropped crotch. In spring 2003, several other designers showed high-waisted pants for fall. And in August 2003, Sarah Jessica Parker, an arbiter of style, told Vogue that she doesn't consider low-rise pants to be age-appropriate for a woman like herself.

It usually takes only a couple of months for a trend to go from the fashion magazines to the streets, and yet somehow, like the G-strings it popularized, this trend clings tenaciously on. It could be that the pants are a feminist statement, demanding as they do an ecumenical embrace of body type by wearer and viewer alike, and as such, women are loathe to abandon them. It could be that the dark fissures and peek-a-boo undies they reveal are physical emblems of our confessional culture, the sartorial equivalent of the tell-all memoir. It could simply be that letting your belly hang free is comfortable. Or that women, buying these pants for lack of choice, have unwittingly created a false sense of demand. But the strongest argument for the persistence of the trend might simply be that we want to dress like the '70s because we feel like we're starring in a reprise of that decade: Our economy is bad; we're entrenched in an occupation abroad; we mistrust our government at home.

I'm not advocating that we abandon this style in favor of Katharine Hepburn-type trousers belted just below the rib cage. As a fashionable friend recently said, low-slung trousers, with their rock 'n' roll connotations, simply look "groovier." But moderately low-rise pants can be worn with style and class. There's a famous photograph of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, taken by the celebrity photographer Ron Galella in the early '70s. In it, Jackie walks along a Manhattan street, holding only her keys. The wind musses her hair, and she looks over her shoulder at the camera. Perhaps surprisingly, she is wearing hip-huggers with a slim-fitting ribbed knit sweater. Not surprisingly, she bares no midriff. And a G-string is nowhere in sight.



My Life as a Phone Psychic
Callers are paying $2 a minute for a supernatural adviser. They're getting me instead.
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 9:30 AM PT

Not that I believe in this psychic stuff, but at one point in my life I was spending so much money having my tarot cards read at occult bookstores that I decided to do it myself. I bought a deck and discovered I had the gift. Each time I posed a question about my life, the cards so unerringly forecast frustration and disappointment that I finally stuck them in the bottom of a trunk.

I dug them out again this spring for a foray into a career as a phone psychic—the latest installment of "Human Guinea Pig," a column in which I am supposed to explore intriguing corners of life, but in which, so far, I mostly humiliate myself. (Like here, for example.) Locating openings for my extrasensory services was easy. I went to an online job site and typed "psychic" into the search engine. I sent e-mails to the three companies listed, and two—I'll call them ESP Net and Chakra Con—sent me back contracts to fill out.

ESP Net's online "guidance site" asserts that it is an "unrealistic expectation" for callers to assume psychics are psychic. But its contract is more ambiguous about occult powers. While it stated I could not claim a call was "anything more than entertainment," on the next page, awaiting my signature, was this sentence: "It is my personal feeling or understanding that I possess psychic or clairvoyant abilities." How could I sign this? Then I thought of my supernatural ability to read my husband's